In celebration of the 43rd anniversary of the founding of the Triratna Buddhist Community, (formally the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order) we bring you an moving and engaging talk by Subhuti: “Awake to the Cries of the World” the keynote talk from the FWBO celebrations a decade ago. How do we respond to the suffering in the world? Subhuti speaks from his experience of years trying to answer that question – the joys and pitfalls of trying to ‘help’ as part of a committment to the Bodhisattva Ideal. Complete with an introduction by Padmavajra on Avalokiteshvara. Talk given on FWBO Day, 2001.
Free Buddhist Audio
Awake to the Cries of the World
(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - There's certainly no doubt that suffering is before us all the time. Images of suffering are there every day in the press. On the television and so on. And we do become somewhat inured to it. But every now and again, an image from the media strikes home. Suddenly one sees and feels the personal suffering behind the headlines. I was recently in India at the time of the Gujarat earthquake and I saw a picture in an Indian paper of a group of people struggling to hold back a woman as she wailed her heart out, watching rescue workers pull a dead child from a ruined building. It was one of those moments when the essence of human tragedy was really caught, was really captured by the picture. But human tragedy is around us all the time. There are wars, political unrest, famines, natural disasters happening all the time. Millions of people suffer very directly every year from events like that. The media picks up each of them for a few days, finds a few notable images and then moves on. But there are also many less newsworthy tragedies, some of which we never hear about. Petty injustices, crime, violence, breakdowns in communication. And of course, sickness, injury, accident and death. Indeed, life is from a certain point of view, made us up of a succession of tragedies, disasters, disappointments, frustrations, sufferings and pain. Now this is of course an insight central to Buddhism. When the Buddha looked at life with the eye of enlightenment, he saw three principal things. His insight was made up of three principal elements that constitute the essence of his experience. First of all, he saw that all things are impermanent. Then that all things are insubstantial or without abiding essence. And then he saw that all conditioned things are in the Parlian Sanskrit word dukkha, which rather difficult to translate exactly, but means something like imperfect, unsatisfactory, even painful, suffering. So important are these three, impermanence, insubstantiality and suffering, the contemplation of them by whatever means is the gateway for us to the Buddha's experience. If we take those insights and we reflect upon them, we will penetrate their real meaning. Now when we say that all conditioned things are dukkha, that is imperfect, unsatisfactory, painful, suffering, we're not saying that there is not or so an experience of happiness, fulfillment and pleasure within conditioned existence. Surely no one's life is unalloyed misery. And some people probably consider their lives to be predominantly happy and pleasurable. But dukkha, suffering, cannot be escaped. No life can be completely devoid of unhappiness and pain. Indeed, when we look deeply enough, there is a deep thread of dissatisfaction in life that we experience sometimes very strongly indeed, although at other times, we're able to hold it at bay. We could say that that dukkha, that suffering, and unsatisfactoriness or imperfection, is experienced on three different levels. First of all, there's literal suffering, there's material suffering, actual pain, loss, deprivation and so forth. Then there's psychological suffering, insecurity, fear, frustration, longing. Then finally, the deepest level of all, there's what we might call spiritual suffering, existential suffering even. Spiritual ignorance, a sense of lack of meaning, limited imaginative horizons, existential perplexity and lack of ultimate fulfillment. All these three are everyday facts of experience. In the midst of pleasure, joy, happiness and satisfaction, suffering on any of these levels or all of these levels, is there with us all the time. And it's the experience of dukkha, especially the spiritual kind, that sets us all off on the spiritual path. When we feel that our horizons are cramped, confined, when we feel that we don't really know what life means and that that hurts us, that pains us, then we want to find the solution to dukkha. We want to find an end to suffering on all levels, especially on the deepest. Buddhists see the Buddha as having found the solution, having reached the end of dukkha. At this point, the Buddha is one who is awake. Buddha literally means awakened one. Woken up from the dream or even madness it is the source of suffering. Experience of dukkha is replaced by an experience of what is known as the apranihita samadhi, the directionless, unbiased, in one rather unfortunate translation, unhancred. So that in this state, we feel free from the pressure of longing, craving, dissatisfaction. We feel completely fulfilled, blissfully at rest, wanting nothing, needing nothing, with no inner pressure to move in one direction or the other. But it's not just a sort of numbness or anesthesia. It's a state of being wonderfully and fully awake, contented and at peace, the sense of infinite creative possibility, a creativity that is entirely spontaneous, motivated only by compassion. This is the experience that Buddhists are committed to realising for themselves. So there we are. When we've reached that point, we've solved the problem of dukkha, of pain and suffering. We're beyond it. So we can all go home. We've answered the question. But of course, that isn't the end. That only answers one part of the problem and it only represents one aspect of the Buddha's experience. We may be happy. We may be beyond suffering, but what about others? Can indeed we really be happy if others are not? We can hardly ignore the cries of the world around us. Around us. Not just because we ought not to, but because they impinge upon and affect us so directly. We cannot help but have some sort of response or reaction. And the nature of our response will shape us and affect our own happiness and well-being. We cannot help but identify to some extent with others' suffering. However, unconsciously or subliminally, we cannot help but put ourselves in their place. That's a natural reflex of our human self-consciousness. We almost spontaneously, almost automatically could say, identify with others. And that means that we cannot be truly and deeply happy if others are suffering around us. Our natural and inevitable response to suffering, the suffering around us, leads us in either of two directions. Firstly, we're overwhelmed by it. We over-identify with it and we feel helpless in the face of its inexorability. Our reaction is a sort of horrified pity, leading often to hatred of the perpetrators of suffering or to a kind of sentimentality, or even a kind of foolish martyrdom, self-martidom. And in the end, this trend leads to despair and depression. The other direction in which our responses may tend is towards indifference. It's just too much. So we harden our hearts. We look the other way. We don't allow ourselves to notice. Since it's endless, since suffering is endless and inevitable, let's just get on with our own lives and try to avoid it as much as we can for ourselves. Given the effectiveness of the modern media and their relentless quest for sensation, some hardening of the heart is almost inevitable. I notice this myself on the very rare occasions when I see television news, which often has very, very powerful images of people in really terrible states of suffering. And it's quite incongruous. Everybody's sitting around very comfortably, watching the television screen, and there are maybe hordes of refugees in utmost desolation, where dead bodies horribly mangled, and people are just sort of sitting there watching, sipping their cup of tea. And the first time one sees it, one can hardly believe it. But then if you watch it the next night, you're a bit more used to it. The night after that, a bit more used to it too. So we harden our hearts. We almost have to harden our hearts. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed by the suffering that's all around us. So our ordinary means will simply not let us encompass the magnitude of suffering. What then are we to do? Well, we must begin by going to the heart of the matter, into our own minds. We cannot find a solution to the problem of suffering on its own level. Even if political solutions could be found to all the crises in the world, even if poverty could be eradicated, and these are, of course, very, very big ifs indeed, "suffering will still be there. "People will still be subject to disaster and inhumanity, "to separation, loss, sickness, and death. "We could never take suffering out of existence. "As long as there is space and time, "there will be suffering." So we must look for the solution on another level. We've already seen that Buddhist consider it as possible to transcend suffering from a personal point of view. Through spiritual practice, we can eliminate the causes of suffering, can experience the apranihita samadhi, that state of blissful spontaneity, without egoistic impulsion. But the ultimate response to the cries of the world is that we not only pursue the path to enlightenment ourselves, but that we encourage and help others to do so, too. Suffering ends when all beings are enlightened, when all reach that state of freedom from suffering. That is, of course, a goal of such magnitude that we cannot imagine it ever being fulfilled, but still it's the only one within which we can pursue our lives awake to the cries of the world. Any lesser aspiration leaves us either overwhelmed by hopeless despair or hardening our hearts so that the cries of the world hardly reach us, or only reach us enough to deal with what we're willing to deal with. Rather than being awake to the cries of the world, we either live in a nightmare or fall gently asleep. So vast is the task that it's utterly beyond us as individuals. We must therefore see ourselves as part of something much bigger than ourselves. As individuals, we can play our part in a process. We join with countless numbers of others, past, present and future, who all have our will respond to the cries of the world, who all work towards that impossible goal of ending suffering. Even so, we need to stretch our imagination much further, for our ordinary minds are quite inadequate to the task. What is needed to carry out this task is an altogether different kind of mind. A consciousness that utterly transcends our own, that is completely devoid of selfishness, that is devoted only to the welfare of others, and that is endlessly creative. In Buddhism, this mind is known as the Bodhi Chitta. It's the mind of the Bodhi Satva, ultimately the mind of the Buddha. And it's the mind that strives for the enlightenment of all beings. If we are truly awake to the cries of the world, we must invoke that consciousness, drawing on it for our inspiration and strength, allowing it to transform our own minds and hearts, so that eventually our own minds are the Bodhi Chitta, spontaneously responding to the cries of the world in the absolutely appropriate way. Only by the invocation of the Bodhi Chitta can we be fully awake to those cries, neither overwhelmed by them nor hardened to them. We can listen to them, take them in, and respond in the appropriate way. This principle is exemplified in a meditation taken from the Indo-Tibetan tradition, a meditation that is specifically intended to evoke the Bodhi Chitta, because it expresses its essential character. In this practice, we allow ourselves to become aware of suffering around us. We close our eyes and we picture around us beings in all kinds of states of pain. We don't avoid it, but we do not become overwhelmed by it. We empathize as fully as we can, and we develop a very powerful mood of loving kindness and compassion. We awake within ourselves that force of mitri or metta, which radiates out from our hearts. And we see that radiation from our hearts, not just as a sort of feeling, but as a flow of pure white light that passes out into the world and falls upon each of the suffering beings we're holding in our imaginations. At the same time, we see that each of them is filled with a thick, black smoke. This represents the unskillful deeds they've performed that have led them into states of suffering. As we know from a Buddhist point of view, our sufferings are ultimately the consequences of our own deeds, directly or indirectly. So with each in-breath, we take in the thick, black smoke that is a basis of their suffering. So we're fully alive to it. We're fully awake to it, we let it in. Within our hearts, we transform that smoke within us into the pure white light that shines from our hearts into theirs. So we sit breathing in that black smoke out the pure white light. In that way, we take from them all that darkness and we transform it into light. And in the end, by the end of the practice, at least for the purposes of one meditation session, we leave all those beings completely filled with pure white light with no black smoke left at all. If we're really able to enter fully into the spirit of this practice, we will be transcending very radically our normal, selfish, self-interested, self-cherishing mind. We will experience at least a touch of the bodhicitta. And this is the spirit that we need if we are to be awake to the cries of the world. So far, so good. We've seen the kind of attitude we must have, the kind of spirit we must try to develop. But what are we actually to do? We've already been warned about mere fantasy in this field. It's too easy to have a nice imaginative experience, to sit in our meditation room feeling. We're taking on all the sufferings of all the beings in the world. But actually, nobody has been helped in any way. So we have a kind of fantasy of being awake to the cries of the world, a sentimentality indeed. We must act. In other ways, we can manifest the bodhicitta, that extraordinary, transcendent state of mind, are infinite, and they are particular to circumstances and individuals. But I want to suggest the range of activities we could each be undertaking, if we want to be awake to the cries of the world and respond to them appropriately. Perhaps we can even see ourselves as taking them on collectively. If we do identify ourselves with this particular spiritual movement, this FWBO, TBMSG, then we can see ourselves as collectively taking on practices, projects, to answer, to help meet the cries of the world. After all, the FWBO is a spiritual fellowship founded in direct response to the cries of the world. It's an attempt to bring the bodhicitta into operation within the world. It's at least one attempt to do so. We do already work together as a response to those cries anyway. So it's perhaps a matter of just seeing more clearly, more sharply what it is that we're doing and what we could do to meet the cries of the world more adequately. So let me suggest these areas in which we could be working and you can fill in the individual variations, et cetera, as needed. So first of all, and very obviously and essentially, we've got to be working on ourselves. It's odd, our response to the cries of the world must first of all be dealing with ourselves. Undertaking spiritual practice, participating in spiritual community, putting ourselves as much as we can in conditions that support our spiritual efforts, for instance, by going on retreats and so forth. We should never forget that we are not just trying to make ourselves comfortable, however. We're not just trying to compose a cozy life for ourselves, full of nice people in nice mental states. It's the death of the spiritual movement. We're trying to transcend ourselves to allow the bodhicitta more and more to manifest within us. We should not forget this is a vigorous, even a difficult life. Perhaps one might also say a dangerous one, although it is also a deeply satisfying one in the long run. Working on ourselves to transform our consciousness in every detail of life must be the starting point for our response to the cries of the world. If it is not, we may do more damage, much damage in the name of helping. Often, one senses that people need to be protected from those who come to help them because their motives are so confused, even murky. So we should be working on ourselves to clarify our own motives, to bring ourselves into as positive a state of mind as we possibly can. Otherwise, our help is at best ambiguous. We should recognize that in working on ourselves we're going to need help and guidance and that we need companions on the way. This is indeed the fundamental purpose of the FWBO, to provide the circumstances, the guidance, the help that will benefit as many people as possible in their work upon themselves. So that's our essential starting point and one that we cannot neglect. Having attended to our own development, we must turn to that of others. So this is our second area. If we believe that the solution to suffering lies in enlightenment, we will want to help and encourage others to take up and follow the spiritual path. If we see Buddhism, if we see the Buddha as our own ideal, surely it must be an ideal for all. If it's just an ideal for us, well, it's not really an ideal because there must be something beyond it that's more universal. So if we go for refuge, we must surely feel that the Buddha, Damran, Sangha, that we go for refuge to are ideals for all humanity in one shape or form. Naturally, there are many opportunities for helping others on the spiritual path in a personal way, even through quite ordinary contact without ever mentioning Buddhism, at work, at home, and so on. Many situations where we come into contact with people, we can be a helpful, even sometimes a guiding spirit, often just a voice of sanity. And many people, of course, will respond to us simply as individuals in the course of our ordinary lives. But we can go further than that. Each of us can become a damaduta, a messenger of the Dharma, letting people know about Buddhism to the best of our ability. Now letting people know about Buddhism doesn't mean forcing it down people's throats, or becoming a Buddhist ball. Piping up with Buddhism says whatever the topic of discussion. People are talking about football, and you give them what the Dharma has to say on the subject, which is probably not very much. Although judging by some ordinary members is quite a lot. So, being a damaduta work is not just sort of ramming Buddhism down people's throats and banging on about Buddhism. Inevitably, that often happens to some of us to begin with. Sometimes the idea of communicating our love of the Dharma gets confused with a reluctance to be a missionary. We've got that idea of ramming it down people's throats, and we don't want to be like that. So we think that being a damaduta is dangerously like being a missionary with the negative view that we have of being a missionary, and we don't want to do that. But actually, there's nothing wrong with missionaries of any persuasion, so long as they do not use force or take advantage of people, either by threats or by appeals to negative emotions or simply by paying them. There have been quite a number of cases of that in India recently. We shouldn't be playing on people's fear, their greed or their loneliness. I once listened to a little bit of an American evangelist's speech. And very, very obviously appealing to people's loneliness. He was almost deepening their sense of loneliness so that they would come forward to be converted. So long as someone is genuinely trying to communicate their own experience, their own response to whatever it is, then it's all right to be a missionary. So long as they'll shut up when you're obviously not interested, so long as they're not just talking at you without any sensitivity to you, what is wrong with communicating what it is that we care about. Personally, I'm very grateful, indeed, that Bante, Ergy and Sangerakstra, was not shy about being a dhammaduta. I might never have come to the dhamma if he had been. If he'd been embarrassed about communicating it, well, I wouldn't be here today. And if he'd been ashamed of actually going out, advertising, and telling us what he believed, well, I might not be here today, and presumably most of us would not be here. So if we want to respond to the cries of the world, we can be dhammadutas, messengers of the dhamma, carrying the message of the dhamma, offering the medicine of the dhamma. But we can be much more effective if we combine our efforts. Each of us could go out alone and try to teach the dhamma. A very impressive image in central Birmingham, quite often on a Saturday morning, but somebody just stands there and reads the Bible. Nobody pays any attention, but he just carries on reading the Bible. I'm not suggesting that you do that, although it could be tried. Not the Bible, but I don't know the heart sutra or whatever. But surely it's much better if we combine together and we organize ourselves and we find effective means for getting in touch with people. We can work together to spread the dhamma, to spread the teachings of Buddhism. And this is the purpose of the FWBO. We work together to set up centers where the dhamma can be taught and practiced. We run classes, courses, retreats, and so forth. At the moment, of course, we're a relatively small movement. We're only doing a relatively small amount. We only have a few centers here in the UK, for instance. And there are many places in the UK where there is no dhamma center of any kind, whether FWBO or any other. Even here in Birmingham, there's only one FWBO center for some two and a half million people in the West Midlands. Well, even if only a tiny fraction of that two and a half million people would be interested in the dhamma, well, we could have so many more centers. There's so much more we could do to reach them. Not everyone will respond, of course, but there must be thousands of people, even within the West Midlands, who would be very grateful indeed for the opportunity to study and practice the dhamma. If only we organized ourselves well enough, if only we went out to them as true dhammadutas. And this is true in many, many cities and towns throughout the United Kingdom, let alone throughout the world. Now, not everyone can teach. Really, one needs quite a bit of experience to do so. And in our movement, we usually can find teaching to order members. But we can do quite a bit, it needs quite a bit of training and study to be able to teach properly. You really need to know what you're talking about. You need to have quite a bit of experience of practicing the dhamma. But one can begin to prepare oneself for that work. Everyone at whatever level can be studying and practicing the dhamma with the end in mind that they will teach it themselves at some point. If they're able, not everybody's able ever. But even if you can't teach the dhamma now, even if you don't have the experience to do so now, everyone can help directly now. You can help those who can teach. You can support them practically, even morally. Be there to befriend those coming along, for instance. The more of the organizational work others do, the more those who teach are free to do so themselves. Raising money, finding places, putting up posters, making the team. I certainly did my own apprenticeship in this way. Organising jumble sales, hunting for premises for new centres. That's how I began, at least, to be a dhamma dutta. Banti, at that time, was not only teaching the dhamma, he was also selling things in the jumble sales, I remember. It's not only a question of helping to provide teaching. People need supportive circumstances for spiritual life and practice. Often there's a lot against us in ordinary life. And people around us just don't understand what our interest is. They don't understand what we're trying to do. There are all sorts of pressures and opposing influences. And we see that when circumstances are supportive, we can get on much better. We see this very clearly on retreat, when we're in beautiful or at least quiet surroundings with like-minded companions, just studying and practicing the dhamma. We can be so happy and make such clear progress. So we can do what we can to provide those circumstances. We can help to provide those circumstances. For instance, we can help with retreats. And for those able and willing, we can set up or support communities and right livelihood businesses, where people can live and work together on the basis of a shared commitment to the dhamma. Now I believe that this area of dhamma dutta work is one we need to engage in more vigorously in our spiritual fellowship. It's too easy for us to be looking after our own spiritual practice, even for us to be doing interesting and useful things for the world, whilst not directly contributing to the spread of the dhamma. That seems to me to represent a failure to be fully awake to the cries of the world, and to understand the nature of the situation. I suggest that every one of us who feels any commitment to spiritual life within the fellowship of the FWBO, especially those who are mittress and order members, should have some, at least, regular activity that directly helps to spread the dhamma. Outside our own movement, there are many people doing all sorts of good work, and we should feel that, as that extent, they are our brothers and sisters, engaged in the same enterprise of ending suffering. But there are relatively few doing dhamma dutta work, even though there are people doing good work of this kind in other spiritual communities in the world, in the UK, the Buddhist movement in this country is still pretty small. So, that is what we have uniquely to offer. We have the dhamma uniquely to offer. We, as individuals, see the dhamma as the solution to our own suffering, and therefore we must see it as the solution to the suffering of others. And it is what we uniquely have to offer as Buddhists. And if we do truly believe this is an answer to the cries, surely we should make sure we are doing what we can to reach the dhamma to people who do not yet have it. Now, in a sense, what I have mentioned so far are the most important issues. If we want to answer the cries of the world, we should do so by practicing the dhamma ourselves and by helping to spread it. These are the most important because, as I have said, they are what we, as Buddhists, have uniquely to offer, and they answer the cries of the world on the deepest possible level. But that still leaves the immediate material and psychological suffering around us. Are we simply to ignore that? To put it rather dramatically, if someone is in front of you dying of thirst, you don't say, "I'm sorry, I can't help, I've got to go and teach the dhamma." You give them some water there and then. If we are genuinely trying to make a contribution to resolving the world's suffering, surely we should all be doing something to help immediate material suffering in a direct way. Each of us should respond in a personal way to the suffering we encounter. But again, I wonder whether we should not also think of combining our efforts, taking on collective tasks, so that we can experience ourselves making a difference, we can be much more effective. I want to suggest four areas where I think we could come up with collective projects, at least for the FWBO and the UK. I don't necessarily consider myself the best person to say precisely what they should be in each and every case. They each need a certain amount of investigation and expertise to come up with the right approach. So we are doing the most valuable thing in the most effective way. I'd like to encourage others to think these through and come up with workable objectives, workable projects. I'd be very happy to put myself behind them and help, and I'm sure many others would be too. Actually, in some of these areas, we are already doing a certain amount, and all I'm doing is drawing attention to projects we already have. But in others, we still have quite a lot to do simply even to think what to do. So what are my four areas? Firstly, we should make some contribution to alleviating poverty and deprivation, especially in the third world. We should be contributing to social harmony within our own society. We should be helping to overcome loneliness and isolation of many old people. We should be contributing to restoring and preserving the natural environment. So let me say a few things about each of these. I'm just going to sketch in the areas and hope that some people who are better qualified than me will get together and formulate how we might do this if we're not already doing so. So yes, we should, first of all, do what we can make some contribution to alleviating poverty and deprivation, especially in the third world. There's no need for me to spend time explaining why this is needed. Everyone is well aware of the enormous difficulties so many face in much of the world. And it's very important that we feel we are contributing. Otherwise, we see those images in the paper and we feel we've got nothing to say, we've got nothing to give. But fortunately, this is an area where we do already have a collective response. We've decided to concentrate on helping in India, at least for the time being. We have very strong connections with some of the most socially deprived people in India, many of whom have converted to Buddhism. And our own movement has a presence there. We have something like 25% of our order members are Indians. And we run there many social projects to help deprive people. And we have here our own Karanar Trust, which raises money for those and other social welfare projects. Karanar Trust does support Bahujin Hittai projects, that is the organization, or the organizations that order members run in India. But it also supports a number of other projects, worthy projects that we think are doing good work. For the time being, I believe that's enough. We just need to support this work even more. Karanar always needs donations. There's always a need for fundraisers. There's always a need for people to come together to participate in fundraising campaigns. Which interestingly enough, are conducted not just as ways of raising funds, but as spiritual practice in their own right. In fact, some people have told me that participating in a six-week Karanar appeal is one of the best retreats they've ever been on, even if it is pretty tough. And of course, we also can help by bringing Indian order members over here to help them train so that when they go back to India, they'll be able to make an even greater contribution. So that's our collective response to deprivation and poverty in the third world. Of course, as individuals, we may choose to respond to other such cases. But this is our own collective response, and it's a very appropriate one because we have very strong personal links with people who are working in India. And in that way, our work is not just sort of abstract, it's not at arm's length. So I do encourage everybody to participate even more fully in the work of Karanar, which is very much a response to the cries of the world. Then we move on to the issue of contributing to social harmony within our own immediate society. It's very obvious there's a terrible streak of xenophobia in human nature, and it seems to be surfacing again rather unpleasantly in the UK today. One hears from time to time of very disturbing, well, really scapegoating that goes on. For instance, I heard recently that one ethnic group was being accused of having caused the foot and mouth epidemic, and people from that group were being targeted in the streets and so on. This is really a very unpleasant aspect of modern life. Actually, I think it's because xenophobia is universal and omnipresent, but every now and again it surfaces in a particularly unpleasant way. As we should do what we can to overcome prejudice of this kind, especially we should do it by reaching out deliberately beyond our present kind in our classes. Not just settling for the same type of people, even if we are not ourselves prejudiced. We just get used to the same sort of people from the same class, the same sort of background coming through the door, and they're generally speaking people like us. And we don't even notice that with lots of people who don't come or just come and go away again because they don't feel really welcomed, they don't feel really comfortable. They don't even quite, perhaps, appreciate the message that's been given, because it doesn't take them sufficiently into account. We need to realize that people from different backgrounds see things very differently, and they may find it difficult to come among us. We should all the time, in every situation we find ourselves in, within the FWBO, be seeking to open ourselves up to different kinds of people, and consciously overcoming the tendency to accumulate around a certain sort of socio-economic kind. We should find ways to reach out across barriers, whether racial or cultural, not just in the Buddhist connection. We are doing a little there, but we could do so much more. But also in a general human way, we should be helping in whatever way we can in our own city, in our own town, in our own neighbourhood to break down the barriers that are such a strong feature of modern life. Something's been occurring to us very recently, is that Muslims often get demonized in Western society, in English society. There's probably got ancient, atavistic overtones of the Crusades and so forth, and more recent fears abound. And interestingly enough, of course, topically, it's Buddhists who've been the victims of one set of Muslims in tolerance in Afghanistan, with the destruction of the Bamiyan statues. But as Buddhists, we should not react. Indeed, it should just strengthen our feeling that there's a need to reach out, whatever way we can, to close those gaps. So I think this is something that we need to give thought to, to find ways in which we can reach out from our centres across barriers, to at least have fraternal gatherings, for fraternal meetings with people from other communities, other backgrounds, even if they're not likely to become Buddhists. We shouldn't just hold back. It's so much needed in modern society. We shouldn't just be a kind of Buddhist ghetto, only interested in people like us, and indifferent at best to others. My third area is that of helping to overcome the loneliness and isolation that many old people experience in the modern world. Again, this is an unpleasant feature of modern life. The decay of the extended family means that many people end their lives living on their own, or living together in old people's homes, which are often not particularly pleasant or inspiring places. Sometimes they can be. Many elderly people, there are many elderly people living on their own around our centres. I've often sort of noticed this when I visited centres, particularly in London. And surely we could do something to reach out to them, not necessarily again with Buddhism. We shouldn't think that being Buddhists, we're sort of absolved from merely human response. Surely as Buddhists we should be even more strong in our human responses, and contributing in whatever way we can to help people in this new social phenomenon of the loneliness and isolation of old age. Finally, we should be contributing to restoring and preserving the natural environment. Once again, there's no need for me to give a detailed analysis of the issues. It's quite obvious why they should touch us as Buddhists. Our concern as Buddhists is for non-harm. We should cherish all that lives. Most of us are vegetarians for that reason, because we don't want to cause harm. But there's so much that we are doing that we as humans are doing that does harm living creatures, and indeed it harms other human beings, not least those of the future. As Buddhists, surely we should be taking active steps to minimise the harm we do through our activities. Minimise, for instance, the amount of energy we waste, stop engaging in polluting activities as much as possible. The car, of course, being the major basis for pollution, and the one that we can probably do most about limiting. And so on. The issues are well known, the kind of areas are well known. We probably all do do a little, but we could do so much more. Again, I suggest that those who are knowledgeable on these matters come together to identify some clear targets and goals, ones that those of us who wanted to could take on collectively. Perhaps particularly that our centres, communities and right livelihood businesses could take on, so that they are each of them consciously trying to target a few areas and make progress with them. So if we were to collectively undertake projects in these four areas, we could feel that our spiritual community was making a contribution to reducing the material suffering in this world. So I've suggested that being awake to the cries of the world, sorry, I've suggested what being awake to the cries of the world does mean. It means committing ourselves to the spiritual path, so that we approach the end of suffering ourselves, so that we develop more and more skillful mental states and ultimately experience the bliss of spontaneous creativity. Then it means doing what we can to spread the dharma, studying and training to teach it ourselves, supporting those who already can do so, and helping to establish the conditions for many more people to study and practice the dharma. Then it means having some response to the material suffering around us in a direct and personal way, but also I have suggested by our formulating collective projects. Firstly, to alleviate poverty and deprivation, especially by supporting the work of the Karanar Trust. Secondly, by contributing to social harmony, that is by reaching beyond our own established socio-economic categories and bringing more people to the dharma, but finding ways to reach out across the barriers of social life just in a human way. Thirdly, helping to overcome loneliness and isolation that many old people experience, and fourthly contributing to restoring and preserving the natural environment. If we are able to work in these ways, we will be awake to the cries of the world, we will be contributing to the welfare of all, we'll be part of that extreme, that great current within history of people who are trying to deal with the sufferings of the world. And while we are working like this, we'll be changing ourselves, we will be becoming more and more self-less, and the bodhicitta will begin to manifest within us. Our whole movement indeed will be an embodiment of the bodhicitta, a real force to help bring an end to suffering, truly awake to the cries of the world. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]