Engaging With Mental Illness

"The Buddha said if you want to care for me you should care for the sick".



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Martin Luther King and Thich Nhat Hanh

Martin Luther King said in 1967: ‘Before you finish eating breakfast, you’ve depended on more than half the world.’ Dr King was making a philosophical point with moral consequences. ‘We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,’ he said. Therefore ‘whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’ That’s an argument for solidarity with people who are suffering or persecuted, wherever they may be.

Dr King probably had Christian sources for these ideas, but earlier in 1967 he nominated Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who campaigned against the Vietnam War, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke constantly about the interconnectedness of the human condition, drawing on Indra’s Net, a traditional Buddhist image of life. The net is infinite in dimensions and has a jewel at each intersection which reflects all the others. At every point we see endless reflections showing the net’s infinite scope.



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Andrew Strauss, Compassion and the Buddha

Lords was awash with red yesterday on the second day of the Ashes Test Match. Red caps, red shirts and even red adverts marked the Ruth Strauss Foundation, which, as we’ve heard, former England captain Andrew Strauss has established to commemorate his wife, who died of lung cancer. As well as raising money for research, Strauss wants to encourage openness about death and grief, especially among men.

Finding a measured response to suffering is one of the fundamental challenges that Buddhism identifies. The Buddha, himself, is a balanced figure who exemplifies compassionate gentleness but is also tough and heroic, abandoning comfort to confront life in its unvarnished truth. And his teachings suggest that the key to balanced emotional awareness is distinguishing different kinds of emotions.................



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