

                                  
                                  
            BPS Newsletter Cover Essay #1 (Summer 1985)
                                  
                                  
                         A NEW UNDERTAKING
                                  
                         by Bhikkhu Bodhi
                                  



    This year has been a time for the BPS to initiate new undertakings.
    Having outgrown our home of the last twenty years, we recently moved
    into spacious new quarters equipped with the larger facilities our
    expanding work requires. Another new undertaking inspired by our
    growth is the issuing of this newsletter, to accompany each of our
    future mailings. The newsletter gives expression to our wish to
    establish closer contact with you -- our members, readers and
    friends. In these columns we will be providing you with information
    concerning our activities and publications, as well as book reviews,
    news notices and short Buddhist essays.

    Perhaps we can best begin this regular essay column by exploring the
    purpose which guides our work at the BPS today. Put quite simply,
    that purpose is to offer to the world the teaching of the Buddha as
    set forth in the oldest collection of Buddhist scriptures, the Pali
    Canon. However, we do not aim merely at providing objective factual
    accounts of the Buddha's teachings of interest solely to Oriental
    scholars and their students. Our purpose, we candidly admit, is
    advocative and prescriptive: we are convinced that the Dhamma
    communicates a message which is still very much alive and relevant,
    and through our publications we seek to make that message widely
    known.

    In line with this aim it is essential for us that the Dhamma be
    addressed not only to its original and primary task of indicating
    the timeless path to deliverance, but also to those vexing
    existential problems posed by the particular circumstances of our
    age. Prominent among these is the widespread moral and spiritual
    deterioration evident in so many spheres of human life. For
    increasing numbers of people both East and West, cynicism,
    skepticism and a narrow fixation on material goals have toppled
    traditional views and values without offering any satisfactory
    alternatives to replace them. Thus, while our sciences unlock the
    most obscure secrets of nature and yield its powers to our control,
    we find ourselves beset with a sense of inner poverty, destitute of
    those fundamental guiding principles which can give a deeper and
    richer meaning to our lives.

    At the root of our current spiritual disorder lies a distorted
    conception of value which locates the ultimate end of human activity
    in the satisfaction of personal desire. Tacitly accepted and adhered
    to without reflective awareness, this thesis has become the dominant
    working basis for contemporary civilization. Mobilizing individuals,
    ethnic groups and nations alike, it draws them into an enervating
    chase after the achievement of power, wealth and pleasure, and pits
    them against one another in a struggle for supremacy marked either
    by cool suspicion or by vehement hate. Given a creed of
    self-fulfillment in an age of declining moral vigor, it is not
    astonishing that in the midst of plenty we witness all around us a
    frantic search for instant gratification and a rising tide of
    destructiveness unconstrained by even the least human sympathy.

    To remedy this disturbing situation, moralistic preaching will not
    suffice, nor can much be expected from economic, social and
    political reforms isolated from more fundamental changes. For at its
    core our crisis is a crisis of consciousness. Its real origins go
    deeper than our institutions, deeper than our cultural norms, deeper
    than our avowed motives and goals. Its origins lie in the hidden
    strata of the mind, in the breeding place of those tumultuous
    emotional and volitional forces which the Buddha summed up in the
    three "roots of evil" -- greed, hatred and delusion.

    What is most crucial, therefore, if there is to be any change in the
    direction of the world, is a change in those who make up the world,
    that is, in ourselves. To achieve our own genuine welfare and
    effectively promote the welfare of others, we require the acumen to
    distinguish clearly what is truly in our interest and what may be
    immediately pleasurable but ultimately harmful; and we require too
    the stamina to undertake the work of liberating our minds from the
    bonds of greed, hatred and delusion. Admittedly, the number of those
    who will see the need for inward change and make the appropriate
    effort will always be small. However, the difficulty does not annul
    the necessity. For those of clear vision who are responsive to the
    call of the good there can be no choice but to take up the long hard
    task of self-transformation.

    If the work of inner cultivation is to come to full fruition, it
    must begin with and be guided by correct understanding, by that
    discernment of the true nature of existence which is called in the
    language of the Dhamma "right view." The unfailing pointer which the
    Buddha has provided for right view is the teaching of the Four Noble
    Truths. It is this perspective of the Four Noble Truths, with the
    light it sheds on the perplexing relationship between desire,
    happiness and suffering, which may be the most important
    contribution the Dhamma can make towards dispelling the rampant
    confusion of our time. In contrast to the whole world, which stands
    on the assumption that happiness is to be achieved through the
    satisfaction of desire, the Buddha teaches that the entire
    enterprise aimed at appeasing desire is doomed to futility, that the
    pursuit of desire leads not to happiness but to suffering. In the
    teaching of the Enlightened One the way to genuine and unshakable
    happiness lies in the restraint and mastery of desire. It is only by
    training ourselves to resist the lure of pleasure and power, to
    abandon the quest for self-aggrandizement, and to relinquish our
    hold on our attachments, that we can find for ourselves the
    indestructible peace of deliverance. And it is only thus that we can
    act with true compassion for the benefit of others, for the good,
    welfare and happiness of the world.

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