Engaging Outer Peace

Buddhism teaches that wisdom should be developed with compassion. At one extreme, you could be a goodhearted fool and at the other extreme, you could attain knowledge without any emotion. Buddhism uses the middle path to develop both. The highest wisdom is seeing that in reality, all phenomena are incomplete, impermanent and do not constitute a fixed entity. True wisdom does not simply believe what we are told but instead experiencing and understanding truth and reality. Wisdom requires an open, objective, unbigoted mind. The Buddhist path requires courage, patience, flexibility and intelligence.

Extending the same logic, Buddhist social ethics, in keeping with the Buddhist doctrine of Pratityasamutpada (doctrine of dependent origination), shows that individual betterment and perfection on the hand and social good on the other, are fundamentally interrelated and interdependent.

A society, in which all individual members are self-sufficient or selfsustaining, can be called happy and secure to a large extent.

Further, a secure and peaceful society is favourable to individual, intellectual, and spiritual pursuits. The Buddhist standpoint ascertains that a minimal amount of responsibility for individual betterment and perfection is required of all individual, while maintaining an appropriate degree of social responsibility. Even the most solitary monks have been in regular contact with-and are responsible for-the ‘wellbeing’ of a community, and studies show that it may not be entirely true to say that the Buddhist monastic order, for instance, stays entirely aloof from society. Therefore, even though it is acknowledged that Buddhism is a religion of renunciation and transcendental understanding, the ‘challenge’ to Buddhist praxis was-and is-to create, and to perpetuate an institutional framework that is ‘of–theworld’, yet at the same time’ out-of-the-world’.