The Wisdom of "Basic Goodness" and Contemplative Practice: Implications for Ethics and Social/Environmental Justice Education

• In Event: 73.018 - The Politics of Wisdom and the Politics of Knowledge: The Contemplative Turn in the Curriculum

Abstract

Contemporary times are witnessing worldwide violence and inequality, pervasive moral confusion and corruption, and the rapid unprecedented global destruction of our environment. One of the salient responses to these global exigencies is mounting interest in contemplative education in North America. This interest makes perfect sense. We need to counteract the feverish pace of life, relentless pressure to work and produce, insatiable consumerism, and an overall increased stress level in all spheres of life by reclaiming more balanced, centered, grounded, and more organic-paced ways of living and being. In response, recent years have seen a marked turn to mindfulness meditation and other contemplative practices within North American schools, colleges, and universities (Gunnlaugson et al., 2014; Barbezat & Bush, 2014).
While we support the recent contemplative turn, we believe that such educational initiatives—as well as current scholarship on social/environmental justice—would benefit from deeper engagement with the ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of the “wisdom traditions” from which these contemplative practices are drawn. Our instrumentalist culture, already primed to seek isolated techniques and products for solutions for discrete problems, has shown the tendency to seize upon mindfulness as an isolated technique to solve health, stress, and addiction problems that afflict us all, young and old. While validating the effort and much good results obtained from the applications of mindfulness, we feel that it’s time to take the next step of the mindfulness revolution by going to the roots of mindfulness: the living and experiential philosophy as in Buddhism.
Philosophy is not a technique, although there can be technical aspects to philosophy, such as logic. This is especially the case in philosophy as a way of life (Hadot, 1995) such as Buddhism. Ethics, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology all are branches of a philosophical tree. The point of studying philosophy is to grow wise and compassionate, peaceful and loving. As such, meditation as vital part of philosophy must be undertaken in concert with ethical, epistemological, ontological (and so on) studies. Venerable Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rimpoche (1986) puts it this way: “Meditation without listening and reflecting [as in philosophical studies] is blind, but listening and reflecting without meditation is like having eyesight and no legs” (p. 13).
In our paper, we introduce the notion of “basic goodness” and other Buddhist teachings to discuss how the contemplative path can both manifest and cultivate an inherent human potential for dignity, insight, and compassion (Eppert, 2009; Bai, 2013). Our intent is not to proselytize Buddhism but to exemplify a holistic philosophy of practice that addresses the whole humanity of integrated mind-body-heart-spirit and ethical ways of life that lead to such integration. Also, as an application of such philosophy to contemporary challenges, we show how social and environmental justice can benefit from commitment to an ethics of solidarity rooted in the perennial non-dual ground of wisdom, and we examine the relevance of “basic goodness” to complex and diverse cultural contexts.

Authors

• Heesoon Bai, Simon Fraser University

• Jing Lin, University of Maryland - College Park