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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Vesak and Mental Health Week

Vishvapani offers the story of Kisagotami as a model for how we might respond to others’ mental
health struggles – something Prince William has done, referring to his own experience. But it goes further. Kisagotami's dead child represents the painful truths that we can neither face nor let go in all our fragile, impermanent, interconnected lives. Recognising her child’s death didn't just restore Kisagotami’s sanity. It connected her to others, prompting an insight into the human condition that was the Buddha’s real message.

The story ends as Kisagotami returns to the Buddha, bows and says: ‘The work of the mustard seed is done.’



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The Loss of Biodiversity

Something important is happening when scientists start talking about the good life. In principle at least, science has left discussion of values to religion and the arts. But in the ecological crisis, the long-held distinction between facts and values is breaking down. The environment is seen as a vast feedback system that’s being reshaped by human behaviour. Our individual actions are magnified on a planetary scale and reflected back to us as environmental change.

That connection between actions and consequences is the heart of ethics, but it’s not the role of scientists to tell us what our values should be. So where can we find an alternative idea of the good life? And what social narrative offers an environmentally sustainable understanding of what makes us happy?




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Global warming

Everyone wants to be happy; but when we look for happiness in immediate pleasures or prioritise our own interests over others, we turn happiness into an object that we think we can grasp. But Buddhism suggests that the grasping mentality is itself an important part of what makes us unhappy. If that’s true of individuals, it’s also true of society. In either case the alternative is fostering the conditions that support our long term wellbeing.

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager, is admirably impatient and rightly demands that we recognise climate change as a crisis that requires urgent action. But acting in ways that are effective in the long term means recognising that we need to think freshly and think big..................

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American poet Mary Oliver by Vishvapani

Many British people, even those who read poetry, might not have heard of the American poet Mary Oliver, who died on Thursday aged 83. But in the US she was loaded with honours and won a wide readership for poems expressing a distinctively modern kind of spirituality.

Her most famous poem is The Summer Day, which starts with the ancient religious question, ‘Who Made the world?’ Then the poet gazes at a grasshopper that’s landed in her palm as she walks through the fields, and reflects that the answer lies in engaging with what’s before her with care and curiosity. ’I don't know exactly what a prayer is,’ she says. ‘I do know how to pay attention’...........................



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Vegetarianism and veganism

This week we've heard from Oxford scientists that limiting carbon emissions and feeding a growing population should mean moving towards a more plant-based diet. The discussion's awkward but vegetarians have long argued that the choices we make around eating are intrinsically ethical. 

From a Buddhist perspective, what links these issues is the belief that the consequences of food production for both animal suffering and the planet are our responsibility. Not all Buddhists are vegetarian, but Buddhist ethics teaches that acting well means paying careful attention to the conditions from which things develop. Some Buddhist monks start a meal by reflecting on where the food has come from with a sense of gratitude to the farmers and cooks......................

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Climate Change

When I look at my own behaviour, I find that blandishments about living more simply don’t really prompt me to make lasting changes. Those only come from my underlying values, and to keep them in mind I reflect regularly on what Buddhism calls ‘The Four Reminders’..............................




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Wise Speech

Vishvapani discusses the Buddhist concept of Wise Speech in relation to diversity.




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The Call of the Forest

In this talk, Vishvapani considers the story of how Felix Dennis, the young editor of Oz magazine, following his death left £150 million to establish a broad-leafed forest in Warwickshire comprising 10 million trees.

"Most of us value nature and fear climate change, but often that’s one concern among many, and collectively we’ve been slow to act. For that to change I think we need to know the natural world more fully and love it more deeply. We need to let the call of the forest, which the poets have so often expressed, stir our imaginations with a longing for freedom and simplicity. 

The impulse to restore the forests is a response to the needs of the planet, but it also engages our own spiritual need for wholeness and renewal."



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Appreciation and Gratitude

In this Thought for the Day Vishvapani discusses the rescued boys who had been lost in the caves of Northern Thailand. Less than a fortnight after their rescue, all but one of the boys entered a Buddhist monastery for nine days, following the Thai tradition of temporary ordination.

The point of this custom is to foster a sense of appreciation and gratitude, and the boys are focusing on thankfulness to their rescuers, including the Thai diver who died when his oxygen ran out, as well as their parents and the Buddha, who they consider the ultimate source of protection.



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Climate Change and the Parable of the Burning House

The 2015 Paris Climate Change agreement was an inspiring example of the world coming together to tackle a shared problem. But talks in Bonn on implementing the deal stalled this week with poorer nations saying that the richer ones prioritise their own economic growth above reducing emissions or helping developing countries.

Fear alone can't sustain the slow and difficult changes that will reduce global emissions. We also need compelling images of a sustainable society that's more attractive than the current one, and countless initiatives around the world focus on doing that..................................



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The Paris Uprising of May 1968

"When I became a Buddhist as a teenager I found myself around people who were still fired by the radicalism that had inspired the Paris students. They also felt that something was fundamentally amiss in conventional society, but they said that changing the world started with changing people. The revolution they wanted was a transformation in human consciousness.

The Buddha's key insight was that everything humans create, from war and injustice to the belief systems that underlie our societies, express our fundamental emotions. 'Everything we experience,' he said 'is led by mind and produced by mind.' A better world therefore requires better people; and revolutions that don't take this into account risk replacing one form of oppression with another."

Vishvapani




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Responding Skilfully to Whatever Happens

To be ethically skilful in the Buddhist sense is to act with an awareness of one's motivations and sensitivity to their likely consequences. Techniques and rules only get you so far, so Buddhist ethical training means applying principles thoughtfully and fostering the emotional intelligence and sensitivity. From this perspective, what it means to be ethical is no more a matter of subjective opinion than judging mastery of a practical skill.



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The Value of Public Service

Vishvapani talks about the commitment of those in the caring professions.



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Accepting Impermanence in the Digital Age

"Bigger cars don't make us happier................."



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Our Relationships with Eating

For Buddhism, compulsive behaviour never satisfies our craving. In fact, it encourages yet more craving to develop, and that in turn makes us suffer. That's how food becomes connected with so much else: a desire for a better body, reassurance or stimulation. It becomes a focus of guilt and anxiety and a substitute for more dependable sources of satisfaction.

The Buddha's advice was: "Have a sense of moderation in eating and eat simply for the continuance of your body." Buddhist monks still follow a rule of not eating after midday and some only take one meal. That removes the temptation to wander towards the fridge or the mango grove in an idle moment and frees up time and energy for their Buddhist practice.



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Wesak - Buddhism's Relevance in the Modern World

This week Buddhists celebrate the Buddha's Awakening or Enlightenment. According to the traditional dating that took place in 538 BC, and the spiritual tradition he founded eventually inspired a vast civilisation. So we can agree that Buddhism deserves a place in a museum. But in a world that's hurtling towards post-modernity and faces unprecedented challenges, we can justifiably ask if an ancient tradition like Buddhism has any continuing relevance?



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Parinirvana Day

Vishvapani's latest talk on Thought for the Day....................

Today Mahayana Buddhists mark the death of the Buddha in a festival called Parinirvana Day. Aged 35, 4 or 500 years before Christ, Buddhists believe that the man history knows as Gautama attained 'Enlightenment' or 'Awakening'. For the next 45 years he travelled continually across the Ganges Valley meeting people and sharing his understanding of life. He gathered a large following and was widely revered for his wisdom.........................



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