Rev. Danny Fisher

Sign the petition here.

In editorial this past weekend, the Washington Post offered wisdom for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has promised to review the U.S.’s policy toward Burma. Here’s the money quote:

It may be that the U.S. review can lead to smarter and more targeted sanctions, with better coordination among allies and neighbors. Certainly, we hope that Ms. Clinton will make clear to Burma’s government that the United States could never ease sanctions without first conducting full and free consultations with Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s rightful ruler. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party overwhelmingly won an election in 1990, but the junta ignored the results and has kept her isolated and under house arrest for most of the time since. Her release, and that of thousands of other political prisoners — and their families — remains essential.

Amnesty International is seeking people to lead or join delegations to meet with members of Congress during the April recess, and push them for an independent investigation into torture and prisoner abuse committed during the Bush Administration’s tenure in Washington. For more information, follow this link.

This from MoveOn.org:

The people in AIG’s financial products division are perhaps more responsible for the severity of our economic meltdown than anyone else.

And yet, they’re getting $450 million in bonuses.

That’s just plain unacceptable. On Wednesday, we have a chance to let AIG’s leaders know what we think of their bonuses.

When AIG’s executives appear before the House subcommittee, we’ll make sure they hear your voices. We’ll deliver all the signatures and comments we receive before 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday in time for Wednesday’s hearing.

The full texts of the petition reads:

Under no circumstances should the AIG executives who helped create the financial crisis receive bonuses. That’s our money and you should do whatever it takes to get it back.

Sign it and add your own message here.

Today’s mailbag question comes to us from a professor of psychology doing preliminary research for a new book. She’s interested in doing a robust study of hope as it is understand in a wide variety of contexts, and was referred to me in her search for literature on the subject from the Buddhist religions. I’ve done my best below to offer some helpful pointers, but I confess that I don’t know a lot of sources on this topic. Your help–particularly your article/book/talk recommendations–would be most appreciated by both myself and the professor. And, as always, please feel free to leave your observations, opinions, reactions, questions, quibbles, and so on in the comments below.

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DEAR DANNY: I was wondering whether you might be able to guide me to sources on the subject of hope in either the scholarly or practitioner-oriented literature in your area or any other discipline in which you might have encountered it. — ANONYMOUS

DEAR ANONYMOUS: This seems an interesting topic to address, especially considering all the projections in the West about Buddhism being a negative or pessimistic religion. (In his piece “Engaged Buddhism in German-Speaking Europe” for Christopher Queen’s Engaged Buddhism in the West, Franz-Johannes Litsch offers an excellent and pithy break-down of how the various European interpreters of Buddhism throughout modern history–including Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Weber, and Pope John Paul II–contributed to shaping such erroneous notions about Buddhism.) Buddhists, as you might imagine, have understood their tradition(s) a bit differently. Some modern scholars have even characterized the goal and/or path of Buddhism in terms of hope–Winston L. King even titled his ruminations on Buddhist morality In the Hope of Nibbāna: The Ethics of Theravāda Buddhism. W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s book Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines: Or, Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path, According to the Late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering also includes a section in the general introduction entitled “The Joyous Optimism of Buddhism.” And in his piece on “The Practice of Jodo-Shinshu” for Alfred Bloom’s Living in Amida’s Universal Vow: Essays on Shin Buddhism, Taitetsu Unno observes:

Buddhism is a path of supreme optimism, for one of its basic tenets is that no human life or experience is to be wasted, abandoned or forgotten, but all should be transformed into a source of vibrant life, deep wisdom, and compassionate living (pg. 65).

Other scholars and teachers, though, have tended to talk about Buddhist as a way of looking at the world that doesn’t necessarily encourage or need hope. Rigdzin Shikpo, for example, authored a book called Never Turn Away: The Buddhist Path Beyond Hope and Fear. One of Ken Jones’ works of Engaged Buddhist Studies is titled Beyond Optimism: A Buddhist Political Ecology. And in her book, Soaring and Searing: Buddhist Perspectives on Contemporary Social and Religious Issues, Rita M. Gross qualifies a moment when she uses the word “hope” with “insofar as a Buddhist is permitted to hope” (pg. 54).

As far as more substantial treatments of the subject, though, I’m not aware of very many. The first I can think of is a piece by Maha Bodhi Society founder Anagarika Dharmapala, called “The Constructive Optimism of Buddhism”, which he wrote for the Maha Bodhi Journal in 1915. You might find that helpful. There’s also a whole chapter of Thomas Tweed’s book The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture & the Limits of Dissent entitled “Optimism and Activism” that has a lot observations and insights that you might appreciate. And, in the epilogue to his and Charles S. Prebish’s The Faces of Buddhism in America, Kenneth K. Tanaka reflects on Tweed’s thoughts in light of the various “colors and contours” of American Buddhism today. Lastly, in an interview with Tricycle: The Buddhist Review for their Fall 1995 issue (vol. 5, no. 1), the great Allen Ginsberg offered a memorable response to the question, “Is there any cause for optimism?”:

Well, personally, yeah. Everybody’s got a life to lead and they’ve got a bodhisattva tendency, everybody wants to do good, so I just think on a personal level, yeah. On a larger scale, there doesn’t seem to be any hope unless compassion becomes a more widespread important teaching on how to live. Compassion to self and others.

That’s all I’ve got. But perhaps some of the blog’s readers can leave you some helpful hints in the comments. — DANNY

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Got a question for me? You can send it to me via email, Facebook, Twitter, Tricycle Community, or Myspace. Or you can just leave me a comment in this or other posts.

NEXT TIME: I’m definitely going to do the Buddhist military chaplains question next. : )