《 Nature and Nonviolence 》

From my dear teacher Thay's (Thich Nhat Hanh) book "The World We Have", a Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology.

Thay said, the title should be called "The World We Are" since we are our environment and our environment is us. It's such a powerful and compelling book, on interbeing, on deep ecology, on engaged Buddhism.

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Suppose we take a seed of corn and plant it in the damp soil. A week or so later the seed will sprout. About three days later, we may come and ask the corn seedling, "Dear plant, do you remember the time you were still a seed?" The plant may have forgotten, but because we've been observing, we know that the young cornstalk has truly come from the seed.

When we look at the plant, we no longer see the seed, so we may think the seed has died. But the seed has not died; it has become the plant. If you're capable of seeing the corn seed in the corn plant, you have the kind of wisdom the Buddha called the wisdom of nondiscrimination. you don't discriminate between the seed and the plant. You see that they inter-are with each other, that they are the same thing. You can't take on any part of the earth. Political and economic systems that deny someone these rights harm the whole human family. Awareness of what is happening to the human family is necessary to repair the damage already done.

To bring about peace within the human family, we must work for harmonious coexistence. If we continue to shut ourselves off from the rest of the world, imprisoning ourselves in narrow concerns and immediate problems, we're not likely to make peace or to survive. The human race is part of nature. We need to have this insight before we can have harmony between people. Cruelty and disruption destroy the harmony of the human family and destroy nature. Among the healing measures needed is legislation that is nonviolent to ourselves and to nature, and that helps prevent us from being disruptive and cruel.

Each individual and all of humanity are part of nature and should be able to live in harmony with nature. Nature can be cruel and disruptive. But we need to treat nature the same way we treat ourselves as individuals and as a human family. If we try to dominate or oppress nature, it rebels. We must be deep friends with nature in order to manage certain aspects of it and create harmony with our environment. This requires a full understanding of nature. Typhoons, tornadoes, droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions, pro-liferations of harmful insects all constitute a danger to life. We can largely prevent the destruction that natural disasters cause by working with the land from the beginning, and making plans and building decisions that take into account the nature of the land, instead of trying to impose complete control over it with dams, defrorestation, and other devices and policies that in the end cause more damage.

One example of what happens when we try to overly control nature is our excessive use of pesticides, which indiscriminately kills many insects and birds and upsets the ecological balance. Economic growth that devastates nature by polluting and exhausting non-renewable resources renders the Earth impossible for beings to live on. Such economic growth may appear to temporarily benefit some humans, but in reality it disrupts and destroys nature as a whole.

The harmony and equilibrium within the individual, society, and nature are being destroyed. Individuals are sick, society is sick, and nature is sick. We must reestablish harmony and equilibrium, but how? Where can we being the world of healing -- in the individual, society, or the environment? We must work in all three domains. People of different disciplines tend to stress their particular area. For example, politicians consider an effective rearrangement of society to be necessary for the salvation of humans and nature and therefore urge that everyone engage in the struggle to make changes in the political system.

Buddhist monks are like psychotherapists in that we tend to look at the prolem from the viewpoint of mental health. Meditation aims at creating harmony and equilibrium in the life of the individual. Buddhist mediation deals with both the body and the mind, using breathing as a tool to calm and harmonize the whole human being. As in any therapeutic practice, the patient is placed in an environment that favors the restoration of harmony. Usually psychotherapists spend their time observing and then advising their patient. However, I know of some, who, like monks, observe themselves first, recognizing the need to first free themselves first, recognizing the need to first free themselves from the fears, anxieties, and despair that exist in each of us. Many therapists seem to think they themselves have no mental problems, but the monk recognizes in himself his susceptibility to fears and anxieties, and to the mental illness caused by the inhumanity of our existing social and economic systems.

Buddhist practitioners believe that the interconnected nature of the individual, society, and the physical environment will reveal itself to us as we recover and we will gradually cease to be possessed by anxiety, fear, and the dispersion of our mind. Among the three domains -- individual, society, nature -- it is the individual who begins to effect change. But in order to effect change, the individual must be whole. Since this requires an environment favorable to healing, the individual must seek a lifestyle that is free from destructiveness. Our efforts to change ourselves and to change the environment are both necessary, but one can't happen without the other. We know how difficult it is to change the environment if individuals aren't in a state of equilibrium. Our mental health requires that the effort for us to recover our humanness should be given priority.

Restoring mental health does not mean simply adjusting oneself to the modern world of rapid economic growth. The world is sick, and adapting to an unwell environment cannot bring real health. Many people who need psychotherapy are really victims of modern life which separates us from each other and from the rest of the human family. One way to help to move to a rural area where we have the chance to cultivate the land, grow our own food, wash our clothes in a clear river, and live simply, sharing the same life as that of millions of peasants around the world.

For therapy to be effective, we need environmental change. Political activities are one recourse, but they are not the only one. Tranquilizing ourselves with over consumption is not the way. The poisoning of our ecosystem, the exploding of bombs, the violence in our neighborhoods and in society, the pressures of time, noise, and pollution, the lonely crowds -- all of these have been created by the course of our economic growth and they are all sources of mental illness. Whatever we can do to bring these causes to an end is preventive medicine.

Keeping our mental heath as a number one priority means we must also recognize our responsibility to the entire human family. We must work to prevent others from becoming ill at the same time that we safeguard our own humanness. Whether we are monks, nuns, teachers, therapists, artists, carpenters, or politicians, we are human beings too. If we don't apply to ourselves what we try to teach to others, we will become mentally ill. If we just continue on with our lives, goin along with the status quo, we gradually become victims of fear, anxiety, and egotism.

A tree reveals itself to an artist when the artist can establish a certain relationship with it. Someone who is not human enough may look at his fellow humans and not see them, may look at a tree and not see it. Many of us can't see things because we're not wholly ourselves. When we're wholly ourselves, we can see how one person, by living fully, can demonstrate to all of us that life is possible, that a future is possible. But the question, "Is a future possible?" is meaningless if we're not able to see the millions of our fellow humans who suffer, live, and die around us. Only after we've really seen them are we able to see ourselves and see nature.

Recall the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which killed hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, and Africa. People who had come from Europe, Australia, and the United States on vacation also died in the tsunami. All of us suffered all over the world, and we asked the question, why? But I practiced. I sat down and I practiced looking deeply. And what I saw is that when these people died, we also died with them, because we inter-are with them.

You know that when your beloved dies, a part of you also dies; somehow you die with your beloved. That's easy to understand. So if we have understanding and compassion, then when we see other people dying, even strangers on the other side of the world, we suffer and die with them. What we find out is that they die for us. So we have to live for them. We have to live in such a way that the future will be possible for our children and their children. Whether or not their deaths will have meaning depends on our way of living. That is the insight of interbeing. They are us and we are them. When they die, we also die. When we continue to live, they continue to live with us. With that insight, you suffer less and you know how to continue. You carry all of them inside of you and, knowing this, you have peace.

To practice mindfulness and look deeply into the nature of things is to discover their true nature, the nature of interbeing. We find peace and can generate the strength we need in order to be in touch with everything. With this understanding, we can easily sustain the wok of loving and caring for the Earth and for each other for a long time.