Folks,
The text bellow is a quotation from the book "Buddhist Practice
on Western Ground", written by Harvey B. Aronson.
Observation: Mr. Aronson is a teacher in the tibetan tradition.
However, I believe that the text bellow is relevant for all buddhist
practioners in the West.
" Individual or Related?
Our culture also affects the way we attend to Buddhist teachings
on social interdependence. Buddhism was traditionally taught in
cultures where practitioners were linked with the larger society
through an understanding of mutual relatedness. Many North American
practitioners are embedded in their sense that it is good and right
to realize and express individual selfhood. They often use Buddhism
to promote their individual health and welfare, to heigten awareness
of their own feelings, and to allow for more sucessful individual
engagement. When seen from the holistic worldview of traditional
Buddhism, such an aproach ignores the tradition�s rich interpersonal
vision of spirituality.
Training in the capacity to experience our lives more fully
through mindfullness, to modulate our inner experience through
concentration, or to become more sucessful due to enhanced well-being
through meditation will serve to enhance our culturally constructed
sense of individuality. This is epitomized by a magazine
advertisement for Mercury Sable automobiles that shows the seamless
and unacknowledged absorption of these practices into our cultural
milieu: "There are many paths to reach independent thought.
Mediation. Yoga. Calling 888-748-8812."
The value we place on here-and-now pleasure, wellness, and
personal sucess has created certain filters on what gets transmitted
from the tradition. The most culturally assimilated works about
Buddhism practice do not emphasize acknowledging the spiritual
teachers who have maintained the traditions, the significance of the
social duties of a moral life, gratitude and love for others as a
basis for engaging in medidative practice, or considering our
interdependence with others when engaging in practice. Such teachings
may be mentioned, but their significance is downplayed. For example,
in Tibetan practice, before teachers give any instruction, they
typically say a prayer acknowledging the lineage of masters who have
maintained the teachings down to the present, and they will often
elaborate the history of the teachers who transmitted the teachings
about to be given. This is part of holistic vision that accounts for
spiritual family history and ancestry. In addition, every teaching is
preceded by a brief homily reminding students that all sentient
beings have been related to us and been kind to us in the past, and
we therefore owe them a debt of gratitude. Out of this gratitude, we
practice with the aspiration to be able to assist others in their
wish to be free from suffering and established in happiness. The
teacher will explain that the way to do this most effectively is to
attaing buddhahood ourselves so that we can instruct others in how to
be liberated from the cycle of rebirth. In this way, our experience
of receiving teachings occurs in a historical context, and our
motivation for practice from a vast sea of universal care.
When we assimilate Buddhism, sometimes unconsciously, into our
concern for own individuality and happiness, we lose an opportunity
to freshly consider how our norms influence our experience of life
and whether we wish to alter our perspective. On a social level,
traditional teachings that link our motivation for practice with a
heartfelt concern for others mirror the holistice vision common to
Asian cultures. Markus and Kitayama poignantly contrast the social
sources of happiness in Japan with the individualistic ones of modern
North Americans: "Happiness and elation are apparently of a different
nature in Japan and seem to require an awareness and assurance of
connection and interdependence." Spiritually, the Buddhist teachings
on interrelatedness take a cultural vision of interconnection and
extend it to all beings. Traditionally, practice is to be grounded in
a deep gratitude for what all beings are doing now and have done over
the course of many births.
My sense is that as Westerners, we yearn for the sense of
embeddedness and connectedness described in the social vision of
Buddhism. Yet we have some ambivalence as to whether recognizing our
relatedness might impair our sense of individual freedom. How do we
consider and integrate Buddhist teachings concerning our profound
relatedness? How do we build from within who we are, melding new
values and insights into what already exists, rather than merely
attempting to emulate teachers and teachings from a different time,
place, and culture? We cannot go back to earlier models and earlier
times, nor can we move in a simple-minded way from an independence-
oriented model to a culture of reciprocal relationship. We can,
however, begin to seriously consider how values of interdependence
can be woven into our hyperindividualized social structure."
Quotation extracted from the pages 29-31 of the first edition
of "Buddhist Practice on the Western Ground", written by Harvey B.
Aronson and published by Shambhala Publications, Inc.
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