Spiritual Vision for Healing Our Earth: The Buddha’s Four Ennobling Truths and their Implications for our Global Society
What concrete steps are we called to take, as individuals, and collectively, so we may all together arrive at such a scenario of personal and global well-being?
Prof. Ruben L.F. Habito
Spiritual Vision for Healing Our Earth:
The Buddha’s Four Ennobling Truths and their Implications for our Global Society
Our current global society is in a state of crisis, and is on the brink of collapse, with violence being perpetrated from all fronts, leading to widespread sense of insecurity and fear; a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, with significant numbers of our global population living in subhuman conditions in different areas of the world; and with worsening ecological deterioration marked by the extinction of living species by the thousands each year and with the impinging climate change that will upset the biological balance of our communal life on Earth.
We turn to the Buddha’s fundamental insight into the human condition enshrined in his teaching of the Four Ennobling Truths for a clue toward addressing our current global situation, toward its healing. This teaching, inspired by Āyur Vedic teaching on healing human illness, begins with a delineation of symptoms of the illness or dis-ease, goes on to the determination of their root causes, and then envisions the healed state, or a state of well-being through the elimination of those root causes, and then offers prescriptions of active steps to be taken toward this elimination and consequent healing. From applying it to the individual human being’s existential condition, we transpose it to apply to our global community and its dysfunctional state (global dukkha). We can pinpoint root causes in the destructive effects of the three poisons (greed, illwill, and delusion) transposed from individual to social and institutional levels. What is institutional greed? Look at a society as ours that runs on the bottom line of the profit motive, on the consumeristic urge to have more and more stuff to fill in the lack that one feels from within, on the drive to acquire more and more at every level of society. What is institutional illwill? Look at our global society that runs on the tribalistic “us vs. them” mentality, that marks off identity based on belonging to some subgroup that wants to feel superior to the other groups. What is institutional delusion? Look at the widespread dissemination of misleading views of what is happening in the world, “fake news,” diversion of the attention of the populace from the important features that determine our collective destiny, toward the sensational, the addictive and palliative pleasures of the moment.
In pinpointing the root causes and reflecting on how we are all contributing to these causes in our own respective ways, we are inspired and empowered to take steps toward eliminating them, as we envision a world wherein greed has been turned into generosity, illwill has been transformed to goodwill, and delusion has now been set aside and has given way to wisdom. Can we imagine a kind of a world is it that is marked, on the individual as well as on institutional, structural levels, not by the three poisons of greed, illwill, and ignorance, but by the three gems of generosity, goodwill, and wisdom? Finally, what concrete steps are we called to take, as individuals, and collectively, so we may all together arrive at such a scenario of personal and global well-being?
