Good evening. Thank you for being here.

I am grateful to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community for this opportunity to speak about the core of Buddhist practice, and how that can manifest as a force for social peace.

Religion is about peace, both personal inner peace and peace in our relationships with others. Actually, we can’t have peace in our relationships without first establishing peace within ourselves. This is something each Buddhist student verifies for themselves.

As my practice as a Zen Buddhist student slowly progresses, there is gradually less and less conflict in my social life. As a human being, it is almost impossible for me to have a life without being social, so inner peace and social peace turn out to be much the same thing in my life and it is the same for other people.

Inner peace is not something that happens without effort. Just as we must exercise our muscles if we want to stay healthy, so we have to make an effort in spiritual practice if we want to experience inner peace. Although it is an effort, it is also quite natural for us to want to do this. People suffer from inner conflict, and people suffer from the resulting social conflict. As human beings we are united in our desire to end conflict and suffering, but we don’t always find peace.

There is a saying among Buddhists “if you are lucky you win the lottery, if you are very, very lucky you find a teacher.”

Not all teachers are Buddhist, a good teacher in any religious tradition will help her or his students go through a definite developmental process resulting in inner peace.

As far as I know no one is ever entirely done with the process. Even the founder of Buddhism, Shakyamuni himself, to the surprise of some disciples, continued with the basic meditation practice of being aware of the breath throughout his life.

Although it seems there is no end to religious practice, some people are definitely more mature than others. If you are open to it you can tell when someone has a mature practice. They have a calming effect on others.

The effect we have on others is very important in Buddhist practice. If my teacher, Joshu Roshi, catches us just sitting around enjoying “inner peace” he pushes us to manifest this in our relationships.

If our relationships are not peaceful, we hear about it. I’m probably not the only student who has been told directly “no fighting.”

My occasional desire to punch someone out, even if I was immature enough to act on it, is insignificant beside the weapons of mass destruction available to many political leaders.

It would certainly be a good thing for the rest of us if national leaders responsible for social peace and war had a calming effect on each other, and made themselves accountable to teachers like Roshi, who teach “no fighting.”

I teach biology and study Zen, so I don’t know very much about politics; but even I can name Mahatma Gandhi and the 14th Dalai Lama as political leaders whose struggle for inner peace was and is inextricably linked with the larger struggle for social peace. Each of them has worked with spiritual teachers. Each has had an immeasurable positive impact, showing us what is possible.

Neither Gandhi nor the Dali Lama could achieve complete social peace, because they did not, and do not, have the cooperation of everyone else. We are all responsible for this situation. I need to practice as if world peace depended on me, because it does.

The Dalai Lama has said that he would give up Buddhism if that would bring peace. Thich Nhat Hanh who is a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, and a Zen Buddhist teacher has said something very similar. Thich Nhat Hanh was reputedly challenged by a veteran who said,

"You're a fool, what if someone had wiped out all the Buddhists in the world and you were the last one left. Would you not try to kill the person who was trying to kill you, and in doing so save Buddhism?!"

Thich Nhat Hanh answered,

"It would be better to let him kill me. If there is any truth to Buddhism . . ..the Dharma it will not disappear from the face of the earth, but will reappear when seekers of truth are ready to rediscover it."

"In killing I would be betraying and abandoning the very teachings I would be seeking to preserve. So it would be better to let him kill me and remain true to the spirit of the Dharma."

I need to get this serious about peace. I need to be ready to give up my religion, ready to die.

There is more to this than just wanting peace. As Thich Nhat Hanh explains, spiritual work needs to be done before we can be effective.

This teacher said:

"There are so many of us who are very eager to work for peace, but we don’t have peace within. We shout for peace, angrily, and we shout at the people who are also for peace like us. There are many groups who are very dedicated to peacemaking, but they fight each other a lot and they cannot have peace."

It seems ridiculous for peace workers to fight. It is ridiculous to think that we can bring an end to acting out aggression, by acting out aggression. But we make these mistakes.

The Buddhist approach to the problem of mistakes is to start with ourselves. Thich Nhat Hanh has spoken at length about how to do this, he suggests we begin . . .

"with the practice of sitting quietly, walking mindfully, taking care of our body, releasing the tension in our body and in our feelings. So the practice can bring peace to us right away; and when you are more peaceful, more pleasant, you can be more effective in contacting other people and inviting other people to join in the work of peacemaking. And since you are peaceful, you know how to look peacefully, how to speak peacefully, how to react peacefully, and you can persuade many people to join you in the work of promoting peace and reconciliation."

We might hope for a world where all political leaders were required to undertake this sort of spiritual training. People like Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama do help us create more social peace. But to be effective spiritual practice must be chosen, development can’t be forced.

Even in the Tibet ruled by the Dalai Lamas, who started training before they were old enough to refuse it, and even in aboriginal societies where leaders also received spiritual training from childhood, things were not perfect. Even an enlightened leader makes mistakes. Even in a moment of enlightenment a leader may need to defend their people.

Worse can happen and has happened: religious power can corrupt, or be seized by corrupt leaders; misunderstanding of religious teaching can lead to religious war. All religions suffer from this corruption. Whether it is crusades, a mistaken idea of jihad, or Samurai with Zen training, the problem is the same.

These mistakes, this corruption, start with a fundamental misunderstanding. As we grow up, we learn to distinguish between self and other. Conventional development results in many of us making this an absolute distinction. Absolute distinction between self and other produces the passion, aggression and stupidity that lead to war. We call these the three poisons.

There is danger here, you might misunderstand what I mean by passion, aggression and stupidity. In Buddhist practice these are not insults, they are precise technical terms for mistakes that we all make.

Passion here means blind passion. There is nothing wrong with enthusiasm, or liveliness, unless they are inappropriately directed. Giving up aggression does not mean we become passive, it means our energy is not funneled into self interest. Stupidity is ignorance of our fundamental nature, which is not separate from everything else. It is quite possible to be very clever, and very stupid, at the same time. We do this when we show off by making smart remarks that hurt other people.

Passion, aggression and stupidity can manifest in small ways, as well as in a large scale war. Hurtful remarks, individual violence and war all have the same root. All are mistakes resulting from making an absolute distinction between self and other.

Once we have made the mistake of making an absolute distinction between self and other, then we cling to our passion, aggression and stupidity as if they were good for us, so we become progressively more alienated, more hostile, without peace in our own lives and unable to interact peacefully with others. At this point it is easy for us to use our religion to justify acting out our passion, aggression and stupidity.

If we use religion in this way, then we are missing the point.

If we are political leaders our passion, aggression and stupidity may cause national or international disasters. If we are working for social peace, our work may disintegrate into the sort of squabbles that Thich Nhat Hanh described, instead of blossoming into the peaceful creativity shown by Gandhi, by the Dalai Lama, and by Thich Nhat Hanh himself.

Our aggression will turn sincere people away from our religion, and make it harder for them to find peace. Our peaceful creativity will help others find peace. What we do matters.

Making mistakes is part of being human. There is no utopia in the human world, no possibility of zero mistakes. This summer my teacher, Joshu Roshi, addressed the issue of war in his talks, saying that there will always be war in the human world, because this is how people are. Anzan Hoshin Roshi, a Soto Zen teacher based in Ottawa, was also clear on this point when he addressed his students immediately after September the 11th 2001. He said:

"The events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 are deeply shocking and truly terrible. But events of greater and lesser scale are always occurring every day. This is the world as it is."

Since both smaller individual acts of aggression and events like 9/11 arise from people’s inner states we don’t have to be political leaders to increase social peace. We all interact with others. We can make the choice to be responsible for ourselves, so that our contribution to the world will be peace. To do this we need to find a way to end the mistaken perception of absolute separation between self and other.

There is complete interbeing between us, between us and this room, between all of that and the rest of what exists. It obviously took the sun, the earth, many ancestors, many farmers, and many teachers to get me here, and to get you here, so we could be here together. It is pretty easy to see intellectually that we are linked to each other and to everything else, by chains of cause and effect. But this is not enough.

We use meditation and contemplation to investigate ourselves. When we do this correctly, as Buddhists, we fully experience, acknowledge, and even embrace, BUT NEVER ACT ON, the violent urges that arise in all humans. This purifying practice helps us correct our fundamental mistake, and realize that we are not separate from everything else.

We call this realization interbeing or oneness. Others use other methods; some pray and call the resulting sense of interbeing “being with God.” This is why Thomas Merton, who practiced both Christianity and Buddhism, said, “God is everything.”

However we do it, once we deeply experience the truth of interbeing we will be so aware of our oneness that we will be as interested in each others wellbeing as we are in our own. Then it will be possible for us to genuinely work for peace.

Realization of interbeing doesn’t happen all at once. At first we only catch tiny glimpses. Later there is more. We realize at deeper and deeper levels that we are part of everything else, and it is part of us. We let go of our self interest and become genuinely peaceful a little at a time. If we keep going, inner peace deepens and we get better and better at peaceful relationships.

It takes many of us a long time and a lot of effort in spiritual practice before we experience peace. Then, if we stop practicing, instead of becoming more peaceful, we resume clinging to passion, aggression and stupidity again. Our method, whatever combination of meditation, contemplation and prayer we use, needs to continue for a lifetime.

Very few people start young enough, and work hard enough, to ever practice in an entirely self directed way. Most of us will always need a teacher.

This might seem daunting, and to start with it is, but the results are worth the effort, and we can start doing what we naturally want to do, and make a contribution to peace, pretty early on. There is some benefit at every level of realization.

As Thich Nhat Hhan says “peace is every step.“

Thank you for taking this step with me.