Activist

My name is Roshi Joan Halifax. I am a Zen Buddhist priest and Abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have been a social activist since the 1960’s and know first-hand the power of the people in mobilizing responsible moral and social change.

As a woman, a Buddhist, and an elder, I am standing here today in solidarity with the younger generation, people of color, indigenous peoples, and those fleeing war and the climate catastrophe, all of whom will disproportionately bear the burden of climate devastation.

I am also standing in solidarity with you, all of you. Every one of us, our children and grandchildren, no matter how great our privilege, will be affected by this unfolding climate catastrophe.

We must awaken, collectively, to the fact that the primary cause for climate change is fossil fuel dependent economic growth, primed by human greed, ignorance, and the perverse incentives of capitalism. Fossil fuels are a finite, dangerous, dirty, and destructive source of energy. For us to continue to depend on fossil fuels is life-destroying and immoral, no matter how you look at it.

We live in an interdependent world, and cannot deny how profoundly damaging this energy source is to the individual and collective health of all species. It is absolutely necessary that we revolutionize our intertwined energy and economic systems. And we have to do this now from a space of courage, compassion, love, and wisdom.

And yet, thus far, we haven’t. Why? Fossil fuel companies are focused on making a profit, and they have bought politicians, derailed the media, lost their moral compass to cronyism, and subverted our democratic processes so that they can continue to profit, no matter the cost to the environment and humanity.

And listen carefully: there’s a reason why predatory corporate and financial elites promote a focus on individual behavior, like recycling or energy saver light bulbs, and also why they support autocratic regime change, which ends up causing gross economic and social inequality. These forces of capitalism do not want us to realize that we need fundamental systems change, including making our government enforce checks and balances on the companies profiting from polluting our earth and condemning our future. They know that thriving democracies with active citizens are a threat to them; and, hear me clearly!: We need to behave like a thriving democracy, or else!

We also have to wake up to the fact that the climate crisis is making us sicker and sicker every day.

Our air has become a toxic harbor for increasing allergens, mold, fungi, smoke, mercury (a neurotoxin for fetuses), petrochemical cancer-causing poisons, choking dust, disease bearing insects, and extreme heat.

Our water is a toxic harbor for endocrine disruptors, poisonous chemicals, microbial pollutants, including sewage and lethal algae bacterium; as well, plastics are wiping out our oceans and fisheries, sea water is contaminating our drinking water; and drought and flooding are destroying forests, farmlands, and cities.

But maybe the most insidious and least talked about area of sickness is the profound trauma and bottomless grief being experienced by millions whose lives are shattered by floods, droughts, fires, and heat waves caused by climate change.

Extreme climate heat is also linked with aggression, and connected with violent conflict and forced migration, another source of profound trauma, as well as moral injury for millions of people.

Then there is the pernicious psychological suffering experienced by those who witness the terrible degradation of life associated with our climate catastrophe, and the moral anguish experienced in response to the aggressive assaults on the dignity of those who raise their voices in protest and who are bullied and dehumanized by politicos, fake news reporters, and those who profit from this devastation.

We must ask then: who will make the change? Clearly, every one of us must! Whether faith leader or farmer, politician or policewoman, kid or grandmother, we must demonstrate in solidarity for those who are on the frontlines of climate change impacts and hold accountable the perpetrators of climate-caused suffering.

Lawyer Mariel Nanasi, President of New Energy Economy, writes: “We are at a crossroads. We either face the very real possibility of a planet on hospice, driven by an energy system that is the epitome of capitalism on steroids with extreme exploitation and racism at its core. Or a profound opportunity to shift at the very basis of our economic system that we haven’t seen since the abolition of slavery. And it’s really up to us which way we go.”

The first 200 years of capitalism were based on slavery; the second 200 on fossil fuels; and the next 200 must be based on renewables, if we are to survive. If we could abolish slavery on which our country was built, which involved the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, we can respond to the climate crisis and abolish the use of toxic fossil fuels, as well as transform the economies of injustice into economies of peace. Just as the abolition of slavery was the morally right thing to do in 1861, ending fossil fuel use, whatever the cost, is the moral imperative of our time. And we can do this!

As I said, we need to function as a thriving democracy. What happens in a thriving democracy? People VOTE. It’s the single thing that almost everyone can do regardless of station. And it’s the most important thing at this point. Clearly, we need to get this administration out of office, and people need to vote for principled candidates in next November’s election and get their friends and family to vote and help get out the vote and they need to start now! Phone banks, canvassing, financial contributions to democratic candidates in swing states.

For every voter the Republicans purge from the rolls, we need to register two new democrats.

The next thing people can do is contact their elected representatives. Flood them with calls and letters. Tell them to support the Green New Deal. The only thing that will counter corporate power is a steady and overwhelming expression of people power.

Another thing we can do is support the organizations on the front lines: the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide, the League of Conservation Voters, the National Resource Defense Council, Fridays for Future.

Join, give money, volunteer. And talk to friends. Share concerns and ideas. Organize. Protest. Engage in civil disobedience. Action breeds hope. Without hope we have no future but if everyone acts, there is something to hope for.

A good part of my life has been spent relating to situations that might be deemed hopeless—as an anti-war activist, a civil rights worker, a caregiver of dying people. I have also volunteered with death row inmates, served in medical clinics in remote areas of the Himalayas—where life is hard, food is scarce, and access to health care is nil—and worked in Kathmandu with Rohingya refugees who have no status, anywhere. You might ask, why bother? Why hold out hope for ending war or injustice? Why have hope for people who are dying, or for refugees fleeing from genocide, or for solutions to climate change?

I have often been troubled by the notion of hope. But recently, in part because of the work of social critic Rebecca Solnit and her powerful book Hope in the Dark, I am opening to another view of hope—what I call wise hope.

As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what will actually happen. Not getting what we hoped for is usually experienced as some kind of misfortune. Someone who is hopeful in this way has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. This ordinary hope is a subtle expression of fear and a form of suffering.

Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of suffering—both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It’s when we realize we don’t know what will happen that this kind of hope comes alive; in that spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act.

Too often we become paralyzed by the belief that there is nothing to hope for—that our cancer diagnosis is a one-way street with no exit, that our political situation is beyond repair, that there is no way out of our climate crisis. It becomes easy to think that nothing makes sense anymore, or that we have no power and there’s no reason to act.

I often say that there should be just two words over the door of our temple in Santa Fe: Show up! Yes, suffering is present. We cannot deny it. There are 65.3 million refugees in the world today, only eleven countries are free from conflict, and climate change is turning forests into deserts. Economic injustice is driving people into greater and greater poverty. Racism and sexism remain rampant.

But understand, wise hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them, addressing them, and remembering what else is present, like the shifts in our values that recognize and move us to address suffering right now. “Do not find fault with the present,” says Zen Master Keizan. He invites us to see it, not flee it!

The Czech statesman Václav Havel said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” We can’t know, but we can trust that there will be movement, there will be change. And that we will be part of it. We move forward in our day and get out the vote, or sit at the bedside of a dying patient, or teach that third grade class.

As Buddhists, we share a common aspiration to awaken from suffering; for many of us, this aspiration is not a “small self” improvement program. The bodhisattva vows at the heart of the Mahayana tradition are, if nothing else, a powerful expression of radical and wise hope—an unconditional hope that is free of desire.

Dostoyevsky said, “To live without hope is to cease to live.” His words remind us that apathy is not an enlightened path. We are called to live with possibility, knowing full well that impermanence prevails. So why not just show up?

Lion’s Roar - February 28, 2022

As we bear witness to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we cannot fall into our tendency to turn away from suffering, says Roshi Joan Halifax. We must see that we are not separate from others, and move with compassionate action.

This past weekend, hundreds of people rallied in support of Ukraine outside of the White House. Photo by Yohan Marion.

As we witness what is happening in Ukraine in real time, today, probably like you, I am acutely aware that the world is at risk. Hopefully, we also realize that we are not separate from the world. We might ask: How might we meet this reality of suffering and violence, seeing that we are part of it? What is our experience as we bear witness to Ukraine’s satirist turned global figure, President Zelensky, as he stands in the streets of Ukraine’s capitol in a flak jacket with others? Or the young Russian soldier holding a gun? What about the old woman holding her hand out filled with sunflower seeds as she scolds the Russians soldier, or the young Ukrainian man kneeling before the Russian tank, examples of non-violent, civilian resistance? What is the task at hand and ahead of us to meet confusion, delusion, and violence in our time, in our country, in our lives? And how do we realize peace transformation in the midst? And this in the midst of our human driven climate catastrophe.

If we see that we are not separate from others, then we not only share their awakening, we also share their suffering.

The renowned Czech humanist Vaclav Havel once said that morality means taking responsibility, not only of your life, but for the life of the world. From a Buddhist perspective, it means seeing the roots of violence in our country and in ourselves, and finally understanding that we are not separate from all beings and things and must act accordingly or further violence will spread as the Corona virus has spread.

Buddhism has since its very beginning guided its practitioners to realize the most radical form of inclusivity, the realization that all beings in all realms, no matter how depraved and deluded, can be free of suffering and delusion, and to also see that we are not separate from any other being, whether Putin or Hitler, or His Holiness the Dalai Lama or Malala.

It is not necessarily so easy to realize this. Many of us have not allowed ourselves to look deeper than our personality and our opinions to see and touch who we really are. Yet, Buddhists and contemplatives of many traditions have long been guided to go within to discover not only the interconnectedness of all things, including the natural world, but also the peace that surpasses understanding, knowing, ideas, conceptions, and opinions, the peace that is basic to all beings when they have come home to a state of nonalienation, and also the peace that nourishes courageous and liberating action in the world, knowing that this peace is not complacent, nor is it restless.

Out of this wise peace arises compassionate action. If we see that we are not separate from others, then we not only share their awakening, we also share their suffering. This morning, as I write these words, I am not separate from the fear and courage of Ukrainians who are taking a stand in the streets of their cities, but also I am not separate from the suffering of those who are attacking Ukraine.

In this experience of non-separation, right now, I also notice that I am neither restless nor complacent. I am open, open to discover, bear witness, and hold as much as I can with a strong back and soft front.

Peace transformation is about realizing and living nonalienation from all beings on our earth, and living this realization as the bodhisattva does, riding on the waves of birth and death. Peace transformation and what I have learned from the work of John Paul Lederach is grounded in the experience of connection and radical intimacy with the world. It is about the most basic realization that awakening is not an individual experience, rather it is the liberation of intimacy in our relatedness with and through all beings.

Awakening then is ultimately social, and Buddhism, Buddhists, and buddhas serve and awaken with and through relationships that are based in the lived experience of a deeply shared life, a life that is dedicated to nonviolence and benefitting every being and thing on our planet.

Thus, we as human beings who love and feel compassion cannot hide from the presence of the pervasiveness of suffering and alienation as we bear witness to what is happening in Ukraine at this very time. We cannot turn our backs on the tendency to turn the world and its beings into objects which we call “other.”

When there is an “other,” there is an Auschwitz, a caste of people we will not touch, a ravaged and raped woman, a clear-cut forest, an abused and abandoned child, a man behind bars medicated out of his mind and heart, a rundown village of old women whose men have all died in war, a young man from Russia with fear and hate in his eyes and a gun in his hand prowling down a street in Kyiv.

We can nurture peace by transforming our own lives. At the same time, we must work actively for nonviolence toward all.

The basic vows that we take as Buddhists remind us that there is no “other.” The most fundamental practices that all of the schools of Buddhism engage in point to the fact that there is no “other.” The teachings of the Buddha tell us that there is no “other.” Yet we live in a world peopled by those who are subject to the deepest forms of alienation from their own natural wisdom, a world where whole communities see “others” who should be done away with, liquidated, eliminated, raped, ravaged, cut down, and gunned down.

Today, more than any other time in human history, we are living in a kind of familiarity and immediacy that can destroy or liberate. Our weapons can find their targets within minutes, our diseases can spread like a wildfire in a dry forest, and our delusions can quickly contaminate the minds of millions. And activist and sociologist George Lakey reminds us: violence cannot keep us safe.

At the same time, in the same instant, we must reach through courageously to where the suffering is most acute, sending our voice, taking a stand, and making peace by strengthening values, views and behaviors that are based in the great treasures of compassion and wisdom.

We can nurture peace by transforming our own lives. And, at the same time, we must work actively for nonviolence toward all and deep and true dialogue with respect for and appreciation of differences and plurality. And we must take responsibility. We have to ask what is our part and our country’s part in feeding the demon of hatred and violence?

We all live under each other’s skin, and it is now more than ever functionally intolerable to turn away from what is happening in Ukraine and in many other parts of our world, whether Ukraine, Afghanistan, or the streets of Chicago. As Buddhists, we share a common aspiration to awaken from our own confusion, from greed, and from anger in order to free others from suffering. The Bodhisattva Vows at the heart of the Mahayana tradition are, if nothing else, a powerful expression of what I have called “wise hope” and hope against all odds. This kind of hope is a species of hope that is victorious over fear and time. What else could be the case as we chant: Creations are numberless, I vow to free them. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to transform them. Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it. The awakened way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.

May we realize these vows now in word and in deed.

Recently, I taught a G.R.A.C.E. training in Japan for those who work in the end-of-life care field. I shared with the participants that life and death are messy experiences. We should not expect perfect outcomes or to have things go our way. A doctor in the training stood up and spoke about the uncontrollable anxiety he experiences every day as he tries to meet the needs of his patients. When one of his cancer patients is transferred off of his floor to the palliative care unit, he feels completely defeated, like he has failed his patient. His morale crashing, he panics as he realizes that he has no time to deal with his fear and grief—and no time to get through the line of patients who need his help. He feels trapped by a sense of futility that has drained his capacity for compassion and caring and has led him to experience utter despair and to consider suicide—but he does not want to harm his family.

Clearly this doctor is in a charnel ground, one that is partly of his making and partly of his society’s making. Overwork, stress, guilt, low morale, panic, futility, despair, suicidal ideation… it’s a lethal combination that can lead to death. He told us he had come to the G.R.A.C.E. training to see if he could find a path out of this desperate situation. Listening to him, I was reminded of Tibet and the charnel grounds I have visited there.

Every time I’ve traveled to Mount Kailash in Western Tibet, I have climbed up to the Dakini Charnel Ground, a barren, rocky plateau above the trail on the Western side of the mountain. This is the place where dead bodies are offered in a practice known as sky burial—or in Tibetan, jhator, “scattering to the birds.”

There I have practiced walking meditation among piles of bones and pools of blood, fat, and feces. The stench is rancid, even in the cold wind, and I could hear the flap of vulture wings and howls of jackals close by.

The first time I visited the charnel ground, I came upon two faces shorn of their skulls, their bloody hair in a tangled mess. Shaken, I barely managed to stay on my feet as I avoided stepping on these bloody masks of death. A man dressed in a ragged military coat approached me and motioned for me to lie among the fresh remains. Glancing around, I saw that Tibetans were sitting here and there among the body parts; a woman was pricking her tongue and others were pricking their fingers, drawing blood, symbolic of death and rebirth.

The man in the military coat glared at me and again gestured toward the cold, slippery earth. I slowly lowered my body and laid back onto the messy, rocky ground. The man then drew a long, rusty knife from a sheath beneath his coat and began to mime chopping up my body. A wave of fear and disgust passed through me. But then I let go into the realization that I too am blood and bone. The aversion left me as I gazed at the snow-capped Mount Kailash, remembering that sooner or later, I too will be dead. And the thought crossed my mind: Why not live fully now? Why not live to end the suffering of others? What else would I want to do with my life?

In a way, this strange experience is not so foreign. We are made of blood, bone, and guts, as any trip to the ER will remind us. Yet Kailash is a sacred place, and the ritual of symbolic dismemberment, representing death and rebirth, is a rite of passage that opens one to the reality of one’s own death and immortal life. For me, this experience was very intense, but not traumatizing. In fact, it was liberating—because it’s harder to fear what one more clearly sees. Isn’t this what we learn about compassion from contemplative practice, from serving those who are most vulnerable? When we see compassion more clearly, we might stop fearing the vulnerability that it opens within us.

We don’t have to go to Tibet or into a war zone to practice in a charnel ground. The charnel ground is a metaphor for any environment where suffering is present—a Japanese hospital, a school room, a violent home, a mental institution, a homeless shelter, a refugee camp. Even a space of privilege, like the corporate boardroom or Wall Street trading floor, can be a charnel ground. Really, any place that is tainted by fear, depression, anger, despair, disrespect, or deceit is a charnel ground—including our own mind.

Whatever our profession or calling, charnel ground practice is available; we are always sitting in the midst of subtle or obvious suffering. The mire we fall into when we go over the edge—this also is a charnel ground. It’s a place where we have to face our own struggles, and where our compassion for others who are struggling in the depths can grow strong.

When we suffer within our own internal charnel ground, we are vulnerable to pathological altruism, empathic distress, moral suffering, disrespect, and burnout. But when we take a wider and deeper view, we see that a charnel ground is not only a place of desolation but also a place of boundless possibility. My colleague Fleet Maull, who was incarcerated for 14 years on charges of drug trafficking, compares his experience of practicing meditation in prison to practicing in a charnel ground. The prison is a tough practice environment, one where greed, hatred, and delusion are the order of the day. Yet this charnel ground proved something to him. In his book Dharma in Hell, Fleet Maull writes, “I’m thoroughly convinced after spending fourteen years in prison with murderers, rapists, bank robbers, child molesters, tax dodgers, drug dealers and every sort of criminal imaginable, that the fundamental nature of all human beings is good. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind .” Like Fleet, I believe that redemption is possible, and every situation has within it something that can teach us, something that can lead us to our natural wisdom.

In many Tibetan mandalas, the outer protective circle depicts eight cemeteries filled with corpses, scavenging animals, bones, and blood. There is no better place to contemplate the impermanent nature of our lives than a cemetery. This circle serves as a barrier of entry to the fearful and unprepared; it is also a zone in which our meditation practice can flourish. If we find equanimity in the midst of death and decay, then we may become the Buddha at the center of the mandala .