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!

One could say much about what we Christians — especially we Christian activists or liberationists — have to learn from the Buddhist insistence that unless we spend time, lots of time, sitting under a Bodhi tree and seeking enlightenment, we’re not going to be able to really change the world and its structures.  That message came through again and again in my dialogues in Korea.  And I know I have not yet fully understood what it is telling me.

But I’m not sure whether the Buddhists I spoke with really grasped what I think is one of the DISTINCTIVE ingredients in what Jesus discovered about the Mystery he called God/Father.  It’s contained in the cross.

I recently came across a powerful expression of this distinctive message of Christianity in a book by Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. (Wily-Blackwell, 2009):

If God is indeed in one sense utterly other, he is also made manifest [for Christians and for the world]  in the tortured body of a reviled political criminal … The ghastly good news of the gospel is that being done to death by the state for speaking up for love and justice is the status to which we must all aspire. The message of the New Testament is that if you don’t love you are dead, and if you do, they will kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and your opium of the people. It is a message scandalous alike to the civilized liberal, the militant humanist and the wide-eyed progressive.  (p. 256)

Eagleton’s statement is strong.  I would change his “the status to which we all must aspire” to “for which we all must be ready.”  Still, his (and my) understanding of the Gospel as not only calling us to have compassion and love our neighbor (that the Buddhists would readily agree with) but to also confront the systemic powers that be (the state or the economic system) and be ready to accept the uncomfortable or deadly consequences — this is a message that the Korean Buddhists I talked with found difficult to comprehend.

Which means that “the sitting Buddha” and “the crucified Christ” have a lot to learn from each other.

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.

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.

That may come across as too simplistic. Sure, there are many factors behind religious terrorism — or violence in the name of God.  But one of them surely is what Ahmad and Eagleton are pointing to:  People get very angry when they feel they are being pushed aside, stepped on, or not respected.  And when they think God doesn’t like that either, they feel (rightly so, I would say) that they can respond with God on their side.  And if they have a notion of a patriarchal father God who himself gets violent when he’s angry, watch out. That’s where anger-endorsed-by-God leads to violence-endorsed-by-God.

So, the solution to religious terror is indeed secular justice. But that is not enough. The solution  also requires theological criticism and reform of a patriarchal God who gets pissed off and starts swinging.