Engaging Inner Peace

Socially Engaged Buddhism methodology would not be complete without bringing peace in one’s inner life. In this method, we can bring the personal experience and insight of the meditative, inner practice of contemplation and other Buddhist practices such as ritual, merit-making, dana, sila ect… into the social dimension in order to mutually illuminate both areas. This technique could help to dissolve barriers between self and other, us and them, and personal and political; we also can explore the mutual causality and interdependence of these pairs. This modality is also a radical approach to social theory in that it insists that the personal is as important as the structural, political and systemic.

Put simply, what goes on in one mind is mirrored in the world; looking inward is a hallmark of a socially engaged Buddhist critique. We can discover “where am I implicated?” for example, where are the very same structures of greed, hatred, and delusion present in my own mind? How do my inner kilesas create or mirror external reality? This “turning inward” invokes compassion for others who perpetuate structures of violence as well as can provide insight into understanding both how and why these structures work, and what could be done about them.

Furthermore, this gives us a starting point for critique because by referencing personal experience we can break the seemingly enormous social problems into more easily understandable, personal, bite-sized explanations of how structural violence works. More significantly, when we look at the Buddhist practice and see personal responses to suffering and how we antidote or work with kilesa on a personal level, we might be able to abstract these same “personal antidote” or practices out to the social level. This approach illustrates how the authority of an oppressive structure rests not on something objective, but on the collective and often unconscious agreement of individuals. This agreement can be made conscious and people can choose to act differently.

However, Buddhism believes that the two major core within a human are mental and physical, which are usually called the food for mind (mental) or internal peace and the food for body (physical) or external peace, respectively. Both ordained and lay Buddhist must be aware of all such kinds of beneficent ways (methods) for both majors in order to liberating and developing one’s own mind. Here are the most good sources for practitioner to engaging in mental development and the beneficent to gain peace, awareness, calm and purify of one mind such as Meditation, mindfulness, listen the Buddha Dharma, chanting the sutra, chanting the Buddha’ name…..ect. In other word it would help to bring the mind to deep concentration and able to liberate one’s own mind.

Mind is basic. Mind is primary. Mind is ever-present in each situation. For anything to be happening in this moment Mind is necessarily present, Mind is the basic for this, for what’s going on now.

This is the very heart of what the Buddha taught: “Everything is founded on Mind, is made of Mind. To act or speak with a pure mind is happiness.”But is it really possible for us to speak or act from such a mind? And just what is a pure mind, anyway?

A pure mind enters freely into each situation, no matter what it is. We may feel sadness, remorse, or grief, but if our mind is pure, it all sweeps through. It doesn’t take hold anywhere; it doesn’t grind us up. There’s nothing in the mind to obstruct the emotion, so it doesn’t get caught. We feel no need to avoid it, block it, take hold of it, work it up into something bigger, or make something else out of it.

There is a story of a Zen teacher who cried when his wife died. His students were very surprised by this. “You’re enlightened! Why are you cried?”. The teacher simply said matter -of–factly, “I’ll miss her.” What his students were really saying was, “We didn’t think you were human!”

It’s nonsense, of course. A Zen teacher is a human being, with emotions. Yet many people have this erroneous impression that once we wake up we won’t (_or shouldn’t) have deep or powerful emotions anymore. Such an impression is pure delusion. Why would awakening cause to suddenly relinquish all human feeling, to become something other than human?

With a pure mind, our feelings are not fundamentally different. But what we do with them (or, more appropriately, stop doing with them) is very different indeed.

The Buddha also said, “Everything is founded on Mind, is made of Mind. To act or speak with a corrupt mind is misery.” what does it mean to act or speak with a corrupt mind?

A corrupt mind is a fractured, splintered, broken, divided mind-a mind that sees this as opposed to that. It’s the mind of self and other, of separation and alienation-in other words, our ordinary mind.

In a corrupt mind, emotions and ideas arise, just as they do in a pure mindbut then we grab hold of them rather than let them pass through and sweep away. We hold them close and build all kinds of mental structures around them. We carry them around with us, identify with them, and put them on display.

In other words, a corrupt mind is removed from the Whole. It’s the mind of ego, a mind that views everything as though apart from itself. It’s a mind that gets caught up in greediness, selfishness, fear, longing, loathing, and grasping. The Buddha did not hesitate to call this mind “misery.”