European Network for Buddhist-Christian Studies
 St. Ottilien October 1997 
Dharmachari
Kulananda 
(following Prof. Aasulv Lande's talk) 

Transcribed by: Paul
Trafford Date: 26 July 1998 NOTES: =20 

1. Text entered in square brackets
[like this] denotes additions or comments inserted by the transcriber. =20
2. Further, comments with dots and a question mark, e.g. like, [..?..]
denote missing words; a question mark by itself [?] denotes uncertainty
about preceding text, particularly a name. 
----------Start ofTranscript--------------
There has to be some kind of response to
other beings because we are, after all, in a state of interconnectedness
with one another. We cannot cut off from other living beings and at the same
time go for refuge to the Three Jewels - to ignore other living beings is to
deny the very process of going for refuge to the Three Jewels and [..?..]
point. =20 So these facts account for two separate but related aspects of
Buddhist engagement. The altruistic dimension of going for refuge leads
Buddhists into three areas of engagement: it leads them into Buddhist
missionising, the desire to help other beings by spreading the Dharma; it
leads to social work; and it leads to social activism. And the dimension of
relatedness leads to the perceived need to create Buddhist social
frameworks, frameworks within which practising Buddhism, the practice of
going for refuge to the Three Jewels is possible. It seems to me that the
impulses in these directions are intrinsic to the process of going for
refuge to the Three Jewels. They spring naturally from it as a spiritual
experience. It's not something that has to be added on to a spiritual life
which can somehow do without them. I think as a spiritual life begins of
unfold, impulses of that order will arise at some point. Now, recently
[there has been] a plethora of activity in the western Buddhist world in
this regard - an outbreak of social activism, social work. A number of Zen
centres in the United States, for example, have gone about different
projects. The San Francisco Zen Center has its hospice, now very well known,
a hospice project in San Francisco working particularly at one point with
people who were dying from AIDS - medical science had moved on to working
with cancer patients [?] The Zen centre in New York in Yonkers[?] is doing a
huge amount of work under the guidance of=20 Roshi Bernard Glassman amongst
homeless people, unemployed people, people with AIDS, people with drug
problems. The Rokpa Foundation in the UK and in India does a good variety of
social work under the auspices of the Karma Kagyu tradition. The Karuna
Trust, of which I am a trustee, has been doing a great deal to promote
social work in India amongst Untouchable Buddhists. And so it goes on.
Perhaps I shall fill in just a little background detail about the work of
the Karuna Trust, for that is the work I know most intimately, though I
think Bernard Glassman's experiments in New York would certainly repay
further investigation for anyone interested in this area. I think his way
out ahead of most other people in this field, although whether it is going
to remain Buddhist or not is a good question - time will tell. The Karuna
Trust is a response to the situation that members of the Western Buddhist
Order found themselves in in India. The founder of our order,
Sangharakshita, had done a lot of work with a man called B. R. Ambedkar, who
was a leader of Untouchables in the 1940's and 50's, a political leader, who
had himself had been born Untouchable and who came up very strongly against
the caste system and engaged in a great deal of political work on behalf of
the liberation of the Untouchables and came to the conclusion eventually
that untouchability was not going to be eradicated from Hinduism. The only
way forward for the Untouchable people was to convert to Buddhism, for if
they converted to Buddhism they would escape the caste system. Several
million therefore converted with Ambedkar and became new Buddhists. Ambedkar
died and [..?..] Sangharakshita engaged himself with it. Interestingly
enough, very few other Buddhists around the world seemed to take the
movement seriously and this is an important fact and also it needs to be
considered when one considers the issue of engaged Buddhism. Why wasn't
there a response from particularly Southern and South East Asians to the
conversion, a response which Ambedkar passionately called for in= [..?..]?
So you had several million new Buddhists in dire straits in India, looking
for guidance, receiving it from very few people, one of whom was an
Englishman in [..?..]=20 Sangharakshita came back to England, founded an
order. In due course some of his disciples went back to India to help work
amongst these new Buddhists. One of the things we discovered there was that
the immediate needs were for Dharma, above all that was what people wanted.
We were dealing with some of the most impoverished people in India, some of
the poorest people in India. What they were asking for from Westerners who
were making themselves available was not for social work, not for education
or health care or employment. What they were asking for was religious help,
help in understanding the steps they had taken in becoming Buddhist, what it
all meant - Dharma teaching. =20 This is something I've noticed myself time
and again as I've travelled through India, sometimes throughout[?] the
villages, giving lectures, a desperate hunger for instruction for these
people had been left to their own devices for a long time. They didn't
really understand fully the steps they had taken, [so] wanted very much to
know more. At same time, we felt that whilst wanting to engage very fully
with them, we couldn't avoid the social context - the immediate need for
education, primary health care and employment, but perhaps above all for
education. As a consequence, we helped to found an organisation called
[..?..], for the welfare of the many, which is now run entirely by Indian
members of our order, providing hostels - 16 or 17 educational hostels -
around India, where boys and girls can go and stay from the villages in
order to get education in the towns, because very often in the villages
education isn't [..?..]. And suddenly what you notice in India is that if
somebody gets education in the family, it's not just their benefit, but for
the whole family's benefit, because they then get reasonable employment,
they send money back to the village and it brings in their own cousins and
nephews also into education, so the whole family lifts up. Something which I
noticed very much as I was travelling around India lecturing, was that if
you went to a village where there were two or three men living in the city,
it was a relatively prosperous, relatively educated, and in some ways civil,
for Untouchables living there [?]. If you went into villages where that was
not happening, the village was illiterate and more than that, to some
extent, the issues that people faced, were very often [..?..] They were
often very strongly at odds with another. =20 (This is a bit of a
diversion). It is hard to describe the effects of systematically depriving
people of religion for a thousand years. When you systematically deprive a
people of a religion for a thousand years, as the caste system has done, the
implications are devastating for the culture in which that happens, because
when you deprive people of religion you are also depriving them of their
ethical foundations and people are left with nothing, they just don't know
how to go about organising themselves, how to relate to one another in
kindly ways. It really is quite devastating. The caste system has been an
extraordinary abomination in the practice of Untouchables in India.=20 Now
what we've found is that whilst people who were involved in the caste system
have come to hear about Buddhism, it has given them an ethical framework to
live by, which they immediately respond to in that way [?], but also a
feeling of self worth. Untouchability deprives people of self worth
absolutely, Buddhism has given them a sense of self worth - this is very
very important. So the work that we do in India is valuable, I think, but it
has a dependent counterpart in the West, which is very interesting. In the
West, we have a number of people who depend upon the work in India, quite
literally, for their livelihood because they are raising the funds to
support the charitable work in India. So they require this to be happening
in order for them to be able to practice right livelihood. This is an
interesting turnaround, that's one we need to be reminded of time and time
again that people who are donors in the North depend upon the benefactors,
the recipients in the South. So in the UK the Karuna Trust was established,
which raises about a million dollars each year for social work in India and
the main way of raising the money is people decide to volunteer for six
weeks a year - they go knocking on doors, asking for money. This is a
powerful practice for many of our Friends, it really confronts someone with
themselves. They live communally for six weeks, they train in the work and
then they go off every evening knocking on the doors of complete strangers,
saying this is who I am and "I'd like you to give =A310 a month =85 in
perpetuity to help us fund our work=85" And that's very very challenging to
many people. It really confronts them with their own reservations, their own
lack of conviction, their lack of courage, helps them to develop self
confidence, straightforwardness, honesty and many other important spiritual
qualities. So we see the fundraising work as an important dimension of
spiritual training and we present it as such, we offer it as such - an
aspect of spiritual training. So the people who are engaged in fundraising
work, live together, meditate together, do devotional exercises (puja)
together and in the evening they will all go off onto the streets of
whichever town they are and try to get one or two or three people to sign up
and give =A310 a month. They find this enormously challenging - in trying to
meet their targets and so on - and people found that they come out at the
end of these fundraising appeals substantially changed for having engaged in
them, spiritually changed for having engaged in them. =20 So perhaps this
sort of thing is a flavour of what we might mean by 'engaged Buddhism' these
days, a form of Buddhist practice that engages with the world and transforms
it. Another dimension to engaged Buddhism, which I think may be worth
touching briefly on, is this need to create Buddhist social frameworks. It
is not easy to practice Buddhism in isolation, it is not easy to sustain a
regular mediation practice, to sustain a particular kind of ethical
practice, to keep up a devotional practice and so on, in isolation. We find
that people benefit from living and working together - communal situations.
I've come to understand from my own experience why Buddhism has placed so
much emphasis on community over the years, spiritual community, particularly
on monastic communities. They make such a significant difference to people's
lives to be able to practice communally.=20 But also in the west today, one
can't as a Buddhist practitioner just go out with begging bowl and [..?..]
for support. It's not on. It doesn't happen. So one is confronted if one is
taking up full time spiritual practice with issues of livelihood. So how
does one engage in full time spiritual practice in the West today without
large charitable institutions or state taxes which are willing to support
the individual who is engaged in such spiritual practice? This is an issue
that confronts Western Buddhist today? One of the solutions that we have
found is what is called 'team based right livelihood business'. A group of
men or women get together with the intention of starting some kind of
business enterprise for the sake of supporting themselves and hopefully
making a surplus to [..?..]. So a group of people will start a project
together working communally, living communally, trying to live as simply as
possibly, not taking too much, and working on the basis - in our own
organisation - of 'give what you can and take what you need'. So people take
as little as possible, try to disengage from the consumerism all around them
and try to make surpluses available for the charitable and [dana..?..] One
of the most successful right livelihood businesses we have now is Windhorse
Trading which operates in Cambridge and employs something like a hundred
people. It has sales of over $10 million a year and this year, I hope, we
will be able to give away over a million pounds in dana towards supporting
Buddhist activities around the world. All the men and women working in
Windhorse Trading adopt this basis of 'give what you can, take what you
need'. They live communally, live very simply, in a semi-monastic
residential community, receive small pocket money for medical and other
expenses, 6 weeks of retreat allowance a year, and so on, and share - share
cars, share washing machines, etc. They don't have a great deal of private
property apart from books, CD's, music systems and the occasional portable
computer. This kind of experiment is taking place and perhaps this is an
important dimension of social engagement, a new way of engaging in society.
It is also taking on the issue of consumerism which, I think, western
Buddhists have critically to address because if we are trying to deal with
problems of craving, aversion and delusion, living in society which is
seeking all the time to inculcate craving as deeply as possible within us,
and I think we have actively to find ways of turning away from consumerism,
finding alternative ways of living. These are some of the models that social
engagement that are working. It's interesting that in=20 Windhorse Trading,
I think there are probably more Ph.D.'s per square foot working on the
warehouse floor in the world and the Managing Director takes no more by way
of personal remuneration, than someone who is newly arrived - may take less
because if the person newly arrived has greater need in the family they
support and so on, they may take what they need in order to do that. So
these are some of the ways in which engaged Buddhism is beginning to work
its way out in the western Buddhist context. But all that having been said,
I think we must return to the subject that consciousness is primary. A quote
I've not been able to track down from Thomas Merton, but which [..?..],
which I've taken to heart and believe in is the notion that "Hermits are
spiritual engines of the cosmos." Something like that. =20 Engagement is,
after all, engagement with the Three Jewels. That is the most important
engagement. Practice is centrally important. It is not essential in all of
this to be rushing around doing good to be practicing the Dharma. Sometimes
in order to practice the Dharma, one has to go away, sometimes for very
considerable periods of time, even into isolation in order to practice the
Dharma. But if one takes as one's archetype the life of the great saint
Milarepa, one of the founding fathers of the Kagyu tradition, who lived as a
hermit in the Himalayas, the influence of his life upon the world has been
immense. His songs continue to inspire Buddhists down the ages, even now,
many many hundreds of years after his death. =20 So engagement is above all
engagement with practice, with the Dharma, and engagement with the Dharma
may lead one to wish to shepherd that, may lead one to want in different
ways to change the world, but above all it leads one to want to change
consciousness and that is the most important thing. Thank you. [ =85 people
then talk amongst themselves about what Kulananda said =85 ] [Question and
Answer Session =85] Prof. Gerhard Koberlin [?]: [..?..] consciousness
without changing the world. Can you separate the consciousness of the actual
work that needs to be done? I still have difficulties with accepting a
phrase like this: 'Consciousness is prior to =85 you said =85=20 Shenpen[?]
[..?..] Koberlin: to [..?..] Kulananda: Consciousness is primary to
being[?], secondary Koberlin: =85 Primary and secondary, yes. And I still
try to find a formula to speak of the interconnectedness of both and not try
to separate again. Kulananda: Ultimately, there is a level at which
distinction cannot be made. The doctrine of dependent origination which
[..?..] showed you can't make ultimate separations. I think you have got to
look at something like the teaching of Kamma, which suggests that it is the
quality of volitions behind an action that determines the outcome. So
although they cannot be intrinsically separated, we are not talking about
ultimate duality between being and consciousness, but rather=20 within total
reality there is a dimension which is consciousness and a dimension which is
being - they are not ultimately separate, they are part of the same overall
process. Nonetheless it is the quality of the consciousness that determines
the quality of being and obviously the quality of being feeds back into the
quality of consciousness. It's like this. I find it very difficult to
meditate at the side of a motorway. I can meditate much better in a shrine
room, certainly. The quality of being around me affects obviously my level
of consciousness. My activities in the world, the quality of my activities
in the world, the way in which I impinge upon the world and begin to affect
it for better or for worse will be determined by the quality of my
consciousness. So there is something to be said for withdrawing for a time,
for example into morning meditation, trying to change my consciousness in
the best possible conditions in order to affect the world in the most useful
kind of way. That's the sort of thing I mean. German Man: I would like to
add one point to the question. I also feel that mind has priority in
Buddhism. a few examples. For instance, beginning first with the Dhammapada,
"All things come from mind." But there are also some philosophical reasons
for that because Buddhism believes in genuine freedom, genuine human choice,
it is not deterministic. So there cannot be a complete balance between mind
and surrounding because if that was a real balance, it would mean that=20
the mind was in the same way determined by its surrounding like it was
possible to influence its surrounding. That would eliminate genuine freedom,
I think. Therefore it is important to keep that priority, but this does not
exclude that there is a heavy influence of your context on your decisions
and on the field [..?..]. Buddhism clearly acknowledges that society is
important for the conditions of the flourishing of the Dhamma, for instance,
and that the Sangha is very important for the conditions of the development
of the single member who is in the Sangha. My question is: you mentioned
that the converts of the Ambedkar movement had been left without any Dhamma
teachings and I wanted to question you a little about that because Ambedkar
wrote 'Buddha and his Dharma' and I read the whole book - it is a big book,
as you know. If you read that book you understand why no other Buddhist
schools came and did that work because Ambedkar did not convert into an
existing Buddhist strand or tradition, he converted into a kind of Buddhism
that he had created himself before. This 'Buddha and his Dharma' was
projected for him as the basis of the teaching that he wanted to spread. =20
So my question is what did the Western Buddhist Order do? Did you spread
Ambedkar's 'Buddha and his Dharma' or did you do some corrections on that?
Kulananda: One has to work very very skilfully with that. Obviously,
Ambedkar is venerated amongst his follows. Today, his photograph is on the
wall of every house, garlanded every morning, it is side by side with the
Buddha. He's a great hero, the great liberator and his achievement in
humanist spiritual terms is quite outstanding. He has freed seven [?] people
for a start. So we accept that, we have to work with that. He is a saint of
this movement. That can't be ignored. =20 At the same time, 'The Buddha and
his Dharma' is an idiosyncratic book, so one has to work very skilfully
around it. I think Sangharakshita has done this with a certain degree of
mastery. He teaches in India the same number that he teaches everywhere
else. He is very familiar with Ambedkar's books. He goes around. So members
of our order in India who have trained in India would find themselves very
much at home without[?] the training we have received in the West. The
training we receive in the West is much more classical than that. We have
difficulties in India inasmuch as the figures of the Bodhisattvas, the
Mahayana Bodhisattvas, remind people in that tradition of the Indian gods.
They react very strongly to that, but gradually they are introduced.
Gradually people come around to that - it is a gradual process. I think that
should never have been a stumbling point. It is just a matter of working
with that, working around that, and being skilful and [..?..] careful. It
can be done. Man [who?]: What, for instance, would you do with the doctrine
of reincarnation? Kulananda: We don't stress it. =85 Man: [..?..] Kulananda:
It has been taken for centuries as the justification of the caste system. So
we leave it as an open question. Frankly, I think that as a doctrine it has
to be treated as an open question. It has to be treated that [..?..] one[?]
of us remember where we were in our past lives. Let's see. This is what the
tradition presents us with. The doctrine of reincarnation. Let's see. We can
treat it as an open question and continue to practise Buddhism Man 2: I want
to go back to the question of the active life and the meditation, how they
go together? One thing I found fascinating about the Jesuit past, the Jesuit
life, is a saying 'Contemplativus in Actione' - you are contemplative, but
very active. The founder Ignatius had much difficulty with people who needed
a lot of meditation and contemplation. He was presented with a request by
some people, "We need at least 8 hours every day, otherwise we cannot
function." [..?..] And either its one hour and you need to be over - all
these people who need 8 hours, he cut it down - one hour should do and
then... [tape change] And you were saying, of course, there is a difficulty
on the noisy roads to do your meditation. But to some extent I would say the
[..?..] ideal is exactly on the noisy roads in the noisy cities, do your
meditation and especially once you have reached a certain stage how much
meditation do you really need and then would you go along to find in the
action these brief moments of contemplation or meditation being sufficient
to carry on. Kulananda: I think that in our own experience it's a mix. We
generally recommend committing members of our order to take at least a
month's solitary retreat each year, and to maintain at least one hour's
meditation practice each day as a minimum. Beyond that, there are many
people in our order, who have very long periods - 10 years, 15 years =85 -
living in meditation retreat centres, just doing meditation, then they may
do something else. Or someone may spend several years in a meditation
retreat centre and then go off and live a more active life. There are also
people living quite active lives who keep up a significant meditation
practice. I think it is also easy to fool yourself in what is your real
capacity to maintain a clear meditative state of consciousness in the midst
of activities [..?..]. It is very easy just to get active and to say that
"Oh yeah, my activity is my meditation!" I'm not always convinced. One has
to observe the quality of the action - is it mindful. When I watch my own
teacher scratch his nose, he does this =85 [..?..] There is a difference
here, there is a continuous mindfulness, continuous awareness and that's raw
consciousness. Shenpen: You don't have to [..?..] You could mindfully
[..?..] Kulananda: Sure [..laughter..] You can see the difference between
the mindful [.. laughter] and ... Someone used to say to Ajahn Chah, "What
do you mean by meditation." (Ajahn Chah was one of the great forest
monastics of the last generation in Thailand). What he would often do - he
would pour them a glass of water, just mindfully pour them a glass of water.
That was what he meant by meditation. I don't think there was any symbolism
in the glass of water - it was the activity, an important thing to bear in
mind. Man 2: Yes, otherwise you get some problems if you divide the
meditation and the other practice and whatever it means. As far as I
understood the teaching of the [..?..], it's a way of doing something that
separate doing [..?..] and the activity =85 in the garden or the work in the
kitchen, that'= s the way of doing something. You can do whatever you like,
if it is in a special way of consciousness, then you are in meditation.
Kulananda: Then, the question is how do you access and [..?..] those states
of consciousness? That becomes an important question. Man 2: of the person
[?]. Shenpen[?] Something that interests me is this 'engaged Buddhism', a
Western term to counterbalance the idea that Buddhist practice is all about
going off and meditating. It strikes me in comparison, having lived in the
East and lived with Eastern Buddhists, what they would understand by
'engaged Buddhism' would actually be accumulating punnya. And what's quite
interesting, I noticed psychologically the difference between thinking of
engaged Buddhism as accumulating punnya and, yes, if you are lucky you might
be able to meditate while you do accumulate punnya and even you don't
manage, anyway you've accumulated punnya. So [it's] psychologically very
fulfilling. And also the punnya-making is defined by motivation and actual
action, so if your motivation is to worship the Buddha, for example, and you
make an offering, then that would definitely produce a certain amount of
punnya. If your decide your motivation is to help the poor and you start to
try and help the poor and you give away a lot of money, then that has
created the punnya, so you don't need to worry about it too much, what the
actual effect is of giving the money. Whereas, I think, as engaged western
Buddhists, we are much more concerned with the sophistication of awareness,
and being aware of what we do, and being aware of the effects of what we do,
and that maybe if we give money to these people it might do them more harm
than good and actually it might turn out to be a bad thing we have done. So
we are worrying about that sort of thing, which you could say is a higher
form of awareness, but at the same time does allow you to feel at the end of
the day that you have totally failed, because not only did you fail to do it
mindfully, but also what you tried to do to help others actually turned out
to be destroyed overnight because of whatever, or it turned out to be
ill-conceived, or whatever. So you could end up feeling very undermined,
going back and feeling very negative about yourself. =20 I think that's
quite an interesting contrast. I wonder if at all this idea of punnya is
taking off in the engaged Buddhism world or if you think that it would be a
bad thing if it did, which is also a possibility? Man 2: Could it be=85 My
suspicion is because it is Western Buddhism, isn't there an interaction of
some what you could call Christian ideas into Buddhist thinking and
framework. Is it something that has to be thrown out or can we say this is a
kind of inter-religious learning from one another and enriching one another?
Shenpen: Certainly =85 [..?..] Kulananda: Two interesting and separate
questions. Punnya issue - I don't know. It is interesting the way that
westerners just don't seem to take to the idea. I think it is a wonderful
idea. It makes tremendous sense to me. Just think of Punnya as the
uninspired =85 the unexpired[?] vipakas, the positive vipakas. [..?..] I
think because people don't understand [..?..] haven't a sufficiently deep
appreciation of the doctrine of karma yet. Shenpen Certainly not of good
Karma. I also think they are obstructed because they have taken on a
Christian idea =85 I think they have taken on this Christian idea that your
actions should be selfless and you shouldn't want any return on your action
and you shouldn't look for result from your action and from that point of
view it's a very high morality. And I think that there is an automatic
clamping down where, "I don't want to think I get anything back from the
action", because even if I think, "Oh well, I am going to give away all the
punnya," you know that the doctrine is that you get even more punnya if you
did that. So that people think, "I don't want to get involved in that,
that's egocentric, that's kind of grasping at things [..?..]. Its not just
they're not taking up on that, they actually don't like the idea. Kulananda:
I think that is right. Man 3: They fear that they get attention with what
they do. [..?..] they are dealing with and all that. That's the first answer
you get in the East. It doesn't matter in which country you come, when you
ask, "Is there any social work in the Buddhists surrounding you, you will
mostly get the answer 'no', or just some little things come up. When you
ask, "Why don't you do it?" First you get the answer, "Because it is not
really in the teachings, that's wrong." Second is "That might a problem
because you are attached to what you do and you want to do more and the
people are lucky, and then you get more and more involved in that and that
is not getting detached from the world." =20 Therefore I agree that in
contact with the Western thinking and the Christian thinking, that you can
bring out in such an emphasised way the activity in Buddhism, although the
Buddha has, as far as I know, no problems with that involvement. Once he was
very angry with his monks that they didn't care for a sick person. He
chastised them that nobody took care, so he went and washed him and took
care of him and then he told the monks, "When you have left your home - that
means father, mother and family - then you must be father, mother and family
to each other. You can't put it more precisely than that. Kulananda: Yes.
Aasulv: Thank you. Just a comment. [..?..] I visited Soka Gakkai a few years
ago and it is impressive how they have developed this idea of compassion in
a social context, particularly for health care and medical health and so
forth. And they based this on the studies of suttas - I don't know exactly
where they've found it, but it is in the idea of the compassion of Buddha,
and it is in this context a very strong and comprehensive Buddhist concern
for society and the whole human [race]. Shenpen: =85 Many years ago in the
mid-60's, I was talking with [..?..] Rinpoche, who was then in Britain. He
actually said that he thought that a major contribution of Western society -
a good influence on Buddhism - would be (and would definitely come about)
would be this sense of a social conscience, the sense that we ought to be
doing something for others rather than simply thinking in terms of punnya.
He actually deliberately didn't actually put forward this idea of punnya. It
is quite noticeable that he doesn't mention it. I mentioned this to Tibetan
nuns, saying what a wonderful teacher Trungpu Rinpoche was, "You know he
never talks about punnya." They said, "What! How can you have Buddhism
without talking about punnya? If all else fails, at least there is punnya."
It strikes me that what happens with social work =85 although, in Tibetan
society, the monks and the lamas were the centre of learning, the centre of
medical care, the centre of any kind of legal system there was, they were
the centre of the community, which was a kind of social work. But in terms
of what people were actually thinking when they were making offerings to the
monastery, they weren't thinking of social work, they were thinking that you
get more punnya if you give to the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. And you see this
among refugees as well. They will use their money not to improve their
situation, but to actually put more [..?..] lamps, burn more lamps at the
shrine - what we would call extravagance. You could see that as the negative
side of punnya. Perhaps? I don't know. Kulananda: Who knows what the
outcomes are? Man 1: Regarding the social dimension, I completely agree with
what you said at the beginning of your speech. It is interesting, just the
passage you mention about the Buddha washing the ill monk. =20 When Albert
Schweitzer came across this passage he said, "There you can see how the
Buddha acts against his own teaching." =20 It is very difficult for Western
interpreters of Buddhism with their preconceptions. They did not see that
their preconceptions were wrong. You can give any proof you like, "This is a
problem of Buddhism that it does not stick to its own principles.' [..?..]
In order to see what has happened, I think it would be helpful here to look
at the history because at the time of the Buddha himself, it was impossible
for his poor followers to do any of what we would call social work. All they
could do was to offer some rice to the Sangha, something like that, not to
do any kind of social work. But the people who were able to do something
like that (the kings, princes, rich merchants and so on), were constantly
admonished to do that. The is abundantly full of telling kinds to give money
to poor people, and to build wells, roads, [..?..] houses and so forth. All
this has been realised within the Buddhist kingdoms until the time of
colonialism. The big break came with colonialism and you can really prove
that. The situation is different in the Chinese/Japanese area because
Buddhism there had never succeeded in dominating societies but in [..?..]
you can really see where all those .. [recording stops] =85
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