One step, all step. All step, one step
The Buddha's ethics in the Modern World

Geoffrey Hunt
Buddhapadipa Temple, Wimbledon
Lay Buddhist Association Lecture
Maghapuja Day 12th February 2006

One path, not two

In the last couple of years I have been thinking more about how the different Buddhist traditions fit together. Sometimes perhaps we may draw too sharp a line between Zen (Mahayana) and Theravada. It might appear that Zen emphasises the idea of compassion for all sentient beings - it is the 'big path' embracing all human beings and life, and the 'bodhisattva' is the follower of the Path who is working modestly for the liberation of all. It might also appear that Theravada is rather different in so far as it appears to emphasise the cultivation of the individual in a personal path towards the liberated 'arahant'. I think this idea of a separation between a Buddhism that is a compassion for all, and a Buddhism that is a personal self-cultivation, is not helpful.
The Buddha did not think that there is a path of compassion for all and another path of personal self-cultivation. All Buddhists really know this very well, but may forget it in their actual lives. There is one path which is both personal and human at the same time.
Of course, the five (or ten or more) ethical precepts, as well as the Vinaya generally, are of great importance, and part of the Buddha's teaching. However, the ethics of the Buddha is not just a list of precepts that have been added onto his teaching like some optional extra. The Buddha's teaching is one coherent whole, springing from his own enlightenment, so his ethics also spring from directly from it and is inseparable. The key to the Buddha's ethics is craving (clinging, attachment). That is the source of human suffering, and it is this that has to be the focus of our efforts, as individuals, and as a human race, if there is to be true peace.

One step in subduing my (your) craving is one step in subduing our craving. One step in subduing our craving is a step for each one of us. Individual self-cultivation is both the liberation of the individual and the liberation of all humans and all life. There is no individual liberation that is not a step in the liberation of all, and there is no step in the liberation of all which is not a liberation of the individual. At the same time, any way in which I am imprisoned in my cravings is imprisonment for all of us; and in so far as we human beings are collectively imprisoned by our cravings, then each of us is imprisoned too. In our ignorance we cannot always see this.

In the modern age we all need to make connections between the condition of our personal lives and the condition of all human life (and indeed all living things). It is not always easy to see these connections, but let us try to think about some of these today. But let us begin by taking the Buddha as our guide. His teaching on the eight worldly conditions [attha lokadhamma] is very helpful.

The eight worldly conditions
The Buddha is recorded as saying:
"These eight worldly conditions, monks, keep the world turning around, and the world turns around these eight worldly conditions. What eight? Gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain…
"When an uninstructed worldling, monks, comes upon gain, he does not reflect on it thus: 'This gain that has come to me is impermanent, bound up with suffering, subject to change.' He does not know it as it really is…
"When gain comes he is elated and when he meets with disrepute he is dejected. When praise comes he is elated and when he meets with blame he is dejected. When he experiences pleasure he is elated and when he experiences pain he is dejected. Being thus involved in likes and dislikes, he will not be freed from birth, ageing, and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair; he will not be freed from suffering, I say…
"But, monks, when an instructed noble disciple comes upon gain, he reflects on it thus: 'This gain that has come to me is impermanent, bound up with suffering, subject to change.' And so he will reflect when loss and so forth come upon him. He understands all these things as they really are, and they do not engross his mind… [etc].." (Anguttaranikaya 8:6; IV 157-59)

The eight worldly conditions are both personal conditions and humanity's conditions. It is not only this or that individual (me, you) that uses great energy to chase gain and avoid loss, the 'world turns around' on this agitating energy. Profit-making corporations rule the world through advertising, competing for gain and avoiding loss. Gigantic industries have grown around providing pleasure - alcohol, pornography, package holidays, and packaged foods - while other industries have grown around the avoidance of pain - the medicalisation of every human bodily discomfort. Media 'celebrities', cosmetic surgeons and 'image consultants' satisfy our craving for fame, while 'reputation managers' and libel lawyers defend our reputations. In our workplace and schools procedures and policies encourage to seek praise and blame others. Craving indeed makes the world go round, and there is nothing but fleeting satisfaction in it.

The unpleasant truth that we have to face as individuals is the same unpleasant truth that the human race, in all its various organisational forms, has to face. If we want to know what's wrong with the world, why it turns as it does, each of us need look no further than his own mind and heart. Wisdom, compassion, courage, peace are possible, indeed they are already with us in countless diverse ways, but they have never been attained, and will never be attained, without first recognising the truth about the human condition.

Facing the truth about the human condition
This means we have to have the courage to face things we do not want to face: unpleasant things deep in ourselves as individuals, and unpleasant things about the global consequences of these deep truths about ourselves. Let's consider some global consequences now.

Poverty & Disease: The inequality between the wealthy and the poor on the planet continues to increase. Roughly speaking, in the top one third of the wealthiest countries per capita income grew at almost three times the rate of the middle third, while the bottom third showed no increase (Scott, 2001). Despite global economic growth, poverty persists, with two-fifths of humanity living on less than US$2 per day, the minimum for meeting basic needs. Healthy life expectancy in Zimbabwe is 33.6 years, in Zambia 34.9 years and Afghanistan 35.5 years, while it is 75 years in Japan, 73.3 in Sweden and 72 years in Canada and in France. About 2.3 million people, mostly in the developing countries, die from eight diseases that could be prevented by vaccination (Pirages, 2005, pp46, 50).

In the so-called 'developed world' many people still believe that infectious diseases are 'their problem' in the 'developing world'. This is a misconceived and divisive idea, for in fact infectious disease is a global issue, as HIV, hepatitis C, SARS, avian flu and TB have recently reminded us. Furthermore, global warming could eventually spread West Nile virus, cholera, yellow fever and malaria into the temperate zones of the industrialized world. So, inequality is not just a threat to 'them', but a threat to all of us, to humanity. Yet, out of 1,233 drugs on the global market in the period 1975 to 1997, only 13 were applicable to the tropical diseases causing the most infectious disease deaths (Pirages, 2005, p46).

In any case, medicines are not as important as people are led to believe by pharmaceutical corporations. The greatest improvements in human health have been achieved by clean water supplies and efficient sewage and waste disposal systems. Medicine, including antibiotics, have made some gains, but have also caused new problems. Consider antibiotics. Annually, about 40,000 people die of antibiotic-resistant microbes in the USA and about 7,000 in the U.K., and worldwide resistance is growing to antimicrobial medicines aimed at chest infections, TB and other diseases (Pirages, 2005, p48). The fact that the United States has the highest per capita medical expenditure in the world but ranks 28th on the healthy life expectancy scale, shows us that wealth and technology are in themselves no guarantee of a healthy population (WHO, 2001, table 3-2). Spending a lot of money on health, does not necessarily make one less sick.

War and violence:
It has been estimated that all the wars of the 20th century killed 111 million people, both combatants and civilians (Pirages, 2005, p43). When one adds the numbers that war has injured and psychologically damaged, tortured, and bereaved and then one adds the victims of other kinds of conflict less than war, the ethical condition of humanity has a painful clarity. Mass destruction weapons, the product of the nuclear age, are still an enormous threat to human life. The countries with large nuclear weapons arsenals (USA, UK, France and others) insist on small countries not developing such weapons while at the same time they are unprepared to give up their own (Hunt, 1986).
Environment, animals, plants: It is time to work on nature's own terms. Sustainability is a socio-economic state in which the human demands placed upon the environment are met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations (Dalal-Clayton, B & Bass, S, 2002).

Environment
Global warming is a consequence of the human life-style of gain, pleasure, fame and praise. Emissions of the principal greenhouse gas CO2 continue to rise. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has projected an average global temperature change of 1.4-5.8 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. It may be higher, even much higher. Ice shelves and glaciers are now melting, major storms and floods are increasing, and sea levels are rising. About 42 per cent of carbon emissions are from electricity generation, 24 per cent from transportation, 20 per cent from industrial processes, and 14 per cent from residential and commercial activities (Lester R Brown et al, 2003, pp59-68, 114). Is each of us prepared to consume less energy, use fewer electrical appliances, use the car less or not at all, and are we prepared to ask questions to manufacturers and retailers about the ecological damage caused by the products they sell and we buy?

The recent intensive and comprehensive Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concludes that about 60 per cent of the planet's ecosystems are being degraded or used unsustainably. It catalogues a destabilising loss of fish-stocks, forests, mangroves, coral reefs, natural water cycles and so on (Graham-Rowe, D & Holmes, R, 2005).

Over-consumption:
Every world religion and moral outlook has a central place for acknowledging and subduing greed and promoting a sharing attitude. Yet there is perhaps an increasing perception that greed is no longer just an incidental and personal vice, but is the basic value of the modern unsustainable economy.

Unsustainable consumption, and its global consequences, is most clear in the case of oil. It is not only the most important source of energy, and running out (Roberts, 2004), but is the main ingredient in hundreds of consumer products from shampoo and drugs to cars and paint. Oil combustion accounts for 42 per cent of all emissions of the main human-generated greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (Prugh et al, 2005, p102).

Overconsumption may begin with oil, but does not end with it. In 2000 North America and Western Europe, with 11.6 per cent of the world population, accounted for over 62 per cent of the spending on private consumption. In the USA about 60 percent of all adults are overweight, and in Europe too more than half of people in the 35-65 age group are overweight (WHO, 1997). Consumer goods, fruit, vegetables and meat are flown around the world, because the resultant air pollution and other damaging 'externalities' are excluded from their prices, making these goods artificially cheap. Strawberries, broccoli, carrots and potatoes are brought by air freight into the UK, although all of these can be grown locally. Bottled water is transported in large quantities with similar eco-environmental unreality, although PET bottle manufacture produces greenhouse gases, and more water is consumed in making the bottles than they contain (WorldWatch, 2004, p87). Increasing meat consumption has not only undermined ecosystems, but under competitive cost-cutting measures that run counter to ecological sense generated the new BSE-CJD disease (Hunt, 1996).

Consumer patterns reveal our actual priorities. Recent reports on annual expenditure on 'beauty products' show that about $18 billion is being spent, while a reasonable estimate of the cost of eliminating global hunger and malnutrition is about US$19 billion needed in additional annual investment. Similarly, US$15 billion goes annually on perfumes, while clean drinking water for everyone would require only US$10 billion in additional annual investment (WorldWatch, 2004, table p10).

This then, is the human condition. It is my condition, and your condition. We cannot say it is 'their' condition. It is our condition. This condition cannot be changed through violence, as some have thought, but only through understanding the condition of each human mind and heart. There is a way to subdue craving - it is the Noble Eightfold Path.

Liberating developments
The truth of the first two Noble Truth - suffering and and its cause in craving - is clear enough in this world. But the truth of the third and fourth truths is also evident in this world, and we shall all recognise its manifestations and reach for them. There are organisations for peace, for reconciliation, for an end to torture, for the end of the death penalty, for fair trade, for protecting wildlife, for environmentally friendly transport, for the ending of discrimination and intolerance and many more. We should not forget these. This too is where the light is. All followers of the Buddha's path should reach for these beams of light, every day in everything we do, whether big or small. When I give up the famous brand name washing-up liquid and choose a washing up liquid that does not harm life (even if it costs a bit more), then I am subduing gain, subduing craving, subduing harmfulness. It is the same when I leave my car at home and get on a train, or grow my own vegetables organically, or - generally live more simply and respectfully.

At the end of this talk a list of websites was distributed indicating voluntary organisations that can help us to live with right communication, right action and right non-action, right livelihood and right effort. The Buddha's ethics may begin in the sangha meeting, but it does not end there.

Conclusion
I conclude with what I began with. One step in subduing my craving is one step in subduing our craving. One step in subduing our craving is a step for each one of us. Individual self-cultivation is both the liberation of the individual and the liberation of all humans and all life.

References
This talk draws on my chapter on global ethics in: Hunt, G & Mehta, M (eds) Nanotechnology: Risk, Ethics & Law, Earthscan, London, 2006.
The Pali Canon: The Nikayas
Brown, Lester R., Larsen, J., and Fischlowitz-Roberts, B (2003) The Earth Policy Reader, London, Earthscan. Dalal-Clayton, B & Bass, S (2002) Sustainable Development Strategies: A Resource Book, London, Earthscan (with OECD & UNDP). Ehrlich, P & Ehrlich, A (2004) One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future, Washington DC, Island Press. Hunt, G (1986) 'China's Case Against the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Rationality & Morality', Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol 3(2), pp183-199. Hunt, G (1996) 'Some Ethical Ground Rules for BSE and other Public Health Threats', Nursing Ethics vol 3(3) pp263-65. Graham-Rowe, D & Holmes, R (2005) 'The World cannot go on living beyond its means', New Scientist, vol. 186 (2nd April), pp.8-11. Pirages, D (2005) 'Containing Infectious Diseases', in WorldWatch Institute, State of the World 2005, New York, W.W. Norton, 2005. Prugh, T, Flavin, C, Sawin J. L. ((2005). 'Changing the Oil Economy', in WorldWatch Institute, State of the World 2005, New York, W.W. Norton, 2005. Roberts, P (2004) The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World, Boston, Houghton Mifflin. Scott, B. R. (2001) 'The Great Divide in the Global Village', Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb, pp162-63. WHO (1997) Obesity: Preventing and Managing the Global Epidemic, Geneva, World Health Organisation. WorldWatch (2004) State of the World: The Consumer Society, New York, W. W. Norton &Co.
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