Author Archives: Maia

Melody Ermachild Chavis is a writer,  private investigator, and longtime Zen practitioner at Berkeley Zen Center. You can read more about Melody here from a previous Jizo “Quote of the Week.”

This quote comes from the essay “Seeking Evil, Finding Only Good,” from Not Turning Away: The Practice of Engaged Buddhism (edited by Susan Moon):

Many death penalty proponents believe that evil infects people like my clients, who must therefore be extinguished…

For twenty years I have searched for evil, and nowhere have I found it. I find causes and conditions aplenty, and I have found something that I wasn’t looking for: inexhaustible quantities of love.

Suddenly, in every case — and it is always a surprise — I find someone giving love against all odds, someone reaching out where it seems nothing but hatred prevails, someone finding it in themselves to forgive against storms of bitter anger. These are often unexpected people, unsung heroes and heroines who want no thanks: a man’s long-ago juvenile hall counselor who comes to testify; a former special education teacher, retired with a bad heart, who flies on three airplanes to get to the trial to ask jurors to spare her former student’s life.

Love, I have seen, is a force alive in the world.

Today’s quote is hot off the digital press. I just received an email today from Bhikkhu Bodhi, founder of Buddhist Global Relief as well as the translator of numerous classic Buddhist texts. You can read the full text of his email here.

Here are the words from Bhikkhu Bodhi:

Three principles of personal and social integrity are especially imperiled today, principles that underlie three of the Buddhist precepts: refraining from violence, theft, and false speech. As followers of the Dharma, we need to promote them as guidelines for social policy as well as exemplify them in our own conduct. To insist on their social expression is not a matter of playing politics but of acting responsibly as human beings; for if they should be subverted, civilization as we know it will regress and may even collapse.

The first principle is non-violence or non-injury. Just as a nation or society can flourish only when its members avoid harming one another, so the world community can flourish only when nations abide by international conventions curbing war and aggression. An especially critical aspect of collective non-violence is making a swift transition to renewable sources of energy, a crying need if we are to prevent runaway climate change from ravaging the biosphere and decimating helpless communities on the planet.

The second principle is social justice, which stipulates that all people possess inalienable human rights regardless of their race, class, gender, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation. Social justice also entails economic justice, a pillar of societal health that is being aggressively overturned. Economic justice entails equitable incomes and safe work conditions. It entails adequate housing, access to healthy food, affordable medical care, and security in illness and old age.

The third principle is commitment to truth. Truth is the guardian of the first two principles, which in troubled times makes it especially vulnerable to attack by those bent on distortion and disinformation. In certain circles it has become an axiom that if one repeats a lie often enough it becomes truth. The limits of this axiom are constantly being pushed, creating ever thicker screens of deception to promote militarism and the assault on social justice.

This week’s quote comes from the late John Daido Loori (1931 – 2009), founder of the Mountains and Rivers Order and Abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in New York. Loori, who studied with Taizen Maezumi Roshi, was also an acclaimed photographer. You can see some of his breathtaking photos of the natural world here.

This quote comes from the book The Heart of Being: Moral and Ethical Teachings of Zen Buddhism (which, by the way, is a wonderful book to read if you’re in the process of preparing to receive the precepts [ jukai]):

Because his experience as an astute social observer became interfused with his absolute wisdom, it is worthwhile to study [the Buddha’s] teachings about social and economic conditions in relation to spiritual practice and ethical life….

One of the central observations Buddha made about the breakdown of the social fabric is that poverty is the chief cause of immorality and crime. Theft, violence, hatred, cruelty, all result from poverty. It seems that ancient governments in India, like many governments today, tried to handle the problem of crime through punishment. They attempted to suppress it. Buddha said that attempts to control crime will ultimately be futile. This kind of control is like building a dam to hold back rising water. The barrier wil hold back the water, but the barrier will always need to be there, and there will always be the threat of the water’s spilling over or sweeping the dam away. Buddha said that if you want to eradicate crime, the economic conditions of people have to be improved.