The Dharma of Social Justice

The Dalai Lama has said, “The threshold between right and wrong is pain.” (Imagine All the People, p.98). He was speaking to the intersection of love and justice. As Buddhists, we know that all humanity is innately compassionate, however often we lose touch with that. No matter how often we try to turn away from pain, our own or that of others, our nature, with the help of practice, draws us back to witness it. We are here on this earth to love each other. Everyone. No exceptions.

That’s a tall order, isn’t it? It begs the question, “Whose pain should I attend to?” The practice of The Four Immeasurables guides us to wish happiness, freedom from suffering, and equanimity, free from passion, aggression, and prejudice, for ourselves, those closest to us, casual acquaintances, strangers, and all beings. As valuable and powerful as that practice is, by itself it does not adequately address the immense pain in the world. Just to tend to our own personal pain, we need to complement such practices with deeds, actions. When it comes to addressing the pain of others, it’s the same. And it often takes even more effort. Among all of those we could help, it is easiest to reach out to those we already personally care about and those who are like us. We feel we understand them, to some extent, and we know pretty much what to expect from them. There’s a certain safety in extending ourselves to them.

We, in the North American Buddhist community, no matter our individual situations, are immensely privileged, both spiritually and socio-economically, to be part of that community. Access to our teachings and practices means we have the resources and time to pursue our psychological health and spiritual growth. In contrast to our relative material comfort, the vast majority of our fellow human beings, not to mention other sentient beings, struggle daily to have shelter, enough food, and safety from innumerable threats. The precarious existence of most humans is not due to the earth not having enough resources to provide for the health and safety of all of us nor to personal flaws of any individual. Rather, it’s due to our having created a social hierarchy. This hierarchy was constructed long ago on what the social critic/activist and Buddhist bell hooks calls modern civilization’s “organizing principle of domination” (The Will to Change, p.116). Out of our collective habitual patterns of passion, aggression, and prejudice, or what in more secular terms includes greed, violence, and fear of the other or unknown, we have allowed certain groups of people to gain unearned power over others. Their power is not based on innate superiority but on their failure to consistently act out of their innate compassion and wisdom. As a result, we have inherited a social system where white, male, monied, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, and mentally and perceptually conventional humans control the world’s wealth and wield power over the rest of us.

This social hierarchy is not the same as the “natural hierarchy” that Chogyam Trungpa spoke and wrote about. As I understand it, his is an acknowledgement that each of us is naturally endowed with certain aptitudes and talents, as well as limitations, which our self-reflection and spiritual practices can reveal to us and guide us each to roles and vocations in which we can make our most valuable contributions to an “enlightened” or good, compassionate, just society. Such roles and vocations, or positions in society if you will, are expressions of our authentic selves, rather than unearned positions attained through self-deceit and wielding power over others. They are expressions of acting on our “basic goodness” or Buddha nature, our spiritual power from within and power with our fellow human beings.

Discovering our authentic selves and finding our appropriate roles is as much a social process as it is personal. None of us alone can create a good society. We need support and feedback from each other. Our discovery is both self-reflective and mutual, interactive. While we work to transcend our individual egos, we must also transcend our social egos, defined by the prejudicial social hierarchy. This requires exploring together, sometimes in separate identity groups, how our society has conditioned us to perceive each other based on our identities, be that white, people of color, men, women, transgender, heterosexual, gay/lesbian, middle class, working class, poor, old, young, able-bodied, people with disabilities, people with certain mental and perceptual characteristics, etc. We need to pay attention to how we treat each other, particularly across those identities – to what is compassionate and just. It is those identities that most define our social hierarchy and the habit of domination. It can be argued that that domination is the source of most of the pain in the world.

This leads us back to the Dalai Lama’s assertion that, “The threshold between right and wrong is pain” – the intersection, indeed the inseparability, of love and justice. If our capacity to love, our Buddha nature, is universal, and we must act on that in the relative reality of limited time and space, how do we discern where and how to direct our love? Shall we limit it to those already within our circle of affection, to those who think and look like us, to our own community, however we define that? If it’s true that systematic domination by those in power is the greatest source of pain, i.e., injustice, in the world, “Whose pain should I attend to?”

The philosopher and activist Cornel West has said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” If creating a good society is a public as well as a personal process, then our spiritual work can have its greatest effect by applying it to our greatest pain, our collective wounds. I’m not suggesting that we not tend to our own pain or the pain of those closest to us. But if we look at that pain more closely, we will see that much of it is a product of the habit of domination by those in power over those parts of us, as individuals and as a society, deemed less worthy and deserving of our trust. When we see this, we will know that the path of personal liberation inevitably compels us to take steps toward our social liberation.