The Path to Cessation of Suffering
The Path to Cessation of Suffering
BY MAIA DUERR
[divide style="2"]Over this past year, we’ve been exploring how the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha can be applied to situations of collective suffering. In my series of essays, I’ve been focusing on economic justice. You can find the first three here:
By the time we arrive at the Fourth Noble Truth, the Buddha offers us the medicine that helps to bring an end suffering. He teaches it as the Eightfold Path, a set of interdependent practices that help us to untangle the knots of greed, ignorance, and hatred.Traditionally, the Eightfold Path is organized into three groups:
Moral Conduct / Sila
Right Speech (Samma vaca)Right Action (Samma kammanta)Right Livelihood (Samma ajiva)
Mental Discipline / Samadhi
Right Effort (Samma vayama)Right Mindfulness (Samma sati)Right Concentration (Samma samadhi)
Wisdom / Prajna
Right Understanding (Samma ditthi)Right Thought (Samma sankappa)The word “Right” in this context should be understood not in the sense of “correct” but rather as implying a more thorough and complete understanding of something. Sometimes the word “Wholesome” or “Perfect” is used instead of “Right”… and those words ring more true to me.It occurs to me that the real power of the Fourth Noble Truth is that any one of these paths does not stand on its own. They require each other to be fully realized – it is the synergy that is most important. For example, we won’t be able to fully realize the gift of mental discipline if we are living in a way that is incongruent with ethics and morality. The kinds of dramas that a life not anchored in some kind of moral compass tends to create will make it that much harder for us to practice in a way that cultivates samadhi.In the same way, a radical approach to transforming social suffering must be holistic in order to effectively address the complexity of a situation. The most potent actions will be grounded in an integrative perspective. “Magic bullets” do not exist. Isolated actions or strategies rarely have much of a long-lasting or profound impact on an issue. (I’m willing to be challenged on this – leave a comment below if you disagree after you read this article, and let’s get a conversation going!)I am most interested in approaches toward activism that carry this kind of integrative perspective. One beautiful example is Joanna Macy’s articulation of the Three Dimensions of the Great Turning. “The Great Turning” is a phrase coined by Macy and David Korten to describe the period of time we are living in, one in which human beings face the imperative of shifting from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization, or risk our own extinction. As Macy teaches it, we need to work in three inter-locking areas in order to navigate this Great Turning. These Three Dimensions are:
- Holding Actions
- Structural Change
- Shifts in Consciousness
Macy’s work was, in part, the inspiration for my own “mandala of socially engaged Buddhism,” a model that supports us to identify our personal strengths as activists as well as see how a diversity of approaches is required so that we can collectively address situations of social suffering. In brief, the mandala weaves in four archetypes – warrior, teacher, healer, and creator – that correspond with four approaches to social transformation.Another helpful model is the Five Buddha Families. Roshi Bernie Glassman has updated this traditional Tibetan teaching and applied it to organizational development, including at the Greyston Foundation which he co-founded with Jishu Holmes in 1982.In each case, these models offer interconnecting pathways of action that create the conditions for not only social change but transformation. That’s an important distinction. A resolution adopted at the 2010 U.S. Social Forum defined transformation as a process through which who we are—individually or collectively—is changed so deeply that the following are altered:
• identity (way of seeing/thinking/reflecting upon ourselves and environment);
• emotions (range of feelings, reactivity and emotional responsiveness);
• embodiment (relationship and connectedness to and within our bodies and how we show up);
• actions (behaviors, patterned responses);
• creativity (capacity for responsiveness and ability to access resources);
• relatedness (compassion and trust, learning with others and response to conflict); and
• paradigms (overall perspective and mode of operating)
(This resolution was drafted by dharma teacher angel Kyodo williams and others.) These models are not just exercises in theory but powerful reflective tools that can serve as a focal point for our organizing efforts and move us toward the transformation of social suffering. Without this kind of approach, we run the risk of re-creating the very oppressive conditions that we aspire to shift. The “how” of social transformation is just as important as the “what,” or, as A.J. Muste once said, “there is no way to peace, peace is the way.”Throughout this series of essays on the Four Noble Truths, I’ve been focusing on the issue of economic justice and specifically how that shows up in my home region – northern New Mexico.Last month I visited the Chainbreaker’s Collective (CC), a group that embodies this holistic approach toward social justice work. Recently I had a chance to speak with Tomás Rivera, one of the founders of the collective.Tomás explained to me that he and a group of friends started the CC in 2004 because they shared a similar problem: they were all bicycle riders who needed to figure out how to fix their bikes. They got together to help each other learn skills and swap parts. “We quickly realized that fixing up bikes could only get us so far,” Tomás said. The next step was to set up a workspace so that people who lacked access to affordable transportation could learn the skills to fix their own bikes (and even to build a bike). This evolved into the Bicycle Resource Center (BRC), which is now open every Sunday.The day I visited, close to 15 people were coming in and out of the workshop area, busily turning screwdrivers, attaching chains, and making bikes come to life again. In the front room, a few more folks were hanging out at a round table, deep in conversation.
The BRC has always been the heart of the Chainbreaker Collective, Tomás told me. But when the economy crashed in 2008, soaring gas prices brought the realities of transit and housing injustices to the forefront of more people’s lives. In response, the Collective’s analysis broadened to include both economic and environmental justice, and re-formed as a membership-based organizationAs Tomás noted, not many groups are working on transportation issues from a social justice viewpoint. He and other members of the CC are interested in connecting the dots. (The Bus Rider’s Union in Los Angeles serves as one model for their work.) They started doing outreach on Santa Fe buses to build membership, talking with riders about their concerns and inviting them to get involved in generating solutions.Many people can’t afford to live in Santa Fe and yet have to spend a large chunk of their very limited income on transportation to get into the city for work – so the link between affordable housing and transportation became very clear.This organizing work literally hits home for Tomás. He said, “I live in a house just around the corner and my family has been here for four generations. This is the issue that I grew up knowing about, gentrification and the high cost of living. We didn’t use those terms, but that’s what I knew about as a kid. It’s more and more segregated by race and by class, there’s a lot of work to do.”This December, the CC will hold its annual event, La Posolada (a riff off of another Santa Fe holiday tradition, Las Posadas) — a celebration of the victories of the past year as well as a time for members to vote on the direction of strategy for next year. Some of those victories?
- 1,700 bikes have been distributed to people who otherwise couldn’t afford one… saving over $7.6 million in fuel costs and preventing over 40,000 tons of CO2 emissions.
- Chainbreaker members have successfully stopped every major service cut and fare hike proposed in recent years, despite a 90% loss of federal transit funding.
- A groundbreaking “Help Santa Feans Ride” rebate program that has provided over 150 free buss passes to people.
- This past year marked the launch of a campaign to create a community-defined Resident’s Bill of Rights to help build a thriving housing justice movement in Santa Fe.
Part of the celebration is giving away 30 bikes to community children, plus lots of food and fun!Tomás told me, “We’ve been able to grow our organization during a time when a lot of others were shrinking and closing their doors. To me that speaks to the need for an organization like this.”This kind of connecting-the-dots work that the Chainbreaker Collective does so well, along with building a strong sense of community and participatory decision-making, is at the heart of an integrative approach to social transformation. CC embodies a holistic perspective not only in the issues it addresses but also in the methods it uses – moving fluidly from direct service to educational work to community organizing, and more.This, to me, is a contemporary rendering of the Eightfold Path as applied to activism. When our understanding of social suffering is tuned to the key of interdependence, our capacity to effect liberation from this suffering will be greatly increased.[divide style="2"]
Maia Zenyu Duerr is an anthropologist, writer, and student of liberation.
She practices in the Soto Zen lineage of Suzuki Roshi, with Victoria Shosan Austin as her teacher and guide. In 2012, she received ordination as a lay Buddhist chaplain from Roshi Joan Halifax.From 2004-2008, Maia worked at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship where she served as executive director and editor of Turning Wheel magazine. For the past six years, she has been the director of the Upaya Zen Center Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program. She also serves on the faculty of the Buddhist Education for Social Transformation project, based at the International Women's Partnership for Peace and Justice center in northern Thailand.Maia's writing can be found on her website, The Liberated Life Project. She is also the curator of a blog on socially engaged Buddhism called The Jizo Chronicles.[divide style="3"]
About BPF's The System Stinks
Buddhist social justice curriculum
To help promote collective liberation and subvert the highly individualistic bent of much mainstream dharma these days, Buddhist Peace Fellowship presents our second year of The System Stinks — a collection of Buddhist social justice media named for the favorite protest sign of one of our founders, Robert Aitken, Roshi.This year, we've asked some of our favorite dharma teachers, practitioners, and activists to reflect on the Four Noble Truths — suffering; the causes of suffering; cessation of suffering; and a path to cessation — from a systemic, social justice perspective.Other Buddhist groups from around the world have also used the Four Noble Truths as a lens for social movements: for good examples, the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, and the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. In a U.S.-based context (not predominantly Buddhist), where mindfulness is increasingly separated from ethics, we are eager to uphold this social justice tradition.If you like what you see, please comment and share to show the world another side of Buddhism!We are deeply grateful to the teachers and practitioners who lend their voices to this cause. In alignment with our media justice values, all contributors to the 2014 series have been offered humble compensation for their work.
You can support engaged Buddhist media makers by donating to BPF.
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