Dr. Ambedkar International Mission, USA (AIM), Begumpura Cultural Society of New York & Sri Guru Ravidas Sabha of New York is organizing a lecture by Rajratna Ambedkar on “Dr. Ambedkar’s Revival of Socially-engaged Buddhism” moderated by Dr. Jayashree Kamble.

Event Address: Mathematics Building, Room# 312, Columbia University, 116th street, Broadway, NY - 10027

Date & Time - Sunday May 5 , 2019 @ 6-8 pm EST, ***REGISTRATION AT 5 PM***

https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/engaged-buddhism

Engaged Buddhism

ENGAGED BUDDHISM

ENGAGED BUDDHISM . Engaged Buddhism, or “socially engaged
Buddhism,” denotes the rise of political activism and social service by
Buddhist communities and organizations in Asia and the West since the
1950s. Paralleling a global increase of political involvement by
religious groups within the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu
traditions, engaged Buddhists have supported campaigns for conflict
resolution, human rights,
economic development, national self-determination, and environmental
protection. They have undertaken medical and pastoral care, educational
programs, and community building among economically marginalized and
low-caste communities, women and children, persons with HIV/AIDS, and
prison inmates. They have insisted that Buddhist mindfulness, morality,
and social action be integrated into all facets of daily life in both
ordained and lay communities. Engaged Buddhists share the belief that
mindful social action is consistent with traditional notions of Buddhist
practice and its goal, the universal relief of suffering, and the
awakening of human potential.

The term engaged Buddhism was coined by the Vietnamese Thiền
(Zen) monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (b. 1926), who founded
peace-oriented educational and religious institutions during the Vietnam War,
led antiwar protests, rebuilt villages, resettled refugees, lobbied
internationally for peace talks, and published articles and books on the
crisis facing his country and the Buddhist tradition. The governments
of Saigon, Hanoi, and Washington opposed these actions, and thousands of
Nhat Hanh’s followers were killed or jailed. In 1963 photographs of a
burning monk on a Saigon street appeared in the international media,
illustrating the determination of the newly engaged Buddhists. After the
war, Thich Nhat Hanh, exiled from his country, spread the practice and
teachings of engaged Buddhism in more than eighty-five books of
commentary, poetry, and meditation, through mindfulness retreats at Plum
Village in southern France, and in public gatherings throughout the
world (King, 1996; Hunt-Perry and Fine, 2000).

Since the 1960s Buddhist movements for nonviolent social change and human rights
have proliferated in Asia and the West. In addition to the Vietnam
peace movement, these include the Buddhist conversion and anticaste
movement launched in 1956 by B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) among the dalit
(”oppressed” or ex-untouchable) peoples of India; the Sarvodaya
Shramadana (Universal Awakening through Cooperative Work) village
development and peace movement of Sri Lanka,
founded in 1958 by A. T. Ariyaratne; the struggle of the Tibetan
people, both inside Tibet and in exile, led by the fourteenth Dalai Lama,
Tenzin Gyatso, to reclaim the lands and culture devastated since the
Chinese takeover of the country in 1959; the Pan-Asian movement to
restore the Buddhist order of ordained women, or bhikkhunī saṃgha, in countries in which such ordination is opposed by male hierarchies; the three Nichiren-inspired “new religions” that took root in Japan after World War II and that have gained international followers for their peace and cultural renewal campaigns—Sōka Gakkai International (12 million members in 187 countries and territories), Risshō Kōseikai (6 million members worldwide), and Nipponzan Myōhōji
(1,500 ordained and lay members worldwide); the Tzu-Chi Foundation
(Fuojiao Tzu-chi Gongde Hui or Buddhist Compassionate-Relief Merit
Society) founded in Taiwan in the 1960s by the nun Cheng-yen to defray
medical expenses of the poor by collecting the equivalent of 25 cents
per month from lay followers, which now claims 5 million members in 28
countries, runs 2 modern 900-bed hospitals, a university, a high school,
and a TV channel in Taiwan, and directs $600 million in donations to
medical relief projects in more than 30 countries around the world; in South Korea,
the Buddhist Coalition for Economic Justice, the Jung To Society
(environmental activism), Buddhist Solidarity for Reform (representing
40 civil organizations), and the Indra Net Life Community (representing
23 temples and Buddhist nongovernmental organizations); and the
Thailand-based International Network of Engaged Buddhists, founded in
1989 by the Thai Buddhist writer and reformer Sulak Sivaraksa to provide
a forum for the bourgeoning organizations and movements that share a
socially engaged Buddhist perspective. (For surveys of engaged Buddhist
movements in Asia, see Queen and King, 1996; and Queen, Prebish, and
Keown, 2003.)

In North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa,
Buddhist organizations dedicated to social activism and service have
also appeared with growing frequency. The California-based Buddhist
Peace Fellowship, founded in 1977 by the Zen teacher Robert Aitken,
coordinates programs for community development, prison reform, and
international relief through chapters in the United States and its quarterly Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism.
Peacemaker Circle International, headquartered in Massachusetts and
founded in 1996 by Bernie Glassman, a former aeronautical engineer and
lineage holder in the Japanese Sōtō
Zen tradition, sponsors “bearing witness retreats” in centers of
suffering and violence, such as the streets of lower Manhattan, the
death-camp sites at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, and Jewish and
Palestinian communities in the Middle East. The International Campaign for Tibet, based in New York
and Washington, D.C., coordinates public support for the refugee and
exile communities of the Tibetan diaspora and organizes international
pressure on the Chinese government to respect the human rights and
cultural traditions of the Tibetan people, whom it has subjugated since
1959. Two engaged Buddhists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet (1989), and Aung San Suu Kyi,
the opposition leader in Myanmar (1991), and three others, Thich Nhat
Hanh of Vietnam, Maha Ghosananda of Cambodia, and Sulak Sivaraksa of
Thailand, have been nominated for the prize.

Origins of Engaged Buddhism

The canonical and extracanonical writings of Buddhist Asia, while
focusing on monastic order, personal morality, spiritual practice, and
philosophical analysis, also include teachings on service to others and
social policies that promote general welfare. The Pali Jātaka and Sanskrit Jātakamālā,
for example, illustrate the virtues of generosity and compassion
through fables in which the future Buddha, born as a deer, a monkey, a
parrot, or an elephant, risks or sacrifices his life to save others from
harm. Didactic texts setting forth social ethics for laypersons include
the Cakkavattisihanada-sutta and the Kutadanta-sutta of the Dīgha-nikāya,
which argue that crimes of property and violence are often related to
poverty, and that government (i.e., the righteous king) should intervene
to provide farmers with grain, merchants with investment capital, and
workers with fair wages in order to promote harmonious society. Indeed,
instructions to the ideal monarch (Pali, cakkavatti or dhammarāja ), such as the Dhammapadāṭṭhakathā (Buddha’s advice to rulers), the “Ten Duties of the King” (dasa-rājadhamma, contained in the Jātaka ), and later Mahāyāna texts such as the Indian philosopher Nāgārjuna’s Jewel Garland of Royal Counsels (second century ce) and Japanese Prince Shōtuku’s Fourteen Article Constitution (sixth to seventh century ce), find early expression in the rock-hewn edicts of the Buddhist king, Aśoka Maurya (reigned in northern India c. 270 to 230 bce), promoting universal tolerance and social welfare and suggesting the pervasiveness of Buddhist ideal conceptions of a just and humane society (Harvey, 2000). The saṃgha (monastic order) founded by Siddhārtha
Gautama, the historical Buddha, in the sixth to fifth century bce,
would appear to embody certain progressive values and social options
associated with modernity in the West: equality of access to men and
women of all classes and castes, a meritocracy based on personal
attainment rather than birth or wealth, and a program of
self-cultivation and community development based on rational analysis
and practical training rather than esoteric knowledge and ritual.
Furthermore, the career of the bodhisattva or Buddhist savior that marked the rise of Mahāyāna Buddhism in the centuries following Aśoka is based on a vow to save all sentient beings from suffering and calamity.

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that the social goals of engaged
Buddhists in the early twenty-first century evolved directly from
Buddhist teachings in the past. As the historian Bardwell Smith has
observed,

The primary goal of [traditional] Buddhism is not a stable order or a
just society but the discovery of genuine freedom (or awakening) by
each person. It has never been asserted that the conditions of society
are unimportant or unrelated to this more important goal, but it is
critical to stress the distinction between what is primary and what is
not…. Even the vocation of the bodhisattva is not as social reformer but as the catalyst to personal transformation within society. (Smith, 1972, p. 106)

Since the time of the Buddha and Aśoka,
many of the social and political ideals inscribed in the early
literature and monuments of Buddhism have faded. Buddhist kings, such as
the second-century bce Sinhalese Duṭṭhagāmiṇī, have been as prone to wage holy war
against the infidel, as were their non-Buddhist neighbors, while
“Chinese and Japanese military forces have used Buddhist symbols,
banners, mudrās, and mantras
to empower their actions and intimidate opponents” (Harvey, 2000, p.
263). In medieval Japan, the largest monasteries supported standing
armies as fearsome as those of the emperor, and as late as the twentieth
century “imperial-way Buddhism” (kōdō Bukkyō ), embraced by all schools, supported the nation’s major wars: from those against China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905) to World War II,
when Zen temples sponsored meditation training camps for the armed
forces, raised money to purchase new aircraft, and recruited and trained
school boys for kamikaze missions for “love of Emperor and in service
to Buddha” (Victoria, 1997, pp. 128–129).

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a general decline of
Buddhist institutions throughout Asia. As Ian Harris has observed: “It
is difficult to point to any part of the contemporary Buddhist world
that has not been massively transformed by at least one aspect of
modernity, be it colonialism, industrialization, telecommunications,
consumerism, ultra-individualism, or totalitarianism of the left or
right. In this radically new situation Buddhists have been forced to
adapt or risk the possibility of substantial decline” (Harris, 2001, p.
19). In country after country—notably China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet, and Myanmar (Burma)—Buddhist
leaders and institutions have been marginalized or assaulted by hostile
regimes or changing social conditions. Even in nations in which the
tradition was interrupted by colonialism, revolution, civil war, and
invasion—such as Thailand, Sri Lanka, Japan, and Korea—the Buddhist saṃgha has not often been aligned with progressive politics, human rights, or social services.

Against this backdrop, progressive, nonviolent Buddhist activism has
nevertheless appeared with growing frequency. “There is plenty of
evidence of significant Buddhist involvement in anticolonial movements,
particularly since the Second World War. Similarly, new or revamped
Buddhist organizations with strongly nationalist, reformist,
social-activist, therapeutic or reactionary-fundamentalist character are
much in evidence throughout the 20th century,” according to Harris
(2001, p. 19). These spontaneous, often charismatic movements represent a
marked departure from state-supported Buddhist establishments of the
past. Engaged Buddhist movements of the twentieth century “direct their
energies toward social conditions over which the state has legal
authority, if not control; but their objective is to influence the
exercise of temporal power, not to wield it” (Queen, 1996, p. 19). As
Sulak Sivaraksa, Thailand’s leading Buddhist intellectual and founder of
the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, has written: “Buddhism,
as practiced in most Asian countries today, serves mainly to legitimize
dictatorial regimes and multinational corporations. If we Buddhists
want to redirect our energies towards enlightenment and universal love,
we should begin by spelling Buddhism with a small ‘b’”—in contrast to the “capital-B Buddhism” that shares influence and favors with the power elite (Sivaraksa, 1993, p. 68).

Engaged Buddhism in Asia is thus an emerging grassroots movement that may be traced across national and sectarian boundaries—not
a series of reforms instituted by local governments or religious
hierarchies. Even when Buddhist movements and leaders have ties to
temporal power, such as the Dalai Lama’s dual role as spiritual and
temporal head of Tibet, the Sōka Gakkai’s affiliation with the Kōmeitō political party in Japan, and the “friendly relations” (jie-yuan) between the Taiwanese government and the Tzu Chi Compassionate Relief Foundation and the Foguang Shan sect of Pure Land Buddhism,
each of these movements is both independent of state power (it is worth
recalling that the Dalai Lama is the exiled leader of Tibet) and
increasingly globalized in its relations with Tibetan, Japanese, and
Taiwanese ethnic diasporas and with their nonnative members and
supporters around the world. The transnational, transsectarian or
nonsectarian character of engaged Buddhism often derives from the life
experience of its leaders, charismatic personalities whose education and
careers linked or blended Asian and Western influences. Ambedkar chose Columbia University in New York and the University of London
for his graduate training; Thich Nhat Hanh studied and lectured at
Princeton and Columbia, traveled to nineteen countries in Europe and North America in his quest for peace in Vietnam, and associated closely with the American religious leaders Thomas Merton and Martin Luther
King Jr.; and the young Taiwanese Venerable Cheng-yen, founder of the
Tzu Chi Foundation, rejected conversion to Christianity by convincing
three Catholic missionary nuns of the universal compassion of the Buddha
while at the same time acknowledging that Buddhists must emulate
Christians in serving the poor by building hospitals and schools.

The cultural hybridity of the new Buddhism—as well as its activism and social service—may
be traced to the interaction of Buddhists and Christians in the late
Victorian era. Representative figures include the founders of the Theosophical Society, Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who publicly converted to Buddhism in Colombo in 1880, and their associate, the Sinhalese Buddhist activist Anagārika Dharmapāla (Don David Hewavitarne), who, with the Japanese Zen master Shaku Sōen
and the Hindu swami Vivekananda, electrified crowds at the World’s
Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 with their evangelical fervor
for the wisdom of the East. By this time, Sir Edwin Arnold’s romantic
verse narrative of the life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, had
become a best-seller in the English-speaking world. Thomas Tweed
remarked on the growing consensus among Buddhists and their admirers in
the West regarding the social impact of religious faith: “With few
exceptions, Buddhist apologists stood united with American critics,
travelers, and scholars in implicitly or explicitly affirming the role
of religion in stimulating effective economic, political, and social
activity. Almost all participants in Victorian culture and contributors
to the public discourse about Buddhism agreed: whatever else true
religion was, it was optimistic and activistic” (Tweed, 1992, p. 155).

Teachings of Engaged Buddhism

Traditional teachings of the Buddhist dharma often find new
meaning and application in the practice of engaged Buddhism. Familiar
doctrines such as nonviolence, interdependence, selflessness,
mindfulness, and compassion are interpreted in ways that address social
and institutional dimensions of suffering in the world. Likewise,
ethical guidelines such as right speech, right livelihood, and skillful
means are understood in ways that acknowledge structural shifts in the
economic life, geopolitics, and information technology of the early
twenty-first century.

Sulak Sivaraksa interprets the traditional five precepts (pancha shila)
to encompass institutional and transnational realities as well as
interpersonal morality, for example. Non-harming is conceived in a
global context:

Hunger is caused only by unequal economic and power structures that
do not allow food to end up where it is needed, even when those in need
are the food producers. And we must look at the sales of arms and
challenge these structures, which are responsible for murder. Killing
permeates our modern way of life—wars, racial conflicts, breeding animals to serve human markets, and using harmful insecticides. (Sivaraksa, 1993, p. 74)

Likewise, non-stealing is treated in terms of economic justice
(”right livelihood”) and voluntary simplicity. Sexual misconduct
concerns the global exploitation of women by male hierarchies, as well
as the global traffic in pornography and prostitution. Avoiding false
speech entails the responsible use of the mass media, education, and
political discourse in order to rescue truth from propaganda and
trivialization and to confront power elites with the effects of their
policies. The fifth precept, against intoxicants, offers Sivaraksa the
occasion to consider the economic addiction of Third World
farmers to the production of heroin, coco, coffee, and tobacco as well
as the use of related products that cloud the mind, for “in Buddhism, a
clear mind is a precious gem” (Sivaraksa, 1993, pp. 75–79).

The twin virtues of wisdom and compassion are understood in similar
ways by the Vietnamese Thich Nhat Hanh and the American Bernie Glassman,
two influential voices of engaged Buddhism. In his “Tiep Hien Order
Precepts,” Nhat Hanh warns: “Do not think that the knowledge you
presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being
narrow-minded and bound to present views….
Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including
personal contact and visits, images, sound. By such means awaken
yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world” (Nhat
Hanh, 1987, pp. 90–91).
Glassman Roshi invites his followers to follow the “Zen Peacemaker
Order Tenets” (1998): “I commit myself to not-knowing, the source of all
manifestations….
I commit myself to bearing witness fully by allowing myself to be
touched by the joy and pain of the universe. I invite all hungry spirits
into the mandala of my being and commit my energy and love to my own
healing, the healing of the earth, humanity and all creations”
(Glassman, 1998, pp. 68–89).
In these teachings, wisdom is associated with a radical agnosticism in a
world of violently competing ideologies in the hope that a mindful
openness to the experience of others will result in a deeper
identification and commitment to help. Likewise, both teachings
illustrate a special concern for suffering beings (echoing the
“preferential option for the poor” of the liberation theology
of Latin American Catholicism), whereby the Buddhist vow of universal
compassion is enacted in concrete programs of service and activism
(Queen, 2002).

Buddhist environmentalism is a striking example of the adaptation of
the traditional Buddhist worldview to contemporary modes of thought,
specifically the findings of modern science. While the Buddhist
teachings of the “wheel of life” and “dependent co-origination” were not
based on modern theories of evolutionary biology, for example, their
metaphorical expression in the ancient literature has resonated strongly
for ecological activists in the early twenty-first century.
Illustrating how the language of awakening and liberation may be
projected from individual to ecosystem, Joanna Macy invokes the general
systems theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Ervin Laszlo to make the
connection:

Far from the nihilism and escapism that is often imputed to the
Buddhist path, this liberation, this awakening puts one into the world
with a livelier, more caring sense of social engagement. The sense of
interconnectedness that can then arise, is imaged—in one of the most beautiful images of the Mahayana—as
the jeweled net of Indra. It is a vision of reality structured very
much like the holographic view of the universe, so that each being is at
each node of the net, each jewel reflects all the others, reflecting
back and catching the reflection, just as systems theory sees that the
part contains the whole. (Macy, 1990, p. 61)

In practical terms, engaged Buddhist monks in Thailand have
faced arrest for “ordaining” trees in the rainforests to protect them
from clear-cutting by international timber cartels (Darlington, 2003),
while members of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship have participated in
nonviolent civil disobedience to prevent nuclear testing at the U.S. government test site in Nevada (Kaza, 2000).

Perhaps the most significant shift, or enlargement, of meaning in the
practice of engaged Buddhism involves the central doctrine of suffering
(Pali, dukkha ). The Buddha is credited with saying, “In the past, bhikkhus, as well as now, I teach only dukkha and the utter quenching of dukkha ” (Alagaddupama-sutta, Majjhima-nikāya
[M.i.140], cited in Santikaro Bhikkhu, 1996, p. 156). As elaborated in
the four noble truths, suffering is universal, it is rooted in
psychological craving born of ignorance, it is “quenchable” in the peace
of nirvāṇa
(freedom from craving and other mental defilements), and it is subject
to the benefits of the eightfold path: efficacious view, aspiration,
action, speech, livelihood, exertion, mindfulness, and concentration.
Yet the logic underlying this and other early teachings is that dukkha
is both the experience and the responsibility of the sufferer. There
can be no victims; every sufferer is held accountable for his or her own
misery. Here the cure depends on the effort of the sufferer to tread
the eightfold path or, in the case of the Pure Land tradition popular in
central and East Asia, to entreat Amitābha Buddha to intervene on one’s behalf. In the case of the Mahāyāna bodhisattva
who vows to save all sentient beings, the mechanism remains a change of
heart and behavior on the part of each being, never a group
dispensation for all who are fortunate enough to hear the dharma and enact its injunctions or to receive the mercy of a buddha or bodhisattva.

The hallmark of engaged Buddhism, on the other hand, is its collectivist application of the teaching of interdependence (Pali, paṭiccasamuppāda
) to the experience of suffering in the world. For if it is possible to
suffer as a result of social conditions or natural circumstances that
transcend one’s psychological (or karmic) states of being—such as poverty, injustice, tyranny, or natural disaster—then dukkha
must be addressed in a collective way to remove these conditions for
all members of the affected group. Thus in Sivaraksa’s interpretation of
the five precepts is an abiding concern with all who are hungry and
injured by wars, racial conflicts, environmental pollution, and economic
conditions that favor the farming, manufacture, and marketing of deadly
drugs. For Ambedkar and the 380,000 dalits who embraced Buddhism
on October 14, 1956, the ceremony offered hope to millions oppressed by
the Hindu caste system, while the college students, monks, and
villagers who dig wells and build schools in more than 11,000 villages
in Sri Lanka believe they embody the name of their sponsoring
organization, Sarvodaya Shramadana (Universal Awakening through
Cooperative Work).

This evolution of Buddhist ethics from one of individual
discipline, virtue, and altruism to one of collective suffering,
struggle, and liberation illustrates the cultural interaction and mutual
sharing with religious and political ideas of the West, such as the
notions of covenant community, social justice, and prophetic witness of
the biblical Hebrews and Christians, and the secular conceptions of
human rights, judicial due process, and democracy associated with Greek
humanism, Roman and Anglo-Saxon law, the scientific and social
Enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and the
pragmatism and progressivism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
America. In this regard, Ambedkar stands as an exemplar of the synthesis
of the ancient and modern, intellectual and activist, and personal and
institutional dimensions of engaged Buddhism. As one of the first
untouchables to attend college in India, Ambedkar emulated the
ecumenical tolerance of the Muslim-Hindu poet-saint Kabīr (c. 1440–1580), the anticaste activism of the Maharashtrian educator Mahatma Phule (1827–1890), and the social and spiritual reformism he found in the life and teachings of the Buddha. As a graduate student at Columbia University in New York from 1913 to 1916, Ambedkar absorbed the pragmatic philosophy of his mentor John Dewey (1859–1952) as well as the Social Gospel of Protestant theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918),
who wrote that religion is “not a matter of saving human atoms, but of
saving the social organism. It is not a matter of getting individuals to
heaven, but of transforming life on earth into the harmony of heaven”
(Rauschenbusch, 1964/1909, p. 65). And, as an activist for untouchable
rights in the decades leading up to Indian independence and as law
minister and chairman of the constitution drafting committee in Jawaharlal Nehru’s
first government, Ambedkar added to his emerging worldview the slogans
of Western progressivism, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and “Educate,
Agitate, Organize,” and the theories of law and government he
encountered at the University of London
and Gray’s Inn. All of these influences were woven seamlessly into the
traditional rendering of the Buddha’s life and teachings in Ambedkar’s
final work, The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957)—a
manifesto of engaged Buddhism that remains the bible for tens of
millions of Ambedkar’s Buddhists followers in the early twenty-first
century.

Conclusion

When Ambedkar was asked by reporters what kind of Buddhism he would
embrace at the mass Buddhist conversion in 1956, he replied: “Our
Buddhism will follow the tenets of the faith preached by Lord Buddha
himself, without stirring up the old divisions of Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna. Our Buddhism will be a Neo-Buddhism—a Navayana ” (paraphrased from Keer, 1971, p. 498). Many teachings and practices of engaged Buddhism transcend the ancient yanas or sectarian “vehicles”—the Hīnayāna or “elite vehicle,” the Mahāyāna or “universal vehicle,” and the Vajrayāna or “diamond vehicle”—by
drawing teachings and practices from them all and by adapting these in
keeping with modern notions of suffering, human rights, social reform,
and environmental sustainability. Accordingly, some observers have
proposed that Ambedkar’s Navayana (”new vehicle”), prefiguring
the beliefs and practices of engaged Buddhism as a global movement
today, represents the emergence of a “fourth yana ” in the
history of Buddhism; others argue that the patterns of thought and
action of the “engaged” Buddhists fall comfortably within the purview of
traditional Buddhism (Queen, 2000, pp. 22–26).
Whichever interpretation meets the tests of history, the sharp rise of
Buddhist social engagement and activism in the twentieth century and the
pervasiveness of its influence on Buddhist institutions and ideology is
not in dispute.

Bibliography

Aitken, Robert. The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics. San Francisco, 1984. Essays by a founder of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

Ambedkar, B. R. The Buddha and His Dhamma. 3d ed. Bombay, 2001. Has achieved canonical status for ex-untouchable Buddhist converts in India.

Chappell, David, ed. Buddhist Peacework: Creating Cultures of Peace. Boston, 2000. Brief essays by engaged Buddhist thinkers and movement leaders in Asia and the West.

Dalai Lama. Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings by and about the Dalai Lama. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990. The Nobel Peace laureate reflects with others on Buddhism and history.

Darlington, Susan M. “Buddhism and Development: The Ecology Monks of Thailand.” In Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism, edited by Christopher S. Queen, Charles Prebish, and Damien Keown, pp. 96–109. London, 2003.

Eppsteiner, Fred, ed. The Path of Compassion: Writings on Socially Engaged Buddhism.
2d ed. Berkeley, Calif., 1988. A widely influential collection
featuring the most prominent actors and commentators in the late 1980s.

Glassman, Bernard. Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace. New York, 1998. Sequel to Instructions to the Cook (1996), detailing a Zen Roshi’s innovative experiments in social engagement.

Gross, Rita. Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. Albany, N.Y., 1993. Historical analysis and manifesto by an activist-scholar; a touchstone of Buddhist feminism.

Harris, Ian, ed. Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia. London, 2001.

Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values, and Issues. London, 2000. A useful survey of the classical foundations of engaged Buddhism.

Hunt-Perry, Patricia, and Lyn Fine. “All Buddhism Is Engaged: Thich Nhat Hanh and the Order of Interbeing.” In Engaged Buddhism in the West, edited by Christopher S. Queen, pp. 35–65. Boston, 2000.

Kaza, Stephanie. “To Save All Beings: Buddhist Environmental Activism.” In Engaged Buddhism in the West, edited by Christopher Queen, pp. 159–217. Boston, 2000.

Keer, Dhananjay. Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission. 3d ed. Bombay, 1971.

King, Sallie B. “Thich Nhat Hanh and the Unified Buddhist Church: Nondualism in Action.” In Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia, edited by Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, pp. 321–363. Albany, N.Y., 1996.

Kraft, Kenneth, ed. Inner Peace, World Peace: Essays on Buddhism and Nonviolence. Albany, N.Y., 1992. Critical essays by scholars and practitioners of engaged Buddhism.

Leyland, Winston, ed. Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists. 2 vols. San Francisco, 1998. Pathbreaking essays on Buddhism, gender, and sexual preference.

Ling, Trevor. Buddhism, Imperialism, and War: Burma and Thailand in Modern History. London, 1979.

Macy, Joanna. “The Greening of the Self.” In Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, edited by Allan Hunt Badiner. Berkeley, Calif., 1990.

Macy, Joanna. Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems. Albany, N.Y., 1991. Offers a full exposition of a systems theory of Buddhist ethics.

Nhat Hanh, Thich. Being Peace. Berkeley, Calif., 1987. See pages 90–91. The most influential collection of teachings by the Vietnamese Zen teacher and activist.

Queen, Christopher S. “Introduction: The Shapes and Sources of Engaged Buddhism.” In Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia, edited by Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, p. 19. Albany, 1996.

Queen, Christopher S. “The Peace Wheel: Nonviolent Activism in the Buddhist Tradition.” In Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions, edited by Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, pp. 25–48. Cambridge, Mass., 1998.

Queen, Christopher S. “Engaged Buddhism: Agnosticism, Interdependence, Globalization.” In Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann, pp. 324–347. Berkeley, Calif., 2002.

Queen, Christopher S., ed. Engaged Buddhism in the West. Boston, 2000. Comprehensive treatment of eighteen movements in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.

Queen, Christopher S., and Sallie B. King, eds. Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia. Albany, N.Y., 1996. The first scholarly treatment of engaged Buddhism, surveying nine movements.

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https://www.lionsroar.com/ambedkars-vision/

Ambedkar’s Vision for India’s Awakened Aboriginal SC/STs