Globalization involves a vast circulation of good and services, of ideas, and cultural products around the world, and it is not at all uncommon today for people to be watching anime that were produced in Japan, wearing clothes that are made in China, watching films from Europe, listening to West African music, or going to downtown Seattle to east fusion cuisine that blends culinary traditions from around the world. So at a certain level, we are very familiar with the objective effects of globalization and with how these shape our senses of identity. But there is also this phenomenon of distant proximity—the fact that things, events and people who are perhaps thousands of miles away can be nearer to our hearts and concerns than the people that we are living with, the members of our families. Historically, this is a peculiar kind of world to be living in with peculiar kinds of stresses that are placed on us as human beings.
But globalization isn’t anything new. I am going to take you back 1,300 years ago to Tang dynasty China, a period when Buddhism is being transported from India across the Silk Roads through Central Asia into China. In India at this time, there are Buddhist universities with student bodies of 10,000 and faculties of 2,000. The imperial capital of China—Chang’an—is a cosmopolitan city of two million at a time when London and Paris are muddy fishing villages of a few thousand people. The history of Buddhism is a history of globalizations.
Buddhist traditions began developing roughly twenty-five hundred years ago in what is now northwest India. The person we now know as “the Buddha”—a term that means, an “awakened one”—was an itinerant teacher who traveled from town to town. There were many such teachers and people often asked the Buddha what is his special teaching?
The Buddha often responded that he did not have any complicated metaphysics or epistemology, and taught only four things—the Four Noble Truths that our present situation has the character of trouble or suffering, that there is a pattern of conditions that lead to trouble and suffering, that these conditions can be dissolved, and that there is a way to do so: the Eightfold Path of Buddhist practice. These truths reflected his own awakening insight that all things arise interdependently: nothing exists on its own or arises independently.
One summary presentation of Buddhist practice is that it involves the resolute cultivation of wisdom, attentive mastery and moral clarity. In a Buddhist context, wisdom rests on deepening understanding of the interdependence of all things, becomingly increasingly aware of those patterns of interrelationship that make us who we are and that enable us to enjoy the things that we enjoy, and suffer the things we suffer. Attentive mastery is one way of translating a term—samadhi—that refers to a meditative attainment and is often translated as concentration. But concentration is but one kind of meditation. More generally Buddhist meditation aims to express or bring forth a way of being aware, a quality of attention, that enables you to respond freely to whatever situation you find yourself in. The third component of practice is sila, often translated as morality or discipline, but which really means moral clarity—clarity about the situation we find ourselves in, as it has come to be. Moral clarity, like maturity, connotes being aware of all the flows of meaning in a situation—all the relational dynamics taking place—and being disposed to respond appropriately. In a Buddhist context: responding in such a way as to bring out the situation’s liberating potentials. Buddhist practice—especially in Mahayana contexts—aims at realizing an unlimited capacities for relating-freely.
Globalization as we know it now gives us lots of freedoms and choices; we can chose our lifestyle, we can chose different identities, we can chose to change our sex if we so desire. We human beings have come to a point that there is little about which we cannot exercise some choice.
Freedoms of choice are not bad. In fact, having some freedom of choice is undeniably better than having none at all. But choice—important as it is—is not yet evidence of freedom in a full, Buddhist sense. Infants and small children make choices. But their freedom is very limited—the ranges of what they can bodily accomplish, emotionally process, intellectually understand, imagine, or spiritually engage are all very, very limited. In a Buddhist sense, we are not “born free.” Freedom is an achievement, the result of practice—the realization of a capacity for relating freely within in any and all situations. Freedom is not a state, something we possess or can be granted as a right; freedom is adverbial, a way of doing things.
Relating freely requires questioning our own habits, our own ways of thinking and our own patterns of likes and dislikes. The popular American understanding of the teaching of karma in Buddhism is that “what goes around, comes around” or action and reaction; you do something bad to people, sooner or later people do something bad to you. But the teaching of karma in Buddhism is that, if you pay close enough and sufficiently sustained attention to your situation, you will find that there is a meticulous consonance between your own values, intentions and actions and the particular topography of your life experience. Our life histories, as they play out moment by moment, day by day, month by month, reflect our own values, intentions and actions. The teaching of karma suggests that resolving our suffering is fundamentally a matter of resolving conflicts among our own values, intentions and actions.
In undertaking questions about our gender identity, a Buddhist would first advise very closely attending to the full range of relationships that make you who you are, and to deeply experience the feelings you have about them. This means becoming one hundred percent open to yourself, no hidden corners, and feeling the pulse of your own presence as a complete person, not falling into the habit of understanding yourself according to categories provided by the media or by other people, but becoming completely continuous with your own uncertainties and realities and seeing where your values, intentions and actions are carrying you. In thinking through gender dilemmas you might find yourself in, it is easiest to focus on self, on ego, on “I”, “my” and “me.” But if we truly have no-self, which in Buddhism means that we truly are relationships all the way down to our core—that we are what we mean for others—then thinking through gender issues is best accomplished by doing so in ways that express compassion, equanimity, loving kindness, and joy in the good fortune of others, bringing about an increasing sense of interdependence with others rather than separation from them.
From a Buddhist standpoint, any pattern of thinking, feeling and action that produces suffering or trouble for ourselves or for others should be immediately and critically engaged. The conditions for this pattern must be understood and then dissolved unless we want to perpetuate a cycle of trouble and suffering in which we become ever more deeply enmeshed.
Sometimes we think it would be really nice to be somebody else…you wake up one morning, you look in the mirror and say “damn, I wish I was somebody else”, someone with a different life, a different job, a different body, a different something. And what Buddhism says is: “start from where you are right now and work out from the present situation to something better; start with what you have available now and make the most out of the ingredients present in the given situation.” In that way can you increase your capacity to love, to cherish the relationships you have with all of the people with whom you are relating and who are making you who you are, even as you are making them who they are, celebrating the beauty that we do find in the world around us. To do this is very Buddhist—to appreciate our situation, both valuing it and adding value to it.
