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ous media of communication and rapid means of transpor-
tation have welded people everywhere into a single family
in which each member is to some degree responsible for
the welfare of the whole, not only of all human beings but
of the entire community of life. But while our technolo-
gies have given us the capacity to provide a decent living
to everyone, grave problems of enormous scope remain.
Poverty, war, hunger, exploitation, and injustice still cast
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their shadows over our future, claiming too many victims
who cannot even voice their grievances, let alone set them
right.
These problems political, economic, social, and
ecological cry out for solutions, and one of the major
tasks faced by every major religion today is to serve as the
voice of humanity s conscience. To regard these problems
as merely temporary snags that can easily be resolved
by political and social reform is to miss the point that
what underlies them all, in different ways, is a blind and
stubborn selfishness pernicious in its consequences. It is
precisely the role of religion, in its innermost essence, to
address and rectify this malignancy. Too often in the past
religion has been an inflammatory force creating divisions
rather than unity, and this trend can still be seen today in
the various kinds of religious fundamentalism rippling
across the globe. But all the great spiritual traditions con-
tain at their core a perception of humanity s unity, to be
translated into a life guided by love and compassion. It is
this side of religion, and not the divisive, that must be fos-
tered in the immediate future.
One of the primary tasks facing Buddhism in the
global world of the future is to develop a comprehensive
vision of solutions to the social, economic, and political
problems that loom so large today. This is not a matter
of blending religion and politics, but of making an acute
diagnosis of the destructive fixations of consciousness
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from which these problems spring. The diagnosis must lay
bare how human defilements the same greed, hatred,
and ignorance responsible for private suffering take
on a collective dimension embedded in social structures.
What is necessary is not only to expose the oppressive,
detrimental nature of such structures, but to envisage
and strive for new alternatives: fresh perspectives on so-
cial organization and human relatedness that can ensure
political, economic, and social justice, the preservation of
the natural environment, and the actualization of our spir-
itual potential.
Although such a project, on so vast a scale, will be a
new challenge to Buddhism, it is a challenge that can be
partly met with the Buddha s insights into the origination
of suffering and the means to its resolution. But only part-
ly, for creative thought is needed to apply these insights
to today s unique problems. This means in effect expand-
ing the liberative dimension of the Dhamma by giving it
a collective or even global application. In this enterprise,
Buddhists must join hands with leaders of other religions
committed to the same goal. Beneath their inevitable differ-
ences, the great religions concur in seeing our grave social
and communal problems as stemming from a primordial
blindness rooted in the delusion of self, either personal or
blown up into ethnic and nationalistic identities.
From the perspective of the great spiritual traditions,
what we must do to redeem ourselves and preserve hu-
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manity s place on earth is to abandon our obsession with
narrow selfish goals and re-align ourselves with the fun-
damental law of the universe, with the timeless Dhamma.
The Buddha teaches that we can only achieve our own
true good when we transcend the standpoint of self and
set our hearts on the welfare of all. This principle is not
the preserve of any particular religion but can be under-
stood by anyone of good will. What Buddhism gives us is
a clear-cut path to master ourselves and to bring forth the
wisdom and compassion so sorely needed as we enter the
new millennium.
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Sangha at the Crossroads
Originally published in the 1998 Centenary Issue of The Buddhist,
journal of the Young Men s Buddhist Association, Colombo.
There can be little doubt that in Sri Lanka today Buddhism
finds itself at a crossroads, its future increasingly in ques-
tion. The challenge it faces is not one of numbers and
power, but of relevance. Not that the Dhamma itself, the
Buddha s teaching, has lost its relevance; for neither the
shifting drama of history nor the undulating waves of
culture can muffle the timeless message embedded in
the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. The
problem lies not with the teaching itself, but with those
responsible for bringing the teaching to life. What is
lacking above all is a combination of skills that can be
summed up in three simple words: comprehension, com-
mitment, and translation. Comprehension: a clear under-
standing of how the teaching applies to the hard realities
of human life today, to a society and world in which the
old certainties of the past are being scattered like leaves
before a storm. Commitment: the willingness to apply the
teachings in the way they were intended, even when this
means defying the encrustations of established tradition.
Translation: not stereotyped sermons, not sweet conso-
lation, not religious lullabies, but solid, sober explana-
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tions of how the timeless principles of the Dhamma can
resolve the distinctive problems and quandaries of our
age.
As we stand at this crossroads looking towards the
future, three choices offer themselves to us. One is simply
to resign ourselves to the decay of the Sàsana, accepting it
as a backward swing of the pendulum of history sad but
inevitable. A second is to wring our hands and complain,
shifting the responsibility to others the government, the
monks, or the minorities. A third is to ask ourselves what
we can do to stem the rising tide. If we adopt the third
route we might begin by noting that the Sàsana does not
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