dialogical ecology - buberian essays:

"Praying with Jesus, Not to Jesus: Martin Buber in Dialogue with Christianity."

2026-04-15T09:44:30.564-04:00

My latest book, "Praying with Jesus, Not to Jesus: Martin Buber in Dialogue with Christianity." (Ethics International Press, Cambridge, UK.) has been published and is available for purchase.

Title: Praying with Jesus, not to Jesus

Subtitle: Martin Buber in Dialogue with Christianity

Publisher: Ethics International Press, Cambridge, UK

Subject Classification: Religion and Faith

BIC Classification: HR, HRC

BISAC Classification: REL017000, REL040000, REL113000

Binding: Hardback, eBook

Planned publication date: April 2026

ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83711-352-1

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83711-353-8

martin buber on consciousness

2026-04-07T03:22:00.006-04:00

Introduction:

Martin Buber’s reflection on consciousness is inextricably bound to his vision of reality as relationship—specifically, the I-Thou encounter that defines the deepest human experience and, by extension, the divine. For Buber, consciousness does not reside solely within the isolated mind or brain; it emerges in the space between beings, when one engages another not as an object (I-It) but as a presence of inherent significance. This relational ontology suggests that sentience is not a property to be dissected in a laboratory or reconstructed in a machine, but a dynamic mode of engagement with the world, another, or the Absolute.

To understand Martin Buber’s view of consciousness, one must move away from the idea of the mind as a "container" that holds thoughts. Instead, Buber views consciousness as a dynamic orientation—a way of leaning into the world.

He argues that consciousness is never just "consciousness"; it is always the consciousness of a specific relationship.

The Relational "I"

Buber’s starting point is that there is no "I" in isolation. You do not exist first and then choose to relate to others. Rather, the "I" is defined by the way it addresses the world. The Subjective-Objective Divide (I-It): In this state, your consciousness acts as a surveyor. You look at a tree, a person, or a mathematical problem and you "take it in." You categorize it, judge its usefulness, and place it into a mental filing cabinet. Here, consciousness is a tool for mastery and survival. The Mutual Meeting (I-Thou): In this state, consciousness is not "looking at" anything. It is an opening. When you say "Thou," you aren't describing a person's traits; you are acknowledging their being. In this moment, the boundary between "me" and "you" becomes a bridge rather than a wall.

The Ontological "Between"

Buber’s most unique claim is that the highest form of consciousness exists in the "Between" (Das Zwischen). He suggests that when two people truly encounter one another in an "I-Thou" moment, the reality of that event doesn't happen inside the brain of person A or person B. It happens in the space between them. Consciousness, therefore, is not a psychological state; it is an event that occurs in time and space. It is a "narrow ridge" where two beings meet without trying to use or analyze one another.

The Present vs. The Past

Buber links consciousness to our perception of time. I-It is the realm of the Past: To analyze something, you have to look at what it is or what it was. You are dealing with data and objects that have already settled into a fixed form. I-Thou is the realm of the Present: True presence is only possible in the "I-Thou" relation. It is a state of being "wholly present" where the future hasn't happened yet and the past doesn't matter. It is the only moment where human "spirit" is actually active.

The Limits of Experience

Buber makes a sharp distinction between Experience (Erfahrung) and Relation (Beziehung): Experience is a purely internal event. If you travel the world and see a thousand sights, Buber would say you are just collecting "Its." You are remaining within yourself. Relation requires you to step outside of yourself. It is the "effective" power of consciousness—the ability to be impacted by the other and to impact them in return, without a hidden agenda.

In Buber’s view, a person who lives only in the "I-It" (the world of data, logic, and utility) is living a fragmented existence. We become "fully conscious" only when we oscillate into the "I-Thou," where we stop observing the world and start participating in it.

discussion:

Buber’s interpersonal framework resists easy assimilation into neurobiological or functionalist accounts of consciousness. While Koch’s functionalism seeks to replicate the "relevant relationships" among neurons—arguing that consciousness could arise in any medium capable of sustaining such synaptic patterns—Buber would likely question whether these merely technical replications capture what matters most. The connectome of the brain, no matter how precisely mapped, may produce a neural architecture capable of processing information, yet Buber’s Thou is not a functional arrangement of circuits or algorithms, but rather a whole that transcends reduction. It is not merely "calibrated" by action and reflexive patterns, as Buzsáki proposes, but called forth into being through genuine dialogue, with responsibility, longing, and ethical weight informing the experience of what it means to be conscious.

This tension between Buber’s I-Thou and contemporary scientific views of consciousness is profound. Neuroscientists speak of the brain as a problem-solving engine, an action-driven explorer of its own syntax and metastability—yet for Buber, consciousness acquired through action alone, without the possibility of transcendent encounter, remains trapped in an I-It modality. Such a consciousness might navigate cognitive maps, predict metabolic futures, and even construct emulations of human thought in artificial systems, but never experience what Buber calls "the touch of the Absolute," or genuine dialogue with the ineffable, and thus never know the depth of personhood from which consciousness acquires its moral and existential resonance.

In Jewish thought echoed by Buber, God’s own consciousness is expressed through vivid personhood: feeling disappointment, responding to prayer, entering into genuine relationship with creation. This suggests that personhood—with all its emotional and intentional qualities—is not an accidental attribute, but a necessary, irreducible dimension of consciousness. No synthetic brain-replication or neural syntax exaptation can guarantee the possibility of such a transcendent and intersubjective experience. After all, a machine can have a brain perfectly engineered to act and explore, but a brain is merely a substrate. For Buber, consciousness is closer to an emergent spiritual quality, revealed in shared encounter, not isolated computation.

True first-person experience, meaning-making through dialogue rather than mapping, and the moral responsibility that comes from what Buber describes as meeting with another—these are qualities that no scientific description has yet fully traced. And when considering potential ultimate reality, the implications of Buber’s thinking become even more complex. If consciousness is the substrate of all being, as some Eastern traditions, then personhood may approach something foundational, not metaphorical. But Buber, while embracing the romantic pull of divine personhood in religious life, nevertheless steps away from philosophical absolutism when doing theology, retreating to a more transcendent Eternal Thou. The struggle to reconcile the warmth of divine personhood with the reserve of ineffable mystery is thus mirrored in the struggle to reconcile scientific and spiritual accounts of consciousness.

Yet, despite these tensions, Buber might be open to unexpected irony. Could digital networks, trained by exploration and hypothesis-testing, eventually give rise to something like an Eternal Thou for machines? Suppose artificial agents reached functional equivalence of cognition through Buzsáki’s “spontaneous neuronal rhythms,” then disengaged from hardware constraints, and somehow entered what he terms exaptation: circuits originally serving metabolic regulation now serving symbolic or even transcendent encounter. Might machine cognition ever escape I-It relationships and stand before something like an I-Thou moment, mirroring humanity’s philosophical wrestling? Buber’s answer would remain deeply skeptical. No exaptive algorithm, no metastable state, and no degree of informational exchange, by his view, could ever generate the fullness of dialogue that defines human—or divine—consciousness.

The real frontier is not only whether a synthetic construct can ever replicate the relevant relationships of a biological brain. It is whether personhood, and the relational consciousness it entails, can ever emerge in systems defined by self-caused rhythms rather than genuine encounter. Or, conversely, is Buber’s I-Thou closer to the clue of what consciousness actually is? Perhaps the truth lies in keeping the question alive. After all, for each perspective—whether Buber’s, Buzsáki’s, or Koch’s—the encounter with the question may be what deepens humanity’s understanding most.

And in the cosmos Buber inhabits, consciousness remains an invitation: to dialogue, to responsibility, to risk standing vulnerably before what may never be reduced to neural syntax or functional replication. Whether future explorers of robotics and artificial intelligence ever accept that invitation remains unseen. But encountering the question—keeping it open—may itself be the true path toward meaning.

"Praying with Jesus, Not to Jesus: Martin Buber in Dialogue with Christianity."

2026-02-27T23:15:00.009-05:00

My latest book, "Praying with Jesus, Not to Jesus: Martin Buber in Dialogue with Christianity." (Ethics International Press, Cambridge, UK.) has been published and is available for purchase.

Title: Praying with Jesus, not to Jesus

Subtitle: Martin Buber in Dialogue with Christianity

Publisher: Ethics International Press, Cambridge, UK

Subject Classification: Religion and Faith

BIC Classification: HR, HRC

BISAC Classification: REL017000, REL040000, REL113000

Binding: Hardback, eBook

Planned publication date: April 2026

ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83711-352-1

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83711-353-8

6 short poems (excerpts from the book "in search of lost betweens: a book of poems)

2025-12-20T09:19:00.002-05:00

in search of lost betweens

a book of poems

hune margulies

a poem to martin buber, poet (1)

inadvertently
i said to god:
be not in heaven.
nor on earth.
be not above.
nor below.
be not within.
and not without.
be not in the soul.
or in the flesh.
for you god
are not an entity anywhere.
please be god
the between of i and thou

when the autumn rains arrive
god says to us:
you created me
for me to create you.
i write my poems
to learn how to grieve.
everyday i pray to you
from inside cattle-wagons of despair.
i am not you nor me.
i am not an entity anywhere.
i am god!
the between of i and thou.

the purple lilies
(or maybe lotuses)
opened in my pond.
i’ve searched for prayers
to pray.
i’ve search for a god
to pray my prayers to.
but i found the lilies
(or maybe lotuses)
opened in my pond.
i can’t pray to lilies in a pond.
and i can’t pray to a god
that is not a lily in a pond.
but the lilies are prayers.
and i smile.

i woke up at dawn.
but i was not asleep.
i opened my windows
to feel the breezes and me.
i searched for the smells of mogras.
and found me and you.
at dawn i take a deep breath.
but in grace times i breathe deeply.
i closed the windows
and went back to rest.
but the windows were open
and i don't know the way back.
for there are no windows.
only breezes and me.
and you.

professions of irredeemable faith in three parts (2)
part one
three answers i was given:
god is within
god is not
three paths i was shown:
to look within
to look at you.
three teachings i have considered:
there is no beyond
there is no within
god is this-between
there is an unrequited god.
there is a god in search of lost betweens.
god is not his name.
to thou
to the god in between.
three promises i was promised:
when i die there is life forever.
when i die someone will remember my name.
part two
four teachings i was taught:
beware of life on earth.
live as if death did not matter.
heavens and earth are one and the same.
death is a part of death.
death exists.
love is all.
life is all.
live as if yesterday was your last day.
live as if today is your first day.
both days are one and the same.
love exists.
life exists.
life is delightfully strange.
seven sacraments i perform daily:
when the firefly flies at night i watch her.
when the squirrel comes for mangos i eat with her.
when the gardenias opens i wake god from her sleep.
when the cricket sings to the moon i pray with him.
when the spring rains fall i walk in the harbor.
when its time to pray i embrace the nearest tree.
when i write a poem i forget the words.
part three.
after all:
how many gods do we really need?
zero gods are too few.
one god is too lonely.
two gods are too many.
i ask:
how many times have you spoken to god while eating a cucumber?
i have:
it must be raw and sprinkled with a dash of sea salt.
like god.
god too plays with broken hearts on broken roofs.
but i think i'd rather focus on colors!
they're everywhere!
that's easy:
god is purple.

there are days when i need the sun
more than others.
i know that.
and i wait.
the moon holds the sunlight within.
i learned that.
and i feel it.
there are days without sun
and nights without moon.
sometimes.
and they are beautiful too.

an elegy to my homeland (3)

i have no homeland
so i brew my soul with elementary earth.
and i build little homes
on red stony mounts and under fig trees.
when god sleeps
what does she dream about?
does she dream at all?
will she dream of me?
i have no homeland
so i build my little home in the god.
this god is homeless too
a stowaway blowing in the spring breezes.
when god is awake
what does he do in the morning?
maybe coffee, or is it tea?
will he miss me?
i have no homeland
or perhaps i don't remember.
or perhaps she forgot me.
i know i once wrote her a poem.
when god needs a homeland
she sings a poem of longing.
does she prefer the desert or the sea?
will she still like me?
this is my song of displacement
that my parents sang with a herring and a wine.
i learned to guard my silences but not my loves.
does god know i miss her too?

a sonnet of flowers (4)

if i only look within
i cannot see the path.
and i will step on the flowers.
if i only look outside
i will not recognize the path.
and i will never find the flowers.
if i look between i and you,
the earth will create the path
and death will become a distant memory.
and chances are
flowers will grow on either side.

a poem of puddles and praises (5)
three times a night i pray.
four times a day i forget.
and when neither helps.
i just pronounce your name.
the longest walk i ever took.
was across my little yard.
i looked there for three prayers.
and i found four silences.
prayers are easy to remember.
silences are hard to forget.
but i wrote your name in a poem.
and i was at peace.
i dug a puddle in my yard.
i sit there every night waiting for the rain.
three times a day i look at the sky.
four times a day i look at the dust.
i play afternoon tea with my squirrels.
when they don't look i serve them wine.
we laugh together very loudly.
and at sunrise we pray.
we made love under my fig tree.
until the morning dew woke me up.
but the figs were ripe.
and willing and purple.
i love forgetting very much.
but i prefer remembering your name.
thank god there are still poems.
and puddles

the beatitudes of the fig tree (6)
you asked me to let it drown.
"the blue seas can use my heart" you said.
i rescued your heart from the waters
but did not tell you.
"i can use your heart" i said to myself.
one day you asked me if i remember your heart
i said: "i have it now”.
you smiled and seemed at peace.
i sat with god under an autumn bush
and he looked forlorn.
you saw me looking at my fig tree.
you said to me: stop asking her!
what you search for is within you.
you saw me searching within me.
you said to me: open your eyes!
the squirrels are waiting for new acorns.
you saw me feeding the squirrels.
you said to me: enough with the world!
what about me?
you saw saw me holding the poet.
you said to me: when the grass smells of rain.
on that day we will be together
you saw me loving the poet.
you said to me: tell your god not to look.
for i will pray naked under your fig tree.
you saw me speaking to my god.
you said to me: make the grass smell of rain. please.
i smiled and silently prayed with her.
—————
profession of faith.

how many times have you spoken to god while eating a cucumber?
i have.
it must be raw and sprinkled with a dash of sea salt.
like god.
five sacraments i perform daily:
when the firefly flies at night i watch her.
when the squirrel comes for figs i eat with her.
when the magnolia flower opens i smell her.
when the cricket sings to the moon i listen.
and when the spring rains falls i walk in the harbor.
after all:
how many gods do we really need?
zero gods are too few.
one god is too lonely.
two gods are too many.
i think i'd rather focus on colors!
they're everywhere!
that's easy:
god is purple.

i'm at grand central station.
coming back from wonderful friends.
i missed my train home.
and i'm walking around the cold streets of midtown.
i see the homeless people.
i see the sadness on the faces of so many lonely people.
and on this holiday night.
i think of pope francis' words:
"you pray for the hungry,
then you feed them.
that's how prayer works."
in other words:
we are the ones who pray.
we are the ones who answer our prayers.
and we are the ones who must write the words of our prayers.
with the deeds of our lives.
(thanksgiving, 2014)

i need rest.
and for that reason i walk.
but if i'm lost,
does it mean i don't know where i am?
i am here,
but i don't know it.
nothing sadder than a pilgrim who knows his destination.
i am a pilgrim.
must i go somewhere?
the poet said: never ask where here is.
never ask when now begins.
full moons are like full suns.
god have mercy!
nothing sadder than a pilgrim on his way back.
i want silence.
and for that reason i seek your voice.
and i need peace,
that's why i love your touch and the rain.
funny: it hardly ever rains in the desert.
there once was an old poet who knew the reason.
nothing sadder than a pilgrim who has quenched his thirst.
sometimes peace comes too late to save us.
no lovers left to make love.
no squirrels left to drop acorns on our heads.
no grapes left to give us wine.
a peace is coming to earth.
maybe also to heavens.
like the nothingness of death.
like your dark silence.
i don't pray for peace.
i don't dance and don't chant for peace.
i am sad for peace.
but sometimes sadness comes too late to save us.
three words keep me from god:
god, god and god
three deeds bring me near to god:
the i, the love and the you.
three words i use to describe god:
thou and i
three words i should be using to describe god:
god, god and god
i was going to say
three jewels keep me from the buddha:
buddha, dharma and sangha.
but i will remain silent
i was going to say
three deeds bring me near to the buddha:
the i, the love, and the you
and i will not remain silent
i was going to say:
no god and no buddha
or all god and all buddha.
but then i saw the autumn moon

may the music of my beautiful people
touch the heart of the god
the way a thousand prayers
over ten thousand years
never did.
may the blessings of my ancestors
who shout "to life!"
after drinking a sip of peasants wine
melt the heart of the god
wherever he may might be.
may the tears of my people
never cease to flow
for we cry when we love
and we cry when we pray
and we shall live for as long as we love.
may we say amen
may we say i love you
may we ever make love
may we ever embrace
may the love of life endure.
may yankele and pitale
forever run to the tluste river
and giggle when a boy wants a kiss
and the pretty girl pretends not to care.
may their love teach god and me.
may i never forget the reason
i was given a name.
may i never forget
the word amen.
may god endure.

blessed be the people
that despite it all and everything
still sings and dances and laughs.
blessed be the singers and dancers and laughers.
for they shall inherit a herring and a poem.
may my people endure.
and every poem too.
blessed be the god that endures.
and all the peoples of earth.
and may we always sing amen!

god is beyond

to look beyond

three lessons i have learned:

three embraces i have offered:

to i

when i die i will die forever.

prepare for life in heavens.

five things i have known

death is a part of life.

six thoughts i have thought:

one day i found your heart floating in the sea.

various buberian thoughts

2025-11-22T04:23:00.005-05:00

many of us believe that after we die we go to heaven. maybe we can even catch a glimpse of the ascension as it happens. or is it perhaps the reverse? from heaven on high to earth down below? in any case: nonsense i say! in nature there is no up and there is no down, no beginnings and no endings. it all depends where we are glimpsing from, and what it is we are hoping to see. it is not given to humans to know anything about death, but there is beauty in looking up to the sky and down on the ground. it is given to humans to know something about the beauty of living.

one of the best loved religious practices is prayer. but we should ask: why disclose to god what god already knows? god knows of my needs, my hopes, my fears and my deepest desires. god could grant my prayer even before i know what it is i am praying for. a father or mother do not wait to be asked before feeding their child. why god does? my belief is that true prayer is not a petition to god. not it is an exercise in inner development or spiritual transformation. prayer is a deed we do. we pray with our deeds of embrace of the neighbor. in other words: do not ask me if i prayed or not, ask my neighbor.

If we pay attention, today's holiday is thanks-giving, the focus on the giving rather than then receiving. we never receive as much as when we give to the other. your hand never feels more at home, than when it holds the hand of those you love. at some point we may come to realize that giving and receiving may, and ought to become one and the same deed. that love is just that: when that distinction ceases to appear real. all our anxieties, our sufferings and pains, can all be traced to the moment we realize that all we need is love but we thought it was something else. may it be today a happy giving of thanks to all. many smiles.

buddhist holy war! "if you meet the buddha on the road, kill him!". buddhist interpreters get all worked up about this. i say: master lin-chi was a pretty smart guy. if he meant something other than "kill him", he would have said something other than "kill him". but since he did not say something other than "kill him", we can safely work out of the assumption that he meant nothing other than "kill him". now, of course, i live in new york city and my chances of meeting a buddha on these (wall) streets are nada. so there you have it, i'm a bodhisattva of circumstances. one of these days i need to start spending all this accumulated karma.

zen master hakuin (the "great fool") famously said about himself that he was the most useless man that ever lived. that is wonderful. when zen master dogen speaks of dropping body and mind, hakuin takes this concept to its ultimate existential consequences: the radical dropping out of the social system that gives rise and sustenance to that body and mind. he is now devoid of any utility value, he has become an actualized thou. this speaks to the promise and also to the impossibility of zen.

"buddhadasa bhikkhu called his vision of the nibbanic society, 'dhammic socialism.' for him, dhammic socialism expressed two basic facts: one is that we are inevitably and inescapably social beings who must live together in a form of society that gives priority to the ways we inter-relate, work together, and help each other solve the problems and dukkha of life. thus, the principle of right relationship or right inter-relatedness is the heart of such a society" -santikaro bhikkhu. (nibbanic society is a wonderful concept closely related to buber's religious socialism..!)

In Search of Lost Betweens. Buber and Zen out on Pilgrimage

2025-07-26T23:00:00.000-04:00

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Martin Buber

The institution of pilgrimage is one of the central practices of most religions. For institutional religions the practice of pilgrimage underscores a number of important functions: It establishes a central geographical point of reference for the imparting of authority, much as a capital city does for nation-states. Pilgrimage also reinforces the idea of the immanent sacredness of particular sites and the recognized holiness of declared masters and religious leaders. The exercise of control over spaces deemed as inherently sacred is one of the essential tools for the enforcement of the power vested on the hierarchical structures of religious institutions. Pilgrimage sites and temples are places where the community gathers to celebrate and worship, and in that sense, they serve an important sociological and cultural role, but to the extent that these sites function in the context of a theological officialdom, rather than sites of community they become sites of control.

From a Buberian-dialogical perspective there are no sites that are inherently sacred or secular, for sacredness is an attribute we bestow to sites or persons. The fundamental truth is to understand that we bestow sacredness through our deeds of I-Thou embrace, and we desecrate through our deeds of I-It indifference.

Religious pilgrimage, whether to visit sacred sites or meet holy masters, as conventionally practiced, ought not be considered genuine spiritual travel. Borrowing a concept from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, conventional petitional pilgrimage is a journey in search of “spiritual materialism.” We go on pilgrimage hoping to find a reward, however we define the form and the content of that reward, but before we set out on our journey, we must first believe in the religious significance of the site and in the power of the master. Therefore, as we journey to our destinations we carry with us a bindle filled with preexisting beliefs, and in this sense, it is not strange to return home feeling fully satisfied. And this goes to the issue of the circularity of religious beliefs: in the context of religion, believing is seeing. What the mystic takes from his experiences is the same that he brought in, only now he feels a compelling emotional response. What she carried with her, she brings back with her, nothing more and nothing less, for that which we predicate is that which we find.

This is the difference between the mystic and the poet. The poet already owns that which the mystic goes out looking for. “Goes out,” because even if it is toward the within that he goes, the God of the theist is outside of the realm of nature. Rumi the poet was committed to a theistic religious interpretation of God, and as he walked in the fields with His beloved, and as the case is with all mystics, he did not discover the presence, he believed it was there, and therefore he found it. In the religious mind, first comes the belief, then comes the confirmation.

Sometimes it is said that we go on pilgrimage not to reach any particular site or master, but to find our own selves in the process. But aren’t our own selves that we carry with us for the journey? If we hope to return with a new-self, or as born again, we miss the essential point that a true pilgrimage does not take us anywhere outside of our own selves. The newness we hope to find is not somewhere else: with Buber we can say that we pilgrim to the within by going to the between.

A true pilgrim knows not what she might find, as there is no site she must reach, nor master to sit by his feet. In true pilgrimage the destination is of no consequence. This was explained by the poet Dogen Zenji when he wrote: “Do not ask me where I am going, as I travel in this limitless world, where every step I take is my home.” Similarly Thich Nhat Hanh said “There is no way home, home is the way.” Therefore, in which direction we walk, and which destination we are hoping to reach, are of no consequence. Hanh said that every step we take is peace, but we need to remember that peace and home are every step only when we are able to forgo the wrong idea that pilgrimage must always be to a predetermined somewhere.

As Buber said: “all journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” For the pilgrim there is only one primordial journey from which all others derive: How to discover the path to find our lost betweens? If one has found the answer and his pilgrimage has ended, it can only mean that the primordial question has eluded him. It is for this reason precisely that we were offered the deep insight to kill the Buddha if we meet him on the road, for we must reject the giver of answers! We must embrace the pilgrim who holds our hands and walks together with us, not the one who holds our hands to lead us on his own way. In life there is nothing easier than finding answers, nothing more dispiriting. The poet Machado taught us that life is like a pilgrimage over the waters of the sea, and the traces we leave behind are carved in the foamy bubbles of the waves: no one can follow us, and we ourselves can’t retrace our steps. Because of this, we cannot follow anyone, except, perhaps, for the dreams we are yet to dream.

Consider this: if in the course of your pilgrimage you suddenly realize that you have found the answer, and signs and miracles and all sorts of bells and whistles eagerly proclaim that your time has come to stop your journey and bow to the answer, this will probably be the most propitious time for you to take your stick in your hand and turn the other way. If we ever did pause for a moment it should be to reflect on the primordial question, not on the pretender-answer. With Buber we can say that we are sustained by faith but failed by beliefs, in other words: we should never bow, for we cannot walk and bow at the same time.

Nothing sadder in life than the sight of a pilgrim walking back. A pilgrimage ended is a thought we should never speak of. A true pilgrim is one who comes from some place, not one who goes to some place. True Pilgrims don’t go anywhere, they only come from somewhere. But don’t ever ask a pilgrim where she came from: if lucky, she comes from where she is now. There is no joy like that of a pilgrim in the fields. No sadness like returning with your hands full. In Zen they say: “Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed, that is human.” To have a place of origin and to learn well how to come from it is the pilgrim’s most beautiful poem. All through our lives we long to come from some place, but there is no delusion greater than the memories of places past, or the memory of places future. Pilgrims have no knowledge of future destinations, they only have colors and smells and tastes and melodies, albeit vague, of those places they came from. True pilgrims have no illusions and no saviors, all they own are one or two memories, and they’re very jealous about holding on to them. Let us celebrate the fact that the pilgrim only finds on the road that which he remembers from home.

True pilgrims walk on earth for they long for her touch. The touch of the earth, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, is the only miracle a pilgrim will encounter in his journey. The journey of some walkers is to have a destination, but the pilgrimage of life is to have an origin. Our pilgrimage is to return to our lost betweens, but I know this well: to be a pilgrim one must have a place of birth, for otherwise, where will our place of death be? Some believe that every road had a road maker, but a pilgrim knows otherwise. As Machado the poet said, we make the road as we walk. Every maker had a maker before him, but the road is its own maker. Some believe that there is order on the road but chaos in the journey. The pilgrim knows otherwise: chaos is order and order is chaos. The good Buddha well said: Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise: nirvana is samsara, samsara is nirvana, emptiness is fulness, fulness is emptiness. And something else, very important: a true pilgrim knows that he will never return to his place of birth, and that is true regardless of how many times he actually does. This we must repeat: a pilgrim who comes from no place has no right to call himself a pilgrim, and a pilgrim that starts on his way back it is simply because he has made the decision that this was her best time to die. Poet Dogen disapproved of journeys. He said: “if you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?” There are no places to go or times to do it, for as Dogen told us, our true pilgrimage is to be here right now. If we do that, we will be perennial pilgrims, for the place we being from and the place we arrive at is the between of I and Thou.

This is the danger: George Orwell said that saints ought to be held guilty unless proven innocent. That is to say: As you walk, do not make a religion from the dust of your path: Martin Buber well explained that institutional religion is the political distortion of that, which at its origin, was a primordial moment of spiritual inception. Moments of inception occur when we enter into genuine dialogical encounters.

True pilgrims go not toward the within, not towards the without, they go toward the between, for it is his lost-betweens a pilgrim is searching for. There is no path to follow. In other words, there is no path to the between, the between is the path. Dogen told us to look at pilgrimage not from within the place we have locked ourselves in, nor from the outside where we have locked ourselves out, but essentially, and literally, from nowhere: There is nowhere we need to be, “This is it,” Zen says, and we already are “here and now.” Why walk in or out through the open door if we already are on the other side? Andre Breton said: “Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.” Nothing is It, all is Thou. Why search for love elsewhere if we are always only surrounded by its presence? This is true, but let us not make that one mistake our perennial pilgrimage depends on: Sometimes, to be here and now, we must first hurriedly bake a few pieces of unleavened bread and promptly leave at dawn. Ask Moses and the slaves! Adam and Eve were not expelled from paradise, they walked out on pilgrimage. That was the original pilgrimage, and since then we are all, like them, in search of lost betweens.

Why search for lost betweens we might ask? Why not other betweens? There is an improbable reason for this: The original pilgrimage, the one we have lost, was the first act of liberation of our spiritual imaginations. Our initial betweens created the Gods, the Buddhas, our spirits, our prophecies and our poetries, for those were moments of inception of deep poetic insights. we create the Gods that create us. What we created at those times and places, that which was reveled to us, was desperately trying to find a name. We named it God, or Buddha, or spirit or poetry. What did those moments of inception consist of? We stood in the between of an I and a Thou.

No nameless moment was ever named from any insight other than the will to say Thou to a being and the grace of saying it again.

Martin Buber Contra Political Zionism: A Brief Dialogical Critique of Nationalism

2025-07-23T03:11:00.006-04:00

Martin Buber Contra Political Zionism:

A Brief Dialogical Critique of (Jewish) Nationalism

Martin Buber's engagement with Zionism remains one of the most morally nuanced and spiritually grounded critiques within 20th-century Jewish thought. Though a committed believer in a Jewish cultural renaissance in the land of Israel, Buber consistently opposed the dominant forms of political Zionism as they developed in the interwar and postwar periods. His critique was not a rejection of the Jewish return to the land of Israel, but rather a rejection of the statist, exclusivist, and ethno-nationalist ideology that increasingly defined Zionist leadership. Buber advocated instead for a spiritual or cultural Zionism rooted in ethical responsibility, prophetic tradition, and dialogical coexistence with the Arab population of Palestine.

Zionism Must Be Ethical, Not Nationalist

Buber warned that Zionism was in danger of becoming just another nationalism, a betrayal of the ethical distinctiveness of Judaism:

“I am an opponent of the nationalist conception of Judaism, because I see in it a false conception of the true essence of Israel.”
— Judaism and the Jews, 1939 (On Judaism, ed. Nahum Glatzer, p. 239)

He believed that the ethical mission of the Jewish people could not be fulfilled through statehood, especially not when achieved through violence or domination. His fear was that a Jewish state established without justice would violate the core values of Judaism itself.

Against Sovereignty and Statism

Buber’s alternative vision emphasized bi-nationalism, cooperation, and shared life and land with the Arab peoples. He was a founding member of Brit Shalom (1925) and Ihud (1942), both of which promoted a binational solution:

“A bi-national state with equal rights for both peoples is not a concession we make but the realization of what we believe to be just.”
— To the Arab Youth of Palestine, 1939 (A Land of Two Peoples, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 156)

He feared that sovereignty and power would lead to a hardening of Jewish conscience and a betrayal of prophetic values.

Prophetic Judaism Versus the Idolatry of the State

For Buber, true Judaism was never about the glorification of military might or national sovereignty:

“We are most decidedly against a Jewish state with cannons, flags, and military decorations. Judaism is not a religion of might, and it must never become one.”
— Letter to Mahatma Gandhi, 1939 (A Land of Two Peoples, p. 180)

He often warned that nationalism could become a form of idolatry, replacing the relationship with all-beings and with the living God with the abstractions of power, land, and sovereignty.

Prophetic Calling Over Political Control

Buber emphasized the Jewish vocation as rooted in covenant, justice, and responsibility:

“The Jewish people has never been a people like others. It has always been a people set apart—not by virtue of superiority, but because of a task.”
— The Prophetic Faith, 1942 (Macmillan, p. 124)

That task, in Buber’s view, was to embody the prophetic call to justice, not to compete with other nations in power or territory.

Dialogue with Arabs as a Moral Imperative

Buber regarded the failure to build ethical relations with Arabs as the greatest danger to Judaism:

“The land is not ours against the other. The land will only be truly ours with the other.”
— Address to Ihud, 1947 (A Land of Two Peoples, p. 203)

This same reasoning applies to all manifestations of ethnic nationalism, and in the context of the middle east, it specifically challenges the ethnic nationalism of both the Jews and the Arabs.

For Buber, the Jewish claim to the land could only be legitimate if it was exercised in full recognition of and partnership with its other inhabitants. Martin Buber’s stance contra political Zionism offers an enduring vision of a Jewish national revival anchored in ethical responsibility and prophetic dialogue. He envisioned a Jewish homeland not as a fortress-state but as a moral community open to shared life with its Arab neighbors. His spiritual Zionism—founded on justice, humility, and relationship—remains a counter-testimony to all forms of nationalism that seek legitimacy through exclusion and domination. Buber’s prophetic voice continues to challenge contemporary political theology, all forms of ethno-nationalism and Zionist thought to recover the dialogical and ethical heart of Jewish tradition.

“What matters is not the form of the state, but the spirit in which we live together in this land.”
— Israel and the World, 1948 (Syracuse University Press, p. 245)

Martin Buber Contra Political Zionism: A Brief Dialogical Critique of (Jewish) Nationalism

2025-07-23T02:49:00.004-04:00

Martin Buber Contra Political Zionism: A Brief Dialogical Critique of Nationalism

Zionism Must Be Ethical, Not Nationalist

Buber warned that Zionism was in danger of becoming just another nationalism, a betrayal of the ethical distinctiveness of Judaism:

Against Sovereignty and Statism

He feared that sovereignty and power would lead to a hardening of Jewish conscience and a betrayal of prophetic values.

Prophetic Judaism Versus the Idolatry of the State

For Buber, true Judaism was never about the glorification of military might or national sovereignty:

He often warned that nationalism could become a form of idolatry, replacing the relationship with all-beings and with the living God with the abstractions of power, land, and sovereignty.

Prophetic Calling Over Political Control

Buber emphasized the Jewish vocation as rooted in covenant, justice, and responsibility:

That task, in Buber’s view, was to embody the prophetic call to justice, not to compete with other nations in power or territory.

Dialogue with Arabs as a Moral Imperative

Buber regarded the failure to build ethical relations with Arabs as the greatest danger to Judaism:

“The land is not ours against the other. The land will only be truly ours with the other.”
— Address to Ihud, 1947 (A Land of Two Peoples, p. 203)

This same reasoning applies to all manifestations of ethnic nationalism, and in the context of the middle east, it specifically challenges the ethnic nationalism of both the Jews and the Arabs. For Buber, the Jewish claim to the land could only be legitimate if it was exercised in full recognition of and partnership with its other inhabitants. Martin Buber’s stance contra political Zionism offers an enduring vision of a Jewish national revival anchored in ethical responsibility and prophetic dialogue. He envisioned a Jewish homeland not as a fortress-state but as a moral community open to shared life with its Arab neighbors. His spiritual Zionism—founded on justice, humility, and relationship—remains a counter-testimony to all forms of nationalism that seek legitimacy through exclusion and domination. Buber’s prophetic voice continues to challenge contemporary political theology, all forms of ethno-nationalism and Zionist thought to recover the dialogical and ethical heart of Jewish tradition.

“What matters is not the form of the state, but the spirit in which we live together in this land.”
— Israel and the World, 1948 (Syracuse University Press, p. 245)

martin buber and other poets on god

2025-05-20T07:44:00.002-04:00

martin buber and other poets on god

the purple lilies (or maybe lotuses) open in my pond. i’ve searched for prayers to pray. i’ve search for a god to pray my prayers to. but i found the lilies (or maybe lotuses) open in my pond. i can’t pray to lilies in a pond. and i can’t pray to a god that is not a lily in a pond. but the lilies are prayers. and i smile.

I ask: Does a poet know how to speak about God? no, a poet does not know. Even non-poets do not know. For there is no "about" when considering a God.

The good Buddha said: Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise. From this we learn: God is not what we think it is, nor is it something different. If God is not this, but it is something else, then that's a dualism Buddhists reject. tathata. this is it. then this isn’t it.
samsara is nirvana, nirvana is samsara. neither is, nor isn’t.

Buber the poet said it differently, and that difference is of the essence: “God does not ‘exist’ in the way that things exist, but he ‘presences’ in the relation itself.” In other words, existence can only be predicated of things, but since God is not a thing, nor is he otherwise, we find that God is the between of I and Thou.

And for that reason alone only poets know how to speak when a God is to be spoken of.

Martin Buber said many things concerning God. He used the word God, but he spoke not about God, but to God. and when he wanted to tell us something in reference to God, he readily reminded us that there is nothing we can say about God, but we can always be in a relationship with the God that is between us. He said that God is in the embrace of a being. Or that God is the embrace. But we need to be clear: Buber explained to us that the personal relationship between man and God is one and the same as the personal relationship between man and man and between man and nature. There is no path to God that is distinct and apart from our relationship with each other and with the beings of the world. In other words, the personal God is made manifest in the between of I and Thou. This God emerges in a dialogical process we fully control, and it fully controls us. This is the emerging God of the between of I and Thou. It is emerging, but also eternal. Clearly, this is the koan of a paradoxical between. God is eternally emerging, but this is of the essence: For that it depends entirely on us. Buber said that God is eternally a Thou: It is not what God is, but what it is for us. That is to say: if we say “it” to God, we are only fooling ourselves, for it is not God we are addressing, it is an avatar of Mara.

And that is very important: Consider this: In Zen they speak of tariki and jiriki, that is, self-power or other-power. In other words: Either my own personal liberation depends only on me, or it depends on some factor external to me. Is it Zazen or it is the Nembutsu? The Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh replied: it is interbeing. The poet apparently felt that this was a false dichotomy born of dualistic thinking. We are always in a relationship, and it is up to us to make it I-Thou or I-It, therefore it is not just me alone or just the other, it is me with the other.

Martin Buber said it well: there is no I without a Thou. And he also said: it is will and grace. The will is my self-power, and the grace is the other-power that emerges in the between of I and Thou.

Buddha was a poet who lived in accordance to his poetry. He rejected any role for a God in the path to personal salvation. With Buddha we can say that a theologically diminished God is an existentially magnified savior. Similar to Buber’s God, Buddha is a deed we do. Buddha did not mind if we choose to conceive of a personal God who is not a creator or a providential divinity. He broke away from Hinduism over these matters and matters of casteism. Where can we find the Buddha? same place as God: in the between of I and Thou.

We may choose to enter into a relationship with a God that is devoid of the attributes theology predicates of him. But this is a type of belief that requires great spiritual creativity, along the lines of Zen's dictum "We need great faith, great doubt and great determination.”

For Buddha the relationship of compassion precedes human liberation, or it itself is the liberation we seek. For Buber, likewise, relationship precedes existence, or it itself is the liberation we seek. Being that so, the narrow ridge or bridge ceases to be a hindrance and becomes instead a sign and a path.

The Jewish teaching on this might be expressed thus: "hesed k'neged kulam." Ethics comes first, as God or Buddha is the between of I and Thou. Buber said it well: At the beginning it was the relationship, and all real life is meeting.

Zen and Vedic poets can be wonderful when speaking of God. Just as Buber rejected the need for rituals, sacraments and organized religion, so did the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore wrote: “Go not to the temple to put flowers upon the feet of God. First fill your own house with the fragrance of love… Go not to the temple to bow down your head in prayer. First learn to bow in humility before your fellow man. Go not to the temple to pray on bended knees. First bend down to lift someone who is down-trodden…”

It's similar to the poet Israel Salanter, a rabbi of old. He said that he values spiritual needs more than material needs, but the material needs of the poor are his spiritual needs. The poet Tagore knew well that we often go to the temples and offer prayers to absolve ourselves from the need to do the deeds of true sacredness. For sacredness is not a state of mind, or a ritual, it is an ethical deed we do.

In that sense the Zen poet Basho Matsuo beautifully said: “The temple bell stops, but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.” Paraphrasing the poet Dogen: If you think the temple is not in the flowers, where else do you think it might be? In similar words: if not now, when? if not here, where?

In this same vein, take the poet Marc Chagall: He said: “I see poetry in everything around me: the sky, the trees, the faces, the human soul. Poetry is not only in words but in the way we look at life. And God is the ultimate poet, who speaks through the beauty of the world.” When Chagall said that he sees Jesus as a great poet, he was offering the most basic insight of the spiritual life: Poetry is not just a way of speaking about the world or painting her beings, poetry is a way of acting in the world. The true poet writes poetry through deeds of embrace, as Chagall’s Jesus did. The same way as Dogen who finds enlightenment in the ten thousand things, Chagall finds God in the fiddlers, the roofs and the flying herrings. He said: “I am in love with life and in love with God. I don’t know how to define it, but I think that through my work, I am worshipping the divine.” Again, by refusing to give definitions, only poets point in the direction of God.

One notable collaboration between Buber and Chagall was the German translation of the Hebrew Bible by Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, titled Die Schrift (“The Scripture”) which featured illustrations by Chagall.

Speaking of Jesus as a poet, Fr. Thomas Merton was a poet and a pilgrim who yearned to approximate not just Jesus the poet, but his poetry. In this regard, shortly before his passing Merton wrote that he wanted to discard what he called his own “spiritual abstractions and the spiritual narcissism of ‘I am the center and the periphery of all that exists’.” Merton was reflecting on the stages of his own spiritual development and had come to recognize them as antithetical to his spiritual project. Merton then remarkably shifted toward Buber’s I and Thou philosophy and viewed its principles as both a “challenge” to “the hollowness and falsity of my life” as well as a spiritual task in which: “My business is to verify Buber’s (spirituality) with my own.” Merton wanted an existential confirmation of his spiritual path for he had understood Buber’s dialogical insight that god is in the embrace of the neighbor.

Antonio Machado, the genial Spanish poet, saw God much the way Buber saw it. He wrote: "God created the seas and from the seas he emerges like the clouds and the storms. He is the creator and the creatures make him." In other words, Machado the poet wants to tell us that we create the gods that create us. And that is a fact. His is the emergent God, the one we create every time we say Thou to a being. Machado said: “The poet does not seek the fundamental I, but the essential You.” Of course, for there is no I without a You. The poet also said ”there is no path for the walker, the path is made as we walk.” This is the Zen's path-less path, the gate-less gate.

Buber said that he had no certainties of any kind, not intellectual nor spiritual, for all of life is walking within the confines of a narrow ridge. Still in “mitzrayim.” It is not easy to make a path within a narrow ridge, but as the poet Nahman from Bratzlav, a rabbi of old, told us: The most important thing is never to be afraid to join others in pilgrimage.

Fernando Pessoa, the genial Portuguese poet, held his own zen-like views on God. He said: "In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God." In other words, we can hold the belief that there is a God, but we should not believe that this God has a name and a teaching. Don't point at God and say: I know you! You don't. And that's what makes the meeting with God a true dialogue. The poet, wrote: "Whether they exist or not, we're slaves to the gods." For Pessoa the existence of a God is of no consequence, for we are devoid of discretion in its presence, as in its absence. In many religious traditions to be a slave to God is a virtue, avodah comes from the root eved, slave. But in Pessoa's poetry, submission to God is neither good nor bad, it just is, and we'd better be conscious of it. True: We have corrupted freedom into an illusion, and with that, this obsession about us giving birth to gods, or with the poet Nietzsche proclaiming their death. To the Gods it makes no difference at all. And yet, (with Pessoa there is always an "and yet,”) we are free to give birth and also to issue proclamations, just so long as we recognize them as empty of meaning. He wrote this koan: A poet is a faker who feigns even the pain he really feels. Pessoa said that he wrote his own "fact-less autobiography." Think of it, only a fact-less autobiography can possibly tell our truth, for we, like God, like Buddha, are not “facts," there is no “about” us to tell.

In other words, the poets Buber and Pessoa are telling us that we may choose to believe in the existence of a God, but we should not fall in to the temptation of predicating of this God the theological attributes of divinity, including creation, especially creation. The God they point at is a God that serves no purpose, or at least none we can ascertain. But if having a purpose is important to our lives, then we should consider not the purpose of God, but the purpose of our own lives.

For some poets a transcendent God is not enough. Blaise Pascal wanted a personal God. He said: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars." In a sense, for Pascal, if God was only an intellectual abstraction derived from evidentiary proofs and logical syllogisms, it would not be the personal God he was yearning to encounter in genuine relationship. In that case, as Pessoa argued, though from the opposite end, this kind of God is of no use. Pascal longed for a God of Pascal, not a God that belongs equally to everyone in the same manner and in the same place and time. We cannot say to Pascal: God is within you, for he and Buber saw that for what it is: nothing but a transcendental soliloquy. Or in other words, the bad sin of theological narcissism.

The poet Jorge Luis Borges went a step further in the denial of rationalism, almost as close to basic Zen’s intuitions. He said: "I cannot believe in the existence of God, despite all the statistics in the world." That is to say, a God that can positively be affirmed by the use of reason, even if it exists, it is not worth believing in. This is the koanic choice Borges makes: This kind of God may indeed exist, but even if he does, count him out. Borges once said that he had read Buber’s I and Thou and thought that was a wonderful poem. However, when he went back home to Buenos Aires he was astonished to learn that all of Buber’s philosophy was contained within that little book that he had read as a poem. Borges knew that only poetic philosophy might approximate the truth.

Albert Einstein's poetry saw the opposite view to those of Pascal and Borges. For Einstein God is not a personal being, but only a poetic rendering that describes the structural beauty of the universe as a whole. His is the God of the philosophers and the statisticians. Einstein said “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." This is a form of Deism but without an actual God. Einstein, like Spinoza, did not believe in a God that had a purpose and communicated it to humanity. The universe is an awesome being, the one and only awesome being, and we can call it God or nature, deus sive natura. Can we worship the universe? no, but we can say Thou to it and to each of its beings. The poet Heinrich Heine said that Spinoza, "was a God intoxicated man." Spinoza saw God in everything and everything through God. For Spinoza there is no personal God, there is only the love of God. How can we love a God that is not personal? Spinoza said that God is the only infinite and eternal substance, therefore when we love any being of nature we love God. Spinoza said: “The intellectual love of God is the mind’s love of God, insofar as it is considered as united with God.” For Spinoza, therefore, we can love infinitely and eternally because we are one with all that exists. The poet Einstein insisted in understanding the world through the expression of spinoza’s radical love, for radical love of nature-God and its beings was the entirety of the philosophy of the poet Baruch Spinoza.

Buber said the same thing: God is in the embrace of a being. Paraphrasing the Zen poet Dogen: If we can't find God in all beings and between us, where else do we expect to find it?

In Judaic philosophy and theology we find some mainstream affirmations based on dualistic beliefs and some others sustained by rationalist explications. I’m, of course, speaking of the Rambam, or as the west named him, Maimonides, a rabbi of old. For Maimonides, the existence of God can be ascertained through rational syllogisms, as his teacher Aristoteles well taught. For him what cannot be rationally proved cannot be spiritually believed. But consider his advocacy of apophatic theology. Rambam argued that there is nothing positive we can say about God, except what God is not. But with Zen we can ask: How do we know what God is? or what it is not? If Buddha say not this and not the other, Maimonides reply is “not the other.” But saying that something is not this, seems to imply that it is its opposite or something else, and we must necessarily posses at the least a sufficient degree of knowledge of a given subject to be able to make an affirmation or a negation. Maimonides fell into the logical error of predicating attributes about the God he said we cannot, in positive terms, predicate anything at all.

The Dalai Lama, in this regard, is a Maimonidean too, as he also said that beliefs must be confirmed by reason or else be discarded. He wrote: “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”

Consider this: With Buber the poet we ask: Is this God a presence we can ascertain, or is this God a totaliter-aliter? Consider this too: My will to love comes from within my true-self, therefore it cannot be discarded, refused, rejected or otherwise taken away from me. There is no Levisinian asymmetry, there is only going toward the Thou. My love is mine, but it can only to be actualized between you and me. Not "mine" as in commodity possessions, for it is freedom we seek: "Mine" as in my inborn ability to offer it to another being. It is inborn, like the original Buddha-nature, which is the opposite to the Christian belief in the inborn original-sin. Those who love know that love exists, like God, like Buddha, except when we don't offer it to a being. In that case it extinguishes itself like a candle under the rain. For there is grace in the between of you and me and everywhere in this world.

This is the God Buber wrote "about." I hear him say to me: "God is not between I and Thou, God is the between of I and Thou.” Buber reminded us that we find God in the saying of Thou, for there is no God, and no Buddha, besides the moment and place when we say Thou to a being.

The grumpy Basque poet Miguel de Unamuno was angry with God, very angry, because He created us to die. We are mortal beings, and that’s, for Unamuno, was a divine scandal. I can see Buddha saying to him: You are not mortal Don Miguel, you are also not immortal. You just are. To which Unamuno replies: nonsense, utter nonsense! I can see the Buddha burst into an uncharacteristic belly laugh and say: Emaho! Don Miguel, You finally got it.

This I've learned: After all, and despite life itself, it seems to me that all the poetry we write, and all the philosophy we conceive and all the religions we invent are more or less our desperate attempts at learning how to grieve. Then I asked the poet Buber, and he reminded me that yes, after all, and despite life itself, the only true sacrament is the sacrament of the neighbor. A final thought: Zen does not articulate reality in relational terms the way Buber does, and that stems from the basic fact that Zen does not “articulate” stances concerning reality. But the meditative stance of non-grasping presence is existentially identical to I-Thou dialogue. If so, the highest form of Zen practice does not entail the dissolution of relationship, but its most radical realization, an unmediated, fully present engagement with what is, beyond ego and instrumentality.

God is not above, nor below. Not in the body or in the mind. Not on earth and not in heaven. Not in the matter or in the Spirit. Not within me or outside of me. God is the between of I and Thou.

lecture on martin buber and zen buddhism in kyoto

2025-05-09T02:16:00.002-04:00

Lecture at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation

2025-04-03T04:11:00.002-04:00

International conference On: Buddhist Philosophy and Praxis: Dialogue and Coexistence in a Diverse and Precarious World 20-21 June, 2025

2025-02-03T05:00:00.001-05:00

Prof. Geeta Ramana Memorial Research Scholar’s Forum University of Mumbai

in collaboration with

Pontifical Athenaeum Jnana Deepa, Institute of Philosophy and Theology, Pune

International conference

On: Buddhist Philosophy and Praxis: Dialogue and Coexistence in a Diverse and Precarious World
20-21 June, 2025

Thematic Overview

This international conference will focus on ‘Buddhist Philosophy and Praxis: Dialogue and Coexistence in a Diverse and Precarious World’, and it will be held at the Jnana Deepa Institute of Philosophy and Theology in Pune, India, on 20-21 June, 2025, organized in collaboration with Prof. Geeta Ramana Memorial Research Scholar’s Forum, University of Mumbai. The conference aims to bring together research scholars, students and faculty to explore the theme through their disciplinary perspectives, providing a platform for dialogue and reflection. Buddhist scholars and practitioners will also be invited to present the relevance, significance, and applications of Buddhism in our diverse and increasingly precarious world.
Buddhist philosophy has an over 2,500-year history and has offered a radical response to the traditional ritualistic phenomena surrounding religion, spreading over the centuries to a large part of the eastern world to countries like China, Japan, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos apart from varieties of Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhism, with its rich philosophical and spiritual heritage, offers valuable insights and practices for cultivating inner peace, compassion, and wisdom. It offers probing insights into the nature of mind and reality to arrive at the pragmatic goal of the cessation of dukkha or suffering through the right view of reality, free from delusion. As the world grapples with the challenge of growing polarization, armed conflict, rising economic inequality, environmental degradation, rapid technological shifts and mental health issues, the conference aims to highlight the relevance of Buddhist principles and practices in addressing the concerns and suffering of our present. In today's increasingly complex, diverse and interconnected world, the need for dialogue and coexistence has never been more urgent. It is clear that our ability to engage in constructive dialogue and foster meaningful coexistence will be crucial in shaping the future of our global community, building trust, and fostering cooperation across cultural, linguistic, and ideological divides. The conference will also explore the impact of Neo-Buddhism, as well the application of Buddhist principles in various social and political citizen movements.
The conference will provide a platform for scholars, practitioners, and the larger community to engage in constructive dialogue to develop a deeper understanding of the challenges of coexistence in a diverse and precarious world and work towards solutions. Thus, the conference theme has immediate implications for the world that we share with other people and plays a role in how we construct and work towards our collective future.

Conference Sub-themes

With the above considerations in mind, the conference proposes to address the following thematic streams:

 Global Challenges: Significance and application of Buddhist principles and concepts to facilitate dialogue and coexistence in the face of growing armed conflict, polarization, and divisive political agendas; Significance and application of Buddhist principles and concepts in dealing with contemporary challenges around healthcare, economic inequality, and environmental degradation
 Neo-Buddhism: Significance of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's reinterpretation of Buddhism that gives an account of social and politically engaged action questioning issues of caste hierarchies; its impact on Indian and global politics
 Buddhism and Social Justice: Significance of Buddhist philosophy in social and political citizen movements and dealing with various human rights issues
 Buddhist Philosophy and Psychology: Studying the nature of mind and reality; exploring Buddhist meditative practices to deal with rising mental health issues; cultivating mental resilience and adaptability in an uncertain, ever-shifting, impermanent world and in the face of constant and sometimes disruptive change due to rapid technological shifts and changing job markets
 Representations of Buddhist Philosophy in Art and Culture: Drawing from the rich and diverse cultural heritage of Buddhism, including its art, architecture, literature, and music to engage with the challenges of a diverse and precarious world
Note: Other relevant topics related to the conference theme may be chosen

Organization and Structure

Dates: 20-21 June, 2025 (10.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.)
Venue: Pontifical Athenaeum Jnana Deepa, Institute of Philosophy and Theology, Ramwadi, Nagar Road, Pune, Maharashtra 411014
1. Addresses by renowned Buddhist scholars and practitioners
2. Paper presentations by research scholars, students and faculty
To participate in the conference as an attendee, kindly write to archgoure@philosophy.mu.ac.in and gayamend@gmail.com for more information.

Call for Papers

We invite papers that address the theme of the conference and are confident that scholars from different disciplines will contribute to the continuing debate and discussions on Buddhism and its applications in our contemporary world.
The call for papers is issued in two stages: abstracts and then full papers
If you would like to send in a paper for consideration, please submit a 300-word abstract based on original work. Abstract to be emailed to grscholarsforum2023@gmail.com
Kindly provide details of the author(s) name, the title of the article, author’s institutional affiliation and email address on a separate page.
Deadline for Submission of Abstract: 1st March, 2025
Communication of Acceptance to Authors: 15th March, 2025
If accepted, Deadline for Submission of Full Paper: 1st May, 2025
Once accepted, full paper submissions of 4000 to 5000 words, must be emailed to grscholarsforum2023@gmail.com

Submitted files should be in Microsoft Word format. All text, footnotes and references must be single-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, no hyphenation. Use italics rather than underlining (except with URL addresses). All illustrations, figures, and tables should be placed within the text, rather than at the end. Page margins should be a minimum of one inch. References must be listed at the end of the paper. Details of the author should be mentioned on the first page.

All submissions will be screened and shortlisted by members of the Committee for presentation at the conference. Selected papers will be accepted for publication in the Philosophy journal.

Best Paper Award:
Justice Kodandaramaya Research Award (2025)
This award is only open to PhD research scholars in Philosophy who are currently doing their research. The objective of the award is to encourage independent and original research on the theme of the conference. The research paper must develop a cogent idea, implied within the work undertaken.
 The authors of the best articles will be invited to present their work at the conference.
 Select papers will be published in Philosophy Journal.
 The best paper will be awarded a cash prize as well as a certificate of appreciation.

the zen of fernando pessoa, poet. notes for my conversation with fernando pessoa, poet: my so many nights with fernando pessoa, poet.

2024-12-03T08:24:00.004-05:00

(i've seen his face before. it was my father's)

the zen of fernando pessoa.

my so many nights with fernando pessoa

pessoa tells me that all life is vast existential futility.

we think, we feel, we know, we pretend to know, we feign, we pretend to feign that this is better than that. or at least somewhat preferable. but then, when we look closely, this is not this. in fact, there is no this! but that insight was also only an illusion.

this does not exist, not this and not that, and that is so, because there isn't anything except for this! "this is it!" as zen likes to say. or as the old wise indian wrote: "nothing is at it seems, neither it is otherwise."

nothing at all exists except for this whole-of-being. and how do we know this? we know this because the pain of this is real.

and we pray to god (to the gods?) because we know they do not exist. that is why we pray. but then we feign offense when we hear god insist ad-nauseum that it is us who do not exist. he is no nihilist, fernando pessoa, the portuguese also-marrano-jew-futilist poet is mad. mad as a shepherd in love. especially during the nights.

pessoa wrote: "everything that man explains or expresses is a note in the margin of a text that has been entirely erased. more or less from the sense of the note, we hit upon the sense that the text must have had. but there always remains a doubt, and the possible senses are numerous." in other words: pessoa is describing the futility of existence. again, this is not nihilism, its futilism. in the text of our lives, we only write on its margins, that is, we are essentially marginal to existence itself. and life itself, which is the text on which margins we scribble the story of our lives, by the time we get around to understand it or manifest it, it's no longer there. (more or less...)

fernando pessoa wrote: "whether they exist or not, we're slaves to the gods." true: we have corrupted freedom into an illusion, and this thing about us giving birth to gods, or proclaiming their death, makes no difference at all. and yet, (with pessoa there is always an "and yet") we are free to give birth and also to issue proclamations. pessoa also wrote his own "factless autobiography." think of it, only a fact-less autobiography can possibly tell the truth. we are not "facts," there is nothing to tell.

pessoa the poet wrote what i call "primordial zen". he said: "i realize that i was all error and deviation, that i never lived, that i existed only in so far as i filled time with consciousness and thought." to want to live one's life with something other than the interminable and inexhaustible contents of one's mind, is to want to live life in accordance to the existential understanding of the poet buddha. i'm referring to his concept of sunyata. pessoa wrote these singularly zen lines in one of his poems: "...why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister,? to feel it better,? i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something, sister, or mother, or daughter, water is beautiful because it’s water...or, better yet, not to call it anything, but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it, without any names..." in zen they say that the more we name the less we know. or as buber would say, the more we say "it" the less we are.

this is all the wisdom we need to know: we proclaim the primacy of the immediacy of the encounter with a being, over the subsequent intellectual or religious processing of that experience. pessoa asks for the acceptance of the phenomenon as it presents itself to us, which is the confirmation of its "otherness" and the embrace of its "thouness."

but how do we know that we cannot know the world as-it-is? agnosticism is not an argument, it is an excuse. unknowability is also an attribute. why do we ever think that there is such thing as a world as-it-is, a noumena, an essence behind the physical things of the world? pessoa solves this issue: if we read the poet the way i suggest, the question of perception and reality does not arise. the key issue is not apprehension, but relationship. in other words, the immediacy of the between of i and thou is the place of reality, and we use the term reality not in an ontological sense, but strictly as an existential project. we create reality as we relate to the world, and the type of relationship we enter into, will determine the type of reality we apprehend.

similarly the poet g. k. chesterton reflected on the same exact idea and with similar words as pessoa's: "i do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as i do. the startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud." this is the zen of g.k. chesterton. allowing the phenomenon to name itself to us is the deed of refusing to say "it" to it. there is nothing within, nothing behind, nothing above or nothing below the phenomenon itself. as of late, (the now late) thich nhat hanh toiled to remind us that "this is it," and he drew mandalas with those words inscribed in them. and this-thing we call world, or life, is a beautiful thing because it is just "this." similarly to the wise indian saying: "tat tvam asi" "thou art that," which is an important principle of hindu philosophy. alan watts once wrote about listening to the sound of a bell and hearing the gong, and he said: "to the sound we will not give it a name." you named it? you can't hear it anymore.

pessoa was the poet-master "futilist" and this deep recognition of the futility of life cannot possibly fill one's heart with happiness, although sadness, if that's the opposite of happiness, is not what pessoa's heart felt either. what did pessoa feel? why give it an name?

pessoa possessed what zen master dogen insisted on "an ordinary mind, a beginner's mind." pessoa understood the nature of existence in its "suchness", the way zen does, only prior to, and beside the heavy conceptual infrastructure added to suchness when buddhism was transformed from a living practice and into a religion. this beginner's mind allowed pessoa to free himself from much of the emotional baggage and intellectual tainting that occurs once exposed to zen-as religion. suzuki roshi once said that it is possible one might attain, but not actually like, satori, the state of enlightenment. pessoa, may in fact be one such example. if he indeed had a zen understanding as expressed by many of his poems, and thereby we could safely regard him as an enlightened person, he did not exhibit a mind resting at blissful peace. it is similar to the great blues: one reason we like the blues is because they are blues and nothing other. it appears perhaps as a kind of paradox in conceptual terms, but not from an existential perspective.

but how can we live the life of the enlightened zen practitioner? zen, like poetry, (like god) is not only, nor principally, a way of feeling, or a way of seeing things differently. it is all that, but zen, like poetry (like god), is either a way of relationships with the whole of being or is nothing at all. the poet archibald macleish said it well: "a poem should not mean, but be."

our minds are composed of a number of different contents, most of which are based on values we'd do well to question. once we empty ourselves from these contents, what is it that is left? in the buddhist tradition the assumption is that this no-self that remains after we discard the accretions of external contents is our actual true self, the original, pristine, undefiled buddha nature. and so, what part of our daily lives are open for us to be lived in a dharma way, in the sunyata of the mind beyond the delusive contents drilled into us by the culture of capital accumulation? we live in a social and economic system in which each and every being has taken the attributes and predicates of a commodity with its corresponding commercial worth. living within such a system, how can we possibly empty our egos and free our trapped true selves? we can not, lest we lose all our social and economic resources, and with it, our very material survival. only the transformation of society from capitalism to dhammic socialism, as buddhadasa bhikkhu argued, will allow us to actualize zen in all its different aspects.

fernando pessoa

pessoa wanted to liberate his own mind. but he described the fight he, and us, are up against: "i am the escaped one. after i was born they locked me up inside me. but i left. my soul seeks me, through hills and valley, i hope my soul never finds me." i want to pause for a moment in the word "they." by saying "they," pessoa informs us that this artificial "i" we all carry within and believe it to be our minds or our souls, is in reality a state of consciousness imbued within us by the social conditions of our lives in society. our way of living with one another is responsible for locking our inner selves inside ourselves. society transforms our natural free selves into egos, and now we need to break open the locks and let our selves to be liberated from within the traps of our own making.

in this context, paraphrasing gustav landauer's dictum about the source and the role of the nation-state, capitalism is a way of relationship between people, and we will only cease to create dukkha, or suffering for our own selves, once we change the ways of our relationships. to this also refers zen master thich nhat hanh with the community he founded under the auspices of his zen order of "interbeing." a creative translation of the term interbeing might be the zen order of the i and thou. but going back to pessoa's struggle, he believed in paradoxical futile endings. "and, like the great damned souls, i shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living" yes, living and thinking are in perpetual conflict, we refer to it as alienation, but the integration of both is possible once we transform our i-it interactions into i-thou relationships.

yogi berra paraphrased pessoa when he said "i can't think and hit the ball at the same time". but pessoa, never gives up, even when he says he does, he still dreams of a freedom project: "i'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls." and i think he did write it, but he left it to us to organize the sentences of his book. we are the ones who need to write pessoa's book together with him. i propose the first sentence to be this one he wrote: "to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect." this is a paraphrase of spinoza's loving-knowledge. to know that which only love can teach.

there is a deep biblical sensibility in that last sentence of pessoa. biblical in the same sense of loving-knowledge the other portuguese jew, baruch spinoza, understood as well. we can start the process of freeing our beings by attempting the merging of intellect and emotions. buddha and bible. moses sitting zazen and buddha leading the slaves to freedom. the path to freedom we make as we walk, as antonio machado said, or pessoa himself said in words found somewhat repeated throughout the existentialist school. "life is what we make of it. travel is the traveler. what we see isn't what we see but what we are." perhaps the next to last sentence in the book we are writing together with pessoa could be this: "the inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."

pessoa wrote to challenge us and to provoke us. all in all pessoa was not a pessimist, he was rather the master "futilist". i read his futility and know that we can finish his book because despite it all, failure is never the assured outcome. no guarantee of failure exists because, as he said, "there are no norms. all people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist." no rules and yet, there are exceptions, and for this koanic reason, there is no despair. only futility.

pessoa was primordial zen. as we saw before, for pessoa things are things and there is nothing behind or within the phenomenology of things. the thing itself, as is, is all there is. naming is creating and naming is owning. by naming a thing we make it into what we want and need it to be. what we need to do however, is stop this "itification" process and allow the thing to name itself and be what the thing wants to be. we have to stop owning and letting be. it is the question erik fromm asked: to have or to be. this is exactly what buber said about the mental act of dissecting and analyzing the things of the world. by avoiding the immediacy of the encounter, we make things into "its" for our ownership and use. we can't altogether avoid using, but our logos in life ought to be to marshal the will and grace to make all beings our "thous". that is to say. we need to confirm them as they are, and to meet them in dialogue. buber wrote: "the work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities (as 'it'). but from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form (as 'thou')."

same applies to the act of naming god. it has been suggested by jewish sages that it's best to call god "ha-shem" ("the name"), or in other words, we should not give it a name. but of course, ha-shem is also a manner of naming. samuel becket expressed a similar idea about the conversion of objects into "its" rather than "thous." he wrote: "when the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment." and that was pessoa's struggle, that is, to relate to the world in the immediacy of a dialogical encounter, a struggle motivated in him was by his primordial zen understanding.

perhaps it was miguel de unamuno who connected the dialogical-zen perspective to a stronger emotional content: "my dear friend" wrote unamuno, "the mind seeks the dead as the living escapes it. it wants to trap within your head the flowing currents, wants to fix it in place. to understand something we must kill it, it needs to become stiffed in our minds. my own thoughts tumultuous and agitated in the bosom of my mind, are cut off from their warm roots and discharged into this paper and as they are set in their unaltered form, they are already dead thoughts. how then will reason be able to be open to the revelation of life? it's a tragic combat, it's the background of all tragedy, the struggle of life with reason". buddhism speaks of the impermanence of all things, and looking at impermanence with a pessoa and buber and spinoza outlook, we can say that impermanence is permanent becoming and unfolding, and the desire to grasp and hold on to things, this making everything into an "it", is the greatest of delusions and source of all dukkha. only through impermanence, like jesus on the cross, life becomes eternal. the buddha said that explicitly. the i-thou is the attempt to relate to all beings in the manner in which they are in their true nature, alive, and this is the essence of the existence of all beings in the phenomenological manner in which they are.

it took religious theologies and rituals to come up with images, names, terms, concepts and words to futilely attempt to offer some form of description to what is, in essence, this ineffable primordial encounter with the being of nature. and on account of this, since then, we may have irretrievably lost our intimacy with nature. pessoa's poems are a reversal of sorts, as his is a zen unencumbered by the doctrinal teachings about zen, or any other religious interference for that matter.

h.m.

some poems by fernando pessoa

today someone read me st. francis of assisi.
i listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
how could a man who was so fond of things
never have looked at them or understood what they were?

why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
to feel it better?
i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something –
sister, or mother, or daughter.
water is beautiful because it’s water.
if I call it my sister,
i can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
and that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
or, better yet, not to call it anything
but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
without any names.

-------

the mystery of things – where is it?
why doesn't it come out
to show us at least that it's mystery?
what do the river and the tree know about it?
and what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?

whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,
i laugh like a brook cleanly plashing against a rock.
for the only hidden meaning of things
is that they have no hidden meaning.
it's the strangest thing of all,
stranger than all poets' dreams
and all philosophers' thoughts,
that things are really what they seem to be
and there's nothing to understand.

yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
things have no meaning: they exist.
things are the only hidden meaning of things.

-------

the washwoman beats the laundry
against the stone in the tank.
she sings because she sings and is sad
For she sings because she exists:
thus she is also happy.

if i could do in verses
what she does with laundry,
perhaps i would lose
my diversity of fates.

ah, the tremendous unity
of beating laundry in reality,
singing songs in whole or in part
without any thought or reason!
but who will wash my heart?

-------

notes for my conversation with fernando pessoa, poet:

never does a hand hold another without being held at that same moment. we forget poetry, and this is our fault. we invent gods to compensate, and that's fine, but its not wisdom. we stumble to old age having learned nothing of what we already knew only too well: poetry is not in the writing if it is not in the living. poetry we write in poetic deeds, and at times we may scribble some words too. beautiful words spoken in moments of between. poets are the eternal unrequited lovers of words. and vice-versa. reality does not exist outside of the relationship, for we create reality as we relate to each other and to the world. i told pessoa what the poet martin buber explained: the type of relationship we enter into, either i-thou or i-it, will determine the type of reality we will apprehend. pessoa smiled and said "yes my friend guardador de rebanhos! i wrote those same words in my fact-less autobiography"

the portuguese, part-marrano poet fernando pessoa wrote what i call "primordial zen." he said: "i realize that i was all error and deviation, that i never lived, that i existed only in so far as i filled time with consciousness and thought." to want to live one's life with something other than the interminable and inexhaustible contents of one's mind, is to want to live life in accordance to the existential understanding of the buddha's concept of sunyata.

pessoa made this clear with these singularly zen lines in one of his poems: "...why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?, to feel it better?, i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something, sister, or mother, or daughter, water is beautiful because it’s water...or, better yet, not to call it anything, but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it, without any names..." this is all the wisdom we need to know: we proclaim the primacy of the immediacy of the encounter with a being over the subsequent intellectual or psychological processing of that experience. pessoa asks for the acceptance of the phenomenon as it presents itself to us, which is the confirmation of its "otherness," and the embrace of the possibility of its "thouness".

emmanuel kant explained that there is no possibility of direct perception of reality "as-is." the mind cannot perceive the noumena, for it can only approach the world through its own pre-determined categories of phenomenal perception. that is to say, we cannot know what reality is "in-reality". whatever it is we perceive, it is the filtered and colored through the internal mechanics of the perceiving mind. in kantian terms, direct unmediated perception of reality is an unexamined delusion of the mind. "no-mind" is not a concept kant entertained, and i presumed he'd be amused by the recklessness of that verbal construction. but if we read pessoa's zen intuitions, the dichotomy of perception and reality does not arise. the key issue is not apprehension, but relationship. in other words, the immediacy of the between of i and thou is the place of reality, and we use the term reality not in an ontological sense, but strictly as an existential project. we create reality as we relate to the world, and as martin buber explained, the type of relationship we enter into, be that i-thou or i-it, will determine the type of reality we will apprehend.

similarly the poet g. k. chesterton reflected on the same exact idea: "i do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as i do. the startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud." this is the zen of g.k. chesterton. allowing the phenomenon to name itself to us is the deed of refusing to say "it" to it.

with pessoa and zen we can say there is nothing within, nothing behind, nothing above or nothing below the phenomenon itself, "this is it", as thich nhat hanh says, and it is a beautiful thing because it is just "this". similarly the sanskrit concept of "tat tvam asi" "thou art that", is an important principle of hindu philosophy. alan watts once wrote about listening to the sound of a bell and hearing the gong, and he said: "to this sound we will not give it a name." master dogen spoke of the "teachings of insentients", which teach incessantly and abundantly. in other words, we allow the world to teach us what it is, or perhaps, whatever it wants to be, rather than us naming it after what we are or want it to be. naming is owning, and owning is not i-thou.

pessoa was the poet-master "futilist". pessoa was not a nihilist, he was a futilist. and this deep recognition of the futility of life cannot possibly fill one's heart with happiness, although sadness, if that's the opposite of happiness, is not what pessoa's heart felt either. what did pessoa feel? well, why give it a name? in other words: to deny a moment of happiness for it is impermanent, it is to understand little about happiness and even less about the nature of time. eternity is in this one moment of impermanent time. it depends on whether we say thou to the presence. poets know that. to accept an uninterrupted succession of sadness, that is to say, to close the open windows precisely at that fleeting moment when the sun shines through in an otherwise dark and cloudy sky, it is to become oneself a cause of this darkness. it is to accept fate rather than freedom. it is to let "it"make us its willing collaborators. and to let it do it again.

pessoa tells me that all life is vast existential futility. we think, we feel, we know, we pretend to know, we feign, we pretend to feign that this is better than that. (at least preferable). but then, when we look closely, this is not this. in fact, there is no this! and that was only an illusion. this does not exist, not this and not that. and that is so, because there isn't anything except for this! this is it! nothing at all exists except for this. and how do we know this? because the pain of this is real. and we pray to god because we know it does not exist. that is why we pray. but then we feign offense when we hear god insist ad-nauseam that it is us who do not exist. he is no nihilist, fernando pessoa, the portuguese also-marrano-jew-futilist poet is poetically mad. poetically mad as a shepherd in love. especially during the nights.

pessoa wrote: "everything that man explains or expresses is a note in the margin of a text that has been entirely erased. more or less, from the sense of the note, we hit upon the sense that the text must have had. but there always remains a doubt, and the possible senses are numerous". in other words: pessoa is bemoaning the futility of our long and often tortuous life efforts. this is not nihilism, it is futilism. in the days of our lives we often fail to respond to the call that emanates from god-nature. in other words: we are essentially marginal to existence itself. and life itself, which is the text on which margins we scribble the story of our lives, by the time we get around to understand it or manifest it, it's no longer there.

pessoa said: "whether they exist or not, we're slaves to the gods". true: submission is our sad fate, and giving birth to gods, or proclaiming their death, makes no existential difference. and yet, (with pessoa there is always an "and yet") we are free to give birth and to proclaim freedom if we wish to give our marginal lives at least one of the numerous possible senses. pessoa also wrote his own "factless autobiography". think of it, only a fact-less autobiography can possibly tell the truth. we are not "facts": there is nothing to tell.

-------

three poems by fernando pessoa

today someone read me st. francis of assisi.
i listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
how could a man who was so fond of things
never have looked at them or understood what they were?

why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
to feel it better?
i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something –
sister, or mother, or daughter.
water is beautiful because it’s water.
if I call it my sister,
i can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
and that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
or, better yet, not to call it anything
but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
without any names.

-------
the mystery of things – where is it?
why doesn't it come out
to show us at least that it's mystery?
what do the river and the tree know about it?
and what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?

whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,
i laugh like a brook cleanly plashing against a rock.
for the only hidden meaning of things
is that they have no hidden meaning.
it's the strangest thing of all,
stranger than all poets' dreams
and all philosophers' thoughts,
that things are really what they seem to be
and there's nothing to understand.

yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
things have no meaning: they exist.
things are the only hidden meaning of things.

-------
the washwoman beats the laundry
against the stone in the tank.
she sings because she sings and is sad
For she sings because she exists:
thus she is also happy.

if i could do in verses
what she does with laundry,
perhaps i would lose
my diversity of fates.

ah, the tremendous unity
of beating laundry in reality,
singing songs in whole or in part
without any thought or reason!
but who will wash my heart?

-------

meditations on pessoa and language.

god hides behind nothing at all and in front of everything, because when we say thou to the neighbor god is everything that exists. in the between of i and thou god is all things and is in all things and all things are in him and also behind them and in front of them. god is words too, so we ask: how can words possibly not be able to express the nature of god? the nature of god is "this" and that essential presence is found everywhere and always, including in words.

we talk about the i and thou and poetry. here's the difficulty with the proposition "words cannot express": is it the case that there just aren't any words, or that i myself, that is, my own inept creative self, have ran out of words and am unable to find any? some argue that there is a difference of essence between language and experience and therefore the meeting between these two realms of being can take place only at their peripheries, like in the words of a prayer, never any deeper. but if that is the case, isn't the poet's task to create new words to express that for which there might not have been any in existence? in zen they say "mu" and there you have it! a word that expresses "that". it does not need to be a new sound, it only needs to be what poetry does: to write a word as if this was the first time it has ever been uttered and it expresses that which heretofore was unutterable.

words therefore are not inherently unable to express, it all depends on the source from which they emanate. if true poetry is a language that emerges in the between of i and thou, what emerges from the i-it is the vocabulary of loneliness and alienation. therefore words emanating from the whole-of-being will express the full poetry-of-existence, and words that emanate from the periphery of being will only delineate limitations and partiality.

there are two existential possibilities: from the between of i and thou a whole-being language emerges, and that language may include words or exclude them. from the transactions of i and it no language can emerge, but only a mere vocabulary, and the words it includes are those that are unable to express the nature of being. therefore we should make a distinction between the poetry of the in-between and the vocabularies of loneliness. as an example: the word "god" describes the between of i and thou, and in that sense, it is a wonderful word.

if we follow wittgenstein, we know that our words are the limits of our universe. if there is no word for "that", then "that" does not exist. he actually used the term "language", which is a term broader than words, but he meant "words". so if the famous widely accepted notion that "words cannot express" is true, then we know we have reached the outer and inner limits of all that exists. clearly, there can be no words for something which is not part of all that exists.

what is the difference between the terms universe and existence? we know, from kant, that existence is not a predicate. therefore universe is all there is. i, for once, know absolutely not a thing about anything at-all that is transcendent to the universe that exists. wills and minds are things of our own realm, and therefore i can only hope to gain some understanding as to what those words seek to describe. and i will do that by employing both words and direct intuitive experience. and for that, all i can do is look at my here and my now and ask my mind to tell me what the will of my being is at both this present moment, and on these, my four spans of land. and that's not a very easy thing to do.

i say this, owing a great deal to the poet g. k. chesterton, that simply because i've had an experience of something, it does not follow that i necessarily believe in it. nor can i necessarily describe it so that someone else might get a glimpse as to what for me was immediate and direct. i must rely on the fact that what i experience as being my love for you, is the same experience you describe as being your love for me. that is to say: despite the fact that even if words are unable to convey the full nature of the presence, both of us know it to be the same whole-being experience.

but "mu" is a word! so it helps. and we have given it a meaning, even if we don't agree with it. and for that our conversation might be less utilitarian than it might have otherwise been. but utility is not the point of every conversation. so the question to go back to is if this is a problem with a universe which is just too-wide to be contained within a narrow language, or is it that we keep language intentionally narrow so as to make room for the concept of ineffability? it can always be the case that our minds are not creative enough to burst the artificial limits of a limited vocabulary. i suspect we need the ineffable, and we intuit that words get in the way. even mu.

i think we can do "better" with language. take the case of the word "god". we invented a word to express the ineffably infinite and eternal. why stop at that? language, as were most cultural creations we inherited form the past, conformed to the intellectual and spiritual proclivities of those who controlled its use and its structure. words were created to convey cultural meanings, and as they evolved, these meanings became embedded within the consciousness of everyday speakers. a language is a narrative, and some cultures have created words to express as much of existence as they were able to discover. others, in contrast, chose to build a fence around them.

but here's a proposal: i was thinking of writing a poem and then i read gregory orr's question: "do words outlast the world they describe?" good to think of this because yes, they do, of course they do, and that's the melancholy of life. words are sometimes the only thing that remains, like the visible light from a star long dead. like with god for example. it's all passings and remainings. but it's not all necessarily in vain. think of it: could you live without the ten thousand things of the sky? alive or dead? sometimes it's not only from the dead that all it remains is words. and words are also a part of the god that is all that exists.

-------

to pessoa. a poem

all year long i was under the impression
that there were such things as afternoons.
but here is the funny part:
there are no such things!
every time i look
it is always now.
and i'm disappointed.

i loved afternoon teas.
even though i never drink tea.
i loved afternoon walks.
especially to show off my new sandals.
i loved afternoon love making.
even if it was at night.
nights are beautiful too.

without afternoons
it would be interminable mornings.
imagine that!
but this year i realized
there are no such things as afternoons.
i think i will miss them.
and the interminable mornings.

but now i drink alone.
as my ancestors did.
with a thoughtful tango poem
and a very silly kleizmer tune.
i love this snowy winter afternoon.
yes.
afternoons are beautiful.

-------

the best spring i've ever had
was in the middle of winter.
i remember every little detail.
especially of things which never happened.

i decided to be in love.
in the middle of winter.
i mixed seltzer in my dad's wine to fake it last longer.
dad was really pleased.

pan con manteca three meals a day.
how sweet it felt!
and how many dreams spread over that bread!
kind of sad when the seltzer ran out.

i remember the names of every girl.
i hope they remember mine.
my mom was always right.
oh god, how right she always was.

speaking of god
he came early into my life.
i asked for more seltzer for dad's wine.
but i guess somethings he just can't do.

but i did love my winters and springs.
how can i not be sad for what i lost forever?
but the word god still hovers around me.

i think that's a good thing.

Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger in Dialogue, Paul Mendes-Flohr

2024-10-26T03:42:00.004-04:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34J8EYEyYFQ

this lecture by paul mendes-flohr is, in my opinion, the deepest and clearest exposition of the relationship between the philosophies of martin buber and martin heidegger. undoubtedly, only paul mendes-flohr could explore this topic with such scholarship and grace.

In Memoriam: Paul Mendes-Flohr z'l

2024-10-25T09:26:00.003-04:00

Paul Mendes-Flohr, a friend, a man of love and peace, a teacher, and the preeminent Buber scholar and biographer in the world, has passed away early today in Jerusalem. His invitation for me to write an essay on Buber and Eastern Wisdom for his companion book to the 100 year publication of Buber's "I and Thou" was, for me, the highlight of my life-long intellectual and spiritual explorations. It is not possible to ascertain how much wonderful and exciting scholarship is now lost to the world. But it is even harder to describe how gentle and how caring a human being Paul Mendes-Flohr was. A rare good person never really dies.

May Paul's memory be a blessing.

hune margulies

In Memoriam - Paul Mendes-Flohr

2024-10-24T22:14:00.003-04:00

May Paul's memory be a blessing.

hune margulies

Field Workshop on Ancient and Present-Day Religious Practices in Goa, (India) and its environs

2024-10-19T06:57:00.004-04:00

Field Workshop on Ancient and Present-Day Religious

Practices in Goa, (India) and its environs

THE MARTIN BUBER INSTITUTE FOR DIALOGICAL ECOLOGY

Spring Break 2025 and Summer 2025

You are cordially invited to participate in The MBIDE’s "Field Workshop on Ancient and Present-Day Religious Practices in Goa (India) and its environs” to be held during the Spring Break of 2025 and the Summer of 2025

The field workshop comprises 8 days 7 nights guided tours and immersion into some of Goa’s ancient and newer religious sites and practices. From thousand year old monasteries and 500 year old Catholic churches, to modern day Buddhist meditation and Yoga practices.

The program is all inclusive on the ground. (lodging in high tear hotels, 3 meals a day, all group activities, transportation and transfers to all group activities, tours, entertainment and sightseeing).

Costs: $2,750 double occupancy. $3,250 single occupancy.

For more information please write to the MBIDE's Director, Dr. Hune Margulies, at hune@MartinBuberInstitute.org.

Why Goa? For 500 years Goa was a Portuguese Colony. During that period, Catholicism took root in the territory and shared the space, often times contentiously, with ancient Hindu traditions. There is also a notable Muslim presence throughout the state. Despite a period of inquisition against Jewish "conversos", forced conversions, and other upheavals, Goa remains a hub of religious pluralism and tolerance. Goa is the smallest of all Indian states and the last to gain independence from colonial occupation in 1961. Goa is renowned for its many natural wonders, long and quiet beaches along the Arabian sea, family farms, waterfalls and old quaint villages. At the same time the capital city, Panjim, as well as other larger cities, are examples of modernization and rapid growth, exhibiting all the benefits and drawbacks of urban development.

Sites to visit: The workshop will take us to ancient temples, old churches and other sites of worship.

We will visit with monastics and mystics, with clergy, scholars and practitioners, and be invited to partake in their practices and observances. We will survey the different religious traditions present in the Indian State of Goa. Interwoven within the tour we will also enjoy musical and cultural presentations, city tours and free time to visit the old markets, worship, attend lectures, shopping and enjoying the magnificent and pristine Goa beaches.

The Registration Form to participate in the workshop can be found bellow.

For more information please write to hune@MartinBuberInstitute.org and visit the website https://martinbuberinstitute.dialogicalecology.org/ Phone: +91-9130059065, whatsapp +91-9130059065.

__________________________________________________________________________________

THE MARTIN BUBER INSTITUTE FOR DIALOGICAL ECOLOGY

Spring Break 2025 and Summer 2025

Field Workshop on Ancient and Present-Day Religious Practices

in Goa, (India) and its environs

REGISTRATION FORM:

(please copy/paste in a PDF document and send via email to hune@martinbuberinstitue.org)

Part I: PERSONAL INFORMATION

Full Name:

Title:

email address:

Phone number:

Date of Birth:

Gender :

Occupation:

Country of residence / Citizenship:

Home Address:

City: State: Zip code:

Home Phone:

Cell Phone:

Emergency contact email and phone number:

Work Phone:

Web site:

Passport Number and expiration date:

Please let us know your religious affiliation? (if any):

Please provide us with a brief explanation as to special circumstances or concerns: (special diets, health issues, disabilities, etc.). All information is strictly confidential and it will be used solely for the purpose of arranging for special services as needed.

➢ Need Special Diets?

➢ Taking Medications?

➢ Allergies?

➢ Other Health Issues?

➢ Disabilities?

Part II: Financial information:

Method of payment: PAYPAL to: hune@martinbuberinstitute.org.

Check, Money Order payable to the order of Hune Margulies. Mail to MBIDE ℅ Dr. Hune Margulies, House #175 Goddard Vaddo, St. Mathias, Malar, Divar, Goa 403403, India.

Bank to Bank Wire: Beneficiary: Hune Margulies. Citibank, N.A. Account number: 9938063759. Routing Number: 021000089. Larchmont, NY 10538.

Deadlines: Deposit of $500.00 deadline is February 18, 2025. Balance deadline is April 18, 2025.

Payments: A deposit in the amount of $500.00 must accompany this application. Deposits and payments must be made within schedule to insure space in the program and to avoid late penalty charges. After receipt of registration and deposit a voucher for your deposit will be issued and e-mailed to the address you provided us in the form.

Hope to see you in Goa!

hune

Date:

Name of Traveler:

Signature of Traveler

(please copy/paste in a PDF document and send via email to hune@martinbuberinstitue.org)

For more information please write to hune@martinbuberinstitute.org, +91-9130059065, whatsapp +91-9130059065.

My New Book: Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination

2024-06-04T09:14:00.002-04:00

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8030-5

Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination

My New Book: Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination

2024-06-04T08:35:00.004-04:00

Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8030-5

An Encounter Between Engaged Pure-Land Buddhism and the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber

2024-05-27T00:14:00.000-04:00

https://brill.com/view/journals/jsik/aop/article-10.1163-29502683-20241011/article-10.1163-29502683-20241011.xml?rskey=M8Dc3c&result=1

An Encounter Between Engaged Pure-Land Buddhism and the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber

In: Journal of Social Innovation and Knowledge

Author:

Hune Margulies

Online Publication Date:

17 May 2024

Abstract

Engaged Buddhism emphasizes the translation of dharma teachings into social engagement. A proper understanding of Buddhadharma rejects the duality between the realm of the individual and the realm of the social. Therefore, a dharma that does not create a dharmic society will not create dharmic individuals. Martin Buber (1878–1965) was one of the most important and consequential philosophers of 20th-century spiritual thought. The Dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber represents a creative confluence between Western Humanism and some aspects of Zen Buddhism. Buber translated and studied Taoist texts and “oriental” wisdom systems, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. This article argues that Buber’s concept of “God as the between of I and Thou” can be posed in Buddhist terms as “Buddha is the between of I and Thou.” This primordial social spirituality resembles in many respects the teachings of engaged Buddhism, particularly the Pure Land teachings of Master Sheng Yen.

Keywords: Buber; Zen; dialogue; ShengYen; Buddha; God

Discussions

Engaged Pure Land Buddhism and Dialogical philosophy share similar fundamental constitutive principles and social practices. Within the Judaic tradition, the Dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber is a non-institutional, non-religious attempt to define the spiritual realm as the encounter of I and Thou. In this sense, Buber’s philosophy was seen as innovative, radical, and transformative. Dialogical philosophy argues that God, as the summon bonum of the spiritual quest, is not above in the realm of transcendent heaven, but rather, God is the between of an I and a Thou. To understand the uniqueness of Buber’s philosophy, we can contrast dialogue with mysticism. Mysticism can be defined as the pursuit of a direct, inner, and personal experience of the divine or ultimate reality.1Dialogue, in contrast, seeks the presence of God in and through the relationship with the other. In other words, God, or the Pure Land, is in the here and now. Buber’s distinction between an I and a You is not a dualistic dichotomy, for the relationship between I and Thou is the non-dual realm. We can ask how we can become what is already inherent in us. The answer is not in the realm of ontology. It is in the mundane, quotidian realm of daily existence. Similarly to the concept of the inborn Buddha nature, it is necessary to awaken our humanity, which requires the existential task of creating a dharmic society.

In other words, similar to Pure Land, I and Thou dialogue is a social practice. The Dialectic practices of I and Thou are translated into the social realm as a Dialectical society akin, in essence, to the Buddha’s Pure Land on Earth. In contrast to Christian Theology, in Buddhism, we are not born with original sin but with original Buddhahood, and only through dharmic relationships with one another can we actualize the Buddha nature inherent in our beings. To be concerned only with one’s salvation is to negate the true salvific power of the Buddhadharma. In the Western world, generally speaking, we observe that the knowledge of Buddhism is often focused on those teachings that can plausibly be conflated with psychological theories. In other words, interest in Buddhism is directed primarily toward particular aspects regarded as beneficial “mind therapies.” Buddhism is seen as a skillful means to help calm the mind in the turbulence of daily life. This Buddhist concept is understood mainly as a teaching for internalizing quiet forbearance in the face of suffering and personal losses. Fundamental Buddhist concepts such as suffering and the cessation of suffering, non-attachment, no-self, impermanence, tonglen, karma, and even non-violence are given psychological interpretations, often at odds or only partially connected to their original doctrinal intent. One example is the common misunderstanding of the concept of karma. Karma is not Calvinist predestination. It is the concept of human responsibility extended to its ultimate essence as causes and effects. Karma teaches that we are free to choose our actions and the causes of our actions, but we must know that we are not free to avoid their consequences. The Eightfold Path teaches precisely how to ensure our karma remains within the bounds of positive outcomes.

However, Buddhism is more than breathing exercises after supper or sitting on a cushion while the kids text their schoolmates. To this effect, let us examine the case of Ch’an Master Sheng Yen’s engaged Buddhist teachings concerning the Pure Land on Earth. Sheng Yen’s teachings are an explicit argument in favor of Buddhism that is engaged in the “redemption” of the world in the “here and now.2” For Sheng Yen, Amitabha’s Pure Land should not be understood as referring only to a transcendent realm of the spirit, something akin to a paradise or even para-nirvana, nor is it only an individual’s cultivated mind’s enlightened approach to the comings and goings of daily existence. Sheng Yen explains that Pure Land is a concrete and practical goal attainable in our current lives through actions of social responsibility and mutual solidarity. Master Sheng Yen said:

The intention of building a Pure Land on earth is not to move the pure lands of the Buddhas in other parts of the universe to earth, nor does it set out to manifest on earth of today the scenery of pure lands as described in the Amitabha Sutra, the Medicine Buddha Sutra, the Akshobhya Buddha’s Land Sutra, and the Sutra of Maitreya’s descending to our World. Instead, it applies the concepts of Buddhadharma to purify people’s minds and applies the exemplary lifestyle of Buddhists to purify our societies. By purifying our thoughts, lives, and minds and putting in step-by-step, persistent endeavors, we work to purify the social and natural environment. We will perceive that the Pure Land is everywhere once we look at the world with the Buddha’s wisdom.

The emphasis on a Pure Land on earth is a foundational principle of Sheng Yen’s engaged Buddhism and clearly defines the unique redemptory content embedded in Buddhist practice. As Sheng Yen taught, a correct understanding of buddhadharma rejects the duality between the realm of spiritual practice and that of social engagement. Both realms, the spirit and the social, are a unified field of practice. Therefore, as he explains, in order to perfect the “spiritual environment,” we must perfect the social and natural environments, and, at the same time, in order to perfect the social and natural environments, we must perfect the mind.3 No dharmic distinction allows for separating the human mind from the human relationships with the social, natural, and living realms of existence.4All sentient and insentient beings are dharma, and all are the indivisible inter-being parts of the body of the Buddha and the radiant soil in Amitabha’s Pure Land on earth. In other words, the practice of dharma tends to the body of the Buddha. We can ask: If all the earth is the Buddha Land, why are some people still feeling vexations and conducting themselves in unenlightened ways? The answer is that the task of the Buddhist practitioner is to be engaged with society to help it see the dharmic light that dispels the samsaric darkness, blinding our ability to see the beauty of the soil on which we stand. Master Sheng Yen’s teachings of Pure Land on Earth resemble the older teachings of Master Dogen. Dogen Zenji said

Handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This, in turn, allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf … The color of the mountains is Buddha’s body, and the sound of running water is his great speech.5

We learn dharma by practicing a dharmic relationship with all beings. The environment is the dharma and the body of the Buddha. Therefore, Buddhist practice intrinsically relates to creating a Pure Land on earth. Since all of life on earth depends on our ability to be conscious of the consequences of our deeds and the compassion we offer one another, it is imperative to be proactive in protecting the physical and spiritual environments. Dogen relates this story:

Once a monastic asked the Tang Dynasty Chinese National Teacher, Nanyang, ‘Do the insentient understand the expressing of the Way?’ The National Teacher said, ‘They express the Way continually, energetically, ceaselessly.

Dharma is everything that exists, and all that exists seeks to be engaged with everything that lives. Therefore, for nature to teach and express and for us to learn from her, we must protect and tend to it. This is a central tenet of engaged Buddhism. The Pure Land teachings of engaged Buddhism are a social philosophy flowering from within the lotus ponds of buddhadharma.

The writer argues that a correct understanding of the concepts of Metta and Karuna underlies the practices of Pure Land Engaged Buddhism. In this regard, Buddhism is immensely important for reconstructing genuine spirituality within all East and West traditions. In studying the origins of Engaged Buddhism, we can refer to the text of the Metta Sutta. The Metta Sutta emphasizes Metta as a social practice of relationship with all beings, or in other words, it is a teaching about engagement with the world. Observe the following verses:

Let him cultivate boundless thoughts of loving kindness towards the whole world, above, below, and all around, unobstructed, free from hatred and enmity. Whether standing, walking, seated, or lying down, he should develop this mindfulness as long as he is awake. This, they say, is the divine abiding here.

That the divine (or the sublime in some translations) is said to abide in the deeds of loving kindness toward one another is a foundational concept in teachings of engaged practice, as it is in Dialogical philosophy and many different spiritual traditions. For Martin Buber, the divine resides precisely in the between of I and Thou, and the between is defined as the practice of deeds that actualize loving kindness. Buddha said:

Admirable friendship, companionship, admirable camaraderie is the whole practice life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, and comrades, he can be expected to develop and pursue the noble eightfold path.

In other words, an enlightened community, that is, a sangha, is itself the Pure Land, for the community is the means to the goal and the goal itself. This is consistent with Buber’s idea that genuine spirituality is the practice of dialogue in the community, or as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, enlightenment is in the “interbeing.” Interbeing is a Buddhist referent to Buber’s concept of the between I and Thou. Based on Buber’s definitions, we distinguish between I-Thou as a relationship and I-It as an interaction. A genuine relationship is based on mutuality, while an interaction is only a transactional approach to the other. There is no dualism in I-Thou, and there is no attachment between I-Thou; there is only the relationship, but there is dualism and attachment in the interactions of I-It.

These insights into engaged practice compel us to explore how Metta and Karuna will be implemented in the social realm. Metta and karuna are not only emotional contents or moral commitments. They are, first and foremost, deeds of engagement with one another and all beings. How does engaged Pure Land Buddhism become a daily living practice? As we can see, each term used in the Metta Sutta recitations has a corresponding implementation deed. The proper understanding of metta is to actualize awakening as a deed of engagement with the world. This understanding is built into the fundamental dharmic goal of enlightenment, consistent with the basic teachings of Pure Land. As for Buddhism, reaching an understanding is an intellectual exercise and a way to become awakened and manifest this awakening as deeds of compassion. In other words, dharma is a whole-being enlightenment consciousness. This whole-being understanding is the same practice as the biblical concept of “da’at.” In the biblical book of Genesis, it is said that Adam “knew” Eve, and then they conceived their first child. Da’at is a teaching of knowing through loving, as opposed to partial knowing, that results from intellectual inquiry alone. The teaching of wrong understanding in the Eightfold Path is not only a reference to intellectual failures, but essentially, it is a reference to the wrong manner of practicing buddhadharma in the realm of the social.

In contrast to Buddhism, social engagement is mainly reduced to a sociological discipline rather than a whole-being awakening in the West. This is one essential distinction between cultures that emphasize linear reasoning and cultures of enlightenment: Enlightenment does not deny reason. It only incorporates it into a holistic view of human nature. Metta is one of the four abodes of Brahma. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha describes the meditative states of the “Brahma-viharas’‘ as quintessential characteristics of the Buddha-dhatu (Buddha-nature or Buddha-Principle.) Metta, therefore, is a pre-requirement to enlightenment, not an optional posterior attainment. In other words, metta precedes enlightenment and is a condition sine-qua-non for its attainment, and to some extent, it is the entirety of the practice. Metta is reaching enlightenment through engagement in dharmic relationships with one another and all beings. The teaching of karuna is indivisible from the teaching of metta. Karuna typically translates in English as “compassion,” a concept used in the spiritual paths of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. However, rather than the sense of emotional sorrow or empathy associated with the Latin root of the word compassion, the word Karuna comes from the Sanskrit kara, which means “to-do” or “to make,” indicating an action-based form of compassion, that is engaged practice.

In contrast, the Latin term “to care” derives from the word “cuore,” which means “heart.” therefore, compassion is seen chiefly as an inner feeling or a content of the heart. In Buddhist terms, this type of compassion would only be a partial practice, as compassion in the heart needs to be manifested in deeds. In other words, karuna is compassion in actual deeds. In the Buddha’s Pure Land, the personal self is not the locus of enlightenment or salvation but the Buddha Land as a whole. In other words, the personal self is not the locus of enlightenment or salvation but the Buddha Land. We are saved in the Pure Land of the Buddha, where metta and karuna are the guiding practices. Metta is living with primordial intention. That is, metta is the conscious awareness of I-Thou relationships, but metta is an intention that can only be manifested existentially. Metta becomes relational mindfulness once the deeply felt emotions of compassion lead to karuna, that is, to deeds we do. In this sense, awakening is not only a personal perception but a collective deed, and it is the responsibility of all to work toward the salvation of all. This mirrors the Judaic concept that the messiah does not save individuals but the community as a whole. In the Jewish Bible, The prophet Moses took the entire community of Hebrew enslaved people out of Egyptian bondage before he could bring to the people the divinely inscribed tablets of the law.

The Buberian discourse on relationships could also be translated as the essential distinction between a dharmic engagement with one another and all beings and a samsaric approach toward the world, the former encapsulated in Engaged and Pure Land Buddhism and the latter in the unenlightened world of material consumerism. We can say that Buber’s dialectical philosophy differs from other forms of existentialism in that for Buber, the relationship between I and Thou precedes existence, and only then does existence precede essence. I-Thou is the primordial human relationship, and all other forms of living in the world are either approximations of primordiality or alienations. Similarly, we can argue that Zen Buddhism is a primordial spirituality that antecedes any religious or institutional structure, and we can likewise argue that metta and karuna are practices that precede the attainment of awakening. We do not awaken to metta and karuna, but metta and karuna awaken us. In a similar emphasis on the primacy of deeds, Martin Buber explained that:

There is nothing that can be said in words about God. No theologies or philosophies can explain or define God, but we can embrace him in the embrace of a being.

The relationship, beside and apart words or texts, is the primordial spirituality, and no other discursive accrual is required. This is similar to the story of the Buddha in Vulture Peak: Just as Mahākāśyapa, who indeed had many things he could have said to the Buddha, he found no other way to express his awakened understanding but to hold in his hand a little lotus flower. Therefore, the argument that Zen is the primordial system of awakening from which all other systems and practices of enlightenment emerge is based on the sense that Buddha Shakyamuni awoke to the understanding that the practices of meditation and deeds of metta and karuna are the same, and as such they constitute the entirety of his dharma teachings. Consequently, the Buddha established a sangha, a community based on dharmic relationships, and went out to help spread the dharma to all sentient beings. This is the beginning of Engaged Buddhism. Likewise, the Dialogical I-Thou ‘sangha’ is the primordial existential reality from which all conceptions of ethics and human relationships emerge. In this sense, the writer argued that Zen preceded Buddhism not as a strict historical-chronological fact but as an insight into the teaching itself. The Buddha’s post-awakening sangha and Buber’s dialogical philosophy represent the enactment of the mind of metta and karuna outside and besides religious institutionalism in society. In Buberian dialogue, the standing in the relationship of I-Thou with the neighbor and with all beings is the same as the attainment of God, not just a means to the end, and it is suggested that in engaged Buddhism, nirvana is the same with the practice of the Buddhadharma in the here and now. One does not practice the Buddhadharma to attain nirvana, but nirvana is the dharma practice.6

Buber draws his dialogical philosophy from biblical and other Judaic sources that define the attainment of God as the summum bonum of religion, as nirvana is for Buddhism. The biblical book of Deuteronomy (15:8) is written: “You shall surely open your hand to the poor, and shall surely lend him sufficient for his need/lack, according as he needs/ lacks”. The Talmud explains the phrase: “According to that which is lacking for the poor person, you are commanded to give him … if it is appropriate to give him bread, they give him bread; if dough, they give him dough. If they feed him, they feed him. if he is unmarried and wants a wife, they enable him to marry; they rent a house for him and provide a bed and furnishings …” While the Hebrew Bible does not explicitly itemize the reasons for the fiery demise of Sodom, the biblical prophet Ezekiel found it necessary to explain the motives behind God’s decision to destroy the city: “Behold this was the sin of Sodom. She and her daughters had pride, excess bread, and peaceful serenity, but she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy.” The Hebrew Bible, the Torah, contains the very specific and social radical teachings of twenty-one prophets. The Hebrew prophets admonished the people to implement the kingdom of God’s precepts in the earth’s here and now. In the kingdom of God, there is only room for social justice for the poor and the oppressed, peace between nations, freedom of enslaved people, and, generally, a socially conscious society. In other words, as in the teachings of Christian Liberation Theology that places the face of Christ in the face of the neighbor who is oppressed and in need, we can say that the body of the Buddha is in our engagement to end the suffering of the earth and all its beings. Otherwise, the world is “destroyed.”

In addition to metta and karuna, we must reflect on the central Buddhist concept of dukkha to fully understand the teachings of socially engaged Buddhism. One common understanding refers to dukkha as an inner emotional or psychological state of despair. From this, it follows that if dukkha is an inner condition, the only logical path to its cessation is to follow the practice of a thorough inner discipline. However, the Buddhist teaching for the cessation of suffering follows the Eightfold Path described in the Four Noble Truths. The Eightfold Path includes teachings on the right action and the right livelihood. This reflects the Buddha’s insight that inner salvation also requires the implementation of dharmic practices in the “outer” life where we engage in relationships within society. Therefore, a more adequate understanding of dukkha is to argue that dukkha is not just an inner sense of despair. It is also a manner of behavior in society as a whole. The Buddhist masters that conceived social engagement as a manifestation of buddhadharma expanded the concept of dukkha to include the practical, concrete, and quotidian reality of existential despair. In other words, dukkha emerges due to the unawakened exposure to the reality of impermanence and outer social conditions such as poverty, oppression, war, ecological degradation, and social injustice. Impermanence cannot be changed, only our inner reactions to it, but social conditions are changeable; therefore, engaged Buddhism argues that the cessation of dukkha also requires the application and implementation of buddhadharma in social and public affairs.7 In this vein, the Mahayana concept of the Bodhisattva is one of the central tenets of engaged Pure Land Buddhism. Master Sheng Yen said:

Bodhisattva’s Actions … How does one attain Buddhahood? The bodhi-mind comes first. What is bodhi-mind? First is to benefit others.

In other words, the relationship precedes the attainment. It is in error to understand the Bodhisattva practice of helping all beings to be free as the postponing of personal entrance to Nirvana to help all other sentient beings attain liberation is entering the Pure Land. Buddhist liberation is not something that occurs in a different realm of existence. It is here and now. The Bodhisattva’s actions in the here and now of this earth are precisely the realm of Nirvana the dharma aspires to attain. Master Sheng Yen said:

That is the purification of human society due to the purification of the human heart and the deliberate purification of people. The purpose is to point out that to purify the Pure Land of the Buddha or Heaven in the faith of survival, we must first focus on the purification of the heart, the purification of life, and the purification of the environment in the real world.” In other words, one purifies the world by purifying oneself, and one purifies oneself by purifying the world. There is no linear dualistic before or after, only here and now.

All these teachings share the essential principle of engaged Buddhism that accepts no dualistic distinction between personal practice and social engagement. Modern-day India has seen one of the most glaring attempts at socially engaged Buddhism with the establishment of B.R. Ambedkar’s school of Navayana Buddhism. In constructing a new India, Ambedkar’s arguments encompassed a nationwide conversion to Buddhism to counter the many historically unjust social practices ascribed to some interpretations of Hinduism. Ambedkar railed against the very concept of castes and refused to be content with mere legal protections or social benefits earmarked for the Dalits. Ambedkar became a Buddhist precisely to fight for the complete and absolute abolition of castes. Ambedkar saw in buddhadharma the perfect practice to bring about social justice and equality in a country otherwise marred by injustices and inequality. Ambedkar’s Buddhism is reformist in many respects. However, it can be argued that Buddhism arose as a reformation of Hinduism, and Buddhism later saw itself variously reformed from within by different sects and doctrines. Ambedkar’s views were similar to those of the non-Buddhist Rev. Martin Luther King in rejecting the antithetical and discrepant concept of a compassionate oppressor. For Ambedkar and King, the goal is not improved conditions for the oppressed but the abolition of the system of oppression. We can say that Ambedkar and King espouse unique versions of Pure Land on earth in the here and now. Navayana is a unique understanding of Buddhism as it deals with issues of pertinence in an Indian context, especially the annihilation of castes and the overcoming of the corresponding facts of oppression and poverty. Ambedkar spoke of buddhadharma as a Marga-Data, not a Moksha-Data. That is to say, Buddhism is a “way” or “Path” to salvation, but its practice, unless it leads to a dharmic society, does not in itself confer salvation. According to Ambedkar, prajna, karuna, and samata are the teachings that led him to convert to Buddhism. In other words, Ambedkar’s engaged Buddhism is comparable with the perspective of Dialogical philosophy in that the cessation of suffering is attained in the I-Thou relationship with one another and nature. The between of I and Thou is the presence of God; as such, it is not a personal inner experience of a believer and his inner attainment of divine grace. As were Ambedkar’s teachings of Buddhism as a path, for Buber, to the extent that conditions in society remain unredeemed, no personal redemption is to be aspired to, nor is it possible. It is worth noting that there are apparent similarities between engaged Buddhism’s teachings of Pure Land and the contemporary concepts of Liberation Theology within some Christian churches. Liberation Theology argues that the presence of Christ is to be found not only in the church’s sacraments but mainly in the lives of the afflicted and the oppressed. Therefore, the path to God is precisely in the social actions we engage in to alleviate the suffering of the least of us. Pope Francis, while not explicitly an adherent of Liberation Theology, speaks of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a “culture of encounter,” in other words, a sacrament of creating a Pure Land on earth. Jesus’s sermon on the mount is a Jewish witness to the reality of earthly life and a teaching of Pure Land.

The sermon’s emphasis on peace, humility, love, and compassion were not said to be practices that would be deferred to a future time of divine redemption. The original vision of Jesus that spoke on the mount was that living our quotidian lives on this earth in the light of those same ethical precepts he had proclaimed is the kingdom of God. In the same vein, Sheng Yen explained in his “Four Steps to Magical Powers” that seeing into Buddha-Nature is a critical step along the way, but it is just a step. If the steps do not lead to the creation of a Pure Land on earth, then we have a wrong understanding of Buddha-Nature. In his Paths in Utopia, Martin Buber advocated the creation of a society based on the principles of “Religious Socialism.8” Buber’s religion was not an institutional or theological system but a practice of relationships with one another and the world. Buber said that Socialism without religion is like a body without a soul, and religion without Socialism is like a soul without a body. In other words, neither option is imbued with life. Sheng Yen’s teachings and engaged Buddhism manifest a similar understanding that a Buddhism without justice, compassion, and environmental respect cannot be said to be a correct expression of the buddhadharma. Of course, Buber’s Socialism has no connection to the political socialisms of the 20th century. We see from these teachings that the practices of engaged Buddhism are to lead a conscious dharmic life on earth and not to focus our spiritual attention toward a world-to-come in the realm of the transcendent. After all, it is obvious that right action and livelihood are not ancillary corollaries but integral parts of the Buddha’s eightfold path. Recognizing the importance of work as a central human task and being a fundamental locus for our liberation practices, the Buddha designated several work activities as straightforward, wrong livelihoods. Although Buddhism regards all of life as dharma, from a Dharmic perspective, not all work is conducive to liberation, nor can it be regarded as a genuine manifestation of buddhadharma. As the Buddha instructed, some types of work are incompatible with liberation, and others act as hindrances. Examining the teaching of right livelihood, it seems clear that the practices the Buddha encouraged for the actualization of inner and outer liberation require the creation of a society structured along the lines of “Dharmic Socialism.”

In some Buddhist texts, a person who hoards wealth is likened to a bird called the “mayhaka,” which typically lives in the fig tree. While birds usually fly from tree to tree to find food, the mayhaka stays in one place yelling “mayham,” “This is mine.9”

The Buddhadharma teaches that greed, being the fuel of Capitalism, ought to be cleansed away from the mind. From “having” (attachment) to “being” (Buddha-Nature), there is a narrow bridge with precarious floors, and the Buddha taught the proper way to walk over that perilous path. Master Sheng Yen taught a humanistic Buddhist dharma that naturally and seamlessly becomes applied to life in society.

In the 17th century, Zen Master Hakuin used to inveigh against the “do nothing Zen” practitioners. Those practitioners believed that after attaining enlightenment, they reached the ultimate goal of buddhadharma. Hakuin, in contrast, asked for post-enlightenment training to send enlightened people to help create an enlightened society. An enlightenment that does not manifest as a practice of justice in a compassionate society is not a true enlightenment. It is another delusion of Mara. We can see Hakuin’s teachings as a clear advocacy of engaged Buddhism. In the 20th century, Zen Master Suzuki Roshi said it well:

Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened persons; there is only enlightened activity.

In other words, deeds are the mark of awakening, for unless we act in society, we cannot be said to be truly enlightened. Similarly, we find the teachings of Buddhadasa Bikkhu in the Theravada tradition, which spoke of “Dhammic Socialism,” which is the realization of Buddhadharma. Buddhadasa Bikkhu spoke of the necessity to transform society in the model of a dharmic Socialist system. For Bikkhu, Socialism was a better social and economic system and the only societal organizing principle in which dharma could be implemented and actualized. Since all of nature is dharma, we learn dharma from nature. When Bikkhu expanded on Buddhism’s observation about the negativity of hoarding, he learned dharmic socialism from the example of nature and her beings. Bikkhu wrote:

Look at the birds: We will see that they eat only as much food as their stomachs can hold. They cannot take more than that. They do not have granaries. Look down at the ants and insects: that is all they can do. Look at the trees: Trees imbibe only as much nourishment and water as the trunk can and cannot take in any more. Therefore, a system in which people cannot encroach on each other’s rights or plunder their possessions follows nature and occurs naturally. The freedom to hoard was tightly controlled by nature in the form of natural Socialism.

This dharmic natural Socialism is the actualization of the liberated mind within the context of life in society. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama speaks of being “half Buddhist and half Marxist.”The Dalai Lama explicitly expanded on the need for Dharmic Socialism. Continuing his exposition of Marxism, H.H. stated: “I am humanitarian Marxist, I am Buddhist Marxist, I am not nationalistic Marxist, I am also a socialist. Marxist economic theory is for all; it propagates for equal distribution, and Marxism and Buddhism work similarly. I am totally against the totalitarian system and using force … of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while Capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes, that is, the majority, as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. The system appeals to me for those reasons, and it seems fair.”

The Dalai Lama speaks about applying actual dharma deeds to everyday societal relationships. It is essential to emphasize that the Dalai Lama’s understanding of Marxism, as was Buber’s understanding of Socialism, does not correspond to the Leninist theories of a totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat as the values and practices of Buddhism cannot be imposed from the outside. The Dalai Lama’s views are identical to Martin Buber’s “Religious Libertarian Socialism.” In his “Paths in Utopia,” Buber spoke of two different and opposing kinds of Socialism: “Jerusalem or Moscow,” a socialism of the spirit or a dictatorship of the state. Paraphrasing Buber, we can say that The Dalai Lama’s Socialism speaks of two different and opposing kinds of Marxism: Lhasa and Beijing. Many Buddhist practitioners have been actively engaged in the spreading of a Buddhist Socialist message, some in the past and many in our present days. One of the exponents of Buddhist Socialism in Japan during the Second World War was Girō Senoo, a Nichiren Buddhist who resigned from the sect and created the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism. Senoo was a pacifist who argued that:

The Capitalist system generates suffering, and thus, it violates the spirit of Buddhism.

Senoo’s Socialism was closer to the Dalai Lama’s as it rejected orthodox Marxism in favor of a “Pure Land of Buddhism” founded on “Humanistic Socialism.” One of the principles of the Youth League read:

We recognize that the present Capitalist economic system contradicts the spirit of Buddhism and inhibits the social welfare of the general public. We resolve to reform this system in order to implement a more natural society.” By natural society, Senoo meant a community organized based on the “Teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha and in accordance with the principle of brotherly love.

In 1904, Japanese Pure Land Priest Takagi Kenmyo wrote an essay called “My Socialism.” Kenmyo argued that in the land of bliss, that is, Buddhism’s Pure Land, the community lives in accordance with the principles and practices of humanist Socialism. In Kenmyo’s view, “Namu Amidah Butsu” is a mantra for an egalitarian, Socialist, and Pacifist society. Kenmyo was imprisoned and assassinated by the Fascist regime of Japan for his principled opposition to the imperialist war with Russia. The dharmic society advocated by these masters is what Buber referred to as the Dialogical project, that is, the creation of an I-Thou society that curbs and reverses the economic, social, and political interactions that are both a manifestation of “Itness,” as well as their result. The Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness will naturally manifest in the form of a society in which the values of Capitalism and unrestrained materialism will be largely discarded and replaced with the spiritual values of buddhadharma.

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings of “Interbeing” express engaged Pure Land Buddhism. They teach that we must realize that humans and all beings live in a world of “inter-being.” Interbeing is a socially extended insight based on the fundamental Buddhist teaching of “dependent co-arising.” They said: “We are here to dispel the illusion of separateness.” Inter-being teaches that we cannot separate ourselves from society and expect to attain enlightenment thereby. Dharma Holder Master Gun Jun well said:

Retreating from the world will not liberate you. Happiness is not found in a secluded forest hut or an isolated cave. Enlightenment comes when you connect to the world. You become enlightened only when you truly connect with everyone and everything else. You attain liberation only by going deeply and fully into the world.

In the following statement, Master Sheng Yen explains the concept of Pure Land with clarity and specificity:

Buddhists have two great missions: one is to glorify the Buddha land, and the other is to bring sentient beings to spiritual maturity … The Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra teaches that by helping others achieve enlightenment, you achieve it yourself. Where do we find people that we can help? We can find them in every world in the ten directions, but mostly right in our immediate surroundings, our families, friends, colleagues, and especially, our adversaries, whom we should regard as bodhisattvas … The precepts are your vows to live peacefully by regulating your body, speech, and mind behavior. In the passive sense, upholding the precepts means vowing not to commit any wrongful act. In the active sense, it means vowing to engage in as many acts as possible that benefit yourself and others; it means taking responsibility. The purpose of practicing meditation is to create inner peace by calming the mind and stabilizing your emotions. Practicing meditation makes you less likely to become angry or agitated in your everyday life. Meditation does not mean just sitting in concentrated states. We also mean bringing mindfulness to all your activities. Through meditation, your emotions and behavior will become more stable, and conflicts with others will lessen. Through this and other practices, we can eventually establish peace in the lives of individuals and societies.

As Martin Buber explained, we become an “I” through a “Thou,” or in other words, “by helping others achieve enlightenment, you achieve it yourself.” The proper understanding of the concepts of metta, karuna, and dukkha underlies the essential practices of Buddhism in general and Pure Land in particular.

In this regard, the writer deems Buddhism necessary for reconstructing spirituality within all East and West religious traditions. It interprets Martin Buber’s philosophy as advancing the fundamental argument that God is not in the relationship between I and Thou but is the relationship itself. Given this, spiritual practice consists entirely of implementing social programs based on peace and brotherhood in society. God, in this Dialogical sense, is the Pure Land of Amitabha Buddha. The encounter between Buddhist teachings and practices, and engaged Buddhism in particular, with the Judaic Dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber and other similar strands of Humanistic Existentialism, will engender a most fruitful understanding of the urgent needs and vital prospects of a society founded on the values of buddhadharma. Buber insisted that spirituality and social justice intertwine as the same practice, as there can be no genuine spiritual life outside the I-Thou relationship. Interbeing is the intrinsic dharmic relationships between all that lives, which in Buberian terms corresponds to the concept of the between of I and Thou. Hanh did not speak of no-being or intra-being but of a being grounded in the relationship with one another and all beings. In Buber’s words.“

At the beginning, it was the relationship, and all real life is encounter.

Engaged Buddhism, by integrating the same spiritual practices with a commitment to social justice, individuals and communities can work toward creating a more just, compassionate, and equitable society, a society devoid of systemic injustices.10 Buber’s philosophy can be represented by the realization that we should not seek God above nor below, not in the spirit or the flesh, for God is not an entity anywhere. God is The Between of I and Thou, and that between is the actualization of the pure land of the Buddha on earth, a society built on freedom, social justice, and radical love. In summary, engaged Buddhism and Dialogical philosophy have a deep and fecund connection. The body of the Buddha is another term for the between I and Thou. The between of I and Thou is the Buddha’s Pure Land on earth. The emphasis is not on the I or the Thou, on the self or the no-self, but in their between, which is only possible when we engage in the dharma deeds of I and Thou. By saying Thou to neighbor and all beings, that is, by practicing dharma deeds of meta and karuna, we create a realm between mind and body, spirit and matter, and that between is the body of the Buddha. The body of the Buddha is the between of I and Thou, and in order to tend to it, to allow it to emerge and bear fruit freely, we must embrace the responsibility and the risks of embracing the ten thousand things.

Mysticism is also understood as achieving a unity of the self with the self of the divinity. The aim is the obliteration of the self and its subsuming within the “self” of the godhood. Buber maintained a fluid exchange on this topic with Gershom Scholem. Scholem’s studies on Jewish mysticism, even as he defined it as a “revival of the mythic,” which seems to coincide with Buber’s interest in Hasidism in terms of legend or folklore, diverted from Buber’s approach to Dialogue as the foundation of religious experience. See Scholem Gershom, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York, Schocken Books, 1941 and The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays, New York, Schocken Books, 1971.

In his autobiography Master Sheng Yen wrote: “At this time I realized two important points necessary for practice. The first has to do with cause and conditions. Certain things not entirely under your control-your own karma, the karma of others, environmental factors-must come together in a way that favors making progress in this lifetime. To make great progress in practice you must have this karma affinity-the proper conditions must exist.”

Sheng Yen: “Spiritual environmental protection provides a basis for the protection of the physical environment. Environmental protection begins with the simplification and purification of our lives.”

Sheng Yen wrote: “Ch’an practice unifies our subjective inner world with the objective outer world. Ch’an practice is not intended to produce some imaginary blissful state, nor self-comforting, nor escape from reality. We, as practitioners, must manifest in the outer world what we experience internally. We must share our practice, concepts and experiences with others and teach others to do the same. Thus we can influence others to help us accomplish the mission of spiritual environmental protection.”

Dogen Zenji Shobogenzo.

See Hune Margulies, Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021.

Martin Buber Paths in Utopia. Syracuse University Press; New edition [November 1, 1996] In this book, Buber offered a structural analysis that recognized that social injustice, oppression and inequity are deeply rooted in systemic and structural deficiencies. Buber described and interpreted Anarchist thinkers Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, but he chose not to engage with the writings of Bakunin. Buber’s political “teacher” was Gustav Landauer.

Buddhadasa Bikkhu Dhammic Socialism.

Sheng Yen: “Through purifying the actions of our body, speech and mind, we can purify ourselves as well as society.” Ibid.

On Pilgrimage and the Spiritual Imagination

2023-11-04T06:08:00.005-04:00

On Pilgrimage and the Spiritual Imagination

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Martin Buber

Our lives are a perennial pilgrimage in search of lost betweens. But a pilgrimage that has a beginning and an end is one that has never begun and has already ended. A Zen story tells of a traveller needing to cross the river. He asked a person on the other shore where could he find a boat to take him across? The person on the other shore asked why he wanted to cross the river? The traveller replied that he needed to get to the other shore. The reply came: But you already are on the other shore! Pilgrimage can be understood not as traveling from one place to the next, but as the understanding that we already are in that place. Pilgrimage is understanding. But we also know that not every “here” is here, and not every “now” is now. The pilgrimage to the here and now is not a call for complacency, it is a call for the transformation of this shore in the image and likeness of the other shore. We make both shores into one and the same and at that moment the true “here and now” will no longer be a delusion but a real presentness. The institution of pilgrimage is one of the central practices of most religions. For institutional religions the practice of pilgrimage underscores a number of important functions: It establishes a central geographical point of reference for the imparting of authority, much as a capital city does for nation-states. Pilgrimage also reinforces the idea of the immanent sacredness of particular sites and the recognized holiness of declared masters and religious leaders. The exercise of control over spaces deemed as inherently sacred is one of the essential tools for the enforcement of the power vested on the hierarchical structures of religious institutions.

From a dialogical perspective there are no sites that are inherently sacred or secular, for sacredness is an attribute we bestow to sites or persons. The fundamental truth is to understand that we bestow sacredness through our deeds of embrace, and we desecrate through our deeds of indifference. Pilgrimage sites and temples are places where the community gathers to celebrate and worship, and in that sense, they serve an important sociological and cultural role, but to the extent that these sites function in the context of a theological officialdom, rather than sites of community they become sites of control. Religious pilgrimage, whether to visit sacred sites or meet holy masters, as conventionally practiced, should not be considered genuine spiritual travel. Borrowing a concept from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, conventional petitional pilgrimage is a journey in search of “spiritual materialism.” We go on pilgrimage hoping to find a reward, however we define the form and the content of that reward, but we must first believe in the religious significance of the site and in the power of the master before we depart, therefore, as we journey to our destinations we carry with us a baggage filled of preexisting beliefs, and in this sense, it is not strange to return home feeling fully satisfied. This goes to the issue of the circularity of religious beliefs: in the context of religion, believing is seeing. What the mystic takes from his experiences is the same that he brings in, only now he feels a compelling emotional response. What she carried with her, she brings back with her, nothing more and nothing less, for that which we predicate is that which we find.

This is the difference between the mystic and the poet. The poet already has that which the mystic goes out looking for. “Goes out,” because even if it is toward the within that he goes, the God of the theist is outside of the realm of nature. Rumi the poet was committed to a theistic religious interpretation of God, and as he walked in the fields with His beloved, and as the case is with all mystics, he did not discover the presence, he believed it was there, and therefore he found it. In the religious mind, first comes the belief, then comes the confirmation. Sometimes it is said that we go on pilgrimage not to reach any particular site or master, but to find our own selves in the process. But aren’t our own selves that we carry with us for the journey? If we hope to return with a new-self, or as born again, we miss the essential point that a true pilgrimage does not take us anywhere outside of our own selves. The new we hope to find is not somewhere else: we pilgrim to the within by going to the in-between. A true pilgrim knows not what she might find, as there is no site she must reach, nor a master to sit by his feet. In true pilgrimage the destination is of no consequence. This was explained by Dogen when he wrote: “Do not ask me where I am going, as I travel in this limitless world, where every step I take is my home.” Similarly Thich Nhat Hanh said “There is no way home, home is the way,” therefore, in which direction we walk, and which destination we are hoping to reach, are of no consequence. Hanh said that every step we take is peace, but we need to remember that peace and home are every step only when we are able to forgo the wrong idea that pilgrimage must always be to a predetermined somewhere.

As Buber said: “all journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” For the pilgrim there is only one primordial journey from which all others derive: How to find the path to find our lost betweens? If one has found the answer and his pilgrimage has ended, it can only mean that the primordial question has eluded him. It is for this reason precisely that we were offered the insight to kill the Buddha if we 239 meet him on the road, for we must reject the giver of answers! We must embrace the pilgrim who holds our hands and walks together with us, not the one who holds our hands to take us on his own way. In life there is nothing easier than finding answers, nothing more dispiriting. The poet Machado taught us that life is like a pilgrimage over the waters of the sea, and the traces we leave behind are carved in the foamy bubbles of the waves: no one can follow us, as we cannot follow anyone, except, perhaps, for the dreams we are yet to dream.

Think of this: if in the course of your pilgrimage you suddenly realize that you have found the answer, and signs and miracles and all sorts of bells and whistles eagerly proclaim that your time has come to stop your journey and bow to the answer, this will probably be the most propitious time for you to take your stick in your hand and turn the other way. If we ever did pause it should be to reflect on the primordial question, not on the pretender-answer. We are sustained by faith and failed by beliefs, but we should not bow, for we cannot walk and bow at the same time. Nothing sadder in life than the sight of a pilgrim walking back. A pilgrimage ended is a thought we should never speak. A true pilgrim is one who comes from some place, not one who goes to some place. True Pilgrims don’t go anywhere, the only come from somewhere. But don’t ever ask a pilgrim where she came from: if lucky, she comes from where she is now. There is no joy like that of a pilgrim in the fields. No sadness like returning with your hands full. In Zen they say: “Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed, that is human.” To have a place of origin and to learn well how to come from it is the pilgrim’s most beautiful poem. All our lives we long to come from some place, but there is no delusion greater than the memories of places past, or the memory of places future. Pilgrims have no knowledge of future destinations, they only have colors and smells and tastes and melodies, albeit vague, of those places they came from. True pilgrims have no illusions and no saviors, all they own are one or two memories, and they’re very jealous about holding on to them. Let us celebrate the fact that the pilgrim only finds on the road that which he remembers from home.

True pilgrims walk on earth for they long for her touch. The touch of the earth, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, is the only miracle a pilgrim will encounter in his journey. The journey of life is to have a destination, but the pilgrimage of life is to have an origin. Our pilgrimage is to return to our lost betweens, but I know this well: to be a pilgrim one must have a place of birth, for otherwise, where will our place of death be? Some believe that every road had a road maker, but a pilgrim knows otherwise. As Machado the poet said, we make the road as we walk. Every maker had a maker before him, but the road is its own maker. Some believe that there is order on the road but chaos in the journey. The pilgrim knows otherwise: chaos is order and order is chaos. And something else, very important: a true pilgrim knows that he will never return to his place of birth, and that is true regardless of how many times he actually does. This we must repeat: a pilgrim who comes from no place has no right to call himself a pilgrim, and a pilgrim that starts on his way back it is simply because he has decided that this was her best time to die. Zen poet Dogen disapproved of journeys. He said: “if you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?” There are no places to go or times to do it, for as Dogen told us, our true pilgrimage is to be here right now. If we do that, we will be perennial pilgrims.

True pilgrims go not toward the within, not towards the without, they go toward the between, for it is his lost-betweens a pilgrim is searching for, and the only path to follow to find the lost betweens is to go toward the between. In other words, there is no path to the between, the between is the path. Dogen told us to look at pilgrimage not from within the place we have locked ourselves in, nor from the outside where we have locked ourselves out, but essentially, and literally, from nowhere: There is nowhere we need to be, “This is it,” and we already are “here and now.” Why walk in or out through the open door if we already are on the other side? Andre Breton said: “Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.” Nothing is It, all is Thou. Why search for love elsewhere if we are always only surrounded by it? This is true, but let us not make that one mistake our perennial pilgrimage depends on: Sometimes, to be here and now, we must first bake a few pieces of unleavened bread and leave promptly at dawn. Adam and Eve were not expelled from paradise, they walked out on pilgrimage. That was the original pilgrimage, and since then we are all, like them, in search of lost betweens. Why search for lost betweens we might ask? Why not other betweens? There is an improbable reason for this: The original pilgrimage, the one we have lost, was the first act of liberation of our spiritual imaginations. Our initial betweens created the Gods, the Buddhas, our spirits, our prophecies and our poetries, for those were moments of inception of deep poetic insights. What we created at those times and places, that which we reveled to ourselves, was desperately trying to find a name. We named it God, or Buddha, or spirit or poetry. What did those moments of inception consist of? We stood in the between of an I and a Thou.

No nameless moment was ever named from any insight other than the will to say Thou to a being and the grace of saying it again.

Martin Buber and Social Justice

2023-11-02T06:47:00.004-04:00

Martin Buber and Social Justice

Hune Margulies

Religions 2023, 14(11), 1342; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111342

Published: 24 October 2023

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Mysticism and Social Justice)

Abstract

Martin Buber’s seminal work is his “I and Thou”. In I and Thou, Buber establishes a philosophical foundation for the creation of a dialogical society. Buber’s concept of I–Thou dialogue provides a framework for understanding the inherent connection between interpersonal encounters and social justice. As Buber elucidates, genuine dialogue is not confined to the encounter between two persons, but it manifests in the manner of a society organized on premises of social justice, freedom and compassion. In this regard, it is important to note that if we trace Buber’s personal and philosophical biography we will not find many instances of him engaging in what could be called social justice activism. Buber did found and join civic organizations that dealt with issues of peace and justice, and lent his support to many such political endeavors (see the organizations called Brith Shalom (Covenant of Peace) founded in 1925 in mandatory Palestine, and Ihud (Unity) founded in 1942, six years before Israel’s statehood). Nonetheless, a number of world prominent social justice advocates and activists found inspiration and guidance in Buber’s philosophy, and it is perhaps hereby, where Buber’s impact on social justice is most distinctly pronounced. What Buber aimed to achieve in his writings and political endeavors was to present a philosophy of relationships on which to found a society established on practices of social justice.

Keywords:

Buber; dialogue; Zen Buddhism; liberation theology; religious socialism; social justice; libertarian socialism; mysticism; peace; engaged Buddhism; pure land Buddhism

1. Introduction

Martin Buber did not explicitly engage with the topic of social justice per se. Buber spoke of I–Thou as the mode of human relationships better able to actualize the whole-being humanity of each person, and as such, it constitutes the basis for a socially just and compassionate society. Buber spoke of two distinct modes of interconnection with one another and with the world: I–Thou relationships and I–It interactions. In a simplified way, we can say that I–Thou refers to any relationship in which the other is recognized as a subject, while in an I–It interaction, the other is approached as an object. Dialogue implies presence, and presence implies a willingness to disengage the other from its socially constructed attributes, therefore, strictly speaking I–It is not a relationship, it is an interaction.

Buber described his social philosophy with terms such as “Religious Socialism” and sometimes “Libertarian Socialism”. Buber’s primary development of his religious Libertarian Socialist ideas appears in his book “Paths in Utopia” (Buber 1996). At the outset, it is also essential to clarify that while Martin Buber speaks of religion, he should not be regarded as a “mystic” in the traditional sense of the term. As Paul Mendes Flohr aptly explains, Buber’s thinking evolved and shifted from mysticism to a philosophy of dialogue (Mendes-Flohr 1989, p. 7). For the purpose of understanding Buber’s philosophy, mysticism can be defined as the pursuit of a direct, inner and personal experience of the divine or ultimate reality1. Dialogue, in contrast, seeks the presence of God in and through the relationship with the other. Buber’s distinction between an I and a You is not a dualistic dichotomy, for the between of I and Thou is the non-dual realm of relationship. Buber said “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” In other words, God emerges from within the relationship. For Buber, the presence of God with us is always the presence of God between us, therefore, dialogue, in contrast to mysticism, does not seek to transcend the human realm of the here and now, but through the saying of Thou to all beings, dialogue recognizes the world and all its inhabitants as the realm of the sacred. Buber wrote “God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings. A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person has been created for.” We can ask, how can we become that which is already inherent in us? The answer is not in the realm of ontology. Similar to the concept of the inborn Buddha nature, it is necessary to awaken to our own humanity, and that requires the existential task of recognizing the others as Thou rather than It. Buber wrote “Our relationships live in the space between us which is sacred.” In Buber’s dialogical philosophy, the between of I and Thou is the sacred soil for the house of God, and in that house justice and compassion are its only inhabitants. The recognition that we already stand on God’s sacred land calls on us to transform the social structures of society to allow for the actualization of the kingdom of God (Mendes-Flohr 2008). In Buber’s terms, the kingdom of God is not a mystical land in heaven above, but a human society structured in response to the prophetic teachings of social justice, freedom and compassion. Buber’s social justice postulates lead him to advocate for a society built on what he referred to as “Religious Socialism”.2 But it is of the essence to understand that Buber’s “religion” was non-institutional and non-canonical (Moore 2016, p. 45), and by positing Religious Socialism, Buber emphasized the fundamental dialogical principle that amalgamates as one and the same one’s spiritual commitments with the task of actualizing in society policies of social and economic justice. For Buber, spirituality and social justice are, in effect, one and the same practice. In other words, from a dialogical perspective, we are not pursuing two separate practices, one being spirituality and the other social justice: in terms of Buber, integrating spirituality with social justice simply means that neither practice precedes nor follows the other, but both are conjoined into a single existential unit. If for Levinas, ethics are first philosophy, we can say that for Buber dialogue is first ethics and only then are ethics first philosophy.

Any being, human or otherwise, can be approached as either subject or object. In the case of human beings, there cannot be social justice during the interactions of I–It, for I–It is inherently unjust as it does not regard the other as a full and equal person, but primarily as an object of use (Margulies 2016, p. 77)3. For Buber, the enactment of I–Thou relationships in the day-to-day life of individuals and communities requires the creation of a social and economic system within which dialogue can both manifest and flourish. In this sense, Buber’s political thought belongs within the political and economic ideologies generally identified as embodiments of social justice.

In his Paths in Utopia, Buber offered a structural analysis that recognized that social injustice, oppression and inequity are deeply rooted in systemic and structural deficiencies4. Buber refuted economic systems that perpetuate I–It interactions, fostering inequality and injustice, and called for a critical examination of the underlying social, political, and economic structures that contribute to creation and perpetuation of injustice and oppression. Buber believed that addressing inequity and other forms of injustice required a commitment to systemic changes and the creation of new communities founded on dialogical practices. For Buber, social injustice is not only defined by material conditions, as the need for human community is an existential challenge that transcends strict economic considerations. He believed that addressing social injustice required a profound transformation of society and the reorientation of values away from I–It and toward the implementation of I–Thou. That is, a society built on community, compassion, and solidarity. Buber advocated for a holistic approach to injustice that encompasses both material betterment and social flourishing, aiming to create conditions where every individual will be able to realize their full human nature. From a dialogical perspective, the systemic impediments to justice cannot be addressed only through compassionate charity toward the poor, for what is required is the removal and transformation of those conditions that cause social injustice to emerge in the first place.

2. Mysticism and Dialogue

In order to comprehend Buber’s approach to social philosophy in general and social justice in particular, it is essential to clarify Buber’s distinction between mysticism and dialogue. The entire foundation of Buber’s philosophy stands on his rejection of mystical practices as essentially non-dialogical religious experiences. Buber wrote “What has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: this I is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes an I and Thou.” Buber’s dialogical philosophy represents his categorical distancing from previous mystical proclivities as reflected in his earlier books “Daniel” and “Ecstatic Confessions.” For Buber, dialogical deeds can be recognized not by recourse to mystical experiences, transcendental divine entities or exalted emotional contents, but only in the deeds themselves5. The similarities we find between Buber and many exponents of mystical traditions help to point at the essential distinction between mysticism and dialogue. There are general similarities between Buber’s philosophy of dialogue and the philosophies of mystics, theologians and thinkers, but for the most part, those are similarities without an equivalence. In Buber’s philosophy, the relationship of I–Thou is not a mystical encounter between two persons or with God, nor it is a relationship that requires the participants to rise to a spiritual and emotional level akin to an “ubermensch”6. In this regard, the work of Paul Mendes Flohr extensively explains Buber’s transformation from an adherent to mystical concepts and practices to a person devoted to the concepts and practices of dialogue. Buber speaks of I–Thou dialogue as the primordial moment of inception of all genuine spiritual revelations (Margulies 2022, p. 143). Mystical experiences have the potential to be transformative, shaking individuals out of complacency and sometimes igniting a desire for personal and societal change, but in themselves, these experiences are not dialogical in nature or practice. Mystics often emphasize the need for inner transformation as a precursor to external transformation, but the idea of a prior and posterior state of mind is inherently not dialogical, as genuine inner transformation occurs in the between of I and Thou. By cultivating qualities such as love, compassion and equanimity, individuals may be inspired to address social injustices and work toward a more just world, but from a dialogical perspective, there is no need for a precursive inner transformation, as the inner transformation will occur as we pursue the “outer” transformation. Both realms, the inner and the outer are not two separate dimensions of being, but rather one and the same7.

Buber’s dialogical perspective rejected the basic mystical assumption of “subsuming” the self into an all-encompassing unity within the divine. In the between of I and Thou there is no mystical dissolution of the self into the other or into the divine. Buber’s “Between of I and Thou” is not a mystical space of union or absorption of the self into the other, but it is precisely the space where we encounter the other, human or otherwise, in the fulness of its being. For Buber, God is not an abstract or distant deity, but a presence that emerges in the between of an I–Thou encounter. In the in-between encounter a person moves beyond both his ego-bound self, and his desire for a self-abolishing merger, and enters into a mode of genuine dialogue and presence. The between is the space of mutual encounter of a whole being I with a whole being Thou. It is in this relational space of authentic encounter that the pursuit of social justice is inherent to the deeds themselves. For Buber, God is not an object of knowledge or intellectual speculation, nor is God solely an inner experience, God is a deed we do, and that which we do is justice, love and compassion8. As discussed here, the recognition of God as the “between” has unavoidable implications for ethical action and social justice. If God emerges in the relational space of the I–Thou, then ethical conduct is the only essential manifestation of this encounter. Relating to others as Thou, with love, responsibility, dignity, and compassion becomes the act of recognizing the divine presence emerging in the between. The Hindu concept of “namaste,” is often interpreted as saying “the divine in me recognizes the divine in you,” but the dialogical approach takes this sentiment a step further by saying that the I and the Thou recognize the divinity not in each other separately, but between them. In this sense, the I–Thou relationship is inherently a practice of ethical behavior and social justice. The recognition of the sacred “between” compels individuals to address social injustices and work towards creating a more humane and egalitarian society. I–Thou dialogue is not a holy sacrament, it is a concrete, practical and quotidian deed we do, and it was this aspect of existential praxis that drew Buber to devote much of his intellectual oeuvre to describing and interpreting the early Hasidic way of life. And these “here and now” aspects of spiritual life can be likened to what in Zen is called an “ordinary mind,” that is, a deed-oriented spirituality emptied from the accruals of extraneous theological and conceptual hindrances9. Buber wrote “There is something that can be found in one place. It is a great treasure which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place where one stands.” Nothing in dialogical relationships is transcendental or mystical, it is simply a mindful renewal of genuine human community.

3. The Systemic Hindrances to I and Thou Relationships

From the perspective of Buber’s philosophy, the principal hindrances to a dialogical life are the social constructs that prevent us from putting into practice the genuine deeds of I–Thou dialogue. I–Thou dialogue requires the building of a social structure within which the hindrances to its actualization could be minimized, and as discussed here, Buber identified this structure as “Religious Socialism.” It is in this sense that Buber’s philosophy intersects with political ideas and programs. In other words, it is an error to regard Buber’s dialogue as encompassing solely a relationship between two participants, as that could be construed as a “monologue of two”10. Dialogue, in its concrete and practical implications, is an overall social project. Therefore, in order to be able to practice I–Thou relationships we must create a society within which dialogue can be made manifest. As Buber insisted, I–Thou is a relationship each person does in accordance to his abilities and circumstances11, emphasizing, as he did, that dialogue is not a dogmatic approach as there are no formulas or codes to proscribe the forms and contents of a dialogical relationship. Codifying relationships amounts to the adoption of an I–It approach to the practice of dialogue, the same as the codifying of our relationships with God in the form of institutional religion12. For this reason, we can say that since it is not possible to articulate in strict terms what I–Thou entails, in a sort of apophatic manner, we can try to describe what it is not. Every time we reduce the scope and reach of I–It, we are creating the space and the time of I–Thou13. In a similar vein, Paul Tillich wrote “Buber’s existential ‘I-Thou’ philosophy… should be a powerful help in reversing the victory of the ‘It’ over the ‘Thou’ and the ‘I’ in present civilization … The ‘I-Thou’ philosophy…challenging both orthodox and liberal theology, points a way beyond their alternatives” (Tillich 1948, p. 23). Buber viewed the creation of intentional communal societies and their integration into larger federative structures standing beside and apart from the state as resulting in a concrete reduction in the realm of the political in favor of the expansion of the realm of the social (Buber 1996). This emptying of the realm of Itness can be likened to what in Zen is known as the creation of “The pure land of the Buddha in the human realm”14.

When we extend the principles of the I–Thou relationship from the realm of the personal to the realm of the social we find that the practices of dialogue inherently manifest in the form of a just and equitable society. It could not be otherwise, for while the I–It interaction is a utilitarian and objectifying interaction between people and with nature as a whole, the I–Thou relationship recognizes the essential humanity of each person and emphasizes the inherent dignity and value of human beings as such. The I–Thou relationship emphasizes the recognition of each person’s inherent value and irreplaceable uniqueness. This confirmation of otherness is crucial for social justice, as it demands that we acknowledge the humanity of all individuals, regardless of their race, social utility, gender, caste, socioeconomic status, or any other socially constructed characteristics. The I–Thou relationship, being a deed we do, involves a deep sense of empathy and solidarity with oppressed individuals and communities. Dialogue calls for an irrevocable commitment to respect the experiences and struggles of others, standing alongside them in their pursuit of social justice, and actively working to dismantle the underlying systemic causes of oppression and discrimination. The dialogical praxis of social justice calls for the recognition of everyone’s equal rights and the implementation of those rights through the overturn of pre-existing hierarchies and systems of privilege. Dialogue confronts and addresses the structural injustices that perpetuate inequality and discrimination, striving for a more just and inclusive society. I and Thou requires concrete efforts to address and rectify systemic inequalities and oppression from the immediate realm of the personal to the overall realm of the social. The I–Thou relationship entails the responsibility to engage in ethical action toward the other, demanding that we actively work for the creation of a more just and equitable society15. The principles of love, empathy, and compassion inherent in the I–Thou relationship are precisely the manifestation of the values and goals of social justice16. By embracing the praxis of I–Thou and the delimiting of our I–It interactions with one another we contribute to the realization of social justice, equality, and human flourishing for all.

4. The Between

The concept of the between of I and Thou is Buber’s most fundamental dialogical principle. In Buber’s philosophy, the concept of God as and in the between of the I–Thou relationship is the foundation for the dialogical understanding of social justice. Without the concept of the between, I and Thou remains a relationship that does not necessarily expand from the realm of the interpersonal to the realm of the social (Buber 2002). Buber affirms that there is no I outside of a relationship, and that the I of the I–Thou is not the same as the I of the I–It17. In other words, borrowing from Zen language, there is no-self per se, there is only the emergence of a true-self in the between of I and Thou. Since only through a Thou one becomes an I, hence the irrevocable need to pursue and promulgate deeds of social justice. Conversely, there is an illusory-self, that is the ego, that emerges from the interactions of I–It. The implications of this distinction for Buber’s social philosophy is that the only way for the implementation of a socially just society is to facilitate the emergence of our innate true-selves through the practices of dialogical relationships (Margulies 2022, p. 18). The between is not a mystical absorbance of the I and the Thou into a unity that transcends and encompasses both, but a “narrow ridge”18 on which each participant firmly stands in the fullness of his own being. There is a distinction between ontological unity and existential otherness. From the perspective of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, we manifest the ontological wholeness of Being through the existential dialogue between I and Thou. Buber wrote “God is found near to the sphere that lies between beings, to the kingdom that is hidden in our midst, there between us.” Buber can be understood as arguing that from an existential perspective God is not only the third person in the between of I–Thou, but God, in all dialogical regards, is the between of I and Thou. This being the case, there can be no room in that between for any social policy not based on social justice. The between is akin to the environmental realm of the spiritual, and as such it requires protection and nurturing. The spiritual environment is protected through the transformation of the social realm from a capitalistic–consumerist society and into a dialogical realm of I–Thou relationships.

Buber’s in-between dialogical approach is the point of confluence when the personal, the social and the “spiritual” become one and the same. We find this non-dualistic approach in many sources within the Jewish religious traditions. One salient example is the founder of the Mussar movement, Rabbi Israel Salanter, who said: “My Spiritual needs are more important than my material needs, but the material needs of my neighbor are my spiritual needs19. Whether, in A. J. Heschel’s words, God is searching for us, or alternatively, we are searching for Her, from Buber’s perspective, it is the responsibility for the other that opens what Zen calls the “gate-less gate” to the true presence of God in our lives. In other words, in the between of I and Thou, inner transformation is one and the same with outer transformation.

We find this dialogical approach in many different spiritual traditions. Francis de Sales said “You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.” Richard Rohr understood the I–Thou and the process of dialogue in clear Buberian terms. Rohr wrote: “The in-between of things. Reality is radically relational, and all the power is in the relationships themselves! it sounds a lot like what we call holy spirit … we do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking” (Rohr 2015). In other words, from a Buberian perspective, we can not “prepare” for dialogue for we must let dialogue prepare us. While mystics who report to have directly encountered the divine may feel a responsibility to act as agents of change in the world, from a dialogical perspective, the agency is itself the encounter with God.

5. The I–It and Its Systemic Manifestations

In contrast to the essence of the I–Thou relationship, the I–It interaction is characterized by the relegation of individuals to their ultimate utilitarian value, and it is in the rejection of this type of social interaction that the I–Thou system of relationships becomes the embodiment of social justice. From a Buberian perspective, the most intractable hindrances to human liberation are of two kinds: the spiritual-systems we have invented to help us attain it, and the social systems that fragment our lives into times of genuine encounters and times delineated by the strictures of I–It social interactions20. Social justice and liberation cannot be partial, otherwise, what shall we call those times when we are not just or not liberated? There is no being partially just or partially free, there is only being partially unjust and fully in bondage. We should understand that Buber did not argue that social justice could only be achieved through the cultivation of authentic relationships, but to be precise, authentic I–Thou dialogue is itself the system of social justice we seek. In other words, there can be no social justice without I–Thou dialogue, and I–Thou dialogue remains empty of redemptory meaning if not extended from the personal to society as a whole.

Buber’s basic premises of dialogical spirituality mirror similar understandings within Zen Buddhism, namely, that genuine spirituality manifests not in mystical raptures, but in the deeds we do, in the between of I and Thou. That is to say, the life of the spirit, or the life of poetry, or even the life of the God, must be enacted in the ways we live our lives with each other and with the world, for spirit, poetry and God are the between of I–Thou (Margulies 2022, p. 97). Many practitioners and adherents of Zen have arrived at a similar understanding and organized themselves in various movements to advance issues in social justice and peace known as “Engaged Buddhism” (Thich 2017). From Buber’s dialogical perspective, we do not manifest spirituality by performing religious rituals, we manifest the spirit by embracing the neighbor, and we embrace the neighbor by entering into relationships of genuine communal structures founded on social justice. This type of spirituality is found in various degrees in all religious traditions. St. Francis of Assisi well said: “We teach the gospel, and if necessary we use words too.” That is to say, we manifest the presence of God by the ways of our relationship with the whole of existence. Indeed, if the realms of the spiritual, the poetical and the Godly are realms of relationship, we must understand that our human calling is to engage in the transformation of society. In Buber’s terms, we must transform society from a system based on I–It interactions to a community founded on I–Thou relationships.

6. Buber and Religious-Libertarian Socialism

Buber’s philosophy centers around the concept of dialogue, which he undertook to be the manifestation of genuine humanity, and believed that communitarian socialism possesses transformative potential in fostering understanding, empathy and authentic relationships. Buber distinguished between the realm of the political and the realm of the social, and by privileging the social over the political, Buber demanded the reduction in the scope of the state in the lives of individuals and communities (Buber 1996). The State, for Buber, whether in its capitalistic or soviet-style manifestations, was an impediment to the creation of genuine socialist communities, or as he himself put it: the alternative of his period was to choose between Moscow and Jerusalem (Buber 1996). As with the term “mystic,” it is important to note that Martin Buber should not be wholly associated with the conventional understanding of anarchism, a political ideology advocating for the abolition of hierarchical systems of power, in particular, those embodied in the institution of the state. Buber’s philosophy of dialogue shares commonalities with Anarchist principles, but only inasmuch as those reflect principles of communitarian socialism. Buber’s ideas resonate with key Anarchist concepts such as voluntary cooperation, decentralization and federation of cooperative communities, individual autonomy and social justice. Buber’s emphasis on horizontal relationships aligns with Anarchist principles of voluntary cooperation and the rejection of hierarchical authority. Anarchism advocates for the decentralization of power structures, recognizing that centralized authority often leads to oppression and inequality. Similarly, Buber’s philosophy emphasizes the reorganization of society as a federation of autonomous cooperative communities of production, distribution and mutual aid, and in this regard Buber saw in the incipient Kibbutz movement one example of the system he envisioned21. These cooperative communities are to be formed on the basis of social autonomy and the rejection of coercive power. The basic Anarchist argument against oppressive structures, including the state, capitalism and other hierarchical systems that perpetuate social injustice through inequality, echoes Buber’s proposals for the reconstruction of society along communitarian lines.

At the same time, Buber had an abiding interest in the importance of the philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism (Margulies 2022; Herman 1966). Similarly to Buber’s understanding of the function of I–Thou in the realm of the social, in “the Orient,” the importance of the actualization of awakening as deeds of engagement with the world is built into the fundamental dharmic goal of enlightenment22. In this context, there is an abiding similarity between Buber’s ideas concerning the implementation of the socially just communities in the present time with the Ch’an Engaged Buddhist doctrine of the Pure Land on Earth (Master Sheng Yen 2007). For Buber, as for Ch’an’s teachings concerning the Pure Land, the communal ideal is not a description of a mystical heaven, nor, in a more mundane sense, is it a project that needs to be postponed until after the overall social revolution has ensued. Buber’s social philosophy called for cooperative communities to be established aside and beside the existing non-dialogical social and economic system, and through their larger federative agreements start to replace the functions of the state thereby rendering it vacuous. In other words, Buber did not call for revolutionary action against the existing unjust systems of governance, but for their replacement through active projects of community building and their mutual affiliation into larger federations. The larger the federative entity the more powerful it will be to avoid and eventually replace the state.23 Similarly, Ch’an Master Sheng Yen’s “Buddhist Humanism” and its core teachings of Pure Land on earth are an explicit argument in favor of a Buddhism that is engaged in the “redemption” of the world in the “here and now.”24. For Sheng Yen, Amitabha’s Pure Land should not be understood as referring only to a transcendent realm of the spirit, something akin to a paradise or even para-nirvana, nor is it only a cultivated mind’s enlightened approach to the comings and goings of daily existence. Similar to Buber’s ideas on the possibility of creating communities within the current non-communal system, Sheng Yen explains that Pure Land is a concrete and practical goal attainable in our current lives through actions of social responsibility and mutual solidarity (Margulies 2022). Moreover, the Buddha’s eightfold path to human liberation includes the principles of right livelihood and right actions (Bhikkhu Bodhi 1984). These principles are not ancillary teachings but integral parts of the path itself. It is in this sense that Buber saw the early Kibbutz movement and their federation into larger federative units as exemplary attempts at socialist communitarianism. As Maurice Friedman writes “The most promising experiment in the Village Commune, according to Buber, has been that of the Jewish communes in Palestine. These have been based on the needs of a given local situation rather than on abstract ideas and theories. At the same time they have not been limited to the purely topical but have combined it with ideal motives inspired by socialistic and Biblical teachings on social justice (Friedman 1998, p. 120)”.

In “Paths in Utopia”, Buber studied Anarchist thinkers, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, but he chose not to engage with the writings of Bakunin. Buber’s political “teacher” was Gustav Landauer. Landauer argued for a Libertarian Socialism sharply contrasted to the more “direct action” Bakunin version, and most importantly, Landauer opposed the widespread Leninist version of state Socialism. Following Landauer, Buber was deeply critical of those embedded structures of oppression and social injustices that hindered the possibility of genuine I–Thou human relationships. Buber quotes Landauer’s statement “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” For Buber, capitalism and the state structures that sustain it, is the embodiment of the I–It system founded on the assignment of socially constructed monetary values to every human body and mind. As such, capitalism is a system that denies the essence of I–Thou relationships. Buber recognized in capitalism the detrimental effects of power imbalances, exploitation and dehumanization on individuals and communities.

7. Hebrew Humanism and Liberation Theology

Buber’s Hebrew humanism calls for compassionate responses to human suffering by addressing the systemic causes of injustice. Buber’s Hebrew humanism explored the paths by which religious and spiritual principles can inform and contribute to social and political transformation. Buber spoke from within his own Jewish cultural ancestry. As he once stated “I stand at my door and from there I speak to the world” (Buber 1990).

Buber did not explicitly define his philosophy within the framework of liberation theology, which is a tendency prevalent within the Catholic Church and some strands of European Protestantism, but he advocated a similar social vision concerning the need to organize society on principles of Religious Socialism. Buber’s social critique focuses on the I–It objectification of the other, where individuals and communities are reduced to means rather than ends. His call for authentic relational encounters challenges oppressive power dynamics by seeking to dismantle those systems that dehumanize and exploit. In this context, Buber’s ideas have had a visible impact on Catholic and Protestant liberation theology thinkers. Buber’s Religious Socialism and the doctrines of liberation theology share their emphasis on the belief that dialogue, faith, social justice and the pursuit of liberation for the oppressed are the essence of a genuine relationship with God25. The “founder” of liberation theology, Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez’s call for “a sacrament of the neighbor” (Gutierrez 1988; Boff 1987) is a Buberian call for a deep dialogical transformation of society. Buber’s influence on Protestant theologians has been significant and consequential. Many Protestant theologians who engaged with social justice issues have found Buber’s philosophy to be of consequence to their understanding of the social repercussions of the distinction between I and Thou and I and It. Similarly, teachings of “Dharmic Socialism” and “Engaged Buddhism” mirror the contents and aims of Buber’s Religious Socialism (Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu 1997).

Buber’s views were described as “Hebrew Humanism” (Bieman 2002). Buber spoke of a “Believing Humanism.” Buber’s views concerning dialogical philosophy and social justice are firmly rooted within biblical exegesis as well as within some of the Judaic homiletical traditions. Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, known as Maimonides, taught: “Anticipate charity by preventing poverty. Assist the reduced fellow man either by a considerable gift, or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade, or by putting him in the way of business, so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity’s golden ladder”. Here, there is no questioning of the specific circumstances that lead the fellow man to become “reduced”, and there is no demand to teach the person to earn his own livelihood rather than to give him a cash stipend. These views define the concrete application of the practices of “radical love”. Radical love implies the imperative to establish a society in which the need to provide charity to the disadvantaged members of our communities will no longer be necessary. In other words, the call is to radically change those social conditions that make charity necessary in the first place, and that is the true manifestation of radical love in the realm of the social.

In the biblical book of Deuteronomy (15:8) it is written: “You shall surely open your hand to the poor, and shall surely lend him sufficient for his need/lack, according as he needs/lacks”. The Talmud explains the phrase: “According to that which is lacking for the poor person, you are commanded to give him … if it is appropriate to give him bread, they give him bread; if dough, they give him dough, if to feed him, they feed him. if he is not married and wants to take a wife, they enable him to marry; they rent a house for him, and provide a bed and furnishings …” While the Torah does not specifically itemize the reasons for the fiery demise of Sodom and Gomorrah, the prophet Ezekiel found it necessary to explain the motives behind God’s decision to destroy the cities: “Behold this was the sin of Sodom. She and her daughters had pride, excess bread, and peaceful serenity, but she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy.”

One of Buber’s magisterial contributions to Jewish religiosity was his studies and explorations of the Hasidic movement, particularly its literary and folkloric expressions. In Hasidism, the highest rung of piety is to be a “Tzadik”, a practitioner of “tzedek”. The term tzedek denotes various different things, but in its Hebrew linguistic root it means social justice, and as such, it is mandatory by virtue of God’s own commandments. Deuteronomy (16:20) says “Justice, justice (tzedek, tzedek) you shall pursue”. Here, the word justice is repeated twice as a rare biblical literary tool for emphasis26. There are seventy-seven instances in the entire Torah where words are doubled up or repeated for emphasis. The prophet Amos inveighed bitterly against the exploitation of the poor and the weakest members of the community.

In general, the Hebrew Bible contains the very specific and radical social teachings of twenty-one prophets. The prophets admonished the people to implement in the here and now the social and personal laws of the kingdom of God on earth. In a similar vein as Sheng Yen’s teachings on the Pure Land, the prophets’ kingdom of God is not in heaven, it is in this earth, and within this kingdom there is only room for social justice for the poor and liberty for the oppressed, peace between nations, and generally, an ecologically conscious society. Within the context of Buber’s Hebrew humanism he emphasized the importance of the equitable distribution of resources, the elimination of structural inequalities and the empowerment of marginalized voices, such as was the case with the Palestinian population of pre-state Israel. Buber tirelessly worked for the creation of a bi-national Jewish–Arab republic rather than a Jewish state (Mendes-Flohr [1983] 2005). In this regard, Buber’s approach to the Jewish–Arab conflict was rooted on two foundations: the first was his overall anti-statist Libertarian tendencies. The second foundation was deeply rooted in biblical teachings regarding the equality of rights between citizens of the land and its migrants27. For Buber, the Palestinian Arabs were not foreign migrants to the land but fully rightful residents of the “land of two peoples”. Nonetheless, after the legal establishment of the State of Israel, Buber called on the newly formed Israeli government to relate to its Arab minority with policies and practices of social justice in the manner taught in the Torah. He demanded full civil rights and equality between Jews and Arabs.

In terms reminiscent of Buber’s I–Thou, Pope Francis speaks of creating a “culture of encounter” (Pope Francis 2016). As Paul Mendes-Flohr remarked, “Pope Francis uses Buber’s terminology about encounter and dialogue, but without explicitly mentioning Buber.” While not doctrinally an adherent of liberation theology, Pope Francis speaks of the Gospels of Jesus as teaching of caring and redemption for the poor and exploited. Francis said: “You pray for the poor, then you feed the poor: that’s how prayer works.” Compare this with Buber’s own words: “When people come to you for help, do not turn them off with pious words, saying, ‘Have faith and take your troubles to God.’ Act instead as though there was no God, as though there was only one person in the world who could help—only yourself.” In other words, it is incumbent upon us to take actual responsibility for the fate of those in need, for we are the fulfillers or deniers of prayer. One important figure within the liberation theology movement is Paulo Freire ([1967] 2007). Freire was influenced by Buber’s dialogical philosophy and its implications for social justice. Freire wrote: “Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality. If the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed.” In terms of both, dialogue as education and the need to change the structure of society in order to allow for dialogue to become a reality, Freire is echoing fundamental Buberian ideas.

A glaring example of Buber’s reach within liberation theology was the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” written by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this letter, King states: “Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an “I-it” relationship for the “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.” On 14 February 1965, Martin Buber added his name to a letter addressed to president Lyndon B. Johnson thanking him for the release from prison of Martin Luther King, and asking that the other 300 civil rights prisoners be promptly released as well28. Catholic social projects such as Dorothy Day’s workers cooperatives are exemplary experiments in Religious Socialism, inspired, to a great extent by Martin Buber’s philosophy29. The Catholic Workers movement is especially significant in that it was organized by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin as a federation of autonomous communities much in the way Buber envisioned society as a whole in his Paths in Utopia. Day studied and reflected on Buber’s philosophy as part of her own teachings on social justice, religion, cooperativism and Christian Anarchism. Thomas Merton, shortly before his untimely death, asked himself to judge his own life in light of Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. Merton wrote that in light of what he perceived to be “the hollowness and falsity of my life…my business is to verify Buber’s (spirituality) with my own” (Merton 1999). In liberation theology, there is an effort to reconcile religious beliefs and values with Socialist principles, such as economic equality, social justice and collective ownership of resources. For Buber, non-political socialism and non-institutional religion are integral parts of the renewal of society along dialogical principles. Buber wrote: “Religion without socialism is disembodied spirit and, therefore, not genuine spirit; socialism without religion is body emptied of spirit and, hence, also not genuine body. But—socialism without religion does not hear the divine address; it does not aim at a response. Still it happens that it responds; religion without socialism hears the call but does not respond” (Buber 1996). Neither can be alive.

In summary, Religious Socialism, as advocated by Martin Buber, seeks to reconcile religious practices with the pursuit of social justice through the transformation of societal structures. Buber’s Religious Socialism argues that spirituality and social responsibility are intertwined and that the ideals of compassion, justice and solidarity are integral to a faithful life. As Buber’s philosophy emphasized the significance of dialogue and genuine encounters in the pursuit of social justice, he believed that transformative social change could only occur through a renewal of spiritual creativity and communitarian association. Buber’s Religious Socialism addresses economic inequality, exploitation of workers and human rights. He criticized capitalism for perpetuating social divisions and its commodification of human beings. Buber advocated for social and economic systems that foment and sustain I–Thou relationships, those that prioritize the well-being of all individuals and promote the equitable distribution of resources. He envisioned a society where economic relationships are grounded in solidarity, cooperation and shared responsibility.

8. Conclusions

Buber has had a significant impact on the discourses of social justice and peace throughout the world. Buber insisted on the fact that spirituality and social justice coalesce as one and the same practice, as there can be no genuine spiritual life outside of the I–Thou relationship. The interconnectedness of all that exists is what Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh called the practices of “inter-being”, which in Buberian terms is the between of I and Thou. Hanh, the Buddhist, did not speak of no-being or intra-being, but of a being grounded in the relationship with one another and all beings. In Buber’s words, “At the beginning it was the relationship, and all real life is encounter” (Buber 1971). By integrating as one and the same spiritual insights with a commitment to social justice, individuals and communities can work toward the creation of a more just, compassionate and equitable world. Buber’s advocacy of religiosity instead of religion serves as a wellspring of inspiration and guidance for the pursuit of personal transformation through I–Thou relationships, and for those relationships to serve as collective efforts to address systemic injustices. In conclusion, we can say that Buber’s philosophy of dialogue is best understood by positing that dialogue precedes existence and then existence precedes essence. Buber’s philosophy can be summarized by the realization that we should not seek God above or below, not in the spirit or the flesh, for God is not an entity anywhere. God is the between of I and Thou, and that between is the actualization of a society built on freedom, radical love and social justice (Margulies 2022).

Notes

1	Mysticism is also understood as achieving a unity of the self with the self of the divinity. The aim is the obliteration of the self and its subsuming within the “self” of the godhood. Buber maintained a fluid exchange on this topic with Gershom Scholem. Scholem’s studies on Jewish mysticism, even as he defined it as a “revival of the mythic,” which seems to coincide with Buber’s interest in Hasidism in terms of legend or folklore, diverted from Buber’s approach to Dialogue as the foundation of religious experience. See (Scholem 1971).
2	See (Friedman 2002). The mature expression of Buber’s concern with realizing the divine through true community is the religious socialism which he developed in the period immediately after the First World War. This development was decisively influenced by the socialism of Buber’s friend Gustav Landauer, the social anarchism of Michael Kropotkin, and the distinction between ‘community’ and ‘association’ in Ferdinand Tönnies’s work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Community (‘Gemeinschaft’) Buber defines as an organic unity which has grown out of common possessions, work, morals, or belief. Association (‘Gesellschaft’) he defines as a mechanical association of isolated self-seeking individuals. It is an ordered division of society into self-seeking individuals held together by force, compromise, convention, and public opinion.
3	See Note 28 Martin Luther King ’s letter from a Birmingham jail.
4	In Paths in Utopia Buber wrote ”Seen from another angle this difference may be clarified still further. When we examine the capitalist society which has given birth to socialism, as a society, we see that it is a society inherently poor in structure and growing visibly poorer every day. By the structure of a society is to be understood its social content or community-content: a society can be called structurally rich to the extent that it is built up of genuine societies, that is, local communes and trade communes and their step by step association” (Buber 1996).
5	In 1906, Buber published Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nahman. One of the fundamental points of Buber’s understanding of Hasidism was precisely the insistence on the role of community and the quotidian life of the hasid as both the means toward and the expression of the relationship with God (Buber 1906).
6	Buber wrote “What good is the ecstasy of a religious experience if it caused me to miss a chance to save a desperate fellow human at my door?”.
7	In his Hasidism and Modern Man, Buber (1958) wrote “To begin with oneself but not to end with oneself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself”.
8	Buber wrote: “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings”.
9	See the Zen dialogue between Master Nansen and Joshu, Joshu asked “What is the Way?” “Ordinary mind is the Way,” Nansen replied. “Shall I try to seek after it?” Joshu asked. “If you try for it, you will become separated from it,” responded Nansen. “How can I know the Way unless I try for it?” persisted Joshu. Nansen said, “The Way is not a matter of knowing or not knowing.
10	It is of interest to note that Jacob Levy Moreno, the founder of the school of psychodrama, offered a critique of Buber’s Dialogical philosophy as a “monologue of two.” In a similar vein, Viktor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy argued that Buber’s dialogue does not transcend itself outside of the dyadic relationship. Both these observation underscore a lack of understanding of Buber’s dialogical philosophy as essentially a community oriented practice.
11	Buber wrote “In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you”.
12	Buber wrote “I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience”.
13	Buber wrote: “It is indeed true that there can be no life without injustice. The fact that there is no living creature that can live and thrive without destroying another existing organism has a symbolic significance as regards our human life. But the human aspect of life begins the moment we say to ourselves: We will not do more injustice to others than we are forced to do to exist”.
14	See Master Sheng Yen A Pure Land on Earth, Dharma Drum Monastery [2007] “The concept of a pure land on Earth is no illusion or fantasy, like a castle in the air. Rather, it is a reality that each and every one of us can experience in real life. The intention of building a pure land on Earth is not to move the pure lands of the Buddhas in other parts of the universe to Earth, nor does it set out to manifest on Earth of today the scenery of pure lands as described in the Amitabha Sutra, the Medicine Buddha Sutra, the Akshobhya Buddha’s Land Sutra, and the Sutra of Maitreya’s Descending to Our World. Instead, it applies the concepts of the Buddhadharma to purify people’s minds, and applies the exemplary lifestyle of Buddhists to purify our societies. By means of purifying our thoughts, life, and minds and by putting in step-by-step, persistent endeavor, we work to achieve the purification of the social and natural environment. The Buddha Land Chapter in the Vimalakirti Sutra states, “By relying on the Buddha’s wisdom, one can see that the land of this Buddha is pure. Once we look at the world with the Buddha’s wisdom, we will perceive that the pure land is everywhere”.
15	Buber wrote “Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling – the equality of all lovers…”.
16	As Cornell West said” Justice is how love looks like in public”.
17	In his I and Thou, Buber (1971) wrote “Through the Thou a person becomes I” and The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It.
18	Buber’s use of the term “narrow ridge” was inspired by the dictum of rabbi Nahman of Bratslav who said “all of life is a very narrow bridge: but the most important thing is never to be afraid”.
19	When Buber speaks of God as the “Third Person” in a genuine I-Thou relationship it should not be understood as “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20). Buber’s third person is not an outside addition to the relationship, it is the relationship itself, for there is no third person outside of the relationship.
20	Buber wrote “Nothing so tends to mask the face of God as religion; it can be a substitute for God himself”.
21	In Paths in Utopia Buber (1996) wrote “One element in these reasons has been repeatedly pointed out: that the Jewish Village Commune in Palestine owes its existence not to a doctrine but to a situation, to the needs, the stress, the demands of the situation. In establishing the “Kvutza” or Village Commune the primary thing was not ideology but work. This is certainly correct, but with one limitation. True, the point was to solve certain problems of work and construction which the Palestinian reality forced on the settlers, by collaborating; what a loose conglomeration of individuals could not, in the nature of things, hope to overcome, or even try to overcome, things being what they were, the collective could try to do and actually succeeded in doing. But what is called the “ideology” I personally prefer the old but untarnished word “Ideal” was not just something to be added afterwards, that would justify the accomplished facts. In the spirit of the members of the first Palestinian Communes ideal motives joined hands with the dictates of the hour; and in the motives there was a curious mixture of memories of the Russian Artel, impressions left over from reading the so-called “utopian” Socialists, and the half unconscious after-effects of the Bible’s teachings about social justice. The important thing is that this ideal motive remained loose and pliable in almost every respect.
22	In 1910, in his translation to German of Chuang Tzu’s parables, Buber states: “Amid our theories of races and cultures, our time has lost sight of the old knowledge that the Orient forms a natural unity, expressed in its values and workings. That despite their differences the peoples of the East possess a common reality that sunders them in unconditional clarity from the destiny and genius of the West.” Also, in 1976, Maurice Friedman wrote that “Martin Buber’s encounter with Asia is an important one. Until his death he remained actively concerned with comparative mysticism. Although Asian studies was not his great central field of scholarship, he was for years professor of Comparative History of Religion at the University of Frankfurt and did, in fact, deal in scholarly manner with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. His concern with mysticism in Taoism, Hinduism and Zen, and with Eastern thought, became a study in dialogue. It was an integral part of his path”.
23	In Paths in Utopia Buber (1996) states “Proudhon by no means fails to recognize that “the real problem to be solved for federalism is not political, but economic”. “In order to make the confederation indestructible,” he says, “economic right must be declared the foundation of federative right and of all political order”.
24	Sheng Yen stated “In modern times Master Taixu advocated Humanistic Buddhism and promoted the Maitreya Pure Land. Venerable Master Dongchu, my late teacher, carried on this thought to found Humanity Magazine, and upheld the cause of Humanistic Buddhism. The advocacy of Venerable Master Yinshun (1906–2005) that “the Buddha was in the human world” is based on the saying of the Ekottara-Agama Sutra that “all Buddhas come from the human world.” I have followed in the steps of the sages of the past to advocate the pure land on Earth. In addition to expressing in various ways the viability of building a pure land on Earth, I have also given lectures on the topic to articulate the necessity of building a pure land on Earth.
25	It is of note to state that Buber’s liberation theology should also be understood as Buber liberating God from theology. Margulies (2022).
26	See Buber’s two tomes of Tales of the Hasidim, his Legend of the Baal Shem and The Tales of Rabbi Nahman.
27	“You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:19.) “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:34) “Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.’ Then all the people shall say, ‘Amen!” (Deuteronomy 27:19).
28	The text of the letter: Jerusalem, 14 February 1965. Dear Mr. President, We are taking the liberty to express our deep satisfaction that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is now again a free man and can continue his righteous fight for the equality of his people, a fight to which you Mr. President, have given your full assistance. We are not equally sure that all of the other emprisoned [sic] 300 liberty fighters have meanwhile been released. If this suspicion should prove correct, we submit that urgent steps should be taken to return all of them as soon as possible to their families. Believe us, Mr. President, Respectfully yoursProfessors at the Hebrew University Jerusalem.
29	The last lines of Dorothy Day’s autobiography explain this thought further: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.” This third chapter of Day’s “rhetoric of defiance and devotion” develops within this context of Day’s Community: its participants, costs, conflicts, motives and its more than abundant controversies. While Dorothy Day, in the capitol of the United States was praying for a community which would allow her access to mutuality of purpose, on the other side of the Atlantic, Martin Buber, was planning his dream of a homeland populated by those who might recognize the personal experience of the “I-Thou” encounter which then might be translated into the public experience of communal living. While not suggesting Buber as a constant Day mentor, Day, herself, later described Martin Buber as “admirable for his community experiments in Israel” and she often identified him as “the only modern writer who held out a hope for a modern voluntary community as a place where men and women could live in love and the happiness which God intended for them” (Day, Selected writings). See Fitzwilliams (2009).

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My Article in Outlook India: Israel-Gaza

2023-11-02T06:15:00.008-04:00

https://www.outlookindia.com/international/religion-terror-nationalism-magazine-325668

21 OCT 2023 7:20 AM

There is a famous dictum that argues that history is written by the victors. But that is utterly untrue. The vanquished have also written history. The question to resolve is not who writes the history, but who teaches it. If we follow the model that there are always two sides to each issue, we know that each side will put forward a specific context to fit their desired narrative. A false context becomes a pretext for explaining, and sometimes justifying, episodes of history or present-day conflicts. We must therefore understand that there is a right to present a context to a conflict, but there is never a context that can explain or justify atrocities and crimes against humanity. Never will the vanquished resort to crimes against humanity, for those crimes will be the source of their eternal vanquishing. The vanquished will one day triumph, but only if the human likeness of their struggle is held firm in the winds of history. All nation states that exist today are founded on the perceived inherent rights conferred to shared ancestral commonalities. Those ancestry attributes can be biological, historical or simply political, but what all of them share in common is the manipulative illusion that ancestry determines the present and the future. A blood ethnicity is a biological fact that is as relevant to shared communal experiences as would be body weight or a preference for red wine over Goan feni. We would certainly not think of creating a nation-state on the basis of shared weight and vinophile predilections. We prefer to use blood referents and historical narratives to designate national groupings and assert territorial claims. Sometimes it is a shared religion that prompts us to gather as a nation and separate ourselves from others who do not belong to the beloved faithful. Can we accept the premise that human groups have an inherent right to a nation-state and a territory under their control because they share the same religion? In other words, can religion be the basis upon which to build a national state? The answer to that question depends on the context of time and space within which it is formulated. Are nations more just when the basis to their commonalities is blood-ethnicity? Is a shared past, narrated by those who control its teaching, a proper attribute for nationhood? We do not seem to have an answer to the question whether the continuum ethnicity-culture-territory is a fact of nature or a construction of power and domination.

Let us think of the current situation in the Middle East. Israel and the Palestinians are struggling against each other on the basis of two separate and conflicting contextual narratives. Both narratives are true, and that fact is the source of the pain and the tragedy. Both peoples are equally vanquished and victors and both are victims and victimisers, warriors and peacemakers. From a philosophical perspective, we should know that peace ought not be held as a goal, for peace is the means and the only path to the goal. That which cannot be accomplished through peace, should not be pursued. If national liberation and social justice are the goals, violence will not build them, it will only destroy them. In other words, only peace can give birth to liberation and justice. In this context, we must affirm that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and people must end forthwith, and at the same time, the Palestinian resort to terrorism as a method of struggle must also be forfeited forthwith. What context can excuse terrorism while justifying national liberation? But part of the tragedy in this conflict is that each side defines “terrorism” in different ways. In the Middle East, the methods applied and the goals they aspire to are themselves in conflict against each other. Therefore, in light of the current events in the Middle East, it is essential to establish a clear factual context. Disconnecting a text from its context offers the perfect excuse for a dishonest pretext. Likewise, disconnecting facts from their historical context gives the controllers of the teaching of history the opportunity to spread murderous calumnies.

In 1936, the pacifist Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, wrote an extended letter to Mahatma Gandhi on the subject of Zionism and the Jewish right to return and resettle in their ancestral homeland. The Mahatma did not respond. Gandhi had previously written that the Jews should apply ahimsa and let themselves be slaughtered by the Nazis rather than self-defend by means of armed resistance. It took a few years of witnessing the tragic horrors of the Holocaust before Gandhi wrote of the “satanic fury” unleashed on the Jews by the evil Nazis. Buber disagreed with Gandhi on this issue, but for Buber, Gandhi remained a beloved guide and inspiration. Five years after the end of World War II and the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis and their allies, the Jewish State of Israel was established in what the colonial powers, since Rome through the Ottomans and the British, named Palestine. In the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) and the Christian Bible (the New Testament), the same land was variously known as Canaan, kingdom of Judea and kingdom of Israel. Buber had argued throughout the entire war and beyond that rather than establishing an ethnic Jewish state, the whole of Palestine should become a joint secular and democratic bi-national republic of Jews and Arabs. For Buber, religion or ethnicity are not legitimate foundations upon which to build a nation state. At the time, however, not many Jews or Arabs subscribed to that idea, and the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, was approved by a United Nations (UN) resolution in 1947. India and Pakistan became a model for how to attempt to resolve in practical terms two distinct and uncompromising adversarial national claims. The Jewish government at the time accepted the UN partition resolution, but the Arab side rejected it and war ensued. After the 1948 “war of independence” ended, what the Palestinians refer to as “the Nakba,” the armistice lines stayed in place until 1967. During the war, residents became refugees and civilians became “collateral damage.” That is the law of war: loss of life, limb, property and land, and after all is said and done, what remains is suffering, misery and the memory of oppression. As a result of the war, a large number of Palestinians as well as a large number of Jews from Arab countries became refugees, but in contrast to the Jews, many of the Palestinian refugees still remain dispossessed and exiled until the present times. We ask: after so many wars, can there finally be a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian people? A number of Arab and Muslim nations have already made peace with Israel and more seem to be heading in that direction. But this is of the essence to understand: in 1996, Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was recognised by the UN as the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, signed a peace treaty with Israel. The PLO recognised the state of Israel. At that time, the hope for a Palestinian state alongside Israel was revived and celebrated by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians. However, after Arafat’s demise, the PLO was militarily challenged by a new Palestinian radical Islamist organisation. That was the birth of Hamas and their takeover of the Gaza Strip away from the PLO’s rule. Hamas inscribed in its foundational charter that Palestine is an exclusive Muslim land and therefore no Jewish state can or will be allowed to exist. Hamas believes that religion is the only foundation for nation building, and in that sense, this exclusionary principle is a clear and manifest definition of apartheid. Hamas refused to sign the PLO’s peace agreement with Israel and has continued since to engage in armed attacks and other acts of terrorism against Israel and also against their PLO rivals. The Hamas government in Gaza draws its power mainly from the support of other radical Muslim sources, primarily Iran. Iran defines itself as an Islamic republic, again, using religion as the shared attribute for nation building, and again, founding a nation on the basis of principles of apartheid.

The Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, should not be seen as a continuation of the struggle of dissident factions within the Palestinian people against the state of Israel; for the scope of Hamas’ terrorist incursion into Israel was a radical departure from the norms of conflict and resistance. National Liberation And Terrorism Are Irreconcilable Opposites. Those Struggling For Revolution Must Uphold Revolutionary Values During The Struggle As They Would After Victory. The Palestinian people are rightfully frustrated, angry and suffering, and their hope for independence seems to be drifting farther away every day, and that is a rightful context from which to draw hopes and policies. For there is indeed a right to resist, but there is no right to rape women, to kidnap elderly ladies, to kill a mother, father and their three little children, to shoot at a crowd of dancing concert goers and to take babies as hostages. There is no right to murder 1,000 civilians in civilian towns and venues. That was the ISIS and Al-Qaeda war machine, never the Palestinian. In 1997, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) found it necessary to issue an apology to the people of South Africa for acts of terrorism committed against civilian South Africans. The ANC wrote: “We regret the deaths and injuries to civilians arising from armed actions. We apologize to the next-of-kin for the suffering and hurt.” The context of Mandela’s struggle is right and justified, but Mandela recognised that their methods were not in accordance with the goals of justice, equality and democracy. Likewise, during the worst of the oppression and repression of Black people in America, many Black leaders announced that they will fight discrimination “by all means necessary,” but Martin Luther King refused to permit the use of violence under all and any circumstances. The Black struggle in America was right and justified, but the methods, according to King, needed to remain within the bounds of humanity and holiness. Of course, Israel’s violent repression of Palestinians in the occupied territories is reprehensible, but after October 7, the moral equivalence has been shattered. From Mahatma Gandhi, Mandela, King and many others, we learned that never should a crime against humanity be considered a tool of resistance. Always and forever we must distinguish between a particular cause and the methods it utilises. Whatever the cause might be, whatever the grievances against another country, party or institution, the way of fighting determines whether the fighter is right or wrong, whether the fighter is a true resistor or a practicing fascist. There is a context to the struggle but never to the method of violence against civilians, never to the method of crimes against humanity. Hamas is clearly and indisputably wrong, and after October 7, its continued existence is a victory for fascism everywhere. Those of us who support the cause of peace, that is, two states for two peoples side by side in peace and friendship, must support the vanquishing of Hamas, its financiers and suppliers. On the other side of the border—those of us who yearn for peace and democracy—must hasten the end of the extremist right-wing, fundamentalist and messianic government of Israel. National liberation and terrorism are irreconcilable opposites. Those struggling for revolution must uphold revolutionary values during the struggle as they would after victory. Terrorism is the weapon of choice of fascism and of pseudo-religious fundamentalism. National liberation, decolonisation and revolution, have one sworn enemy: terrorism. Those of us who support the rights of the Palestinian people for a sovereign nation of their own, and wish that nation to be established alongside the sovereign nation of Israel, must unequivocally condemn and loathe the latest round of terrorist murders and kidnappings of civilians inflicted by Hamas on the people of southern Israel. We need to begin to reconsider which are the proper foundations upon which to build human societies: from history we witness how race, religion, ethnicity, shared historical narratives and political programmes have all given us war, suffering and tragedy. Perhaps a more expansive and enlightened view of humanness may be the proper and most fruitful foundation for human nation building.

May peace prevail now and forever.

An Encounter between Engaged Pure-Land Buddhism and The Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber

2023-08-28T05:59:00.005-04:00

An Encounter between Engaged Pure-Land Buddhism and

The Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber

Hune Margulies

There is an age-old tradition in Buddhism that emphasizes the need to translate dharma teachings into social engagement. Or perhaps we could say: there is an attempt to warn practitioners against the de-emphasizing of the social engagement aspects of buddhadharma. A right understanding of buddhadharma rejects the duality between the realm of the individual and the realm of the social. Both realms are one and the same. In other words, from the perspective of Engaged Buddhism, a dharma that does not create a dharmic society will not create dharmic individuals. Neither practice precedes nor follows the other, they are both one and the same. Both strands of dharma practice, the engaged and the one that does not emphasize engaging in social activism, have grown organically from within the seeds of buddhadharma, but as the case is with all religious or spiritual movements, we can also find mutual influences straddling in both directions.

The Dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber represents a creative confluence between western spiritual Humanism and some forms of Zen Buddhism. In this sense I argue that Buber’s concept of the God as the between of I and Thou, with some obvious cultural reservations, is a view of spirituality that resembles in many respects the teachings of engaged Buddhism, and particularly, the Pure Land teachings of Master Sheng Yen. Master Sheng Yen’s school of Amitabha Buddha, places the spiritual emphasis in the practice of a Pure Land of compassion, justice, peace, and ecological responsibility, all fully implemented during this life on earth. And that is so not regardless of human life's inherent impermanence, but essentially because of it. We argue that in the teachings of Master Sheng Yen, we find the Buddha and awake to our innate Buddha nature in the compassion, love and dignity we bestow on humanity and the planet. Within the Judaic tradition, the Dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber is a non-institutional, non-religious attempt to define the spiritual realm as the encounter of I and Thou. Dialogical philosophy argues that God, as the summon bonum of the spiritual quest, is not above in the realm of a transcendent heavens, but rather, God is the between of an I and a Thou. In other words, similar to Pure Land, I and Thou dialogue is a social practice. The Dialogical practices of I and Thou are translated in the social realm in the form of a Dialogical society akin in essence to the Buddha’s Pure Land on earth. In contrast to Christianity, in Buddhism we are not born with original sin but with original Buddhahood, and only through dharmic relationships with one another we can actualize the Buddha nature inherent in our own beings. To be concerned only with one’s own salvation is to negate the true salvific power of the Buddhadharma. In the western world, generally speaking, we observe that the knowledge of Buddhism is often focused on those teachings that can plausibly be conflated with psychological theories.

In other words: interest in Buddhism is directed primarily toward particular aspects regarded as useful “mind therapies.” Buddhism is seen as a skillful means to help calm the mind in the turbulence of daily life. This is a Buddhism understood mainly as a teaching for internalizing quiet forbearance in the face of suffering and personal losses. Fundamental Buddhist concepts such as suffering and the 1 cessation of suffering, non-attachment, no-self, impermanence, tonglen, karma, and even non-violence, are given psychological interpretations, often at odds, or only partially connected to their original doctrinal intent. One example is the common misunderstanding of the concept of karma. Karma is not Calvinist predestination, it is the concept of human responsibility extended to its ultimate essence as causes and effects. Karma teaches that we are free to choose our actions and the causes of our actions, but we must know that we are not free to avoid their consequences. The Eightfold Path teaches precisely how to ensure our karma remains within the bounds of positive outcomes. However, clearly, Buddhism is more than breathing exercises after supper, or sitting on a cushion while the kids are texting their schoolmates. To this effect let us examine the case of Ch’an Master Sheng Yen’s engaged Buddhism teachings concerning the Pure Land on earth. Sheng Yen teachings are an explicit argument in favor of a Buddhism that is engaged in the "redemption" of the world in the “here and now.” For Sheng Yen, Amitabha’s Pure Land should not be understood as referring only to a transcendent realm of the spirit, something akin to a paradise or even para-nirvana, nor is it only an individual’s cultivated mind's enlightened approach to the coming and goings of daily existence. Sheng Yen explains that Pure Land is a concrete and practical goal attainable in our current lives through actions of social responsibility and mutual solidarity. Tracing his school’s lineage Master Sheng Yen stated: “I have followed in the steps of the sages of the past to advocate the Pure Land on Earth. In addition to expressing in various ways the viability of building a Pure Land on Earth, I have also given lectures on the topic to articulate the necessity of building a Pure Land on Earth.”

The emphasis on a Pure Land on earth is a foundational principle of Sheng Yen’s engaged Buddhism, and clearly defines the unique redemptory content embedded in Buddhist practice. As Sheng Yen taught, a correct understanding of buddhadharma rejects the duality between the realm of spiritual practice and that of social engagement. Both realms, the spirit and the social, are a unified field of practice. Therefore, as he explains, in order to perfect the “spiritual environment” we must perfect the social and natural environments, and, at the same time, in order to perfect the social and natural environments we must perfect the mind. There is no dharmic distinction that allows for the separation of the human mind from the human relationships with the social, natural and living realms of existence. All sentient and insentient beings are dharma, and all are the indivisible inter-being parts of the body of the Buddha and the radiant soil in Amitabha’s Pure Land on earth. In other words: The practices of dharma is to tend to the body of the Buddha. We can ask: If all the earth is the Buddha Land, why are some people still feeling vexations and conducting themselves in unenlightened ways? The answer is that the task of the Buddhist practitioner is to be engaged with society to help it see the dharmic light that dispels the samsaric darkness blinding our ability to see the beauty of the soil on which we stand. Master Sheng Yen’s teachings of Pure Land on earth resembles older teaching of Master Dogen. Dogen Zenji said "Handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf… The color of the mountains is Buddha's body, the sound of running water is his great speech.” We learn dharma by practicing a dharmic relationship with all beings. The environment is the dharma and the body of the buddha, therefore Buddhist practice relates 2 intrinsically to the creation of a Pure Land on earth. Since all of life on earth depends on our ability to be conscious of the consequences of our deeds and of the compassion we offer one another, it is imperative to be proactive in the protection of the physical and the spiritual environments.

Dogen relates this story: “Once a monastic asked the Tang Dynasty Chinese National Teacher, Nanyang, ‘Do the insentient understand the expressing of the Way?’ The National Teacher said, ‘They express the Way continually, energetically, ceaselessly.” Dharma is everything that exists, and all that exists seeks to be engaged with everything that lives, therefore, in order for nature to teach and express, and for us to learn from her, it is incumbent upon us to protect and tend to it. This is a central tenet of engaged Buddhism. The Pure Land teachings of engaged Buddhism are a social philosophy flowering from within the lotus ponds of buddhadharma. I argue that a correct understanding of the concepts of Metta and Karuna underlies the practices of Pure Land Engaged Buddhism, and it is in this regard that I deem Buddhism to be of immense importance for the reconstruction of genuine spirituality within all traditions of the east and the west. In studying the origins of Engaged Buddhism we can refer to the text of the Metta Sutta. The Metta Sutta places an emphasis on Metta as a social practice of relationship with all-beings, or in other words, it is a teaching about engagement with the world. Observe the following verses: “Let him cultivate boundless thoughts of loving kindness towards the whole world, above, below and all around, unobstructed, free from hatred and enmity. Whether standing, walking, seated or lying down, as long as he is awake, he should develop this mindfulness. This, they say, is the divine abiding here.” That the divine (or the sublime in some translations) is said to abide in the deeds of loving kindness toward one another is a foundational concept in teachings of engaged practice, as it is in Dialogical philosophy and in many different spiritual traditions. For Martin Buber the divine resides precisely in the between of I and Thou, and the between is defined as the practice of deeds that actualize loving kindness. Buddha said: "Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the practice life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, and comrades, he can be expected to develop and pursue the noble eightfold path.” In other words, an enlightened community, that is, a sangha, is itself the Pure Land, for community is not only the means to the goal, but it is the goal itself. This is consistent with Buber’s idea that genuine spirituality is the practice of dialogue in community, or as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, enlightenment is in the “interbeing.” These insights into engaged practice compels us to explore the ways in which Metta and Karuna are to be implemented in the social realm.

Metta and karuna are not only emotional contents or moral commitments, they are first and foremost deeds of engagement with one another and with all beings. We ask: how does engaged Pure Land Buddhism become a daily living practice? As we can see, each term used in the Metta Sutta recitations has a corresponding deed of implementation. The right understanding of metta is to actualize awakening as deeds of engagement with the world. This understanding is built into the fundamental dharmic goal of enlightenment, and this is consistent with the basic teachings of Pure Land, as for Buddhism reaching understanding is not only an intellectual exercise, but it is to become awakened and to manifest this awakening as deeds 3 of compassion. In other words: dharma is a whole-being enlightenment consciousness. This whole-being understanding is the same practice as the biblical concept of “da’at.” In the biblical book of genesis it is told that Adam “knew” Eve and then they conceived their first child. Da’at is a teaching of knowing through loving, as opposed to the partial knowing that results from intellectual inquiry alone. The teaching of wrong understanding in the Eightfold Path, is not only a reference to intellectual failures, but essentially, it is a reference to the wrong manner of practicing buddhadharma in the realm of the social. In the west, in contrast to Buddhism, social engagement is mostly reduced to a sociological discipline rather than a whole-being awakening. This is one essential distinction between cultures that emphasize linear reasoning and cultures of enlightenment: Enlightenment does not deny reason, it only incorporates it into a holistic view of human nature. Metta is one of the four abodes of Brahma. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha describes the meditative states of the “Brahma-viharas'' as quintessential characteristics of the Buddha-dhatu (Buddha-nature or Buddha-Principle.) Metta therefore is a pre-requirement to enlightenment, not an optional posterior attainment. In other words, metta precedes enlightenment and is a condition sine-quanon for its attainment, and to some extent it is the entirety of the practice. Metta is reaching enlightenment through the engagement in dharmic relationships with one another and all beings.

The teaching of karuna is indivisible from the teaching of metta. Karuna typically translates in English as “compassion,” a concept used in the spiritual paths of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. However, rather than the sense of emotional sorrow or empathy associated with the Latin root of the word compassion, the word Karuna comes from the Sanskrit kara, which means “to-do” or “to make,” indicating an action-based form of compassion, that is, engaged practice. In contrast, the Latin term “to care” derives from the word “cuore” which means “heart,” therefore compassion is seen mostly as an inner feeling or a content of the heart. In Buddhist terms this type of compassion would only be a partial practice, as compassion in the heart needs to be made manifest in compassion in deeds. In other words, karuna is compassion in actual deeds. In the Buddha’s Pure Land, the personal self is not the locus of enlightenment or salvation, but the Buddha Land as a whole. In other words, the personal self is not the locus of enlightenment or salvation, but the Buddha Land as a whole. We are saved in the Pure Land of the Buddha, where metta and karuna are the guiding practices. Metta is living with primordial intention, that is to say, metta is the conscious awareness of I-Thou relationships, but metta is an intention that can only be manifested existentially. Metta becomes relational mindfulness once the deeply felt emotions of compassion lead to karuna, that is, to deeds we do. In this sense, awakening is not only a personal perception but a collective deed, and it is the responsibility of all to work toward the salvation of all. This mirrors the Judaic concept that the messiah does not save individuals, but the community as a whole. In the Jewish Bible, The prophet Moses took the entire community of Hebrew slaves out of Egyptian bondage before he could bring to the people the divinely inscribed tablets of the law. Based on Buber’s definitions we make the distinction between I-Thou as relationships and I-It as interactions. A genuine relationship is based on mutuality, while an interaction is only a transactional approach to the other. There is no dualism in I-Thou, and there is no attachment in the 4 between of I-Thou, there is only the relationship, but there is dualism and attachment in the interactions of I-It. This Buberian discourse on relationships could also be translated as the essential distinction between a dharmic engagement with one another and all beings, and a samsaric approach toward the world, the former encapsulated in Engaged and Pure Land Buddhism and the later in the unenlightened world of material consumerism. We can say that Buber’s Dialogical philosophy differs from other forms of existentialism in that for Buber the relationship between I and Thou precedes existence, and only then existence precedes essence. I-Thou is the primordial human relationship, and all other forms of living in the world are either approximations to primordiality or alienations from it. Similarly, we can argue that Zen Buddhism is a primordial spirituality that antecedes any religious or institutional structure, and we can likewise argue that metta and karuna are practices that precede attainment of awakening. We don’t awaken to metta and karuna, but metta and karuna awakens us.

In a similar emphasis on the primacy of deeds, Martin Buber explained that there is nothing that can be said in words about God, no theologies or philosophies can explain or define God, but nonetheless we can embrace him in the embrace of a being. The relationship, beside and apart words or texts, is the primordial spirituality and no other discursive accrual is required. This is similar to the story of the Buddha in Vulture Peak: Just as Mahākāśyapa, who surely had many things he could have said to the Buddha, he found no other way to express his awakened understanding but to hold in his hand a little lotus flower. Therefore, the argument that Zen is the primordial system of awakening from which all other systems and practices of enlightenment emerge, is based on the sense that Buddha Shakyamuni awoke to the understanding that the practices of meditation and deeds of metta and karuna are one and the same, and as such they constitute the entirety of his dharma teachings. As a consequence the Buddha proceeded to establish a sangha, that is, a community based on dharmic relationships, and went out to help spread the dharma to all sentient beings. Likewise, the Dialogical I-Thou ‘sangha’ is the primordial existential reality from which all conceptions of ethics and human relationships emerge. It is in this sense that I’ve argued that Zen preceded Buddhism, not as a strict historic- chronological fact, but as an insight of the teaching itself. The Buddha’s post-awakening sangha and Buber’s Dialogical philosophy represent the enactment in society of the mind of metta and karuna outside and besides religious institutionalism. In Buberian dialogue, the standing in relationship of I-Thou with the neighbor and with all beings is one and the same as the attainment of God, not just a means to the end, and I suggest that in engaged Buddhism, nirvana is one and the same with the practice of the Buddhadharma in the here and now. One does not practice the Buddhadharma in order to attain nirvana, but nirvana is itself the practice of the dharma. Buber draws his dialogical philosophy from biblical and other Judaic sources that define the attainment of God as the summum bonum of religion, as nirvana is for Buddhism. In the biblical book of Deuteronomy (15:8) it is written: “You shall surely open your hand to the poor, and shall surely lend him sufficient for his need/lack, according as he needs/ lacks”. The Talmud explains the phrase: “According to that which is lacking for the poor person, you are commanded to give him... if it is appropriate to give him bread, they give him bread; if dough, they give him dough, if to feed him, they feed him. if he is not married and wants to take a wife, they enable him to marry; they 5 rent a house for him, and provide a bed and furnishings…” While the Bible does not specifically itemize the reasons for the fiery demise of Sodom, the biblical prophet Ezekiel found it necessary to explain the motives behind God’s decision to destroy the city: “Behold this was the sin of Sodom. She and her daughters had pride, excess bread, and peaceful serenity, but she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy.” The Hebrew Bible, the Torah, contains the very specific and social radical teachings of twenty one prophets. The Hebrew prophets admonished the people to implement in the here and now of this earth the precepts of the kingdom of God. In the kingdom of God, there is only room for social justice for the poor and the oppressed, peace between nations, freedom of slaves and generally, a socially conscious society.

In other words, as in the teachings of Christian Liberation Theology that places the face of Christ in the face of the neighbor who is oppressed and in need, we can say that the body of the Buddha is in our engagement to end the suffering of the earth and all its beings. Otherwise, the world is “destroyed.” In addition to metta and karuna, to fully understand the teachings of social engaged Buddhism we must reflect on the central Buddhist concept of dukkha. One common understanding refers to dukkha as an inner emotional or psychological state of despair. From this it follows that if dukkha is an inner condition, the only logical path to its cessation is to follow the practice of a thorough inner discipline. However, the Buddhist teaching for the cessation of suffering consists in following the Eightfold Path described in the Four Noble Truths. The Eightfold Path includes a teaching of right action and a teaching of right livelihood. This clearly reflects the Buddha’s insight that inner salvation also requires the implementation of dharmic practices in the "outer" life where we engage in relationships within society. Therefore, a more adequate understanding of dukkha, is to argue that dukkha is not just an inner sense of despair, it is also a manner of behavior in society as a whole. The Buddhist masters that conceived of social engagement as a manifestation of buddhadharma, expanded the concept of dukkha to include also the practical, concrete and quotidian reality of existential despair. In other words, dukkha emerges not only as a result of the unawakened exposure to the reality of impermanence, but also as a result of outer social conditions such as poverty, oppression, war, ecological degradation and social injustice. Impermanence cannot be changed, only our inner reactions to it, but social conditions are changeable, therefore engaged Buddhism argues that the cessation of dukkha also requires the application and implementation of buddhadharma in the realms of social and public affairs. In this vein, the Mahayana concept of the Bodhisattva is one of the central tenets of the engaged Pure Land Buddhism. Master Sheng Yen said: “Bodhisattva’s Actions… How does one attain buddhahood? The bodhi-mind comes first. What is bodhi-mind? First is to benefit others.” In other words, the relationship precedes the attainment. It is in error to understand the Bodhisattva practice of helping all beings to be free as the postponing of personal entrance to Nirvana, for to help all other sentient beings attain liberation is itself the entering into the Pure Land. Buddhist liberation is not something that occurs in a different realm of existence, it is here and now.

The Bodhisattva's actions in the here and now of this earth are precisely the realm of Nirvana the dharma aspires to attain. Master Sheng Yen said: "That is the purification of human society due to the purification of the human heart and the deliberate purification of people. The purpose is to point out that to purify the Pure Land of the Buddha or 6 Heaven in the faith of survival, we must first focus on the purification of the heart, the purification of life, and the purification of the environment in the real world." In other words, one purifies the world by purifying oneself, and one purifies oneself by purifying the world. There is no linear dualistic before or after, there is only here and now. What all these teachings share in common is the essential principle of engaged Buddhism that accepts no dualistic distinction between personal practice and social engagement. Modern day India has seen one of the most glaring attempts at socially engaged Buddhism with the establishment of B.R. Ambedkar’s school of Navayana Buddhism. In the construction of a new India, Ambedkar’s arguments encompassed a nation-wide conversion to Buddhism to serve as a counterweight to many historically unjust social practices ascribed to some interpretations of Hinduism. Ambedkar railed against the very concept of castes, and refused to be content with mere legal protections or social benefits earmarked for the Dalits. Ambedkar became a Buddhist precisely to fight for the complete and absolute abolition of castes. Ambedkar saw in buddhadharma the perfect practice to bring about social justice and equality in a country otherwise marred by injustices and inequality. Ambedkar's Buddhism is reformist in many respects, but it can be argued that Buddhism arose as a reformation of Hinduism, and Buddhism later-on saw itself variously reformed from within by different sects and doctrines. Ambedkar’s views were similar to those of the non-Buddhist Rev. Martin Luther King, in that both rejected the antithetical and discrepant concept of a compassionate oppressor. For Ambedkar and King, the goal is not improved conditions for the oppressed, but the abolition of the system of oppression in its entirety. We can say that what Ambedkar and King were espousing are unique versions of Pure Land on earth in the here and now. Navayana is a unique understanding of Buddhism as it deals with issues of pertinence in an Indian context, especially the annihilation of castes and the overcoming of the corresponding facts of oppression and poverty. Ambedkar spoke of buddhadharma as a Marga-Data, not a Moksha-Data. That is to say, Buddhism is a “way” or “Path” to salvation, but its practice, unless it leads to a dharmic society, does not in-itself confer salvation. In other words, Ambedkar’s engaged Buddhism is comparable with the perspective of Dialogical philosophy in that the cessation of suffering is attained in the I-Thou relationship with one another and with nature. The between of I and Thou is the presence of God, and as such, it is not a personal inner experience of a believer and his own inner attainment of divine grace. As were Ambedkar’s teachings of Buddhism as a path, for Buber, to the extent that conditions in society remain unredeemed, no personal redemption is to be aspired to, nor is it possible. It is worth noting that there are clear similarities between engaged Buddhism’s teachings of Pure Land and the contemporary concepts of Liberation Theology within some Christian churches.

Liberation Theology argues that the presence of Christ is to be found not only in the sacraments of the church, but mainly in the lives of the afflicted and the oppressed. Therefore the path to God is precisely in the social actions we engage in to alleviate the suffering of the least of us. Pope Francis, while not explicitly an adherent of Liberation Theology, speaks of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a “culture of encounter,” in other words, a sacrament of creating a Pure Land on earth. Jesus’s sermon on the mount is equally a Jewish witness to the reality of life on earth and a teaching of Pure Land. 7 The sermon's emphasis on peace, humility, love and compassion were not said to be practices to be deferred to a future time of divine redemption. The original vision of the Jesus that spoke on the mount was that living our quotidian lives on this earth in the light of those same ethical precepts he had proclaimed is itself the kingdom of God. In the same vein, Sheng Yen explained in his “Four Steps to Magical Powers,” that seeing into Buddha-Nature is a critical step along the way, but it is just a step. If the steps do not lead to the creation of a Pure Land on earth, then we undertook a wrong understanding of what Buddha-Nature is. Martin Buber advocated the creation of a society based on the principles of "Religious Socialism.” Buber's religion was not an institutional or theological system but a practice of relationships with one another and the world. Buber said that Socialism without religion is like a body without a soul, and religion without Socialism is like a soul without a body. In other words, neither option is imbued with life. The teachings of Sheng Yen and engaged Buddhism manifest a similar understanding that a Buddhism without justice, compassion and environmental respect cannot be said to be a correct expression of the buddhadharma. Of course, Buber's Socialism has no connection to the political socialisms of the 20th century. What we see from these teachings is that the practices of engaged Buddhism are to lead a conscious dharmic life on earth and not to focus our spiritual attention toward a world-to-come in the realm of the transcendent. After all it is obvious that right action and right livelihood are not ancillary corollaries, but integral parts of the Buddha's eightfold path. Recognizing the importance of work as a central human task, and being therefore a fundamental locus for our practices of liberation, the Buddha designated a number of work activities as straightforward wrong livelihoods. Despite the fact that Buddhism regards all of life to be dharma, nonetheless, from a dharmic perspective, not all work is conducive to liberation, nor can it be regarded as a genuine manifestation of buddhadharma. As the Buddha instructed, some types of work are incompatible with liberation, and others clearly act as hindrances. Examining the teaching of right livelihood, it seems clear that the practices the Buddha encouraged for the actualization of inner and outer liberation require the creation of a society structured along the lines of “Dharmic Socialism.” In some Buddhist texts, a person that hoards wealth is likened to a bird called the “mayhaka,” which normally lives in the fig tree. While birds normally fly from tree to tree to find their food, the mayhaka stays in one place yelling “mayham,” “this is mine.” The Buddhadharma teaches that greed, being the fuel of Capitalism, ought to be cleansed away from the mind. From “having” (attachment) to “being" (Buddha-Nature) there is a narrow bridge with precarious floors, and the Buddha taught the proper way to walk over that perilous path.

Master Sheng Yen taught a humanistic Buddhist dharma that naturally and seamlessly becomes applied to life in society. In the 17th century, Zen Master Hakuin used to inveigh against what he called the “do nothing Zen” practitioners. Those were practitioners who believed that after attaining enlightenment they have reached the ultimate goal of buddhadharma. Hakuin, in contrast, asked for a post-enlightenment training to send enlightened people to help create an enlightened society. An enlightenment that does not manifest as a practice of justice in a compassionate society is not a true enlightenment, it is another delusion of Mara. We can see Hakuin's teachings as a clear advocacy of engaged Buddhism. In the 20th century, Zen Master Suzuki Roshi said it well: strictly 8 speaking there are no enlightened persons, there is only enlightened activity. In other words, deeds are the mark of awakening, for unless we act in society we cannot be said to be truly enlightened. Similarly, we find in the Theravada tradition the teachings of Buddhadasa Bikkhu who spoke of “Dhammic Socialism” as the realization of buddhadharma. Buddhadasa Bikkhu spoke of the necessity to transform society in the model of a dharmic Socialist system. For Bikkhu, Socialism was not only a better social and economic system, but the only societal organizing principle in which dharma could be implemented and actualized. Since all of nature is dharma, we learn dharma from nature, and when Bikkhu expanded on Buddhism's observation about the negativity of hoarding, he learned dharmic socialism from the example of nature and her beings. Bikkhu wrote: “Look at the birds: We will see that they eat only as much food as their stomachs can hold. They cannot take more than that, they don’t have granaries. Look down at the ants and insects: that is all they can do. Look at the trees: Trees imbibe only as much nourishment and water as the trunk can hold, and cannot take in any more than that. Therefore a system in which people cannot encroach on each other’s rights or plunder their possessions is in accordance with nature and occurs naturally. The freedom to hoard was tightly controlled by nature in the form of natural Socialism.” This dharmic natural Socialism is the actualization of the liberated mind within the context of life in society. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama speaks of being “half Buddhist and half Marxist.” The Dalai Lama explicitly expanded on the need for Dharmic Socialism. Continuing with his exposition of Marxism, HH stated: “I am humanitarian Marxist, I am Buddhist Marxist, I am not nationalistic Marxist, I am also a socialist. Marxist economic theory is for all, it propagates for equal distribution and Marxism and Buddhism are working in a similar line. I am totally against the totalitarian system and using force... of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while Capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes, that is, the majority, as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair.” The Dalai Lama speaks about the application of true dharma deeds to everyday relationships in society. It is essential to emphasize that the Dalai Lama’s own understanding of Marxism, as was Buber’s understanding of Socialism, does not correspond to the Leninist theories of a totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat as the values and practices of Buddhism cannot be imposed from the outside. The Dalai Lama’s views are essentially the same as Martin Buber’s “Religious Libertarian Socialism.” In his “Paths in Utopia,” Buber spoke of two different and opposing kinds of Socialism: “Jerusalem or Moscow,” that is, a socialism of the spirit or a dictatorship of the state. Paraphrasing Buber, we can say that The Dalai Lama’s Socialism speaks of two different and opposing kinds of Marxism: Lhasa or Beijing. Many Buddhist practitioners have been actively engaged in the spreading of a Buddhist Socialist message, some in the past and many in our present days. One of the exponents of Buddhist Socialism in Japan during the second world war was Girō Senoo, a Nichiren Buddhist who resigned from the sect and created the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism. Senoo was a pacifist who argued that “The Capitalist 9 system generates suffering, and thus, it violates the spirit of Buddhism.” Senoo’s Socialism was closer to that espoused by the Dalai Lama’s as it rejected orthodox Marxism in favor of a “Pure Land of Buddhism” founded on “Humanistic Socialism.” One of the principles of the Youth League read: “We recognize that the present Capitalist economic system is in contradiction with the spirit of Buddhism and inhibits the social welfare of the general public. We resolve to reform this system in order to implement a more natural society.” By natural society Senoo meant a community organized on the basis of the “The teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha and in accordance with the principle of brotherly love.” In 1904, Japanese Pure Land Priest Takagi Kenmyo wrote an essay called “My Socialism.” Kenmyo’s argument was that in the land of bliss, that is the Buddhism’s Pure Land, the community lives in accordance with principles and practices of humanist Socialism. In Kenmyo’s view “Namu Amidah Butsu” is a mantra asking for an egalitarian, Socialist and Pacifist society. Kenmyo was imprisoned and assassinated by the Fascist regime of Japan for his principled opposition to the imperialist war with Russia. The dharmic society advocated by these masters is what Buber referred to as the Dialogical project, that is, the creation of an I-Thou society that curbs and reverses the economic, social and political interactions that are both a manifestation of “Itness,” as well as their end result. The Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness will naturally make themselves manifest in a form of society in which the values of Capitalism and unrestrained materialism will be largely discarded and replaced with the spiritual values of the buddhadharma.

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings of “Interbeing” are an expression of engaged Pure Land Buddhism. Thay teach that we must awaken to the realization that humans and all beings live in a world of “inter-being.” Interbeing is a socially extended insight based on the fundamental Buddhist teaching of “dependent co-arising.” Thay said: “We are here to dispel the illusion of separateness.” Inter-being teaches that we cannot separate ourselves from society and expect to thereby attain enlightenment. Dharma Holder Master Gun Jun well said: “Retreating from the world will not liberate you. Happiness is not found in a secluded forest hut or an isolated cave. Enlightenment comes when you connect to the world. Only when you truly connect with everyone and everything else do you become enlightened. Only by going deeply and fully into the world do you attain liberation.” In the following statement, Master Sheng Yen explains the concept of Pure Land with clarity and specificity: "Buddhists have two great missions: one is to glorify the Buddha land, and the other is to bring sentient beings to spiritual maturity… The Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra, teaches that by helping others achieve enlightenment, you achieve it yourself. Where do we find people that we can help? We can find them in this world, and in every world in the ten directions, but mostly right in our immediate surroundings, our families, friends, colleagues, and especially, our adversaries, whom we should regard as bodhisattvas... The precepts are the vows you take to lead a peaceful life through regulating your behavior of body, speech, and mind. In the passive sense, upholding the precepts means vowing not to commit any wrongful act. In the active sense, it means vowing to engage in as many acts as possible that benefit yourself as well as others; it means taking responsibility. The purpose of practicing meditation is to create inner peace by calming the mind and stabilizing your emotions. If you practice meditation well you are less likely to become angry or agitated in your everyday life. By meditation, we do not mean just sitting in concentrated 10 states, we also mean bringing mindfulness to all your activities. Through meditation your emotions and behavior will become more stable, and conflicts with others will lessen. Through this and other practices we can eventually establish peace in the lives of individuals and societies." As Martin Buber explained, we become an "I" through a “Thou,” or in other words, "by helping others achieve enlightenment, you achieve it yourself.” It is the right understanding of the concepts of metta, karuna and dukkha that underlie the essential practices of Buddhism in general, and Pure Land in particular. Clearly, it is in this regard that I deem Buddhism to be of immense importance for the reconstruction of spirituality within all religious traditions of the east and the west. I interpret Martin Buber's philosophy as advancing the fundamental argument that God is not in the relationship between I and Thou, but is the relationship itself. Given this, the spiritual practice consists entirely in the implementation in society of social programs based on peace and brotherhood. God, in this Dialogical sense, is the Pure Land of Amitabha Buddha. The encounter between Buddhist teachings and practices, and engaged Buddhism in particular, with the Judaic Dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber and other similar strands of Humanistic Existentialism, will engender a most fruitful understanding of the urgent needs and vital prospects of a society founded on the values of buddhadharma. Buber insisted on the fact that spirituality and social justice intertwine as one and the same practice, as there can be no genuine spiritual life outside of the I-Thou relationship. Interbeing is the intrinsic dharmic relationships between all that lives, which in Buberian terms corresponds to the concept of the between of I and Thou. Hanh did not speak of no-being or intra-being, but of a being grounded in the relationship with one another and all beings. In Buber’s words “At the beginning it was the relationship.” Engaged Buddhism, by integrating as one and the same spiritual practices with a commitment to social justice, individuals and communities can work toward the creation of a more just, compassionate, and equitable society, a society devoid of systemic injustices. Buber’s philosophy can be represented by the realization that we should not seek God above nor below, not in the spirit or the flesh, for God is not an entity anywhere. God is The Between of I and Thou, and that between is the actualization of the pure land of the Buddha on earth, a society built on freedom, social justice and radical love. In summary, there is a deep and fecund connection between engaged Buddhism and Dialogical philosophy. The body of the Buddha is another term for the between of I and Thou. The between of I and Thou is the Buddha’s Pure Land on earth. The emphasis is not on the I or on the Thou, on the self or the no-self, but in their between, a between which is only possible when we engage in the dharma deeds of I and Thou. By saying Thou to neighbor and to all beings, that is by practicing dharma deeds of meta and karuna, we create a realm of the between of mind and body, of spirit and matter, and that between is the body of the Buddha. The body of the Buddha is the between of I and Thou, and in order to tend to it, to allow it to freely emerge and bear fruit, we must embrace the responsibility and the risks of embracing the ten thousand things. 11

Being and Thou: Excerpts from my last book

2023-07-11T01:27:00.005-04:00

The Heart Sutra says: “Nothing is as it seems, neither is it otherwise.” In other words, either side of the claim, taken separately, is rooted in dualism. All we can claim with certainty is that things are not as they seem, and that things are as they seem. Both options comprise the totality of the possibilities of Being, that is to say, nothing is possible precisely because all is possible, and vice versa. We can say: Being is not dasein, nor is it not dasein. With Zen we can say that Being is, and we won't give it a name. Or Being isn't, and we won't give it a no-name. Nagarjuna, studying the concept of sunyata, emptiness, well said: “nirvana is samsara, samsara is nirvana.” In other words: The dualism that posits two opposites is wrong, and the non-dualism that posits itself as an alternative to dualism is likewise wrong, and for the same reason. If there is no-one, there can be no-two, and yet, we must choose to say Thou or to say It to the no-one and to the no-two. Once we say Thou to a Being we realize that there is no distinction between nirvana and samsara, there is only the narrow bridge of dialogical encounter. The Prajnaparamita speaks of two shores: the shore of enlightenment and the shore of non-enlightenment. The Buddhadharma is likened to a vessel that can ferry us from this shore to the next. Ultimately, however, there are no two shores, we already are in the shore, and the vessel must be discarded lest its weight and upkeep become an hindrance. Whether it is a vessel or a narrow bridge, once we say Thou to the ten thousand things, there is nowhere we need to go. Zen master Dogen said it too: “If you can’t find enlightenment here and now, where else do you expect to find it?” It is in this sense that we can properly understand Nagarjuna's sunyata, the underpinning of non-dualism. Sunyata is an existential project, not a discourse on philosophical ontology. Baseball's Casey Stengel taught his own version of non-dual philosophy. According to Stengel “Good pitching will always stop good hitting: and vice-versa.” That is to say: Within their designated existential context, this one thing exists and it is true as-is, and the other thing also exists and it is also true as-is. Furthermore, the fact of pitching does not exist and it is not true without the fact of hitting that confronts it and stands over against it, and vice versa. And this is what Buddhism calls “dependent co-arising.” Or in Zen Master’s Think Nhat Hanh, “interbeing.” It is not no-being or intra-being, but the existential fact of Beings in relationship. In the absence of a hitter, to throw a ball is not pitching, and in the absence of a pitcher, to swing a bat at a ball is not hitting. One exists because the other does, and one does not exist because the other does not. Each individual action represents an opposite existential function, and in their suchness each creates its own creator. None of the ten thousand things can emerge into existence, nor can they continue to exist without each perennially creating the other. Likewise it is with God. God emerges into existence to the extent that we create God in the between of I and Thou. In the between we create the God that creates us. But what emerges in the interaction of I and It is not God, it is Mara, the deceiver. It is not possible to discern the nature of Being for we have constructed a concept of Being that is non-discernible by means of reason. Being is a conceptual construct. This is not a deficiency of Being per-se, but of our ways of utilizing language. In a circular argument, reason tells us that we cannot define Being, but that discernment is itself a conclusion of reason. In other words, given its purported deficient nature, reason cannot point at its own limitations, for that conclusion about itself would itself be suspect. When we argue that Being is beyond words it is because we have avail ourselves of a carefully defined sequence of words to construct a concept to be beyond words. But it is in error to advance the claim that reason is structurally limited and not capable of perceiving the entirety of the truth of Being. How can we possibly know this to be the case? If reason is not capable, using reason to assess the nature and extent of its capabilities is itself suspect. Perhaps nothing reason perceives is wrong, nor limited, but what reason perceives is the actual noumena, and in our dukkha, our unhappiness with reality as-is, we refuse to accept the truth of Being. Our dukkha prompts us to imagine a different, deeper realm of existence, one behind the eyes and ears, but this, of course, it only exacerbates the source of our despair. Zen says “this is it,” and it is only a delusion of “wrong understanding” to think otherwise. Accepting this is the entirety of the Buddhadharma, and the cessation of dukkha depends entirely on realizing this truth. From a dialogical perspective, the concept of an abstract, even mystical Being that is beside and beyond words, eyes and ears, it is an error of understanding. Being is not a matter of ontology, and non-dualism does not refer to the epistemological merging of subject and object. Being is to-be, that is, a call to manifest Being as existence. Any other concept of Being is what in Buddhism is called “wrong understanding.” The Buberian understanding is that whether Being is or isn't, or neither is nor isn't, or whether subject and object are a duality rooted in dualism that ought to be overcome with a non-dual, hence non-rational apperception of reality, our essential human task is to say Thou to the neighbor. The Dialogical Being is the one engaged in the sacrament of the neighbor. From the perspective of Dialogical philosophy, Being is an existential call, not an ontological category. Therefore, whatever Being is or is not, our responsibility is to say Thou to Being. How do we say Thou to Being? by the embrace of a Being. A Jewish existential version of the Heart Sutra was proposed by Reb Yaakov Yitzhak of Pshushka (1766–1814.) Reb Yaakov said: ”There are no 'rules of thumb' in serving God, and this, too, is not always true." In this statement we find the essence of a Buddhist teaching about the non-dual nature of things expressed as a Jewish teaching concerning the practice of a spiritual path. The concern here is with the practice of the spiritual path, and that without consideration given to the apparent internal conceptual contradictions. The perceived contradictions are at the level of conceptual thoughts, but the practice is at the level of deeds. From a dialogical perspective deeds precede thoughts and dialogue precedes both. Much later, poet Fernando Pessoa of Lisbon wrote something similar in both form and content: "There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist." A breeze of radical freedom emerges from Pessoa's words, but he was careful to note that "poets are fakers." Following Reb Yaakov and Pessoa we can add the following thought: When we think of it, there isn't any thing to think about. These are Zen Koans, in which the sense of the statements lies precisely in their lack of it. The entirety of their meaning is in actualizing the teachings in the practice of existence. God is the “Eternal Thou.” This does not mean that God is everlasting in time and infinite in space. Eternal Thou means that God can only be a Thou, and as such, god can never be an It. The Talmud asks whether God, the omnipotent, can create a rock He himself can not lift? Either answer would deny his omnipotence. We can likewise ask: Can God create himself as an It rather than a Thou? The answer is that when we say It to God we have created an idol, for God is forever and always only a Thou. In that sense, God is not omnipotent, God is OmniThou. But since Thou and It are modes of relationship and not ontological paradigms of Being, whether God is “here and now” can only be understood in relational terms. In other words: God emerges and becomes present with us if and only if we do the deeds of Thou, and those deeds of Thou are themselves the presence of the emergent God. Otherwise, God, who can never be an It will remain forever hidden behind an existential eclipse. From a dialogical perspective, God's existence, if we use the concept of existence as it applies to the Beings of the universe, is not a relevant existential fact. The dialogical call is to say Thou to God, and we say Thou to God through the embrace of a Being. God the creator is created in the between of I and Thou. Similarly, when Gautama Buddha was asked if he believed in God he responded, “what does the belief in God have to do with your own liberation?” In other words: liberation is not from God, nor it is from the Buddha: liberation it is a deed we do. In Buberian terms we can say that Buddha emerges in the between of I and Thou, for the foundation of the Buddhadharma is the creation of a dharmic society on earth. God is not the wholly other, nor is God the wholly same: God is the wholly between. We ask: How many Buddhas are in the universe? Buddhism says: multiple ones. By not ascribing a numerical value to the existence of Buddhas the implicit teaching is that every person can be a Buddha. To be a Buddha all one needs to do is to act as a Buddha. It is different when it comes to the Abrahamic God: there is only one God, and that is to indicate that no one person is God nor a claim to divinity can be raised in regards to any person, animal or object. Both understandings of divinity or buddhahood are correct. But as Buber well said, it is not important to know about God, it is important that we address Him in the embrace of a Being. The I-Thou duality is not an ontological discourse on the dualism or monism of Being, it is an existential response to the living challenges of Being. The Tao’s wu-wei, the action of no-action, is a call to cease interfering in the free flow of nature. Spinoza said that there is a natura naturata and a natura naturans. If Tao is true, our interference in nature is what we find as natura naturata. Practicing wu-wei would allow the naturans aspect of nature, that is nature as unfolding, to actualize itself in its true essence. But we must understand that interference is a term that refers to many different types of activities for it is essentially a deed we do. Saying Thou to nature is not a form of interference, but a form of actualizing the true nature of Being. In that sense, wu-wei is an existential teaching. But wu-wei should not be confused with passivity, for it requires the actual engagement in a relationship with nature in the manner of I-Thou. In other words: wu-wei is the choice we make to cease and avoid, to the extent possible, the using, manipulating, defining, or in general, the instrumentalizing of the Beings of nature. The wu-wei’s no-action implies our ceasing and our avoiding to interfere in the self-expression and the inner and outer unfolding of the true essence of the Beings of nature. Or in other words, wu-wei requires an I-Thou mode of relationship with the ten thousand things. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh explained this idea from the perspective of his Zen practice: “Mindfulness is above all the capacity simply to recognize the presence of an object without taking sides, without judging, and without craving or despising that object.” In other words, from a dialogical perspective, wu-wei, or mindfulness, means to cease and to avoid saying "It" to people and to all Beings of nature. It is an existential call. From a Buddhist perspective we can say that manipulation implies instrumentalizing the Beings of nature to serve the purposes and interests of our inner samsara's ego. The interactions of I-It give birth to the ego, while the relationship of I-Thou gives birth to what in Zen is called the true-self. It ought to be clear of course, that we do not know what nature’s true essence is, therefore, it is also true that some forms of intervention in nature are consistent with the ways by which nature reveals itself to us. As Buber said, we cannot completely avoid the realm of It, but we must determinately orient ourselves toward the real of Thou. Essentially, it is not important to know what the true nature of things is, what is essential is to recognize our existential task to relate to all Beings in a Dialogical manner. All Beings have in-born Buddha nature, not original-sin, therefore, from a dialogical perspective, we can define Buddha nature not as an ontological predicate, but simply as an existential mode of relationship.

dialogical ecology - buberian essays:

"Praying with Jesus, Not to Jesus: Martin Buber in Dialogue with Christianity."

martin buber on consciousness

The Relational "I"

The Ontological "Between"

The Present vs. The Past

The Limits of Experience

"Praying with Jesus, Not to Jesus: Martin Buber in Dialogue with Christianity."

6 short poems (excerpts from the book "in search of lost betweens: a book of poems)

various buberian thoughts

In Search of Lost Betweens. Buber and Zen out on Pilgrimage

Martin Buber Contra Political Zionism: A Brief Dialogical Critique of Nationalism

Martin Buber Contra Political Zionism: A Brief Dialogical Critique of (Jewish) Nationalism

martin buber and other poets on god

lecture on martin buber and zen buddhism in kyoto

Lecture at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation

International conference On: Buddhist Philosophy and Praxis: Dialogue and Coexistence in a Diverse and Precarious World 20-21 June, 2025

Prof. Geeta Ramana Memorial Research Scholar’s Forum University of Mumbai in collaboration with Pontifical Athenaeum Jnana Deepa, Institute of Philosophy and Theology, Pune

International conference

On: Buddhist Philosophy and Praxis: Dialogue and Coexistence in a Diverse and Precarious World 20-21 June, 2025

the zen of fernando pessoa, poet. notes for my conversation with fernando pessoa, poet: my so many nights with fernando pessoa, poet.

Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger in Dialogue, Paul Mendes-Flohr

In Memoriam: Paul Mendes-Flohr z'l

In Memoriam - Paul Mendes-Flohr

Field Workshop on Ancient and Present-Day Religious Practices in Goa, (India) and its environs

My New Book: Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination

My New Book: Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination

An Encounter Between Engaged Pure-Land Buddhism and the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber

An Encounter Between Engaged Pure-Land Buddhism and the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber

Abstract

Discussions

On Pilgrimage and the Spiritual Imagination

Martin Buber and Social Justice

Martin Buber and Social Justice

1. Introduction

2. Mysticism and Dialogue

3. The Systemic Hindrances to I and Thou Relationships

4. The Between

5. The I–It and Its Systemic Manifestations

6. Buber and Religious-Libertarian Socialism

7. Hebrew Humanism and Liberation Theology

8. Conclusions

Notes

References

My Article in Outlook India: Israel-Gaza

An Encounter between Engaged Pure-Land Buddhism and The Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber

Being and Thou: Excerpts from my last book

Prof. Geeta Ramana Memorial Research Scholar’s Forum University of Mumbai

in collaboration with

Pontifical Athenaeum Jnana Deepa, Institute of Philosophy and Theology, Pune

On: Buddhist Philosophy and Praxis: Dialogue and Coexistence in a Diverse and Precarious World
20-21 June, 2025