Bridge the spiritual and political
Buddhist meditation practice is well known for its ability to hold strong emotions like hopelessness. I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t take much scrolling on the news today for me to get to that hopeless feeling—fast.
The world is filled with horror to stroke our agony and despair. In activist circles, we’re told to educate, organize, and act. In meditation spaces, we’re told to ground, breathe, and process our emotions.
For those of us who don’t already belong to activist spiritual communities, we’re oscillating these words separately. Toggling and making sense of our values and spirituality in silos.
This separation of the two—engagement in the world and cultivation of spiritual liberation—is, of course, a fallacy.
They are always deeply interconnected. And yet, it can often feel like spaces that specialize in the political and spiritual are not speaking to the nuances, ethical tensions, and practical realities of bridging the personal and collective. Or they privilege one over the other.
Buddhism is often misperceived as only being concerned with individual liberation. You’ll often hear Western Buddhists say the dharma isn’t supposed to be political. I’ll admit it, at the heart of it, the dharma isn’t political—it’s universal. And the way the teachings have spread throughout the world has always been political.
In his time, the Buddha offered a path for individuals, regardless of caste, to attain enlightenment. That legacy lived on through Emperors like Ashoka and leaders of Asian Buddhist liberation movements like B.R. Ambedkar. Engaged Buddhism, the term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh, describes the explicit undeniable connection between the social, political, and economic conditions of personal and social liberation.
This begs the question: Why isn’t engaged Buddhism just called Buddhism? After all, when you walk into a Buddhist meditation center, you’ll likely receive a talk on how we psychologically reproduce suffering for ourselves, not a social and political analysis of power and capitalism.
Here’s my take: Buddhism is relatively new to America, only a little over a century old, and the mainstream translations many of us have received have been shaped by our Western culture. That is to say—it’s been informed by colonialism, capitalism, individualism, and consumerism.
This is not a judgment. We are all shaped by these forces. So our understanding of the dharma has easily been disconnected from the material causes of suffering. The result: The vast majority of Western Buddhist translations of the dharma do not adequately bridge the personal and social.
Western Buddhism as it currently stands is not self-critical, socially or politically, in the way this moment demands. And it leaves meditators and Buddhist practitioners without support to draw connections.
Here’s the problem: The crises we face are too big, too overlapping, too urgent for Buddhist practice to stay isolated in the personal psychological realm.
We are living in a moment in which the world’s suffering—and America’s explicit role in perpetuating it—is yearning for a translation of the dharma that goes beyond the intra- and interpersonal.
The world’s crises are crying for a dharma that can draw continuity between personal practice, our relationships with others, and the way suffering is reproduced in society.
We need to deepen our spiritual and political imaginations together.
How can we do this?
Bridge the spiritual and political: Encourage a dharma culture where social liberation traditions and Buddhist practice can be in conversation. We need to think and grow out loud, in community. This is what the Engaged Dharma Study Clubs are all about.
Recenter ethics + concentration: Engage the entirety of the Buddha’s Threefold Training, specifically our connection to ethics (not just meditation practice). We focus on what this looks like for you in my mentorship program Radical Change.
As Western practitioners, we are best positioned to change the ways our culture perpetuates suffering because we are both its victims and benefactors. I’m hoping that if enough of us begin to do this work in our own ways, “Engaged Buddhism” won’t need its own distinct name.
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