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27 March 1933—

Sowing Peace

At the deepest level,” says Buddhist peacemaker Sulak Sivaraksa, “the causes of suffering are always greed, hatred and delusion. At the more immediate level these causes have become embodied in consumerism, militarism, compartmentalization of thought and practice, and the separation of efforts to resolve social problems from the process of personal transformation.” His life’s work, both in his native Thailand and in the world at large, is to “sow seeds of peace” in place of the weeds of violence.

Long a voice of democratic reform in Thailand—an enterprise that has earned him death threats, arrest, and exile—Sivaraksa advocates a Buddhism engaged with the social, economic, and environmental problems of the day. He argues that the Buddhist notion of mindfulness is the key to overcoming the consumerism, militarism, and compartmentalization he believes characterizes the West and is beginning to encroach upon the East.

Aware that explicitly religious language is regarded with suspicion by many social reformers, Sivaraksa defends what he calls “Buddhism with a small b.” Stripped of “ritual, myth, and culture,” small-b Buddhism seeks to show that traditional Buddhist ideals such as mindfulness—“especially the breathing which brings us back to what is happening in the present moment. With what is wondrous, refreshing and healing both within and around us”—compassion, and a sense of the deep interconnectedness of all creation are also invaluable when invoked in political and economic contexts. They encourage a nonviolent approach to problem solving that’s quite contrary to the usual adversarial way in which governments tackle issues.

For Sivaraksa, nonviolence is an active rather than passive way of life. The key is compassion. To see and empathize with the suffering of any sentient being is to be moved to do something to help alleviate its pain. Sometimes relief isn’t possible. But frequently it is, and in those cases, to do nothing is to silently acquiesce to and collaborate in the damage that’s inflicted on the victim. Passivity in the face of suffering, in other words, can be an often overlooked form of violence. Similarly, a consumer-driven indifference to wasteful modes of production, exploitative uses of human labor, and unsustainable wreckage of the environment, is a type of passivity that in fact is violent. Buddhism with a small b seeks to awaken people to this fact.

Sivaraksa has received international recognition for his efforts, as he says, “to continually plant seeds of joy, peace and understanding in order to facilitate the ongoing work of transformation in the depths of our consciousness.” One of his many honors was a 1995 Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Peace Prize.