Are we depraved because we’re deformed? Or because we’re deprived?  Some Christians, given their understanding of original sin and our fallen nature, would hold to “deformed.”  I suspect that that’s an incorrect reading of the myth of Adam and Eve, and certainly a misunderstanding of what Jesus had to say when he called people to work for the Reign of God here on earth. It is also squarely opposed to what Buddhists hold to be the “human condition.”

Both Buddhists and Christians can agree with another line of “Officer Krupke”: “Deep down inside us there is good….There is good, there is good, there is good, good, good.”

But that “good” has been stifled by our being deprived.

Buddhists would agree. We’ been deprived.  But  of what? Buddha’s answer: Of a correct understanding of who we really are.  Ignorance, not deformity, is the fundamental problem.

Marx would agree with Buddhists that the fundamental problem is not deformity. But he differs in pinpointing what we’ve been deprived of. For Marx, and I believe for many Christians, the fundamental cause of the hatred, violence, and “depravity” affecting our world today is that so many humans have been deprived  of the material conditions necessary to live a full human life.

Terry Eagleton, with his usual clarity and precision, makes this Marxist argument in a passage from his recently published Why Marx Was Right:

If history has been so bloody, it is not because most human beings are wicked. It is because of the material pressures to which they have been submitted. Marx can thus take a realistic measure of the past without succumbing to the myth of the darkness of men’s [sic] hearts. And this is one reason why he can retain faith in the future

It is his materialism which permits him that hope. If wars, famines and genocide really did spring simply from some unchanging human depravity, then there is not the slightest reason to believe that the future will fare any better. If, however, these things have been partly the effect of unjust social systems, of which individuals are sometimes little more than functions, then it is reasonable to expect that changing that system may make for a better world.  (pp. 98-99)

So Marxists, and most Christian liberation theologians and activists, would hold that if we want to change the “depraved heart,” we first must change the “depriving system.”

Buddhists, in general, would see it differently: if you want to change the “depriving system,” you have to change the “deprived heart.”

Which comes first?

Both!

For me, watching it brought a host of emotions. It brought me back to the warmth and light of my beloved India, a country filled with paradox. It is at once ancient and modern, wealthy and poor, religious and secular. The colors and sounds and scents are heady and intense, from the swirling pinks and oranges of colorful saris to the blaze of billboards advertising modern wares with bright white Bollywood smiles on ancient buildings, from the gossipy chattering of lime green parrots in the trees to the endless metallic din of motor rickshaw traffic, from the rose and jasmine tinged incense wafting up in morning prayer to the smoky peat of cow dung patties being burned for warmth and cooking fires. As the video clip shows, it is a country of astonishing wealth and luxury such as can be found in its glittering five-star Taj hotels, and a country of despair-inducing poverty, the squalid slums outlining the cities reeking of excrement, trash and urine. It is, for many visitors, a country of chaos. It is also a country of an ancient order, the caste system.

I’m not qualified to comment on the current understandings of the caste system in India, or on prevailing systemic injustices that call for change. What I do wish to lift up is how this man’s calling spontaneously led him out of the ‘acceptable’ order of his life and society, into a life of scandalous love. I would lift up, too, something I feel even more deeply moved by in watching this video. This man exudes a tangible love for the people he cares for. He seems to exude love in an effortless, easy way that attends his every movement, touch or gesture while with them, and which makes me feel that he must be enormously rich; he is rich in love. There is economic poverty, but there is also a very real poverty of love. In his ministry, it seems this man is engaging with both from a wealth of both. Relating and feeding are not separated; body and psyche are kept together, and he offers a healing and nourishing outpouring on both.

1 John 4:19 says “We love because he first loved us.” From psychoanalytic insights, we know that our ability to give love is primarily and deeply related to the ways in which we have received love. Yet many people suffer from wounds of love; an absence of an affirmation of, and a relating to, our deepest selves. Even those of us who consider ourselves among the fortunate in the world, those of us who seek to be givers, caretakers, ministers, may struggle with loving, feeling at some deep level that we were, or are, not loved ourselves. And we blame ourselves. Yet, we all deserve the experience of receiving love, not just a belief in it, and we thrive when we have this experience with enough constancy to make it true in our bones, so true that it gives rise to its natural corollaries of deep inner freedom and the ability to love others in the same unconditional way. This grace-filled love just may break through into narcissistic systems, internal and external, bringing the life-giving good news of true relatedness where there was captivity, despair, and broken-heartedness.

Love is abundant. Yet, we often find ourselves squabbling like a flock of sparrows over the last crumb, as though we must frantically fight to get our little piece before flying off with it to some protected place and devouring it, and peering enviously at others who arrived first or more aggressively and took their share. Or perhaps we give up our share entirely, believing that it is starvation that is required of us to save others from our own hungering, rather than a joyful feasting together.

The absence of love where there should have been love is extraordinarily painful. Yet, this movie clip inspires me. It inspires me because I feel reminded, in an embodied way, that the reality of love is that it is endlessly real and utterly generous. Love is not a zero-sum commodity, as though love for oneself comes at the cost of love for others, rather than both bubbling up from the same deep well-spring and building gloriously and joyfully on each other, tumbling us into new spaces of freedom, creativity, generosity and even play.

Whatever my past experience has been or whatever corresponding beliefs about myself I arrived at, I don’t actually have to fight for my share of love, earn it by conforming to expectation, or affirm or partake in any system that overtly or covertly claims that I do. Neither does anyone else. This, to some of parts of some of us, is just as scandalous as it may have been to that man’s family when he stepped out into his call. Just as he had to break with the oppressive and unjust aspects of is social context to live out this life of love for others, so too is it given to us to break with inner systems that are oppressive and conditional and would dehumanize the needy and vulnerable, and also the hopeful and lively and loving, within ourselves and others, and to withstand the inner scandal that such  grace may bring. The more love we know, and allow ourselves to know, the more we will be able to offer both food and love to a world in an agony of starvation for both.

More can be learned about his work at www.akshyatrust.org

Pia Chaudhari is a Ph.D. student in Psychology and Religion .

The median household income in America is $50,000 a year. The Donnell’s live off exactly that number. They used to earn two times that, swimming in the river of the American myth of prosperity, and living by an ethos of, as Gregg Donell puts it, “the need for more things.” They stopped living that way, though, beginning to recognize and appreciate their gifts rather than succumb to the desire to buy them.

Quantitative easing is something altogether different. Its a complex word with a simple meaning. Remember when your parents would tell you money doesn’t grow on trees, they were right; it can come out of thin air. QE is essentially what happened in the 2008 stimulus package that went out to major banking centers. Firms possessed large bundles of bonds no one would buy so the Federal Reserve bought them. And here’s the trick, they did it with a surge of money right off the press.

QE is an answer to the necessary task of keeping our economy afloat. And as Paul Krugman argues another wave of stimulus money is very necessary, even if it is politically unappetizing. QE exemplifies the paradox of our current economic state. If we don’t funnel money into credit lending institutions our economy sinks further, but when that money for nothing is handed over it sets a priority for the way we organize our society. And that’s what’s troubling about QE: it’s a lesson in how our supply-side economy works vis-à-vis how we act as a society. The Federal Reserves’ money out of thin air goes into the major financial firms which,  further fuels speculation, further widens the income gap, further allows exploitation of limited resources, and further instantiates a psychological entitlement for the proverbial “more.”

The question I have is does this pattern of economic practice continue to delay the inevitable? That is, as a country we have been living beyond our means for far too long. Is austerity really our enemy?  I wonder what would happen if middle-class families started making financial decisions the way the Donnell’s do: living by what they need rather than living through the desire for more. Of course a large spending freeze doesn’t sound good to any economist, but what would it mean to finally realize we have more than enough to live content lives. The Niebuhrian in me tells me to get real, but what a hope. More Donnell families might just have the power to do something radically sublime. It may instill enough humility that we can move from conversations about quantitative easing and the desire for more to conversations about the joys of living with enough. Oh but the doubting question remains: can middle-class families make such radical financial  statements, or be faulted for not doing so, when the seduction of wealth continues to always beckon one nigh?

I want to say something about Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rauschenbusch (about whom I am in no way specialized, whereas two of my colleagues here at Union, Jim Cone and Gary Dorrien, are) and about Buddha (about whom I know a little more).

What triggered these reflections was an article in today’s New York Times titled “God and Politics Together Again.” The author, Sam Tanenhaus,  notes that President Obama has been influenced not by liberation theology (as Glenn Beck has been proclaiming) but by the Social Gospel of Rauschenbusch, which calls on Christianity “to add its moral force to the social and economic forces making for a nobler organization of society” in which “the burden of poverty” would be lifted from the back of millions.

But Tanenhaus immediately adds that Obama has also been strongly influenced by Niebuhr’s Christian Realism which recognizes “that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things.”

Tanenhaus draws the insightful conclusion that “the tension between these two religious ideas – one wedded to progress, the other mindful of the limits of worldly activism – reflects the broader tension in Mr. Obama’s liberalism, itself divided between an enthusiasm for bold policy initiatives and a pragmatic understanding that some things can’t be fixed or even changed through politics.”

To many of us (yes, especially us liberals), it sure seems that Obama’s tension is tilting toward Niebuhr.  Recently, the President’s words and actions, especially in confronting Republican intransigence, have slipped from “bold policy” to the “pragmatic understanding that some things just can’t be fixed.”

Here’s where I think that Buddha might offer Mr. Obama – and posthumously, Mr. Niebuhr –a helping hand.  Gautama the Buddha also recognized the tension between the “realism” of suffering (dukkha) that is caused by greed (tanha) on the one hand, and the “bold policy” of transformation through enlightenment, on the other.

But he placed his money (so to speak) and devoted his full energies to the transformation of individuals and of society that can come through awakening to our true nature, our Buddha-nature.

For Buddha, the reality of evil and the promise of awakening did not have a 50-50 chance.  Albert Nolan has said somewhere in his Jesus before Christianity, that anyone who believes that good and evil have a 50-50 chance is an atheist.  In this sense, Buddha was no atheist.

So I think Buddha would walk a middle path between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr. (Okay, with a tilt toward Rauschenbusch.)  He would hold up the promise, calling for our full commitment, that the individual and society do not have to stay the way they are; they do not have to be caught in the “poisons” of ignorance, greed, and hatred.  But at the same time, he would tip his hat to Niebuhr in recognizing that we have to be mindful of the realities of ignorance and greed and hated.  “Being mindful” means we have to be fully aware of them, analyze them carefully, engage them through “skillful means” (upaya) – in the assurance that they can be – yes, they can be – changed.

Why would Buddha be so sure that things can be different than what they are now?  I think for two reasons:

1)    Because of impermanence (annica): everything changes, nothing – neither the human heart nor the capitalist system – has to stay the way it is.  As one Buddhist saying has it: “Impermanence makes everything possible.”

2)    Because of our inherent Buddha-nature:  In our deepest reality —  even though that reality is covered over by ignorance and all kinds of “causes and conditions” – we are Buddhas, inherently connected with all beings in mutual goodness and mutual compassion.

What Buddha discovered is in no way contradictory to what Jesus discovered.   For me, it offers the possibility of a deeper grasp of St. Paul’s announcement that “where sin abounds, grace does more abound” (Rom. 5:20) – that is, sin and grace do not have a 50-50 chance. And when Buddhists affirm that we are all called to be Buddhas, Christians affirm that we are all called “to put on Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:27)

Rather than Christian “realism,” maybe we are closer to Jesus and to Buddha if we talk about a Buddhist-Christian “mindful optimism.”

That’s quite an achievement.  Finding a common word about the economy between Buddhists and Christians who share few common words about “theology” (Buddhists are uncomfortable with the word, theology) will be surprising to many.  It’s an indication, I think, that religions can more easily find agreement about ethics than they can about doctrine.

In any case, our “Common Word” will soon be announced once it has been vetted by the organizations who sponsored our dialogue (the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation).

For the moment, I can offer a preview of the content of our Common Word under the slogan: “The Way to the Global Is through the Glocal.”  That’s cutesy, I know. But it contains a powerful insight.  Let me try to explain briefly.

Throughout our conference, as I tried to make clear in earlier blogs, we – both Christians and Buddhists – agreed that to understand and do something about the financial crisis that now surrounds us, we cannot talk only about personal or individual greed.   Rather, we have to recognize and grapple with the reality of structural greed. Personal greed takes on the form of structural greed, and structural greed takes on a life of its own.  So to prevent similar economic catastrophes from happening in the future, we have to deal with the greed that has become incarnated in the structures of the global economy.

But how do that?   These structures of greed are incredibly powerful, living as they do, not just in the neoliberal economic policies of Wall Street, but also in the politics of Washington, Berlin, London, Tokyo –as well as in the public media that determine how people think of their nation and its economic policies.

So it’s not very promising to start from the top of the economic, political, and media systems.  It seems impossible to start with trying to dismantle greed in its structural forms.

But that doesn’t mean that we should therefore simply start from the bottom – that is, from the level of personal greed.  Of course, we must always seek to transform individual hearts. But that is not enough to change structures.

Therefore – and this gets to the heart of our Common Word – we should focus our energies not on the structural level, nor on the personal-individual level – but on the local level.

On the grassroots level, in our local communities, at the roots of civil society we should try to create structures that will insure economic policies and practices that will promote the democratization of the economy – that will prevent economic power from being concentrated in the hands of a few, that will provide a process of checks and balances for economic transactions.

We identified four examples of such local efforts that are already taking shape in different parts of the world: local exchange and trading systems (LETS) in which trading is done in local and regional currencies, cooperative banking, decentralized energy, and localizing the production and exchange of goods necessary for basic needs such as water and food.

Such local efforts, which are based in personal values  and which try to create local structures of greater economic participation, will not remain just local.  As these local realizations of a new way of organizing the market and the production and exchange of goods increase, and especially as they network with each other, they will have a transformative effect on global structures.  They will become “glocal.”

But, at the end of the process, the Buddhists reminded us Christians, that all these efforts on the “glocal” level meant to transform the “global” level, won’t really work unless we are also continuously working on the “personal” level.  Our efforts to transform the world have to be rooted in our efforts to transform our own hearts.

As Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us:  We cannot make peace unless we are peace.

So the message of our conference is this:  As we all seek to transform our hearts from self-centeredness and expand our hearts toward compassion for others, we work on the local level, trying to create new ways of organizing our local economy that, we hope, will gradually transform the global economy.   Our focus is the local. Our goal is the global.  We act glocally.

The Christians responded to their Buddhist partners: “Yes, we certainly agree, but you can’t forget that greed can take on structural forms and become part of the very economic system of free-market capitalism.”

And so the first day of our Buddhist-Christian dialogue began.

After a good bit of back and forth, we came to a working consensus:  We have to make a distinction between individual greed and structural greed.  Though the two are very much related, there is a difference.  Getting rid of one, does not necessarily mean getting rid of the other.  I can remove all (or to be realistic, most) of my own individual greed and still be part of a greedy system that leads me to act greedily, whether I’m aware of it or not.  My heart may be full of love of others, but if I buy a pair of pants made in a sweatshop in El Salvador, I’m part of a greed-based system that is exploiting some people for personal wealth.

But at the same time, we can pass all kinds of regulatory laws that constrict the greedy actions of Wall Street, and still, greedy individuals will find ways around the laws.

A simple analogy was used: Individual greed is like the air that a greedy person blows into a balloon. The balloon represents the greedy structure or system that results from the greedy individual.  The Buddhist point is that without the greedy individual blower we would not have the “structural” greedy balloon.  But the Christians respond that sometimes, the balloon ties itself closed, as it were, and floats away from the blower. Then, even though the individual blower stops blowing, the balloon is still floating around. The balloon, even though it originated from the blower, assumes an existence of its own.

So we came to a Buddhist-Christian consensus:  to do something about the financial mess we are in, we have to try to remove, or at least reduce, both individual greed and structural greed at the same time.   To deal with only one, won’t work. It won’t really bring about any change.

This is the point that was made powerfully by one of the speakers this morning, Sulak Sivaraksa, one of the world’s leading socially-engaged Buddhists (who over the past 30 years has been  on a number of occasions either imprisoned or forced into exile because of his criticisms of economic exploitation in Thailand).

Sulak said pithily: “Without inner peace there cannot be outer peace.” That’s the Buddhists’ point: you have to work on changing your heart and attaining the peace of enlightenment before you can be an effective social activist.  But he immediately added:  “But inner peace can be achieved at the expense of outer peace.”  That’s the Christian point:  To think that we have done enough by overcoming our individual greed and attaining peace of heart is to exonerate ourselves from the necessary job of changing the greedy structures that prevent social peace.

We Buddhists and Christians are realizing that we have so much to learn from each other.

We’ve come together to talk about the financial tsunami that moved out from Wall Street in 2007 and covered most of the world. Our questions: why did it happen? And especially: What can we do about it?

We start this evening, Sunday, and will be talking and deliberating – as well as praying and meditating – together for the next four days.

This is exactly the kind of dialogue that I, with many others, have been trying to move along – dialogue based primarily on solidarity with all suffering sentient beings. In this case, the sentient beings are suffering because of economic conditions that have led to a horrible and deplorable disparity in the way the goods of the world are shared.

This is the kind of dialogue that certainly doesn’t exclude the hard work of studying and learning about each other’s traditions and the inspiring work of sharing in the spiritual-mystical treasures found in the religions of the world.  But it sets the context, or prepares the ground, for such theological and spiritual sharing by first deliberating and acting together to address eco-human suffering.

What counts most, what presses most, is, as Buddha told us, to remove suffering.  In trying to do that, we prepare for everything else.

In the following days, I’ll try to report on what happens here in Chiang Mai – how Buddhists and Christians can complement each other in addressing the immediate financial crisis and the deeper causes that brought it about.  And how this practical “dialogue of solidarity” might lead us to a deeper “dialogue of learning” and a “dialogue of spirituality.”

What a privilege it is to be here.

William Greider

I’ve just returned from a wonderful, nostalgic visit to my favorite city in the whole world: Rome. And I’ve been trying to catch up with national news.

The latest issue of THE NATION has left me stunned, bewildered, unable to be incredulous. A column by William Greider, whose books, columns, and appearances on the Bill Moyers show have elicited my trust and respect, lays out the case that President Obama is, indeed, “whacking the old folks.” (I guess I should make that “us old folks.”)

This is his main contention: “The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan compromise in which Democrats agree to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees while Republicans accede to significant tax increases to reduce government red ink.”

Greider offer particulars: “Obama is arm in arm with GOP conservatives like Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, who for decades has demonized Social Security as a grave threat to the Republic and has spread some $12 million among economists, think tanks, foundations, and assorted front groups to sell his case.”

But the facts contradict such claims. “Social Security has accumulated a massive surplus — $2.5 trillion now, rising to $4.3 trillion by 2023.”

Therefore: “Despite conservative propaganda, cutting Social Security will have no impact on the deficit problem that so stirs public anxiety. The While House knows this. So why is the president targeting Social Security?”

Greider’s answer to this question sends shivers up the spine of many an Obama supporter, especially those who are moving close to retirement: “Targeting Social Security is a smokescreen designed to reassure foreign creditors and avoid confronting the true sources of US indebtedness.” Those true sources of our gigantic deficit are the two wars we are now fighting on borrowed money, tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, and the deregulation that was a major cause of the recent financial crisis.

So why doesn’t Obama address the real causes of our deficit? Greider’s answer to that question is both sobering and shivering: “Those and other sources of deficits involve very powerful interests. Instead of taking them on, the thinking in Washington goes, let’s whack the old folks while they’re not watching.”

If this is the thinking in Washington, as it seems to be, both young and old folk better speak up before they get whacked.

Check out Greider’s full case.

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

When I think on this, when I let it seep into my feelings, I become a bit nauseous.  It implies that we have an economic system that by its very nature puts profits over people — better, profits for some over the well-being of many.  “You basically don’t want workers.”  If the system could get along without workers, it would.  If it could create wealth for shareholders without creating wealth for workers, it would.

Something is sick with the system.

I know, Adam Smith — or those who interpret him — tell us that if we pursue profits,  then all the people will eventually profit.  Profits come first, and the invisible hand will take care of the distribution.  I guess I would have to say about the invisible hand what atheists say about God:  where’s the empirical evidence for what you are claiming to be real?

“It’s the system, stupid” would seem to apply.  The system needs fixing. — Or, do we need a new system?  I really am not sure.