Lama Jampa Thaye Speaks on Politics →
On any given day this election season, the very act of following the news through any medium - television, social media, print - can leave concerned citizens in a knot of aggravation and heartache. Those who have not disengaged fully are struggling to make sense of the state of the country without emotionally draining themselves.
Close to fifty such people gathered at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica on July 11th in hopes that the Buddhist perspective could help them. In a talk called “Why Politics Doesn’t Matter,” Lama Jampa Thaye, founder of the Dechen Foundation and the first westerner to be granted this title, offered thoughts from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition on politics broadly and how individuals should process it.
Lama Jampa acknowledged from the outset that this was an unusual subject for him or any Lama to speak on, given the basic incompatibility between spiritual and political missions, as well as the patchy history of both religious governments and religions that become politicized. But the aim of the talk was not to give specific political recommendations, but rather to apply the central Buddhist practice of examining one’s assumptions about the world to the political world.
“It was a different subject for an authentic Lama to tackle,” said event coordinator Joe Ruggiero, “but he was like a fine surgeon deconstructing the machinery of politics.”
Lama Jampa divided the talk into three “meditations” with the first asking why politics lets us down. The answer is not individual politicians, who the Lama believes we ask too much of, given the common humanity we share with them. But it is the promise of politics itself - that human suffering can end through the correct social arrangements and that history flows in a linear fashion leading to the promised land.
“From the Buddhist perspective, this is a fairy tale,” the Lama said. “History is cyclical.” It is crucial to understand that political change, while not undesirable, is always temporary. Buddhism teaches that liberation comes from understanding what is permanent. The second meditation asked the audience to search for where they have been influenced by “the delusion of selfhood,” the notion that we are separate individuals and we can be happy if the world shifts to our wishes. Politics feed this delusion because it asks us to create an “us” and a “them” when we are all in fact part of a “network of dependents.” Unless we can awaken to this fact within ourselves, we won’t be able to create positive world change.
So how, the third meditation asks, can we engage with the world when the work of inner reform is so pressing? The Lama offered that the “castle of self…the bubble of pomposity” that traps us all steadily dissolves with compassion, the act of forgetting about ourselves through attention to others. But we should do this with “modesty,” because we are all heavily guided by the “imprints of our past selfish choices.” Despite the talk’s title, the Lama did not argue that politics is irrelevant but rather that we can get past the suffering it causes us and still effect positive collective change if we act with compassion to root out our selfishness.
Before ending with a brief silent meditation and an at-times emotional Q & A, the Lama told a story of a wealthy couple he knew who identified as revolutionary socialists, but never tipped at restaurants because they wanted the waiters to become discontented with their wages and rise up. This was not an indictment of revolutionary socialists, but a way of demonstrating that political priorities do not absolve us from individual action.
This is a notion we can all stand behind, no matter our ideological background.