East & West -- Books: Buddhist reflections on caring for the Earth, each other

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THE WORLD WE HAVE: A BUDDHIST APPROACH TO PEACE AND ECOLOGY
By Thich Nhat Hanh
Parallax Press, 141 pages, $10.95

This small, thoughtful volume by renowned Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh brings a Buddhist perspective to the fragile state of our planet and issues a compassionate call for the personal transformation needed to address the ecological crisis.

The truth of impermanence applies to all things, including civilizations -- including our own, Nhat Hanh writes. The peace that comes with accepting this truth will bring the possibility of hope: “With this kind of peace we can make use of the technology that is available to us to save this planet of ours. With fear and despair we’re not going to be able to save our planet, even if we have the technology to do it.”

Hope for the planet is grounded in the “interbeing” of all things, he emphasizes throughout the book. “We’re imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of having some comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self. If we want to change the situation, we must begin by being our true selves. To be our true selves means we have to be the forest, the river and the ozone layer.”

While Nhat Hanh touches on practical means of respecting our interdependent place in creation -- such as adopting a vegetarian diet, reducing or eliminating car use, and pursuing solar energy -- the core of the book can provide spiritual reflection to support and inspire environmentalists of all faiths.

TOGETHER UNDER ONE ROOF: MAKING A HOME OF BUDDHA'S HOUSEHOLD
By Lin Jensen
Wisdom Publications, 276 pages, $16.95

There’s a fascinating book hinted at in the pages of Lin Jensen’s collection of short essays on the “Buddha’s household” -- by which he means the entirety of our world. The founding teacher of Chico Zen Sangha in California, Jensen seeks to refute the notion that Zen practice is merely an internal journey toward personal enlightenment. On the contrary, he writes, “either we wake up together or none of us awakens at all. It is this recognition of a common, inseparable humanity that constitutes enlightenment and it is the failure of this recognition that dooms us to lives of mutual antagonism and distrust.”

Exploring this ideal through ancient Zen tales, Western literature, and Jensen’s personal experiences, the essays are often insightful. But by far the most intriguing are the few that focus on Jensen’s experience as Buddhist chaplain at California’s maximum-security High Desert State Prison. This Western Zen teacher came to serve inmates predominantly of Southeast Asian descent and of Buddhism’s Theravada and Pure Land traditions. The glimpses Jensen gives of intra-Buddhist differences and his eyewitness accounts of the harsh U.S. prison system were so intriguing they deserved a book of their own.

“What we’ve got here is the scum of the earth,” a prison guard told Jensen, but in Buddhism, Jensen says -- and the Christian reader will recognize the commonality -- “there is no such person as an outcast. Everyone is included.” More than the rest of his essays, a deeper exploration of Jensen’s encounters with these inmates, whom society has shunned and forgotten, could have driven home the message, “Either we wake up together or none of us awakens at all.”

National Catholic Reporter October 31, 2008