The experience of Enlightenment or Awakening for Buddhists includes the realization – not just theoretical in one’s mind, but practical in the way one finds oneself living one’s daily life – that we are part of a larger, inter-connected Reality (wisdom); and to feel this is to feel compassion both for all the other sentient beings who are part of this bigger picture as well as for ourselves.

So the Buddhist experience is one in which one feels oneself energized with a natural, spontaneous necessity to embrace the world in active, love but at the same time one knows that this inter-connecting love is already there, already going on, already complete.

When I ponder this Buddhist realization that wisdom (interconnectedness as given) and compassion (interconnectedness as embraced) are two sides of the same coin, it confirms the central Christian message of having to love and act for what Jesus called the Reign of God. This is at the heart of the Gospel: the call to love one’s neighbor, to act for justice, to “fix the world” (as Jesus’ Jewish teachers might have taught him), to keep acting so as to bring this messed up, suffering world a little closer to the ideal of God’s Reign.

Such loving action for justice is what Buddhists might recognize as compassion. But they then immediately remind Christians that such action for justice and a better world needs to be combined with the wisdom that this world, as it is, is already filled with what Christians might call the interconnected Spirit. As Jesus himself taught, the Reign of God is not only ‘still to come,’ it’s already present. In all the limitations and imperfections, in all the suffering and injustice, the Reign of God is present and taking shape. We have to fix this world, but we can do that only if we work with and in the world as it is. Only when we can accept the way it is (that’s wisdom), can we change the way it is (through compassion).

So when we Christians insist that we have to act to change the world, the Buddhists would definitely agree, but they would add that we should not make too much of a “big deal” of our action. Our actions are important in one way, but in another way, they are not. We have to act, we have to get things done, but the bigger picture is bigger than our individual actions.

Buddhism is here helping me reconnect with what I learned way back in my seminary days from St. Ignatius. He told his Jesuit brothers that they must act, but always with a “holy indifference” (sacra indifferentia). Such holy indifference can be translated nicely as equanimity – a balanced soul, or an easy-going heart.

If we are truly in touch with our Buddha-nature, if we are really “in Christ” as St. Paul puts it, we will be called to give all that we have to loving others and working for a better world, but at the end of the day, or even in the very actions themselves, we will be able to relax and know that even if our actions don’t succeed, even if people don’t respond, it’s no big deal. The bigger picture or the inter-connecting Spirit is still there, still active, still carrying on.

We are to act with all our might, but at the same time, relax. We have to be fully committed, but at the same time, we’d better not take ourselves too seriously.

President Obama’s political predicament is
perhaps more serious than he understands or
appreciates. He appears to see opponents as
rivals to be charmed. What he should see are
enemies determined to destroy his presidency. To
save the agenda for which he was elected, he must
give up the pretense of being a postpartisan
professorial president and start acting like an Oval Office tiger.

Can Obama be a tiger?  Should he?  I basically agree with Rogers, but with a kind of Buddhist caveat.  What I’ve always liked about Obama, from the start of his campaign, was his Buddhist quality of not demonizing his opponents, of trying to stay connected with them even when he has to stand in opposition to them.   But that does not seem to be working, at least with the Republican opponents whom he has been facing over his health care reform.  So he needs to be a tiger and get tough.

But does that mean that he has to get nasty?  Usually, we associate, even identify, toughness with nastiness.   Buddhism suggests, even warns, that we don’t have to.   Obama can get tough and really face off with his opponents, pointing out their inconsistencies and lack of honesty.  But he can do that without being nasty toward them — without putting them down or ridiculing them.  Or more positively, one can get tough and at the same time show respect and openness towards those we are opposing.

Will that work?  I think Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr have shown that it can.   They were tough. But they never showed hatred toward their enemies; more importantly, they never acted out of hatred.

So Obama can be a tiger who growls loudly and can induce tremors of fear — but who never eats his prey.