How does Zen help the world?

I roughly get how Zen helps individuals, but what does it actually offer the world?  Even if I’ve realized my true nature, what good does it do for farmers drowning in debt or the war in Yemen or some other plague of the world?

If you’re upset by something at work and you come home to your wife and kids, how does that affect how you treat them?

Bad.  I’m good at keeping my darkness under control, but I know I know that it leaks out.  I snap at them.  I care less about what they’re going through.  I don’t listen well. That kind of stuff.

So does your inner state affect how you relate to the world?

Yes, 100%.

There’s your answer

But I look at some monks and see them spending 20, 30, 40 years in some remote monastery where only a few hundred people visit a year and only a dozen or so live full time.  I just wonder how someone like that, who spends most of their time meditating, is actually helping the world.

For starters, at least they’re not messing things up that much. That’s a lot more that can be said for a vast majority of humans.  Often, the people that cause the most damage are the ones so sure that they’ve got things figured out and are acting righteously.  Look at all the misery, deprivation, and loss that followed in the wake of communist uprisings in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.  Mao, with his Great Leap Forward, killed over twenty million people through hair-brained economic policies.  Many in his own party disagreed with his policy and rightly blamed Mao for the devastation. Mao, the political adept he was, began the Cultural Revolution of ‘66 to keep attention off him while also killing millions more.  Pol Pot. Kim Il-Sung. Ho Chih Minh.

The missionaries believed they were justified in enslaving, torturing, and exploiting locals in North and South America. This was done, in part, in the name of both God and country and to civilize the savages. Looking at their actions, they ruined entire countries and cultures with their arrogance and callousness. Almost everyone now looks on in horror at what they did, but they believed they were doing the Lord’s work.

The worst that you could say of the monks living in their mountain hermitages in China was that they weren’t contributing anything and draining resources from their supporters. Fair enough.

That’s not inspiring. “I’m a Buddhist.  At least I didn’t mess things up that much.” I need something more than that.

I’m not saying that’s the end goal, but it is a decent standard to ask yourself to uphold.  So many have this savior complex.  I need to save the world.  I need to fix this big problem.  I need to help.  It’s a nice heroic story to tell oneself, but after someone’s passed on, how many can really make the say that they didn’t mess things up that much or contribute to a movement that did?  Maybe 20% or 30%.  I don’t know.  People get dragged into all sorts of nefarious projects by fools, tyrants, or revolutionaries.  Often, it’s a few decades or centuries later that people look back on what seemed so obviously right and think, “Man, that was dumb.  What were they thinking?”  Don’t worry, though, there’s more to Zen than just not messing things up, there’s the Bodhisattva.

Years and years back, when I first started getting into Buddhism, my Christian conservative aunt asked me, “Who’s the Dalai Lama?” I replied, “Imagine if Jesus, instead of going to heaven after he died, came back countless times to save humanity from itself.” That’s what a Bodhisattva is. Impressed now?
More like confused.

Bodhisattvas strive to realize enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. Traditionally, they also vow to keep being born, aging, and dying until every single sentient being in the entire universe is free. Talk about a savior complex, right?  We go right off the cliff and a thousand miles into the deep with that one. That’s its saving grace.  Saving all sentient beings, from ants to Gadafi to me, is impossible.  Even the Buddha, arguably the greatest, most enlightened, most powerful awakened being in the history of the universe, claims only about 7% of the world’s population as followers at present. Of that 7%, roughly .01% of them are doing the work to have any prospect of achieving enlightenment in their lifetime.  The other 99.99% are Sunday Buddhists.

When the Buddha was around, his religion thrived, but it didn’t emerge as a clear-cut winner.  After his death, Buddhism faced fierce competition from Hinduism and Jainism. In some regions, like North India, Buddhism was on top. In other areas, though, it hardly existed.  With the Muslim invasions in the 10th and 11th centuries, Buddhism was largely wiped out from northern India and soon the entire Indian subcontinent save for the border regions of Tibet and Sri Lanka.  So even our own Buddhist superman couldn’t pull this off. What hope is there for people like me who still struggle to keep sane on the daily? Comfortingly, as much as there was for the Buddha: no hope.

Despite the impossibility of the task, the work of a Bodhisattva is two-fold: 1) wake-up and 2) help others wake-up. By waking-up, we also help others wake-up.  By helping others wake-up, we help ourselves wake-up. To make sense of this, let’s return to two principles we’ve already discussed: oneness and non-harm. Oneness means that the world’s one interconnected whole from which there’s no escape. If I decide to be as big of a jerk as humanly possible and Machiavellian in my dealings, I have to live with the consequences of the world I shaped. I live with those consequences through my children, friends, students, and all other lifeforms which survive me. If I make hell, I reap hell.

Oneness also means that I can’t sharply divide my own well-being and others’. They are me. I am them. So if I have this idea that I’m just gonna wake-up and peace out of this burning mess, my whole project’s built on the delusion of separation. If I want to wake-up, and I’m all living things, then I must want all living things to wake-up.

The next principle is non-harm. Waking-up is the main way to extinguish suffering. No matter how much comfort a person has, if they still crave and cling, they’re gonna experience suffering. Just look at Howard Hughes’ decent into madness despite his fortunes. Thus, if I want to be moral, then I have to actively work for my and others’ awakening. Being a Bodhisattva is the natural consequence of these two principles.

How does that square away with monks meditating in a cave for 30 years?

Everything has context. If you take rebirth seriously, thirty years is the blink of an eye compared to innumerable kalpas of existence.

What’s a kalpa?

Imagine a mountain made of iron three miles wide, high, and long.  Once every hundred years, a bird flies over the mountain, holding a scarf in its beak and brushes against the mountain.  The time it takes for the scarf to wear down the entire mountain is one kalpa.  In traditional Buddhist cosmology, we’ve gone through this ride of life-and-death for countless kalpas.  So when you say, “This guy just sat and meditate for 30 years, what a waste!” it completely misses the cosmic context that those 30 years are seen. In the traditional view, since he’s taken the Bodhisattva vow, he’ll come back again-and-again to wake us ignorant folks up.  It’s heroic if you look at it like that, not selfish.

I think the whole rebirth thing’s off, but if you’re going to criticize monks who meditate in caves for much of their life, you’ve got to understand that their world is radically different from our own.  I don’t see the world that way, like many Zen folks today, but they didn’t know any better.

For someone who doesn’t believe in other realms of existence and rebirth, then, the work of a Bodhisattva is more nuanced. Running off to the caves to spend 30 years meditating to get enlightened runs the risk of dying without ever making any meaningful contribution to the world. Instead, a balance must be struck between individual and collective awakening. Where that line falls, though, I’m still figuring out myself.

But this discussion doesn’t yet fully address the issue of how Zen helps the world quite yet. Zen’s a waking-up system. Zen trains its practitioners in developing integrity, a powerful mind, and insight into the nature of oneself and the world. This training creates the foundation on which transformation can take place.
How an individual uses that foundation, however, depends on them. They might teach Zen to others, be a highly successful researcher, teach art to kindergarteners, run a thriving landscaping business, or working in the Sudan to build infrastructure for clean water, all of these are legitimate possibilities.

Without that foundation, the risk for damage is immense. Pride and glory-seeking can hijack noble endeavors. Attachment to views can lead to harmful, ossified understandings. An unstable mind can wreck a fruitful endeavor. Anger and vengeance can blind people to their real goals.

Zen isn’t a guarantee that all of a practitioner’s actions will be 100% pure and correct. There's nothing that can offer that. Instead, a good head-and-heart protects against many of the ethical and psychological factors that undermine otherwise noble endeavors, prevents one from falling into evil ways, and being abused and manipulated by bad-actors. Outside of this, we humans have to use all of the tools at our disposal to figure out what's right and live those values.