The Journalist and the Buddha

The Buddha, the Dharma and the Media

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin -- There is an old interviewing trick journalists use to  get people to say things far more intimate than they planned to reveal.   

The trick works when the journalist, instead of asking a follow-up question during the silence that follows an answer, instead stays silent. The compulsion to fill conversational vacuums is so powerful that people often blab intimacies they didn't mean to share.

That interviewing ploy is one of many ethical shortcuts I used as a reporter and editor in the mainstream press for more than twenty years, first as a reporter for The New York Times, and then later as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in London and Hong Kong.

As the years passed, I cut more and more ethical corners as a journalist to get exclusive stories, to elicit juicy anecdotes and quotes, and to get my stories the best possible play on the newswire or in the newspaper -- preferably on page one.

Verbal Steroids

I became a serial exaggerator of social trends. Increasingly, I started defining every trend as ''new and important,'' ''widespread,'' or ''emblematic.''

My writing vocabulary was getting showy and meretricious (and a Happy New Year!), and I began avoiding humble but specific, useful words. 

I got hooked on such verbal journalistic steroids as ''unprecedented,''  ''in a dramatic new development,'' ''revolutionary,'' and ''raises new and troubling questions.'' I felt sheepish, hangdog and worse. But I kept using.

Sometime I'd get to the part of the story where I needed to type in these phrases, and I'd literally feel sick.

Was I really going to do this again, I'd ask myself?

Usually, I would. Because when I injected these particular words my stories and -- most important -- my byline shot straight onto the front page.

And that felt oh, so good. But where was the end to these addictions?

Extreme Reality

Of course, deeper ethical issues face the modern global journalist, language-wise.

The world is filled with violent words and actions that journalists must sometimes, of necessity, report. Sugar-coating reality would be an ethical lapse equal or even greater than occasionally exaggerating social trends.

The world is filled with realities so extreme they are literally beyond the reach of language, used at its most extreme, to accurately describe. But even straight and well-intentioned reporting of such violence, incendiary language, and extreme reality can kick the cycle of violence to even more violent rounds.

What morals should guide a journalist's professional purpose, reporting methods, and use of language in such a world?

In recent years, Buddhism’s doctrines on life’s purpose, human suffering, and ethical speech  have seemed to me to suggest -- as no other moral system I have yet found -- practical answers to such questions facing a global media.

Practical Morals

There is a spiritual side to Buddhism, it's true. But its most appealing trait to me from the beginning has been its straightforward and empirically-based morals. It asks not a speck of faith from anyone. Yet it offers a comprehensive and practical human morals of which speech is an integral part.

In this way, Buddhism seems tailor-made for journalism’s ethical, and increasingly global and multicultural, needs.

Indeed, in its relentless quest to observe without filter or distortion the nature of daily human existence -- the fact and flavor of the simple ordinary present, the living now -- Buddhism seems, in a certain way, quintessentially journalistic. 

In my early years as a journalist, I was happy to discover the world through journalism. My youthful curiosity and optimism carried me through those years.

My drive to explore the world more widely (if not more deeply) trumped the ethical questions that always tagged behind.

Ethics Codes

It's only natural, I suppose, that with age the question of one's purpose looms larger. You've only got so many days in life, and so many chances to direct one’s attention with positive intention and purpose. 

For a few years, I searched for an ethical system within the profession, or even from another profession, that addressed these concerns. Basically, I got nowhere. I found out that journalists don't like to talk about the moral basis of what they do, which is to use language. They are practically allergic to such a thing. That's got to change if journalism is going to evolve ethically and globally.

Journalism's moral obtuseness is enshrined in its ethics codes.

The specific injunctions of these guides to newsroom practice -- not to plagiarize, not to lie get a story, not to cause anyone harm, etc. -- are nowhere connected to any fundamental vision of human existence or morals.

That may sound like too grand a hope for journalism, but medical and legal ethics are grounded in this way. Why not journalism and the media?

Kant and Mill

By now, surely, the enormous impact of the media on global affairs is obvious enough to warrant thinking more seriously about media morals, beginning with the morals of journalism, which is the public service branch of the media.

Journalists wishing to go deeper ethically than their profession allows, as I did on my quest, traditionally look to Enlightenment philosophers for enlightenment.

In particular, ethics courses at communication schools teach the ''utilitarian'' ethics of John Stuart Mill, and the ''duty-based'' ethics of Immanuel Kant. 

Mill's utilitarian ethic calls for examining each case to determine if the greatest good is achieved for the greatest number. The Kantian ethic, by contrast, asks people to question if a given action would help or harm society if it was repeated by everyone. Could it be ''universalized'' to society’s benefit?

These approaches have great appeal because they define communication ethics as a matter of general human morals, and not of daily expedience.

Buddhist Media

And yet, how impractical Mill and Kant are!

Enlightenment philosophers, I discovered, ascribe superhuman powers to ordinary people. Can any single person reasonably guess, with any degree of accuracy, whether a given act of speech will result in ''the greatest good for the greatest number''? Or whether it could be ''universalized without harm?''

Since when could any being but a God do such a thing? Neither the morals of Mill nor of Kant are easily translated, in practical terms, to individuals facing daily life situations, much less to hyperactive, competitive newsrooms. 

It was in Buddhism that I finally found an explicit and practical morals of human communication. Since I discovered its doctrines a few years ago, my ethics thinking has centered around the question whether it might be possible to develop a new journalism based on such universal yet practical principles.

A journalism grounded in Buddhist morals would display two salient traits derived from its moral purpose and methods. Such a journalism would be:

1. A journalism of healing. Buddhism is often not classified as a religion because it teaches no theology, declares no divinity, and requires no faith. Instead, its doctrines revolve entirely around the achievement of a practical goal: “the end of suffering.” Nor is the definition of suffering complex or esoteric. It is ordinary everyday suffering, aches and pains, mental moods and afflictions, sickness and death. On a social level, suffering in Buddhism is defined as any harshness, violence, and division of the community.  A Buddhist journalism would therefore be aimed at helping individuals overcome their personal sufferings, and helping society heal the wounds caused by injustice, hatred, ostracism, and physical violence. Such a defined professional purpose would give the Buddhist journalist a measuring stick for each word and story produced: does it help overcome individual and social suffering?

2. A journalism of timely, truthful, helpful speech. A Buddhist journalism would need tools and materials adequate to its healing purpose. The Buddhist “Right Speech” doctrine provides many of them. Right Speech sits midway along the “Noble Eightfold Path,” the Buddha’s prescribed method to reach the end of suffering. The midway place of Right Speech along the Noble Eightfold Path is interesting, because speech is the first action to follow the gaining of wisdom and positive intention, as developed in meditation. By this view, speech is a person's very first chance to act morally in the world. It is followed then in the Noble Eightfold Path by “Right Action” and “Right Livelihood.”  Also, very helpfully for journalists, the identifying traits of Right Speech are specifically defined as “timely, truthful, helpful, and spoken with a mind of good will.” Likewise, the five main types of speech to avoid are lies, divisive speech, harsh and abusive speech, and idle and distracting speech.

Can a new global journalism of healing be practiced that embraces timely, truthful and helpful speech, and avoids the five destructive modes?

It would be important and interesting to find out.

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report

For Part 1 of the Burleigh Lecture, click here.
For Part 2, click here.

Do Buddhists Believe in God?

Unitarian Universalist Church, Rochester, MN

Sunday Sermon, February 17, 2008

ROCHESTER, MN -- I picked the topic for today's sermon, ''Do Buddhists Believe in God?'', because I'm asked occasionally to speak about Buddhism at churches around town. This is usually the first question to come up. If it's not the first question, it's at least always the one that generates the most interest and anxiety in the room. 

Everything goes quiet when somebody finally asks, ''Do Buddhists believe in God?'' I believe this quiet that descends is out of deference for what most people today believe is the ultimate question, the one that spiritually matters the most. 

Actually, the Buddha certainly did not consider the question whether God exists, or other such metaphysical questions, to be the most important ones. When people asked the Buddha such questions, he often maintained a Sphinx-like silence, simply refusing to answer. 

And yet, there is an important sense, one that serious Buddhists acknowledge, in which questions about God certainly are the ultimate spiritual questions. 

Many contemporary Buddhists consider this.   

Haven't each of us had moments where we seem to be in touch, even if briefly, with a higher power? No matter what our religion, this is a common human experience which we register not just intellectually, but even more so bodily, emotionally, and spiritually. 

During such moments and sometimes long after, we may feel the powerful, natural arising of positive intentions such as compassion, equanimity, generosity, patience and truthfulness. 

What are these moments about? Why do they happen? 

Where does morality come from? 

Seen in this way, few if any Buddhist masters from 2,500 years of history would object to saying that Buddhist practice is about finding this living God within oneself, and in one's daily life.  

There are three major contemporary teachers on the relationship of Buddhism to Judeo-Christian notions of God. They are the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, and many recent Buddhist interpreters of the Gnostic Gospels, discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

The Dalai Lama compares Christian notions of God and compassion to Buddhist teachings. His favorite device is to compare Buddhist texts to Bible passages, such as the Matthew 5 passage where Jesus teaches people to turn the other cheek and ''To love your enemies and pray for your persecutors.'' 

The Dalai Lama says: ''This passage could be introduced into a Buddhist text and it would not even be recognized as traditional Christian scriptures.'' To demonstrate, he quotes the Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha's sayings, whose most  famous passage reads: '''He insulted me, he hurt me, he defeated me, he robbed me.' Those who think such thoughts will not be free from hate. For hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love. This is eternal law.'' 

The Gnostic Gospels, as most of you probably know, are the ''lost gospels'' of early Christianity. Many  people believe these texts describe authentic Christianity, that is, before institutional religion distorted Jesus' original teachings to suit the needs of a powerful, global, proselytizing church. 

Whether that last accusation is fair, the Gnostic Gospels surely offer a very Buddhist-like early Christianity, and a very Buddha-like Jesus. 

For example, the Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, just like the Buddha in the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow, time after time warns his followers to avoid trying to find his essence in his words, or in any system of religious or conceptual thinking. 

Every time his followers try to pin him down in this way, Jesus spins away. He says in the Gospel of Thomas: 

''If those who lead you say to you, 'Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,' the birds of the sky will get there first.' If they say, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will get there first. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.'' 

The Buddha, like Jesus, used many verbal ploys to illustrate that his true, living nature had nothing to do with words or thoughts or definitions.

In one story, soon after his enlightenment, the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the Buddha's extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence.

The man stopped and asked, "My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?" "No," said the Buddha. "Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?" Again the Buddha answered, "No." "Are you a man?" "No." "Well, my friend, then what are you?" The Buddha replied, ''I am awake.''

The Buddha taught humans to seek this state of being awake  within themselves. ''Be a lamp unto yourselves,'' he said.

Jesus also used the metaphor of inner light to describe his living essence, both in the Bible – ''I am the light of the world'' he says in John 8:12 -- and in the Gospel of Thomas when he says: ''I am the light that is over all. I am the all. The all came forth out of me, and to me the all has come. Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there.''

Instead of focusing on these words or the ideas they express, you might try an experiment. What I am offering here is a traditional Buddhist meditation. 

To understand the meaning of Jesus’s or the Buddha’s inner light, be aware of your body and your mind as it is right now, at this very moment, right here in church. Ask ''How is my body and mind right now?'' Don’t look or strain to hear anything special, inner voices or glinting sunbeams, or anything like that. Just note whatever little aches and pains or heat or tingling you may feel, anywhere in your body, just little sensations here and there. As ordinary or boring as it may seem, just with these for as long as you can.

Just notice whatever is happening in your body and your mind for a few continuous moments.

This is a standard Buddhist meditation, but it is also, you see, very much like inviting you to experience your own body and mind as that piece of wood, or the lifted rock, from the Gospel of Thomas.

This is where Jesus said he was to be found.

More than any other contemporary Buddhist, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has drawn parallels between the Christian and Buddhist conceptions of God.

Thich Nhat Hanh calls God by a name that he invented, called ''interbeing.'' I’ll end my remarks today with a passage from Thich Nhat Hanh, taken from his book that compares Buddhism to Christianity called ''Living Buddha, Living Christ.''

''When we look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds, there could be no rain, there could be no flower. Without time, the flower could not bloom. In fact, the flower is made entirely of non-flower elements. It has no independent, individual existence. It 'inter-is' with everything else in the universe. When we see the nature of interbeing, barriers between ourselves and others are dissolved, and peace, love and understanding are possible. Whenever there is understanding, compassion is born.''

To Thich Nhat Hanh, to the Dalai Lama, and to many other contemporary Buddhists, the being born anew every moment – as registered in our everyday aches and pains, our little spots of passing pleasure and our ordinary sensations – are what really matters.

This is not a question to be pondered, a theory to be debated, or a belief to be grasped.

It's an experience to be had. And it can be had right here, right now. 

It is, both Buddha and Jesus tell us, a chance to experience the living God.

Copyright @ 2008 Douglas McGill

Why Can't Journalism Talk About Its Own Morals?

ROCHESTER, MN -- As the New Year rolls in like an inexorable tide, I have watched the elections, done some reading and made a resolution as a journalist, as a citizen, and as a guy.

It's a resolution about, um, morality.

It's about how to determine what's right from what's wrong, wholesome from unwholesome, especially in the making and consuming of the media.

My resolution is about how to tell the difference between good and evil in the  media, which flattens the bumpy richness of life into a single, thin, fluorescent or inky dimension.

I'm excited but nervous to be writing this.

Because on the one hand, I'm energized to be speaking openly about morality and journalism. That breaks an ancient taboo of my own profession, which is always an exciting day's work.

On the other hand, there are dangers in talking about morality in journalism, the high-walled and sometimes vengeful kingdom of neutral "objectivity."

Robertson or Chopra?

It's easy for readers to spot that single word "morality," and immediately decide one has succumbed  to rightwing scolds a la Pat Robertson, or to New Age fuzzyheads a la Deepak Chopra. (The latter being much the greater likelihood for me, Buddhist as I am.)

But it's just this pigeonholing of anyone who talks about morals that fuels my drive to find the roots of the problem. Because surely it is dangerous not just for the media but for society.

If the people who create the mass media and the millions of other who consume it, don't have a language to talk with each other about what's right and wrong, what's healthy and what's unhealthy to consume, what kind of a mass media and journalism are we going to have?

At the very least, by simple logic, we will have a confused mass media and journalism. And at worst we'll have a wicked one, as chaos is often exploited by the intelligent but depraved. 

Simple Question

At the library I found three trusted guides through these tricky waters -- "communitarian" philosophers who explain why topics like morals, character and virtue are so little discussed in modern society at large. Not just in journalism and the media, but everywhere.

My guides were Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who wrote “Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy;” Jonathan Durham Peters, a professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author of “Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;” and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief but inspiring essay called “Spiritual Thinking.”

All three of these writers ask vivid questions to kick-start moral thinking. One question they all ask in one form or another is:

How come Lady Justice wears a blindfold?

And hey, is that really such a good idea?

The Blindfold Theory

Is willful blindness the best way to make ethical, wise choices? Is it smart to block from our consciousness all those telling little winks and tics that we constantly receive from the life around us and by which, in reality, we navigate our daily rounds? 

Hillary Clinton just won the New Hampshire primary based on a microsecond of tearing up, plus a tiny subtle hitch in her voice that apparently persuaded a few thousand women to switch their votes to her at the last minute.

Lady Justice would have missed it all. 

The blindfold theory holds that on the societal scale, the rational process of balancing costs and benefits works better than seeking wisdom from within one’s supposedly subjective conscience and soul.

Does that reasoning pass the common sense test? 

I’ve got a big pile of poker chips placed on this question, because as a journalist I’ve worn a mighty moral blindfold for 30 years. It goes by the name of “objectivity,” the idea that journalists serve the public best by writing about issues as neutral bystanders, rigorously detached from what they observe.

Without taking sides, we journalists are supposed to gather facts and deliver them to the public to “let the readers decide.” 

Sandel, Peters, Taylor

I’ve wrestled with journalism’s objectivity problem before. After a fair amount of soul-searching, a few years ago I finally was able to describe (as many others have before me) the ethical shortcuts and rationalizations that journalists make in objectivity’s name. 

But until I read my three philosopher-guides, I’d never before felt that I understood the true roots of the problem. So how could I ever have hoped to resolve it? 

The three authors are Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who wrote “Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics;” Jonathan Durham Peters, a professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author of “Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;” and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief essay called “Spiritual Thinking.”   

For all three writers, the mighty blindfold is called liberal political theory, which is not just a theory of course but the bedrock faith of modern western society. These authors especially deplore the strain of liberalism that has dominated in the past half-century, which they say has removed individuals as moral decision-makers from public affairs. 

Depressed Newsrooms

“According to this liberalism,” Sandel writes, “government should be neutral as to conceptions of the good life. Government should not affirm, through its policies or laws, any particular conception of the good life; instead it should provide a neutral framework of rights within which people can choose their own values and ends.” 

By defining individual moral action in society as a choice between ready-made options, which Sandel calls the “procedural republic,” instead of developing the character of individuals to make subtle, case-by-case decisions, Sandel says society loses in the end. 

“A political agenda lacking substantive moral discourse is one symptom of the public philosophy of the procedural republic,” he writes. It has also “coincided with a growing sense of disempowerment. Despite the expansion of rights in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that they are losing control of the forces that govern their lives.” 

That sounds like the depressed atmosphere of mainstream newsrooms today. 

Disempowerment in newsrooms today takes many forms, all the way from mass layoffs at newspapers that are downsizing, to the frustration of reporters who are assigned to cover celebrity scandals while skipping important civic issues.

Meanwhile, there is neither any substantive moral discourse in newsrooms about these trends, nor any suitable framework to have one. (Only fired and refugee mainstream journalists on the Internet can try that!) 

"Satanic" Arguments

John Durham Peters’ critique of liberalism is more radical than Sandel’s, especially on the right to free speech and the lengths to which he believes the media exploit it. 

“There is something satanic about many liberal arguments in favor of free expression,” Peters writes. “Defenders of free speech often like to plumb the depths of the underworld. They tread where angels do not dare and reemerge escorting scruffy, marginal, or outlaw figures, many of whom spend their time planting slaps in the face of the public.” 

In a talk at McGill University last year, Peters placed a red laser dot on liberalism in plainer English: “Liberalism undermines itself by pretending to be above the battle, by pretending to be neutral. Lots of liberals say it’s only a set of procedures and rules. But I would suggest that liberalism is one of the players. It’s not a referee. And that liberalism needs to recognize that it too has a vision. And that even in claiming neutrality it thereby forfeits a kind of neutrality, because by always trying to seek the higher ground it ends up pushing people out of an ethical position.” 

Looking back, I have never seen more moral hypocrisy than in mainstream newsrooms, such as at The New York Times where I worked as a reporter from 1979 to 1989, and as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in its Tokyo, London and Hong Kong newsrooms in the 1990s. Of course, I count myself as one of the hypocrites. 

Absolutism Corrupts Absolutely?

On the one hand, reporters and editors in all these newsrooms were deeply committed to ferreting out the truth, and sometimes showed great courage in doing so. This behavior alone demonstrates journalists' deeply personal and moral involvement in society. 

Yet at the same time, whenever moral questions arose upon the publication of our hard-won factual narratives, our first impulse was always to exempt ourselves from any further dialog by citing “objectivity.”

Our job was simply to gather and put out the information we dug up, we told our miffed complainants, and that was the end of our involvement. 

The accuracy of the facts that we published, and not any further discussion about the moral shadings raised by the timing or manner of their publication, was the highest moral principle we felt beholden too. “You’ve got a problem with what we published, talk to our lawyers,” we’d say to anyone who raised questions.

Free speech absolutism was the alpha and the omega of our moral thinking. That was expedient, but was it right? 

Reflecting on my newsroom experience in the light of Sandel and Peters, I think that by insisting on such moral disengagement, we journalists hurt society in several ways.

Three Problems 

First, we abdicate our leadership role in society as clear, honest, reliable communicators. We limit the valuable contributions that we could make to society as exemplary communicators, by clinging to a hypocrisy that is visible for all to see.

Second, we contribute to journalism’s decline by degrading the public trust that is journalism’s principal foundation.

Third, and worst of all, by our moral obtuseness we fail to create a public space that facilitates robust and open discussion about what constitutes the good life – the best forms of government, the best values and models of human behavior. 

A multicultural and global society especially needs such a free and open forum to progress peacefully. If journalism doesn’t create one, what social institution will? 

These questions apply to citizen journalists -- the millions of bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers and other ordinary folks who are reporting the world around them on the Internet -- as much and even more so than to trained journalists. 

Because like it or not, the formal institutions of journalism, and with them the traditional journalistic values they once protected, are crumbling. That turns the ethical imperative for creating useful journalism over to the people who account for the vast majority of hours that actually are spent today in society looking around, and then recording and commenting on what’s seen, the essential journalistic enterprise. 

So what’s the answer? 

Neighbors and Strangers

My philosopher-guides guides offer three variations on a civic-minded theme. 

Michael Sandel counsels a revival of republican public philosophy that stresses the formation of individual moral character, much along the lines that Thomas Jefferson endorsed in his agrarian vision of democracy. 

John Durham Peters advocates drawing on religious traditions that are in sync with each other and with secular solidarity. “One of the central principles of the law in Judaism is kindness to the stranger, and one of the central principles of Christianity is love of the neighbor,” he says. “In some way, [those] are more powerful foundations for thinking about society than liberalism if you want a society with both solidarity and freedom in it.” 

Charles Taylor, in his brief but enlightening essay, advocates a communitarian project similar to Sandel’s and Peters’. Yet he cautions that any future peaceful world will require a burdensome body of laws and rules to maintain order. 

“We will in many ways be living lives under even greater discipline than today,” Taylor says. “More than ever we are going to need trail-blazers who will open or retrieve forgotten modes of prayer, meditation, friendship, solidarity and compassionate action.” 

Personally, I doubt that any such trail-blazers will be wearing blindfolds. 

My Resolution

My New Year’s resolution is to work as a journalist, to act as a citizen, and to live as a human without a blindfold.

Instead, I'll try to simply use my God-given head and heart and eyes.

Mindfulness, Blended Orgasms and the News

ROCHESTER, MN -- In the grocery checkout line the other day, holding my milk and eggs in hand, I scanned the magazine rack headlines:

• The Blended Orgasm – A More Intense Climax
• Bite Me! Woman’s Bizarre Relationship With Mosquitoes
• Bomb Blast Near Bhutto Kills 126 in Pakistan
• “Queen of Mean” Leaves $12 Million to Pet Pooch
• Viking Fans Feel the Pain, Again and Again and ...

Has anyone out there noticed how a calm mind evaporates like the dew when exposed to newspaper headlines, magazine covers, and Sunday morning talk TV?

Even the serious Pakistan headline above, mixed into this gruel, is transformed into a jitter-making diversion, a passing frisson of gloom.

Yet there is a sense too in which the Pakistan headline fits right along with the others – that is, in the human insanity being described. The tabloids all-too-accurately report on our obsessive attachments and delusions, on the human condition, just as our newspapers factually report the news.

All of it dispels calm:

The strange human urge to be bitten! Maybe I’ll experiment!

The urgency of news from Pakistan! I must respond to it!

Blended orgasms – wow! How can I get one or give one?

I point to how the mass media transforms calm to agitation, because according to the Buddhist tradition, developing inner calm is the royal road to wisdom, which is the royal road to peace.

Obsessions & Fetters

Therefore, if the mass media -- and journalism as the conscience of the mass media -- is going to contribute to world peace, it will have to help develop calm states of mind among its consumers worldwide.

The Buddhist term for calm is “samatha,” or tranquility.

“Monks!” the Buddha once addressed his orange-robed followers. “There is the case where a monk has developed insight preceded by tranquility. As he develops insight preceded by tranquility, the path is born. He follows that path, develops it and pursues it. As he follows the path, developing it and pursuing it — his fetters are abandoned, his obsessions destroyed.”

Those would be the fetters of ignorance and mental restlessness, and the obsession with forming solid opinions, theories, identities and careers.

Developing calm mind states, the Buddha said, begins the path to peace.

Is the mass media, and journalism as the conscience of the media, following this path?

Is the mass media’s role as a major influence on mass mind-states even explicitly addressed in the codified ethics of any branch of the mass media? If not, why not?

Planetary Resource

When you think of it, is there any resource on the planet more precious than a calm mind? The human race needs calm minds like it needs oxygen. When calm minds disappear, anxiety appears, and violence lurks close by.

Without a calm collective mind the human species surely will perish as quickly as if the ozone layer disappeared, or the polar ice caps melted tomorrow. And the mass media – when consumed or produced in huge amounts by anxious and scattered minds – is surely one of the greatest manmade threats to the vital planetary resource of calm minds.

Buddhist psychology precisely names the three basic toxins – the Buddha called them “visiting forces” – that attack the naturally calm human mind.

They are the “kilesas,” or defilements, and they come in three main varieties: greed, which is wanting to grasp what is pleasant; aversion, which is wanting to avoid or annihilate what is unpleasant; and delusion, which is ignorance of reality and an infatuation with unreal things.

Giddy Blisses

Mixing these three ingredients in different proportions yields the full menu of poisons that human beings fall heir to – anger, jealousy, lust, fear, anxious planning, tearful reminiscing, giddy blisses, judging, perfectionism, hypochondria, self-pity, martyrdom, horror, depression, and on and on.

As a journalist, my concern is that I know very little about the role that words and images play as a host or vector of the kilesas; or how language might be used to host, transmit, or support calm and wise states of mind.

The idea that as a journalist, not to mention as a person, I unconsciously host or transmit language toxins – kilesas, if you will, destroyers of the precious natural resource of calm – is slightly haunting. So is the idea that my culture offers no training in the public use of language in wholesome, ethical ways.

Don’t get me wrong.

I am 100% in favor of blended orgasms, whatever they are.

I just want to be able to get one, to give one, and as a journalist to tell the world about them – along with the distracting yet important daily news -- while also staying wise, caring and calm.

A Journalism of Morally Skilful Speech

The doctrine of Right Speech (morally skillful speech) holds a pivotal place in Buddhism's overall moral system, as a kind of gateway between thought and action, between moral intention and active expression.

According to the Buddha, speech is the first action that an individual may positively take in the world following a period of quiet meditation, and perhaps the achievement of some insight into ''the way things are'' through meditation. The equanimity and inner peace that may have developed in meditation thus has a chance to be expressed in the world immediately through speech, even before action.

Crucially, the Buddha explicitly identifies Right Speech as a necessary step on the path to enlightenment. It is given as the first of three virtues necessary as a foundation for spiritual growth, the two others being Right Action (acting so as to help and not harm all sentient beings) and Right Livelihood (making a living in a useful and nonviolent way). Put another way, attaining enlightenment without having mastered Right Speech is impossible. This is true of all three of the above-named virtues but again, by listing Right Speech above the other two, the Buddha seems to give it a certain priority as  requiring that the utmost careful attention be paid to the incredibly subtle, but also incredibly powerful, uses and abuses of human speech.

It's important to sketch out the larger system in which Right Speech holds such a special and pivotal place. That larger moral system, which essentially contains the entirety of the Buddha's teachings, is usually referred to as the Four Noble Truths. These truths were the subject of the Buddha's first sermon following his enlightenment, and he often said they were all that he taught his 50 years as a wandering monk. The Buddha summarized the Four Noble Truths by saying that all his teaching was about one thing only: ''Suffering and the end of suffering.'' The Four Noble Truths are usually given as 1) The truth of suffering, 2) The truth of the arising of suffering, 3) The truth of the end of suffering, and 4) The path to the end of suffering.

The First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering, says that the impermanence of all things is the source of human suffering. The Buddhist word ''dukkha,'' usually translated as ''suffering'' (and the source of the mistaken popular notion that Buddhism is a nihilistic creed) actually connotes not only the ideas of human suffering, discomfort, and pain, but additionally the ideas of impermanence, imperfection, emptiness, and void. The Noble Truth of Suffering says that at the heart of the human experience lies a cosmic seed of imperfection that we spend our lives trying to understand and heal.

The Second Noble Truth, the truth of the arising of suffering, says that ignorance is the root of all suffering. More specifically, it says that ignorance of the present conditions of life -- of  ''the way things are'' -- sets off a chain of potentially disastrous inner reactions based on that ignorance: either trying to make permanent what one likes, or trying to destroy what one dislikes. Either of those reactions only tightens the grip of desire or aversion, leading people to devise ever more desperate schemes for release.

The Third Noble Truth, the truth of the end of suffering, says that an experiential understanding of the way things are, can lead to the end of suffering. This transcendent wisdom gained through meditation dissolves suffering as the morning sun evaporates the dew. It's a wisdom-in-the-bones, a knowledge of lived experience, and not anything book-learned or mentally puzzled out. It blooms from within, drawing on its own depths for nourishment. Suffering ends because wisdom creates the possibility of action that is smoothly continuous with the realities of the world.

The Fourth Noble Truth, the path to the end of suffering, is the Buddha's great how-to manual of enlightenment. It describes eight steps that collectively create conditions in which suffering can decrease by degrees, and finally cease completely. Although the path is usually described as having eight steps, in essence there are only three, with each of those three broken down in groupings of three, three, and two sub-step. The three basic steps are ethical conduct, meditation, and transforming insight into the way things are. Rather than forming a stairway that leads to heaven, these three steps and their eight sub-steps are more like a Mobius Strip that endlessly leaves, travels, and arrives in the here and now. One can start anywhere on the path, or choose to follow any step at any time, or several or all of them all at once, and always arrive at the same place. The Noble Eightfold Path, as the path to the end of suffering is usually called, truly describes more of a place than a path, with the place being the present, a boundary-less orb without coordinates in which all things happen everywhere all the time. To phrase it this way is to advance to the end of the teaching at the speed of light, so take it as you will. The basic point is that the Noble Eightfold Path leads a person to a direct experience of the way things are, which is the solvent of ignorance, which is the path to the end of suffering.

The Noble Eightfold Path is usually shown schematically as:

1. Right View	Transforming Insight
2. Right Intention
3. Right Speech	Ethical Conduct
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort	Meditation
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

 

The essential logic of the path is that virtuous action in the world creates a foundation for fruitful individual meditation, and that individual meditation creates a foundation for the arising of wisdom in a soul. A virtuous circle leading to the end of suffering can thus be started by entering the path at any point. Yet, within this virtuous cycle, Right Speech stands at an especially critical point, which is the line proceeding from wisdom towards virtue. Right Speech  lies right at the point where the wholesome soul developed through meditation, decides to express itself in the world. The very first such expression, the Buddha says, is speech that will either spread the peace achieved by meditation into the world or, if unskillfully spoken, will assuredly achieve just the opposite effect.

   

 

The doctrine of Right Speech (morally skillful speech) holds a pivotal place in Buddhism's overall moral system, as a kind of gateway between thought and action, between moral intention and active expression.

According to the Buddha, speech is the first action that an individual may positively take in the world following a period of quiet meditation, and perhaps the achievement of some insight into ''the way things are'' through meditation. The equanimity and inner peace that may have developed in meditation thus has a chance to be expressed in the world immediately through speech, even before action.

Crucially, the Buddha explicitly identifies Right Speech as a necessary step on the path to enlightenment. It is given as the first of three virtues necessary as a foundation for spiritual growth, the two others being Right Action (acting so as to help and not harm all sentient beings) and Right Livelihood (making a living in a useful and nonviolent way). Put another way, attaining enlightenment without having mastered Right Speech is impossible. This is true of all three of the above-named virtues but again, by listing Right Speech above the other two, the Buddha seems to give it a certain priority as  requiring that the utmost careful attention be paid to the incredibly subtle, but also incredibly powerful, uses and abuses of human speech.

It's important to sketch out the larger system in which Right Speech holds such a special and pivotal place. That larger moral system, which essentially contains the entirety of the Buddha's teachings, is usually referred to as the Four Noble Truths. These truths were the subject of the Buddha's first sermon following his enlightenment, and he often said they were all that he taught his 50 years as a wandering monk. The Buddha summarized the Four Noble Truths by saying that all his teaching was about one thing only: ''Suffering and the end of suffering.'' The Four Noble Truths are usually given as 1) The truth of suffering, 2) The truth of the arising of suffering, 3) The truth of the end of suffering, and 4) The path to the end of suffering.

The First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering, says that the impermanence of all things is the source of human suffering. The Buddhist word ''dukkha,'' usually translated as ''suffering'' (and the source of the mistaken popular notion that Buddhism is a nihilistic creed) actually connotes not only the ideas of human suffering, discomfort, and pain, but additionally the ideas of impermanence, imperfection, emptiness, and void. The Noble Truth of Suffering says that at the heart of the human experience lies a cosmic seed of imperfection that we spend our lives trying to understand and heal.

The Second Noble Truth, the truth of the arising of suffering, says that ignorance is the root of all suffering. More specifically, it says that ignorance of the present conditions of life -- of  ''the way things are'' -- sets off a chain of potentially disastrous inner reactions based on that ignorance: either trying to make permanent what one likes, or trying to destroy what one dislikes. Either of those reactions only tightens the grip of desire or aversion, leading people to devise ever more desperate schemes for release.

The Third Noble Truth, the truth of the end of suffering, says that an experiential understanding of the way things are, can lead to the end of suffering. This transcendent wisdom gained through meditation dissolves suffering as the morning sun evaporates the dew. It's a wisdom-in-the-bones, a knowledge of lived experience, and not anything book-learned or mentally puzzled out. It blooms from within, drawing on its own depths for nourishment. Suffering ends because wisdom creates the possibility of action that is smoothly continuous with the realities of the world.

The Fourth Noble Truth, the path to the end of suffering, is the Buddha's great how-to manual of enlightenment. It describes eight steps that collectively create conditions in which suffering can decrease by degrees, and finally cease completely. Although the path is usually described as having eight steps, in essence there are only three, with each of those three broken down in groupings of three, three, and two sub-step. The three basic steps are ethical conduct, meditation, and transforming insight into the way things are. Rather than forming a stairway that leads to heaven, these three steps and their eight sub-steps are more like a Mobius Strip that endlessly leaves, travels, and arrives in the here and now. One can start anywhere on the path, or choose to follow any step at any time, or several or all of them all at once, and always arrive at the same place. The Noble Eightfold Path, as the path to the end of suffering is usually called, truly describes more of a place than a path, with the place being the present, a boundary-less orb without coordinates in which all things happen everywhere all the time. To phrase it this way is to advance to the end of the teaching at the speed of light, so take it as you will. The basic point is that the Noble Eightfold Path leads a person to a direct experience of the way things are, which is the solvent of ignorance, which is the path to the end of suffering.

The Noble Eightfold Path is usually shown schematically as:

1. Right View	Transforming Insight
2. Right Intention
3. Right Speech	Ethical Conduct
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort	Meditation
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

 

The essential logic of the path is that virtuous action in the world creates a foundation for fruitful individual meditation, and that individual meditation creates a foundation for the arising of wisdom in a soul. A virtuous circle leading to the end of suffering can thus be started by entering the path at any point. Yet, within this virtuous cycle, Right Speech stands at an especially critical point, which is the line proceeding from wisdom towards virtue. Right Speech  lies right at the point where the wholesome soul developed through meditation, decides to express itself in the world. The very first such expression, the Buddha says, is speech that will either spread the peace achieved by meditation into the world or, if unskillfully spoken, will assuredly achieve just the opposite effect.

The doctrine of Right Speech (morally skillful speech) holds a pivotal place in Buddhism's overall moral system, as a kind of gateway between thought and action, between moral intention and active expression.

According to the Buddha, speech is the first action that an individual may positively take in the world following a period of quiet meditation, and perhaps the achievement of some insight into ''the way things are'' through meditation. The equanimity and inner peace that may have developed in meditation thus has a chance to be expressed in the world immediately through speech, even before action.

Crucially, the Buddha explicitly identifies Right Speech as a necessary step on the path to enlightenment. It is given as the first of three virtues necessary as a foundation for spiritual growth, the two others being Right Action (acting so as to help and not harm all sentient beings) and Right Livelihood (making a living in a useful and nonviolent way). Put another way, attaining enlightenment without having mastered Right Speech is impossible. This is true of all three of the above-named virtues but again, by listing Right Speech above the other two, the Buddha seems to give it a certain priority as  requiring that the utmost careful attention be paid to the incredibly subtle, but also incredibly powerful, uses and abuses of human speech.

It's important to sketch out the larger system in which Right Speech holds such a special and pivotal place. That larger moral system, which essentially contains the entirety of the Buddha's teachings, is usually referred to as the Four Noble Truths. These truths were the subject of the Buddha's first sermon following his enlightenment, and he often said they were all that he taught his 50 years as a wandering monk. The Buddha summarized the Four Noble Truths by saying that all his teaching was about one thing only: ''Suffering and the end of suffering.'' The Four Noble Truths are usually given as 1) The truth of suffering, 2) The truth of the arising of suffering, 3) The truth of the end of suffering, and 4) The path to the end of suffering.

The First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering, says that the impermanence of all things is the source of human suffering. The Buddhist word ''dukkha,'' usually translated as ''suffering'' (and the source of the mistaken popular notion that Buddhism is a nihilistic creed) actually connotes not only the ideas of human suffering, discomfort, and pain, but additionally the ideas of impermanence, imperfection, emptiness, and void. The Noble Truth of Suffering says that at the heart of the human experience lies a cosmic seed of imperfection that we spend our lives trying to understand and heal.

The Second Noble Truth, the truth of the arising of suffering, says that ignorance is the root of all suffering. More specifically, it says that ignorance of the present conditions of life -- of  ''the way things are'' -- sets off a chain of potentially disastrous inner reactions based on that ignorance: either trying to make permanent what one likes, or trying to destroy what one dislikes. Either of those reactions only tightens the grip of desire or aversion, leading people to devise ever more desperate schemes for release.

The Third Noble Truth, the truth of the end of suffering, says that an experiential understanding of the way things are, can lead to the end of suffering. This transcendent wisdom gained through meditation dissolves suffering as the morning sun evaporates the dew. It's a wisdom-in-the-bones, a knowledge of lived experience, and not anything book-learned or mentally puzzled out. It blooms from within, drawing on its own depths for nourishment. Suffering ends because wisdom creates the possibility of action that is smoothly continuous with the realities of the world.

The Fourth Noble Truth, the path to the end of suffering, is the Buddha's great how-to manual of enlightenment. It describes eight steps that collectively create conditions in which suffering can decrease by degrees, and finally cease completely. Although the path is usually described as having eight steps, in essence there are only three, with each of those three broken down in groupings of three, three, and two sub-step. The three basic steps are ethical conduct, meditation, and transforming insight into the way things are. Rather than forming a stairway that leads to heaven, these three steps and their eight sub-steps are more like a Mobius Strip that endlessly leaves, travels, and arrives in the here and now. One can start anywhere on the path, or choose to follow any step at any time, or several or all of them all at once, and always arrive at the same place. The Noble Eightfold Path, as the path to the end of suffering is usually called, truly describes more of a place than a path, with the place being the present, a boundary-less orb without coordinates in which all things happen everywhere all the time. To phrase it this way is to advance to the end of the teaching at the speed of light, so take it as you will. The basic point is that the Noble Eightfold Path leads a person to a direct experience of the way things are, which is the solvent of ignorance, which is the path to the end of suffering.

The Noble Eightfold Path is usually shown schematically as:

1. Right View	Transforming Insight
2. Right Intention
3. Right Speech	Ethical Conduct
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort	Meditation
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

 

The essential logic of the path is that virtuous action in the world creates a foundation for fruitful individual meditation, and that individual meditation creates a foundation for the arising of wisdom in a soul. A virtuous circle leading to the end of suffering can thus be started by entering the path at any point. Yet, within this virtuous cycle, Right Speech stands at an especially critical point, which is the line proceeding from wisdom towards virtue. Right Speech  lies right at the point where the wholesome soul developed through meditation, decides to express itself in the world. The very first such expression, the Buddha says, is speech that will either spread the peace achieved by meditation into the world or, if unskillfully spoken, will assuredly achieve just the opposite effect.

Right Speech With Sharon Salzberg

BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS -- Here are some notes on a one-day session on Right Speech -- i.e., the Buddhist guidelines on how to speak in a way that helps and doesn't harm -- yesterday at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies here. Sharon Salzberg, one of the three founders of the Insight Meditation Society, just up the road from the BCBS in Barre, led the session.

A small flyer for the session drew a crowd of 90 from all throughout the northeast and, in my case, Minnesota. The morning was spent almost entirely in meditation, and the afternoon about half, leaving only about one-quarter of the time for discussion about Right Speech. But interestingly enough, that seemed like just the right amount. To have spent more time talking a would have seemed like chatter. That fact in itself, I thought, said a lot about Right Speech.

Simply knowing that the session was about Right Speech also made Sharon's meditation instructions resonate in a pointed way towards lessons about ethical speech, and how one might achieve it. There were even points of contact with specific journalism words and ideas. For example:

1. Pay attention to your breath, like a friend in a crowd.
2. Meditation is healing because it is centering of a scattered and distracted mind, and integrating
3. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment without the intrusion of bias
4. Concentration is a platform for mindfulness
5. Meditation is about relationship, first of all our relationship with what arises within ourselves
6. The key to distinguishing positive from negative speech or action is intention, and we need mindfulness to know our intention

Then there was this four-point series of comments from Sharon to start the afternoon:

1. We cannot control what arises in our minds. But if we are mindful it's not after we send the email.
2. Being aware of what we are feeling is really important.
3. We blame ourselves for what arises in our minds, as though we can control it.
4. Relating skillfully to what arises in our minds is the whole project.

Sharon offered this interesting definition of mindfulness to set the stage for her analysis of Right Speech:

"We generally react in one of two ways to strong negative feelings that arise in us. One is to get lost in it, fixated with it. We can do 100 good things in a day, but that one bad thing that we did, we spend all evening or all week remembering it, dwelling on it, worrying about it, blaming ourselves for it. We can get fixated and obsessed with feeling. The other way to react to strong feelings is to have aversion which can take two forms -- anger, which is the outgoing, expressive form of aversion, and fear, which is the ingoing, frozen form of aversion. We can try to block out negative feelings, crazily trying everything we can think of to avoid it, block it out, not feel it. But there is a third way, which neither gets lost in negative feeling, nor becomes fearful and angry. That third way relates to negative feeling neutrally, neither pushing it away or getting lost inside it. That middle ground is mindfulness."

The key to Right Speech, Salzberg said, is "to know our intentions before we speak, and to know our intentions we need mindfulness. This middle ground I've described is very subtle, but it's a ground we cultivate in meditation." As an example, she asked people to imagine a time when they may have felt the urge to gossip. "You can feel it rising up inside you, right?" she said. The key then is just to notice that feeling but, at least at first, to neither act on it nor to piously push it away. Rather, just to be with the feeling for a while, noticing how it feels and what happens to the feeling over time. And as you wait, start a new line of thought along the lines of "will saying what I have the urge to say right now, really serve my goals in relationship with this person and in my life?" If the answer is "yes," go ahead, but if the answer is "no," you haven't said anything to that point so there's a gain to staying quiet.

That boils down to a two-step strategy to attempting Right Speech:

1. Pay attention to intention
2. Ask 'What do I want?'

Starting both the morning and afternoon sessions, Sharon made this point: "These questions are not easy. The moral dimensions are subtle and complex. It's not easy, and that's okay. One hallmark of the enlightened life is real engagement with things that are not easy. Remember, also, it can feel creative. If we can feel that we are using our lives as a creative medium, rather than 'I gossiped, I'm so bad,' that's a positive path, rather than a sense of right and wrong that is punishing.

"Speech is so powerful yet so ephemeral compared to action. A word said 20 years ago can still resound. These questions are a kind of training which implies imperfection."

She elaborated a bit on the notion of intention: "The reason it is so powerful is that its where the energy of a communication really lies. Intention contains the karmic seed of communication."

She said that the Buddha had summarized his instructions on Right Speech to a simple dictum: "Say what is true and useful."

I found her elaboration on the notion of "usefulness" especially interesting. Mindfulness usually implies a pause before speech in which to ask not only "What do I want?" but "What would be useful to say in this situation?" And this has two elements to it -- first, what is useful to you, and second, what is useful to the person you are addressing. Therefore Sharon said: "There is mutual inner and outer awareness at the same time in order to determine the best action or speech."

She acknowledged the difficulties: "Can you be mindful of every word? No. But we can be aware of the waves of emotion and feeling that relates to intention."

Then she said something really interesting: "There are three aspects to every action or speech. There is the intention behind it, there is the skillfullness of the action, and there is the immediate response to the action. We tend to ground our identities only in the third aspect, and to ignore the first two. Yet the first two are by far the most important. Plus there is also a longterm response to a communication that we also usually fail to take into account." Right Speech, she suggested, takes all these aspects fully into account -- at least as best one can under the circumstances -- ahead of each action.

She told a funny story about a group of friends who are working their way through reading foundational Buddhist texts, and recently had gotten to the section on Right Speech. It seems this material has had a kind of silencing impact on them, that it's made them scrutinize what they say so minutely, that they find they have less and less to say. "They are a bit worried," Sharon said, "that finally all they will be saying to each other is 'it's a lovely day, isn't it?'" I know what those folks are going through, or growing through. This Spring, at a retreat, I heard my teacher repeat a famous Right Speech direction: "Don't speak unless you can improve on silence." That's a damn hard standard to reach!

Sharon made an interesting comment about listening, which started with the standard thing people say but then became richer: "Listening is the key to good communication. When you listen well you are listening to yourself as well as them, especially to your reactions, thoughts, patterns and so on." To which I would only add, it's perhaps not listening so much, which suggests an auditory thing, as being aware, which opens consciousness towards all senses and in all directions.

I found almost the most fascinating part of the day was listening to the questions and comments that people made. They showed me conclusively that the grappling I'm doing with this topic in my professional life -- trying to figure out what in a journalist's life qualifies as Right Speech -- is equally shared by many people in all areas of life. Several people spoke about their constant urge to gossip, not knowing what to do with it. One woman says she often finds herself with her husband, wanting to share something gossipy with him. "Then I ask myself, do I tell him because I want my significant other to know what's going on with me, or do I want to tell him just because it's a juicy disaster? Or maybe I should just shut up about the whole thing?"

Another woman talked about wanting to gossip as being "an unconscious attempt to bond" with others and said if she stopped gossiping, she'd have nothing to talk about with her friends. Sharon then drew a distinction between gossip that was harmful, such as spreading rumors about other people, and idle talk, such as what was going to happen on a favorite TV show that night. And she acknowledged that sometimes, gossiping "is how our communities are formed." That last bit really intrigued me and I want to think about it further. On the one hand, I really understand it, and newspapers and journalism of many forms has long used gossipy items that become "water cooler" talk, social currency. But it's worth asking, what kind of a community is formed, when it's formed on the basis of malicious gossip or related forms of talk? Surely, not a healthy and positive community. This is one area for thinking more in a journalistic vein, combining ethical speculation for example with James Carey's discussion of journalism as the conversation of a democracy and, further, a kind of community-forming ritualistic speech.

Another woman presented this dilemma: "At home I live with people who talk constantly about the Bush administration in the harshest and most negative terms. Not that I disagree with that, but their talk is so nonstop, bitter, and toxic. I just want to scream. It wouldn't be so bad if once in a while they got up and did something, but they never do, they just bitch and gripe and moan."

And several people mentioned a kind of Catch 22 they had gotten into, vis a vis speech, as children, that decades later they are still trying to escape from as adults. One woman said she was the self-appointed truth-teller in her family, always taking pains to declare the elephant in the room that no one was speaking about. But she paid the price in terms of being ostracized, she felt, from her parents' affection and from the social life of the family, that left her out of talk and activities as a result. In discussion with Sharon, it came out that she felt anger at her parents for keeping important topics taboo -- things that were hurting the family every day -- and that this anger fueled not only her truth-telling as a child but also her attitudes and habits on communication to this day. "Anger is often a useful fuel for speech, such as truth telling, but there is some danger in being so close to that anger all the time."

At one point in the afternoon, I had what seemed to me a kind of epiphany that might help me escape the journalistic bind that I am now in, in which sometimes I don't even want to publish my best stuff, writing that I think -- that I know -- is really good, because I just don't want to add to the amount of verbiage in the world. Not to mention my concern whether my speech is ethical or not.

The epiphany was that I realized that in the story of the Buddha's life, in the days after he was enlightened, he seriously considered not saying anything about what he'd learned, to anyone. He knew that he was going to be misunderstood, or not understood, by most people, and he figured maybe it was just best to live out his days in enlightened, silent, peace. But he changed his mind when some higher spirit approached him and convinced him that some people -- a minority, but some -- would understand his message, so on that basis he should go ahead and speak. And so he spoke.

Not that I'm enlightened, that's for sure, but the Buddha's model for at least having pondered staying silent, but then deciding just to go forth and do his best -- knowing ahead of time it wouldn't always be enough and indeed sometimes would be direly misunderstood -- seems to me a great model to follow.

Especially considering the alternative, i.e. the biggest case of writer's block of all time.

   

 

BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS -- Here are some notes on a one-day session on Right Speech -- i.e., the Buddhist guidelines on how to speak in a way that helps and doesn't harm -- yesterday at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies here. Sharon Salzberg, one of the three founders of the Insight Meditation Society, just up the road from the BCBS in Barre, led the session.

A small flyer for the session drew a crowd of 90 from all throughout the northeast and, in my case, Minnesota. The morning was spent almost entirely in meditation, and the afternoon about half, leaving only about one-quarter of the time for discussion about Right Speech. But interestingly enough, that seemed like just the right amount. To have spent more time talking a would have seemed like chatter. That fact in itself, I thought, said a lot about Right Speech.

Simply knowing that the session was about Right Speech also made Sharon's meditation instructions resonate in a pointed way towards lessons about ethical speech, and how one might achieve it. There were even points of contact with specific journalism words and ideas. For example:

1. Pay attention to your breath, like a friend in a crowd.
2. Meditation is healing because it is centering of a scattered and distracted mind, and integrating
3. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment without the intrusion of bias
4. Concentration is a platform for mindfulness
5. Meditation is about relationship, first of all our relationship with what arises within ourselves
6. The key to distinguishing positive from negative speech or action is intention, and we need mindfulness to know our intention

Then there was this four-point series of comments from Sharon to start the afternoon:

1. We cannot control what arises in our minds. But if we are mindful it's not after we send the email.
2. Being aware of what we are feeling is really important.
3. We blame ourselves for what arises in our minds, as though we can control it.
4. Relating skillfully to what arises in our minds is the whole project.

Sharon offered this interesting definition of mindfulness to set the stage for her analysis of Right Speech:

"We generally react in one of two ways to strong negative feelings that arise in us. One is to get lost in it, fixated with it. We can do 100 good things in a day, but that one bad thing that we did, we spend all evening or all week remembering it, dwelling on it, worrying about it, blaming ourselves for it. We can get fixated and obsessed with feeling. The other way to react to strong feelings is to have aversion which can take two forms -- anger, which is the outgoing, expressive form of aversion, and fear, which is the ingoing, frozen form of aversion. We can try to block out negative feelings, crazily trying everything we can think of to avoid it, block it out, not feel it. But there is a third way, which neither gets lost in negative feeling, nor becomes fearful and angry. That third way relates to negative feeling neutrally, neither pushing it away or getting lost inside it. That middle ground is mindfulness."

The key to Right Speech, Salzberg said, is "to know our intentions before we speak, and to know our intentions we need mindfulness. This middle ground I've described is very subtle, but it's a ground we cultivate in meditation." As an example, she asked people to imagine a time when they may have felt the urge to gossip. "You can feel it rising up inside you, right?" she said. The key then is just to notice that feeling but, at least at first, to neither act on it nor to piously push it away. Rather, just to be with the feeling for a while, noticing how it feels and what happens to the feeling over time. And as you wait, start a new line of thought along the lines of "will saying what I have the urge to say right now, really serve my goals in relationship with this person and in my life?" If the answer is "yes," go ahead, but if the answer is "no," you haven't said anything to that point so there's a gain to staying quiet.

That boils down to a two-step strategy to attempting Right Speech:

1. Pay attention to intention
2. Ask 'What do I want?'

Starting both the morning and afternoon sessions, Sharon made this point: "These questions are not easy. The moral dimensions are subtle and complex. It's not easy, and that's okay. One hallmark of the enlightened life is real engagement with things that are not easy. Remember, also, it can feel creative. If we can feel that we are using our lives as a creative medium, rather than 'I gossiped, I'm so bad,' that's a positive path, rather than a sense of right and wrong that is punishing.

"Speech is so powerful yet so ephemeral compared to action. A word said 20 years ago can still resound. These questions are a kind of training which implies imperfection."

She elaborated a bit on the notion of intention: "The reason it is so powerful is that its where the energy of a communication really lies. Intention contains the karmic seed of communication."

She said that the Buddha had summarized his instructions on Right Speech to a simple dictum: "Say what is true and useful."

I found her elaboration on the notion of "usefulness" especially interesting. Mindfulness usually implies a pause before speech in which to ask not only "What do I want?" but "What would be useful to say in this situation?" And this has two elements to it -- first, what is useful to you, and second, what is useful to the person you are addressing. Therefore Sharon said: "There is mutual inner and outer awareness at the same time in order to determine the best action or speech."

She acknowledged the difficulties: "Can you be mindful of every word? No. But we can be aware of the waves of emotion and feeling that relates to intention."

Then she said something really interesting: "There are three aspects to every action or speech. There is the intention behind it, there is the skillfullness of the action, and there is the immediate response to the action. We tend to ground our identities only in the third aspect, and to ignore the first two. Yet the first two are by far the most important. Plus there is also a longterm response to a communication that we also usually fail to take into account." Right Speech, she suggested, takes all these aspects fully into account -- at least as best one can under the circumstances -- ahead of each action.

She told a funny story about a group of friends who are working their way through reading foundational Buddhist texts, and recently had gotten to the section on Right Speech. It seems this material has had a kind of silencing impact on them, that it's made them scrutinize what they say so minutely, that they find they have less and less to say. "They are a bit worried," Sharon said, "that finally all they will be saying to each other is 'it's a lovely day, isn't it?'" I know what those folks are going through, or growing through. This Spring, at a retreat, I heard my teacher repeat a famous Right Speech direction: "Don't speak unless you can improve on silence." That's a damn hard standard to reach!

Sharon made an interesting comment about listening, which started with the standard thing people say but then became richer: "Listening is the key to good communication. When you listen well you are listening to yourself as well as them, especially to your reactions, thoughts, patterns and so on." To which I would only add, it's perhaps not listening so much, which suggests an auditory thing, as being aware, which opens consciousness towards all senses and in all directions.

I found almost the most fascinating part of the day was listening to the questions and comments that people made. They showed me conclusively that the grappling I'm doing with this topic in my professional life -- trying to figure out what in a journalist's life qualifies as Right Speech -- is equally shared by many people in all areas of life. Several people spoke about their constant urge to gossip, not knowing what to do with it. One woman says she often finds herself with her husband, wanting to share something gossipy with him. "Then I ask myself, do I tell him because I want my significant other to know what's going on with me, or do I want to tell him just because it's a juicy disaster? Or maybe I should just shut up about the whole thing?"

Another woman talked about wanting to gossip as being "an unconscious attempt to bond" with others and said if she stopped gossiping, she'd have nothing to talk about with her friends. Sharon then drew a distinction between gossip that was harmful, such as spreading rumors about other people, and idle talk, such as what was going to happen on a favorite TV show that night. And she acknowledged that sometimes, gossiping "is how our communities are formed." That last bit really intrigued me and I want to think about it further. On the one hand, I really understand it, and newspapers and journalism of many forms has long used gossipy items that become "water cooler" talk, social currency. But it's worth asking, what kind of a community is formed, when it's formed on the basis of malicious gossip or related forms of talk? Surely, not a healthy and positive community. This is one area for thinking more in a journalistic vein, combining ethical speculation for example with James Carey's discussion of journalism as the conversation of a democracy and, further, a kind of community-forming ritualistic speech.

Another woman presented this dilemma: "At home I live with people who talk constantly about the Bush administration in the harshest and most negative terms. Not that I disagree with that, but their talk is so nonstop, bitter, and toxic. I just want to scream. It wouldn't be so bad if once in a while they got up and did something, but they never do, they just bitch and gripe and moan."

And several people mentioned a kind of Catch 22 they had gotten into, vis a vis speech, as children, that decades later they are still trying to escape from as adults. One woman said she was the self-appointed truth-teller in her family, always taking pains to declare the elephant in the room that no one was speaking about. But she paid the price in terms of being ostracized, she felt, from her parents' affection and from the social life of the family, that left her out of talk and activities as a result. In discussion with Sharon, it came out that she felt anger at her parents for keeping important topics taboo -- things that were hurting the family every day -- and that this anger fueled not only her truth-telling as a child but also her attitudes and habits on communication to this day. "Anger is often a useful fuel for speech, such as truth telling, but there is some danger in being so close to that anger all the time."

At one point in the afternoon, I had what seemed to me a kind of epiphany that might help me escape the journalistic bind that I am now in, in which sometimes I don't even want to publish my best stuff, writing that I think -- that I know -- is really good, because I just don't want to add to the amount of verbiage in the world. Not to mention my concern whether my speech is ethical or not.

The epiphany was that I realized that in the story of the Buddha's life, in the days after he was enlightened, he seriously considered not saying anything about what he'd learned, to anyone. He knew that he was going to be misunderstood, or not understood, by most people, and he figured maybe it was just best to live out his days in enlightened, silent, peace. But he changed his mind when some higher spirit approached him and convinced him that some people -- a minority, but some -- would understand his message, so on that basis he should go ahead and speak. And so he spoke.

Not that I'm enlightened, that's for sure, but the Buddha's model for at least having pondered staying silent, but then deciding just to go forth and do his best -- knowing ahead of time it wouldn't always be enough and indeed sometimes would be direly misunderstood -- seems to me a great model to follow.

Especially considering the alternative, i.e. the biggest case of writer's block of all time.

BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS -- Here are some notes on a one-day session on Right Speech -- i.e., the Buddhist guidelines on how to speak in a way that helps and doesn't harm -- yesterday at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies here. Sharon Salzberg, one of the three founders of the Insight Meditation Society, just up the road from the BCBS in Barre, led the session.

A small flyer for the session drew a crowd of 90 from all throughout the northeast and, in my case, Minnesota. The morning was spent almost entirely in meditation, and the afternoon about half, leaving only about one-quarter of the time for discussion about Right Speech. But interestingly enough, that seemed like just the right amount. To have spent more time talking a would have seemed like chatter. That fact in itself, I thought, said a lot about Right Speech.

Simply knowing that the session was about Right Speech also made Sharon's meditation instructions resonate in a pointed way towards lessons about ethical speech, and how one might achieve it. There were even points of contact with specific journalism words and ideas. For example:

1. Pay attention to your breath, like a friend in a crowd.
2. Meditation is healing because it is centering of a scattered and distracted mind, and integrating
3. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment without the intrusion of bias
4. Concentration is a platform for mindfulness
5. Meditation is about relationship, first of all our relationship with what arises within ourselves
6. The key to distinguishing positive from negative speech or action is intention, and we need mindfulness to know our intention

Then there was this four-point series of comments from Sharon to start the afternoon:

1. We cannot control what arises in our minds. But if we are mindful it's not after we send the email.
2. Being aware of what we are feeling is really important.
3. We blame ourselves for what arises in our minds, as though we can control it.
4. Relating skillfully to what arises in our minds is the whole project.

Sharon offered this interesting definition of mindfulness to set the stage for her analysis of Right Speech:

"We generally react in one of two ways to strong negative feelings that arise in us. One is to get lost in it, fixated with it. We can do 100 good things in a day, but that one bad thing that we did, we spend all evening or all week remembering it, dwelling on it, worrying about it, blaming ourselves for it. We can get fixated and obsessed with feeling. The other way to react to strong feelings is to have aversion which can take two forms -- anger, which is the outgoing, expressive form of aversion, and fear, which is the ingoing, frozen form of aversion. We can try to block out negative feelings, crazily trying everything we can think of to avoid it, block it out, not feel it. But there is a third way, which neither gets lost in negative feeling, nor becomes fearful and angry. That third way relates to negative feeling neutrally, neither pushing it away or getting lost inside it. That middle ground is mindfulness."

The key to Right Speech, Salzberg said, is "to know our intentions before we speak, and to know our intentions we need mindfulness. This middle ground I've described is very subtle, but it's a ground we cultivate in meditation." As an example, she asked people to imagine a time when they may have felt the urge to gossip. "You can feel it rising up inside you, right?" she said. The key then is just to notice that feeling but, at least at first, to neither act on it nor to piously push it away. Rather, just to be with the feeling for a while, noticing how it feels and what happens to the feeling over time. And as you wait, start a new line of thought along the lines of "will saying what I have the urge to say right now, really serve my goals in relationship with this person and in my life?" If the answer is "yes," go ahead, but if the answer is "no," you haven't said anything to that point so there's a gain to staying quiet.

That boils down to a two-step strategy to attempting Right Speech:

1. Pay attention to intention
2. Ask 'What do I want?'

Starting both the morning and afternoon sessions, Sharon made this point: "These questions are not easy. The moral dimensions are subtle and complex. It's not easy, and that's okay. One hallmark of the enlightened life is real engagement with things that are not easy. Remember, also, it can feel creative. If we can feel that we are using our lives as a creative medium, rather than 'I gossiped, I'm so bad,' that's a positive path, rather than a sense of right and wrong that is punishing.

"Speech is so powerful yet so ephemeral compared to action. A word said 20 years ago can still resound. These questions are a kind of training which implies imperfection."

She elaborated a bit on the notion of intention: "The reason it is so powerful is that its where the energy of a communication really lies. Intention contains the karmic seed of communication."

She said that the Buddha had summarized his instructions on Right Speech to a simple dictum: "Say what is true and useful."

I found her elaboration on the notion of "usefulness" especially interesting. Mindfulness usually implies a pause before speech in which to ask not only "What do I want?" but "What would be useful to say in this situation?" And this has two elements to it -- first, what is useful to you, and second, what is useful to the person you are addressing. Therefore Sharon said: "There is mutual inner and outer awareness at the same time in order to determine the best action or speech."

She acknowledged the difficulties: "Can you be mindful of every word? No. But we can be aware of the waves of emotion and feeling that relates to intention."

Then she said something really interesting: "There are three aspects to every action or speech. There is the intention behind it, there is the skillfullness of the action, and there is the immediate response to the action. We tend to ground our identities only in the third aspect, and to ignore the first two. Yet the first two are by far the most important. Plus there is also a longterm response to a communication that we also usually fail to take into account." Right Speech, she suggested, takes all these aspects fully into account -- at least as best one can under the circumstances -- ahead of each action.

She told a funny story about a group of friends who are working their way through reading foundational Buddhist texts, and recently had gotten to the section on Right Speech. It seems this material has had a kind of silencing impact on them, that it's made them scrutinize what they say so minutely, that they find they have less and less to say. "They are a bit worried," Sharon said, "that finally all they will be saying to each other is 'it's a lovely day, isn't it?'" I know what those folks are going through, or growing through. This Spring, at a retreat, I heard my teacher repeat a famous Right Speech direction: "Don't speak unless you can improve on silence." That's a damn hard standard to reach!

Sharon made an interesting comment about listening, which started with the standard thing people say but then became richer: "Listening is the key to good communication. When you listen well you are listening to yourself as well as them, especially to your reactions, thoughts, patterns and so on." To which I would only add, it's perhaps not listening so much, which suggests an auditory thing, as being aware, which opens consciousness towards all senses and in all directions.

I found almost the most fascinating part of the day was listening to the questions and comments that people made. They showed me conclusively that the grappling I'm doing with this topic in my professional life -- trying to figure out what in a journalist's life qualifies as Right Speech -- is equally shared by many people in all areas of life. Several people spoke about their constant urge to gossip, not knowing what to do with it. One woman says she often finds herself with her husband, wanting to share something gossipy with him. "Then I ask myself, do I tell him because I want my significant other to know what's going on with me, or do I want to tell him just because it's a juicy disaster? Or maybe I should just shut up about the whole thing?"

Another woman talked about wanting to gossip as being "an unconscious attempt to bond" with others and said if she stopped gossiping, she'd have nothing to talk about with her friends. Sharon then drew a distinction between gossip that was harmful, such as spreading rumors about other people, and idle talk, such as what was going to happen on a favorite TV show that night. And she acknowledged that sometimes, gossiping "is how our communities are formed." That last bit really intrigued me and I want to think about it further. On the one hand, I really understand it, and newspapers and journalism of many forms has long used gossipy items that become "water cooler" talk, social currency. But it's worth asking, what kind of a community is formed, when it's formed on the basis of malicious gossip or related forms of talk? Surely, not a healthy and positive community. This is one area for thinking more in a journalistic vein, combining ethical speculation for example with James Carey's discussion of journalism as the conversation of a democracy and, further, a kind of community-forming ritualistic speech.

Another woman presented this dilemma: "At home I live with people who talk constantly about the Bush administration in the harshest and most negative terms. Not that I disagree with that, but their talk is so nonstop, bitter, and toxic. I just want to scream. It wouldn't be so bad if once in a while they got up and did something, but they never do, they just bitch and gripe and moan."

And several people mentioned a kind of Catch 22 they had gotten into, vis a vis speech, as children, that decades later they are still trying to escape from as adults. One woman said she was the self-appointed truth-teller in her family, always taking pains to declare the elephant in the room that no one was speaking about. But she paid the price in terms of being ostracized, she felt, from her parents' affection and from the social life of the family, that left her out of talk and activities as a result. In discussion with Sharon, it came out that she felt anger at her parents for keeping important topics taboo -- things that were hurting the family every day -- and that this anger fueled not only her truth-telling as a child but also her attitudes and habits on communication to this day. "Anger is often a useful fuel for speech, such as truth telling, but there is some danger in being so close to that anger all the time."

At one point in the afternoon, I had what seemed to me a kind of epiphany that might help me escape the journalistic bind that I am now in, in which sometimes I don't even want to publish my best stuff, writing that I think -- that I know -- is really good, because I just don't want to add to the amount of verbiage in the world. Not to mention my concern whether my speech is ethical or not.

The epiphany was that I realized that in the story of the Buddha's life, in the days after he was enlightened, he seriously considered not saying anything about what he'd learned, to anyone. He knew that he was going to be misunderstood, or not understood, by most people, and he figured maybe it was just best to live out his days in enlightened, silent, peace. But he changed his mind when some higher spirit approached him and convinced him that some people -- a minority, but some -- would understand his message, so on that basis he should go ahead and speak. And so he spoke.

Not that I'm enlightened, that's for sure, but the Buddha's model for at least having pondered staying silent, but then deciding just to go forth and do his best -- knowing ahead of time it wouldn't always be enough and indeed sometimes would be direly misunderstood -- seems to me a great model to follow.

Especially considering the alternative, i.e. the biggest case of writer's block of all time.

Why Journalists Should Meditate

Among many moral traditions concerning ethical speech, one that commends itself especially to a practical application to modern journalistic practice, is the Buddhist doctrine of Right Speech. There are several reasons for this.

First, the doctrine of Right Speech is embedded in a universal moral system that is grounded, vis a vis the individual practitioner, in rigorous empirical observation and not in blind faith. This is true notwithstanding the mistaken popular view that the Buddha came to Earth as a divine figure or prophet similar to Jesus or Mohammed. To the contrary, the Buddha insisted throughout his life that he was a mere mortal, just a man, albeit one who'd spent significant time observing, very much as a scientist would, the essential nature of his body and mind.

That many modern scientists have declared Buddhism to be the one world religion most compatible with the scientific outlook and method, is natural considering the Buddha's frequent and explicit instructions that none of his followers should accept the assertions made by authority figures, including him, until they had witnessed or experienced something personally themselves. It's an injunction that echoes roundly in ageless journalistic adages such as the one that journalists should ''love their mothers but check her quotes.'' Doubt and skepticism are the foundation of both journalistic and Buddhist investigation.

Second, the Buddhist method of inquiry takes no strong interest in either the past or the future, instructing adepts instead to focus completely on experiencing the present moment. Similarly, journalism, among all literary genres, focuses most strongly on the present. That part of journalism called ''the news,'' especially, is focused on the present, that is giving readers accurate and useful reports on the present conditions of public life. History takes on the past, and science fiction and novels can explore future scenarios, but journalism alone stakes the present as its ground for investigation. And investigation is the word.

Journalism like Buddhism is really a method for exploring the depths of the present, and both disciplines describe, in their user manuals, various methods for ensuring that an individual investigator stays focused on that precise task. These methods, again both in journalism and Buddhism, attempt to heighten and individual's sensitivity to signals from the here and now, while dampening receptivity to such distracting and distorting influences as outdated societal narratives, group anxieties and fears, or political and commercial propaganda. To use the popular Buddhist formulation, both a Buddhist meditator and a journalist conduct rigorous objective investigations into ''the way things are now.''

Third, both Buddhism and journalism, properly understood, are methods of investigation aimed at producing transformative insight. It is not to achieve any special state of relaxation or bliss that Buddhist meditation ultimately is practiced. Rather, it is to create conditions in which a meditator can achieve insights into reality that are strong enough to change him. Even that change itself, freedom from ignorance allowing individuals to fully flower, is naturally mappable from a Buddhist to a liberal democratic civil setting.

It is a powerful if subtle point: the goal of Buddhist meditation and journalism is to produce transformative insight. The assumption in both cases is that only insight into the real, inherently transform. It can not help but transform, because reality seen truly is reality that at last is susceptible to easeful human life. The humans who finally see the path of the real -- which is the only path not littered with obstructive imaginary monsters -- will have no interest in continuing any other way.

At their best, journalists carry out their work based on a similar theory, namely that by illuminating the way things are now in society, they help to create conditions in which wise, fair, and grounded decisions for democracy can be made by the public. Only in one way do the two theories of insight, the Buddhist and the journalistic, significantly diverge. That is, because Buddhism addresses the absolute world of the present, insight into that world is sufficient by itself, to create liberating freedom.

But journalism, an investigation into the present relative as opposed to absolute world, creates insight that is necessary but not by itself sufficient to engender transformative change. Too many other factors are at work to assure such transformation in the relative world.

A Buddhist meditator is an individual working for insights or light that, once gained, illuminates the chambers of the self that made the investigation. And from there, the self is perforce transformed.

But in the relative world, the light gained by investigative journalism encounters many obstacles to its full spreading, not only that obstruct passage of experience from the mind of one writer to one reader in all the usual ways, but also from the mind of one writers to possibly millions of readers, all of whom are simultaneously being bombarded by competing notions and theories of insight, some of which of course are no more than political or commercial propaganda, or worse. Still, the point is, both the meditator and the journalist work to gain insight that they hope will transform human beings, themselves and others.

So the overall world view of the journalist and the Buddhist, both being aimed at gaining transformative insight through skeptical investigation into the present, are inherently compatible. Yet between the two, Buddhist ethics are both more profoundly rooted in human experience and extensive into the world. Two and a half millenia of development on the part of Buddhism, versus a couple of centuries for journalism, is one reason for this; so is the fact that the Buddha taught for the explicit purpose of reducing human suffering, which historically has been only one among many ultimate purposes of journalism over the years, and frequently among the lesser ones.

This is not to try to develop an argument that journalism is in any way flawed because it doesn't try to change men's souls. It's not about that; it's by definition more limited than that; and it's proper that it should be. Rather, it's important to describe the compatibility of Buddhism and journalism, and then to point out Buddhism's greater moral depth, because Buddhism by its nature offers a universal framework for moral decision-making that offers a great many answers, or at least a great many clear paths to answers, to difficulties that increasingly bedevil journalism and the news media today.

What is the basic role of a journalist in society? Is it to entertain, to inform, or to persuade? If some of all the above, what are the right proportions, and under what conditions might those proportions ethically change? An offhand remark from a mother to a daughter can wound both parties for a lifetime; in the same way, a single line of reportage can ruin a reputation not just of an individual but an entire community over a similar time span. Widespread caricatures in the global media can condemn an entire country to scorn and oblivion for decades.

How are individual journalists to work under such circumstances? How are readers or consumers of the news media to understand what they read or see; how much weight are they to give it; and what checks should there be, not only at a policy or social practice level, but at the individual level, to ensure that journalistic speech is healthfully and responsibly imbibed? Journalism's professional ethical code is silent on such questions, and only reference to a deeper moral system in which journalistic ethics are embedded, can begin to offer a useful way to answer them.

Among many moral traditions concerning ethical speech, one that commends itself especially to a practical application to modern journalistic practice, is the Buddhist doctrine of Right Speech. There are several reasons for this.

First, the doctrine of Right Speech is embedded in a universal moral system that is grounded, vis a vis the individual practitioner, in rigorous empirical observation and not in blind faith. This is true notwithstanding the mistaken popular view that the Buddha came to Earth as a divine figure or prophet similar to Jesus or Mohammed. To the contrary, the Buddha insisted throughout his life that he was a mere mortal, just a man, albeit one who'd spent significant time observing, very much as a scientist would, the essential nature of his body and mind.

That many modern scientists have declared Buddhism to be the one world religion most compatible with the scientific outlook and method, is natural considering the Buddha's frequent and explicit instructions that none of his followers should accept the assertions made by authority figures, including him, until they had witnessed or experienced something personally themselves. It's an injunction that echoes roundly in ageless journalistic adages such as the one that journalists should ''love their mothers but check her quotes.'' Doubt and skepticism are the foundation of both journalistic and Buddhist investigation.

Second, the Buddhist method of inquiry takes no strong interest in either the past or the future, instructing adepts instead to focus completely on experiencing the present moment. Similarly, journalism, among all literary genres, focuses most strongly on the present. That part of journalism called ''the news,'' especially, is focused on the present, that is giving readers accurate and useful reports on the present conditions of public life. History takes on the past, and science fiction and novels can explore future scenarios, but journalism alone stakes the present as its ground for investigation. And investigation is the word.

Journalism like Buddhism is really a method for exploring the depths of the present, and both disciplines describe, in their user manuals, various methods for ensuring that an individual investigator stays focused on that precise task. These methods, again both in journalism and Buddhism, attempt to heighten and individual's sensitivity to signals from the here and now, while dampening receptivity to such distracting and distorting influences as outdated societal narratives, group anxieties and fears, or political and commercial propaganda. To use the popular Buddhist formulation, both a Buddhist meditator and a journalist conduct rigorous objective investigations into ''the way things are now.''

Third, both Buddhism and journalism, properly understood, are methods of investigation aimed at producing transformative insight. It is not to achieve any special state of relaxation or bliss that Buddhist meditation ultimately is practiced. Rather, it is to create conditions in which a meditator can achieve insights into reality that are strong enough to change him. Even that change itself, freedom from ignorance allowing individuals to fully flower, is naturally mappable from a Buddhist to a liberal democratic civil setting.

It is a powerful if subtle point: the goal of Buddhist meditation and journalism is to produce transformative insight. The assumption in both cases is that only insight into the real, inherently transform. It can not help but transform, because reality seen truly is reality that at last is susceptible to easeful human life. The humans who finally see the path of the real -- which is the only path not littered with obstructive imaginary monsters -- will have no interest in continuing any other way.

At their best, journalists carry out their work based on a similar theory, namely that by illuminating the way things are now in society, they help to create conditions in which wise, fair, and grounded decisions for democracy can be made by the public. Only in one way do the two theories of insight, the Buddhist and the journalistic, significantly diverge. That is, because Buddhism addresses the absolute world of the present, insight into that world is sufficient by itself, to create liberating freedom.

But journalism, an investigation into the present relative as opposed to absolute world, creates insight that is necessary but not by itself sufficient to engender transformative change. Too many other factors are at work to assure such transformation in the relative world.

A Buddhist meditator is an individual working for insights or light that, once gained, illuminates the chambers of the self that made the investigation. And from there, the self is perforce transformed.

But in the relative world, the light gained by investigative journalism encounters many obstacles to its full spreading, not only that obstruct passage of experience from the mind of one writer to one reader in all the usual ways, but also from the mind of one writers to possibly millions of readers, all of whom are simultaneously being bombarded by competing notions and theories of insight, some of which of course are no more than political or commercial propaganda, or worse. Still, the point is, both the meditator and the journalist work to gain insight that they hope will transform human beings, themselves and others.

So the overall world view of the journalist and the Buddhist, both being aimed at gaining transformative insight through skeptical investigation into the present, are inherently compatible. Yet between the two, Buddhist ethics are both more profoundly rooted in human experience and extensive into the world. Two and a half millenia of development on the part of Buddhism, versus a couple of centuries for journalism, is one reason for this; so is the fact that the Buddha taught for the explicit purpose of reducing human suffering, which historically has been only one among many ultimate purposes of journalism over the years, and frequently among the lesser ones.

This is not to try to develop an argument that journalism is in any way flawed because it doesn't try to change men's souls. It's not about that; it's by definition more limited than that; and it's proper that it should be. Rather, it's important to describe the compatibility of Buddhism and journalism, and then to point out Buddhism's greater moral depth, because Buddhism by its nature offers a universal framework for moral decision-making that offers a great many answers, or at least a great many clear paths to answers, to difficulties that increasingly bedevil journalism and the news media today.

What is the basic role of a journalist in society? Is it to entertain, to inform, or to persuade? If some of all the above, what are the right proportions, and under what conditions might those proportions ethically change? An offhand remark from a mother to a daughter can wound both parties for a lifetime; in the same way, a single line of reportage can ruin a reputation not just of an individual but an entire community over a similar time span. Widespread caricatures in the global media can condemn an entire country to scorn and oblivion for decades.

How are individual journalists to work under such circumstances? How are readers or consumers of the news media to understand what they read or see; how much weight are they to give it; and what checks should there be, not only at a policy or social practice level, but at the individual level, to ensure that journalistic speech is healthfully and responsibly imbibed? Journalism's professional ethical code is silent on such questions, and only reference to a deeper moral system in which journalistic ethics are embedded, can begin to offer a useful way to answer them.

Thinking About Language as Spiritual Food

I  often encourage journalists to think more directly, deeply, systematically, and from various angles about the many modes of action and effects of their chosen medium of expression -- language.

Journalists use many of these modes, but very often without a conscious understanding that they are doing so. As a result, they often aren't aware of the full range of impact their language is actually having on the people who read, watch, and listen to their stories.

Every piece of journalism, for example, attempts to persuade readers of beliefs and premises at deeper level than the explicit content of the article. Even writers who take pains to keep personal opinions and bias out of their articles still must persuade readers of the accuracy, authenticity, and authority of their reporting. And, they have to persuade readers that their writing springs from a moral standpoint and a world view that is basically compatible with theirs.

This invites a study of reportorial journalism, not only opinion journalism, as rhetoric. The use of poetic techniques and tropes in journalistic writing, even sometimes in straight news reporting, similarly invites a deeper study of journalism as poetry; and journalistic narrative techniques invites a study of journalism as non-fiction literature; and so on.

My brief here is to suggest that journalists and scholars of journalism urgently need to open themselves to a branch of language ethics that to the best of my knowledge remains virgin territory as regards its application to journalism and the media.

That is the study of language as an ethical force in itself, as a bearer of a positive or negative moral charge that transcends any specific language message, and which plays a key role in the development of individual human personality, character, destiny, or even, one might say, of soul.

Plato essentially began this line of inquiry in the Western tradition, and many religious, spiritual and moral figures ranging from Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, St. Augustine, Kabir, Hafiz, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers have carried it through to the present day.

What is odd is that over the past 200 years the mass media has exploded, vastly deepening the amount and types of impact that it has on individuals and societies. As almost never before in history, a thorough accounting of languages as a means of moral action is needed. Who is doing it?

No longer does language approach us primarily through the spoken language of those people we directly know, plus books and newspapers and television and radio. Now language comes at us in a raging cataract through the Internet, emails, advertising, podcasts, PDAs, wide TV screens hanging in elevators and waiting rooms and restaurants, and seemingly infinite other ways. Increasingly -- because it could be no other way -- the thoughts and ideas and feelings conveyed through all these omnipresent electronic means become our own personal thoughts and ideas and feelings.

But what is the overall effect of this upon our selves? Our communities? This is very much an extension of the original Socratic, Christian, and Buddhist questions about the moral impact of spoken and written language upon the individual soul and upon society. Again, where is the debate?

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates questions the widespread development of writing, because writing, he argued, would surely weaken the human faculty of memory and therefore harm individual moral character and weaken social bonds. Buddha's doctrine of Right Speech posits that using language in a moral manner is the first and most important link between the wholesome moral intentions that arise in spiritual meditation, and the positive actions that can lessen suffering in the world.

Conditions in the early 21st century cry out for the application and updating of these moral theories to mass communication practices, chief among them journalism, the one branch of the mass media dedicated to civic aims.

A journalist might object that journalism after all is only a slice, and a tiny slice at that, of the overall mass media that is generating such torrents of language upon individuals and the public, to such as-yet-unknown effects. That is certainly true. Newspapers, radio and television news programs, and news magazines today are increasingly mere dits and dots in the organization charts of giant multinational conglomerates that generate profits mainly from movies, pop music, advertising, merchandising, and the cross-marketing of their entertainment and communication services. 

And yet the small size of journalistic organizations within these behemoths is itself an argument for its moral and symbolic importance, as a civic practice serving, at least theoretically, public as opposed to private commercial aims. This charter should theoretically allow journalists, above all workers in today's media communication fields, to do the deep kind of thinking about language that I am here proposing. And then, experimentally at first perhaps, to begin to apply the conclusions reached from such considerations, to the actual practice of gathering, writing, and publishing the news.

From at least one other angle, besides the unquestioned impact of mass communication on government and civic society and individuals today, it's truly a mystery why language's moral essence has never been systematically studied in application to journalism. Because there is such abundant evidence in our daily individual lives of a yawning gap between what we claim we believe are the importance and effects of language upon us, versus the objectively observable effects.

Possibly because language is an ephemeral medium as compared with, say, a hunk of metal or a clump of clay, we tend to discount the impact of language on self and community. ''Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,'' we intone as we launch into yet another vicious public debate that leaves all parties more hurt and angry than ever before. We say that such an outcome, and the acute discomfort of such exchanges, is the price we pay for democracy.

It is high time to make a clear-eyed accounting of what exactly we are accepting as the price of our democracy, when we make such a claim. And we need to examine the logic of our defense of free speech of this type, too. Can we really achieve a more perfect union, through the use of language that bitterly and permanently divides? Where does our journalism and our mass media, in terms of tone as well as message, fit into this calculation? Are our means and ends well in accord here?

The daily language that we commonly use to describe the mass media and our use of it, shows that at some level we understand the basic moral relationship of self and society to language, and the very high stakes involved. Generally this language revolves around the metaphor of food.

We speak about ourselves as media ''consumers'' who ''ingest'' a ''daily diet'' of news and entertainment. We face a ''menu'' of media choices, ranging perhaps from ''dry'' or ''lean'' or ''unpalatable'' programs at one end, to ''meaty'' or ''yummy'' or ''rich'' programs at the other. Reading gossip magazines is a ''guilty pleasure'' like eating ice cream, while watching public affairs programs like The Lehrer News Hour or the BBC news is a matter of civic duty, like ''eating one’s spinach.''

A small amount of reflection on the media-as-food metaphor leads to a terrifically deep mystery, one that is really central to this issue yet one that humanity's greatest thinkers have yet to plumb.

One could pose the question his way: If a steak and potatoes dinner nourishes the physical body, what kind of ''body invisible'' does language feed and enrich, or poison and deplete?

The number of human beings who have ever lived who could credibly claim to answer this question probably is in the few dozens, or even less. One can, of course, look to the explanations of these few, such as the recorded words of Jesus or Buddha. But the problem arises that such explanations of the body invisible always include the caveat that describing the body invisible transcends language itself.

The body invisible, say the great sages, can be known only through direct and personal experience.

''Lift a rock and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am there,'' says Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas. This is one way that he describes not only his, but the common human body invisible. This is our inner body that for all its complexity is proportioned roughly the same for us all, just as each of us as individuals has a head, a torso, four limbs and interior organs that we call our  ''physical'' selves.

But we can never map the body invisible with the same amount of detail as we can the human physical body. Because the body invisible, by definition, cannot be seen. Not only when we look outside at the world do we see as through a glass darkly, but even more so, when we look within.

Charts showing ''chakras'' and ''meridians'' and ''auras,'' the best ones anyway, are perhaps are not as bogus as their detractors say. But even these maps of the body invisible, according to the sages, don't divulge the deepest understanding. Because the body invisible is essentially one of infinite change, like a confluence of rivers of feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching that are endlessly surging and mixing and then emptying finally into a infinite ocean.

At the most ultimate level, the sages say, beyond even these rivers of thought and feeling and perception and sensation that we mistakenly take to be ''us,'' lies a formless unconditioned void that contains all energy and all forms. Any chart or map is a mere cartoon compared to this.

''Within the fathom-long body, the entire universe may be known,'' the Buddha said. We need to begin to understand this statement, and similar ones made by the sages of other traditions, before we can begin to understand the the practical and moral impacts of language on the human soul.

We live usually in a practical, not metaphysical, realm. How does one create a social program that offers guidelines for using language in the media in a way that enriches the body invisible?

To do so successfully is probably not as impossible as it sounds. After all, humanity has advanced a lot in understanding how the physical human body is either nourished or poisoned, and by what types of foods or toxins, and how those foods or toxins pass through various physical and energy states inside the physical human body. All of these are all quite precisely known and even visualized.

We need to begin to understand the body invisible, as much as we have the physical body.

Practical aid can be devised and implemented, even as the ultimate realities remain well beyond our grasp (for most of us, anyway). Understanding the role of language, especially the use and broadcasting of language to masses of people -- thereby either nourishing or poisoning the body invisible of those individuals and their masses as may be -- is an especially urgent task.

We need to get started.

   

Posted at 05:20 PM | Permalink

I  often encourage journalists to think more directly, deeply, systematically, and from various angles about the many modes of action and effects of their chosen medium of expression -- language.

Journalists use many of these modes, but very often without a conscious understanding that they are doing so. As a result, they often aren't aware of the full range of impact their language is actually having on the people who read, watch, and listen to their stories.

Every piece of journalism, for example, attempts to persuade readers of beliefs and premises at deeper level than the explicit content of the article. Even writers who take pains to keep personal opinions and bias out of their articles still must persuade readers of the accuracy, authenticity, and authority of their reporting. And, they have to persuade readers that their writing springs from a moral standpoint and a world view that is basically compatible with theirs.

This invites a study of reportorial journalism, not only opinion journalism, as rhetoric. The use of poetic techniques and tropes in journalistic writing, even sometimes in straight news reporting, similarly invites a deeper study of journalism as poetry; and journalistic narrative techniques invites a study of journalism as non-fiction literature; and so on.

My brief here is to suggest that journalists and scholars of journalism urgently need to open themselves to a branch of language ethics that to the best of my knowledge remains virgin territory as regards its application to journalism and the media.

That is the study of language as an ethical force in itself, as a bearer of a positive or negative moral charge that transcends any specific language message, and which plays a key role in the development of individual human personality, character, destiny, or even, one might say, of soul.

Plato essentially began this line of inquiry in the Western tradition, and many religious, spiritual and moral figures ranging from Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, St. Augustine, Kabir, Hafiz, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers have carried it through to the present day.

What is odd is that over the past 200 years the mass media has exploded, vastly deepening the amount and types of impact that it has on individuals and societies. As almost never before in history, a thorough accounting of languages as a means of moral action is needed. Who is doing it?

No longer does language approach us primarily through the spoken language of those people we directly know, plus books and newspapers and television and radio. Now language comes at us in a raging cataract through the Internet, emails, advertising, podcasts, PDAs, wide TV screens hanging in elevators and waiting rooms and restaurants, and seemingly infinite other ways. Increasingly -- because it could be no other way -- the thoughts and ideas and feelings conveyed through all these omnipresent electronic means become our own personal thoughts and ideas and feelings.

But what is the overall effect of this upon our selves? Our communities? This is very much an extension of the original Socratic, Christian, and Buddhist questions about the moral impact of spoken and written language upon the individual soul and upon society. Again, where is the debate?

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates questions the widespread development of writing, because writing, he argued, would surely weaken the human faculty of memory and therefore harm individual moral character and weaken social bonds. Buddha's doctrine of Right Speech posits that using language in a moral manner is the first and most important link between the wholesome moral intentions that arise in spiritual meditation, and the positive actions that can lessen suffering in the world.

Conditions in the early 21st century cry out for the application and updating of these moral theories to mass communication practices, chief among them journalism, the one branch of the mass media dedicated to civic aims.

A journalist might object that journalism after all is only a slice, and a tiny slice at that, of the overall mass media that is generating such torrents of language upon individuals and the public, to such as-yet-unknown effects. That is certainly true. Newspapers, radio and television news programs, and news magazines today are increasingly mere dits and dots in the organization charts of giant multinational conglomerates that generate profits mainly from movies, pop music, advertising, merchandising, and the cross-marketing of their entertainment and communication services. 

And yet the small size of journalistic organizations within these behemoths is itself an argument for its moral and symbolic importance, as a civic practice serving, at least theoretically, public as opposed to private commercial aims. This charter should theoretically allow journalists, above all workers in today's media communication fields, to do the deep kind of thinking about language that I am here proposing. And then, experimentally at first perhaps, to begin to apply the conclusions reached from such considerations, to the actual practice of gathering, writing, and publishing the news.

From at least one other angle, besides the unquestioned impact of mass communication on government and civic society and individuals today, it's truly a mystery why language's moral essence has never been systematically studied in application to journalism. Because there is such abundant evidence in our daily individual lives of a yawning gap between what we claim we believe are the importance and effects of language upon us, versus the objectively observable effects.

Possibly because language is an ephemeral medium as compared with, say, a hunk of metal or a clump of clay, we tend to discount the impact of language on self and community. ''Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,'' we intone as we launch into yet another vicious public debate that leaves all parties more hurt and angry than ever before. We say that such an outcome, and the acute discomfort of such exchanges, is the price we pay for democracy.

It is high time to make a clear-eyed accounting of what exactly we are accepting as the price of our democracy, when we make such a claim. And we need to examine the logic of our defense of free speech of this type, too. Can we really achieve a more perfect union, through the use of language that bitterly and permanently divides? Where does our journalism and our mass media, in terms of tone as well as message, fit into this calculation? Are our means and ends well in accord here?

The daily language that we commonly use to describe the mass media and our use of it, shows that at some level we understand the basic moral relationship of self and society to language, and the very high stakes involved. Generally this language revolves around the metaphor of food.

We speak about ourselves as media ''consumers'' who ''ingest'' a ''daily diet'' of news and entertainment. We face a ''menu'' of media choices, ranging perhaps from ''dry'' or ''lean'' or ''unpalatable'' programs at one end, to ''meaty'' or ''yummy'' or ''rich'' programs at the other. Reading gossip magazines is a ''guilty pleasure'' like eating ice cream, while watching public affairs programs like The Lehrer News Hour or the BBC news is a matter of civic duty, like ''eating one’s spinach.''

A small amount of reflection on the media-as-food metaphor leads to a terrifically deep mystery, one that is really central to this issue yet one that humanity's greatest thinkers have yet to plumb.

One could pose the question his way: If a steak and potatoes dinner nourishes the physical body, what kind of ''body invisible'' does language feed and enrich, or poison and deplete?

The number of human beings who have ever lived who could credibly claim to answer this question probably is in the few dozens, or even less. One can, of course, look to the explanations of these few, such as the recorded words of Jesus or Buddha. But the problem arises that such explanations of the body invisible always include the caveat that describing the body invisible transcends language itself.

The body invisible, say the great sages, can be known only through direct and personal experience.

''Lift a rock and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am there,'' says Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas. This is one way that he describes not only his, but the common human body invisible. This is our inner body that for all its complexity is proportioned roughly the same for us all, just as each of us as individuals has a head, a torso, four limbs and interior organs that we call our  ''physical'' selves.

But we can never map the body invisible with the same amount of detail as we can the human physical body. Because the body invisible, by definition, cannot be seen. Not only when we look outside at the world do we see as through a glass darkly, but even more so, when we look within.

Charts showing ''chakras'' and ''meridians'' and ''auras,'' the best ones anyway, are perhaps are not as bogus as their detractors say. But even these maps of the body invisible, according to the sages, don't divulge the deepest understanding. Because the body invisible is essentially one of infinite change, like a confluence of rivers of feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching that are endlessly surging and mixing and then emptying finally into a infinite ocean.

At the most ultimate level, the sages say, beyond even these rivers of thought and feeling and perception and sensation that we mistakenly take to be ''us,'' lies a formless unconditioned void that contains all energy and all forms. Any chart or map is a mere cartoon compared to this.

''Within the fathom-long body, the entire universe may be known,'' the Buddha said. We need to begin to understand this statement, and similar ones made by the sages of other traditions, before we can begin to understand the the practical and moral impacts of language on the human soul.

We live usually in a practical, not metaphysical, realm. How does one create a social program that offers guidelines for using language in the media in a way that enriches the body invisible?

To do so successfully is probably not as impossible as it sounds. After all, humanity has advanced a lot in understanding how the physical human body is either nourished or poisoned, and by what types of foods or toxins, and how those foods or toxins pass through various physical and energy states inside the physical human body. All of these are all quite precisely known and even visualized.

We need to begin to understand the body invisible, as much as we have the physical body.

Practical aid can be devised and implemented, even as the ultimate realities remain well beyond our grasp (for most of us, anyway). Understanding the role of language, especially the use and broadcasting of language to masses of people -- thereby either nourishing or poisoning the body invisible of those individuals and their masses as may be -- is an especially urgent task.

We need to get started.

I  often encourage journalists to think more directly, deeply, systematically, and from various angles about the many modes of action and effects of their chosen medium of expression -- language.

Journalists use many of these modes, but very often without a conscious understanding that they are doing so. As a result, they often aren't aware of the full range of impact their language is actually having on the people who read, watch, and listen to their stories.

Every piece of journalism, for example, attempts to persuade readers of beliefs and premises at deeper level than the explicit content of the article. Even writers who take pains to keep personal opinions and bias out of their articles still must persuade readers of the accuracy, authenticity, and authority of their reporting. And, they have to persuade readers that their writing springs from a moral standpoint and a world view that is basically compatible with theirs.

This invites a study of reportorial journalism, not only opinion journalism, as rhetoric. The use of poetic techniques and tropes in journalistic writing, even sometimes in straight news reporting, similarly invites a deeper study of journalism as poetry; and journalistic narrative techniques invites a study of journalism as non-fiction literature; and so on.

My brief here is to suggest that journalists and scholars of journalism urgently need to open themselves to a branch of language ethics that to the best of my knowledge remains virgin territory as regards its application to journalism and the media.

That is the study of language as an ethical force in itself, as a bearer of a positive or negative moral charge that transcends any specific language message, and which plays a key role in the development of individual human personality, character, destiny, or even, one might say, of soul.

Plato essentially began this line of inquiry in the Western tradition, and many religious, spiritual and moral figures ranging from Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, St. Augustine, Kabir, Hafiz, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers have carried it through to the present day.

What is odd is that over the past 200 years the mass media has exploded, vastly deepening the amount and types of impact that it has on individuals and societies. As almost never before in history, a thorough accounting of languages as a means of moral action is needed. Who is doing it?

No longer does language approach us primarily through the spoken language of those people we directly know, plus books and newspapers and television and radio. Now language comes at us in a raging cataract through the Internet, emails, advertising, podcasts, PDAs, wide TV screens hanging in elevators and waiting rooms and restaurants, and seemingly infinite other ways. Increasingly -- because it could be no other way -- the thoughts and ideas and feelings conveyed through all these omnipresent electronic means become our own personal thoughts and ideas and feelings.

But what is the overall effect of this upon our selves? Our communities? This is very much an extension of the original Socratic, Christian, and Buddhist questions about the moral impact of spoken and written language upon the individual soul and upon society. Again, where is the debate?

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates questions the widespread development of writing, because writing, he argued, would surely weaken the human faculty of memory and therefore harm individual moral character and weaken social bonds. Buddha's doctrine of Right Speech posits that using language in a moral manner is the first and most important link between the wholesome moral intentions that arise in spiritual meditation, and the positive actions that can lessen suffering in the world.

Conditions in the early 21st century cry out for the application and updating of these moral theories to mass communication practices, chief among them journalism, the one branch of the mass media dedicated to civic aims.

A journalist might object that journalism after all is only a slice, and a tiny slice at that, of the overall mass media that is generating such torrents of language upon individuals and the public, to such as-yet-unknown effects. That is certainly true. Newspapers, radio and television news programs, and news magazines today are increasingly mere dits and dots in the organization charts of giant multinational conglomerates that generate profits mainly from movies, pop music, advertising, merchandising, and the cross-marketing of their entertainment and communication services. 

And yet the small size of journalistic organizations within these behemoths is itself an argument for its moral and symbolic importance, as a civic practice serving, at least theoretically, public as opposed to private commercial aims. This charter should theoretically allow journalists, above all workers in today's media communication fields, to do the deep kind of thinking about language that I am here proposing. And then, experimentally at first perhaps, to begin to apply the conclusions reached from such considerations, to the actual practice of gathering, writing, and publishing the news.

From at least one other angle, besides the unquestioned impact of mass communication on government and civic society and individuals today, it's truly a mystery why language's moral essence has never been systematically studied in application to journalism. Because there is such abundant evidence in our daily individual lives of a yawning gap between what we claim we believe are the importance and effects of language upon us, versus the objectively observable effects.

Possibly because language is an ephemeral medium as compared with, say, a hunk of metal or a clump of clay, we tend to discount the impact of language on self and community. ''Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,'' we intone as we launch into yet another vicious public debate that leaves all parties more hurt and angry than ever before. We say that such an outcome, and the acute discomfort of such exchanges, is the price we pay for democracy.

It is high time to make a clear-eyed accounting of what exactly we are accepting as the price of our democracy, when we make such a claim. And we need to examine the logic of our defense of free speech of this type, too. Can we really achieve a more perfect union, through the use of language that bitterly and permanently divides? Where does our journalism and our mass media, in terms of tone as well as message, fit into this calculation? Are our means and ends well in accord here?

The daily language that we commonly use to describe the mass media and our use of it, shows that at some level we understand the basic moral relationship of self and society to language, and the very high stakes involved. Generally this language revolves around the metaphor of food.

We speak about ourselves as media ''consumers'' who ''ingest'' a ''daily diet'' of news and entertainment. We face a ''menu'' of media choices, ranging perhaps from ''dry'' or ''lean'' or ''unpalatable'' programs at one end, to ''meaty'' or ''yummy'' or ''rich'' programs at the other. Reading gossip magazines is a ''guilty pleasure'' like eating ice cream, while watching public affairs programs like The Lehrer News Hour or the BBC news is a matter of civic duty, like ''eating one’s spinach.''

A small amount of reflection on the media-as-food metaphor leads to a terrifically deep mystery, one that is really central to this issue yet one that humanity's greatest thinkers have yet to plumb.

One could pose the question his way: If a steak and potatoes dinner nourishes the physical body, what kind of ''body invisible'' does language feed and enrich, or poison and deplete?

The number of human beings who have ever lived who could credibly claim to answer this question probably is in the few dozens, or even less. One can, of course, look to the explanations of these few, such as the recorded words of Jesus or Buddha. But the problem arises that such explanations of the body invisible always include the caveat that describing the body invisible transcends language itself.

The body invisible, say the great sages, can be known only through direct and personal experience.

''Lift a rock and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am there,'' says Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas. This is one way that he describes not only his, but the common human body invisible. This is our inner body that for all its complexity is proportioned roughly the same for us all, just as each of us as individuals has a head, a torso, four limbs and interior organs that we call our  ''physical'' selves.

But we can never map the body invisible with the same amount of detail as we can the human physical body. Because the body invisible, by definition, cannot be seen. Not only when we look outside at the world do we see as through a glass darkly, but even more so, when we look within.

Charts showing ''chakras'' and ''meridians'' and ''auras,'' the best ones anyway, are perhaps are not as bogus as their detractors say. But even these maps of the body invisible, according to the sages, don't divulge the deepest understanding. Because the body invisible is essentially one of infinite change, like a confluence of rivers of feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching that are endlessly surging and mixing and then emptying finally into a infinite ocean.

At the most ultimate level, the sages say, beyond even these rivers of thought and feeling and perception and sensation that we mistakenly take to be ''us,'' lies a formless unconditioned void that contains all energy and all forms. Any chart or map is a mere cartoon compared to this.

''Within the fathom-long body, the entire universe may be known,'' the Buddha said. We need to begin to understand this statement, and similar ones made by the sages of other traditions, before we can begin to understand the the practical and moral impacts of language on the human soul.

We live usually in a practical, not metaphysical, realm. How does one create a social program that offers guidelines for using language in the media in a way that enriches the body invisible?

To do so successfully is probably not as impossible as it sounds. After all, humanity has advanced a lot in understanding how the physical human body is either nourished or poisoned, and by what types of foods or toxins, and how those foods or toxins pass through various physical and energy states inside the physical human body. All of these are all quite precisely known and even visualized.

We need to begin to understand the body invisible, as much as we have the physical body.

Practical aid can be devised and implemented, even as the ultimate realities remain well beyond our grasp (for most of us, anyway). Understanding the role of language, especially the use and broadcasting of language to masses of people -- thereby either nourishing or poisoning the body invisible of those individuals and their masses as may be -- is an especially urgent task.

We need to get started.

The Monks of Burma

I went to the Common Ground Meditation Center tonight in Minneapolis, where the guiding teacher, Mark Nunberg, gave a talk on the Seven Factors of Awakening. I've  been reading recently about the monks of Burma who are protesting the repressive government of Myanmar (Burma) by marching by the thousands in the streets, and refusing to take alms from government officials. I went to Mark's dharma talk listening for points of  connection to what's happening on the Burmese streets.

The Burmese monks' protest seems like an ideal case study in engaged Buddhism. After all, Buddhism in Burma is one of the  original sources of the Theravada/Vipassana style Buddhism that is growing fast in the United States; that is taught at the Common Ground Center; that I personally study and follow; and that is focused on  a simple practice of finding peace in one's heart and mind. What would cause monks who live out this practice on a daily basis to rise up in such an overt political action?

Mark's talk offered several points of illumination, which made clear why, if a political protest is carried out skilfully with wholesome intentions, it is no different from doing anything else in life. For example, Mark talked about how important it is to be aware of attachments that arise in meditation. This can be subtle and a difficult skill to master. For example, it's relatively easy to see how attached we become to  positive phenomena -- good food, money, the praise of peers, etc.  But we can also equally become attached to subtle spiritual longings as well -- happiness, joy, peace, calm.

When Mark said "attachment to calmness is craving," I saw one connection to the Burmese monks. By taking to the streets, those monks have abandoned that attachment, big time. They were giving themselves up to their experience completely, come what may, positive or negative. Presumably, they had also checked their intentions before they walked, to be sure they were acting from compassion towards the military government and not from hatred; and also had resolved, to the degree humanly possible, not to act on any violent urges that might arise during their marches.

Mark then dived into a really deep teaching that is hard for people to believe, if they haven't experienced it personally. And it opened another channel for me to the Burmese monks.

Mark was talking about mindfulness and pain. The two simply cannot coexist, he said, because the one cancels the other. For example, if you are experiencing pain and you bring mindfulness to the pain, the degree of mindfulness you muster, is the degree of pain reduced. The mindfulness chips away at the pain in degrees. For example, at first, you simply notice that with  physical pain comes a raft of mental activity that is  counter-productive, such as worry the pain will continue forever, that you did something wrong to cause the pain, that your life will be ruined thanks to the pain, etc.

The moment you realize this, the opportunity arises to let go of all that useless thought, simply because you see it's useless and there's no need to keep grasping to it. Then other, deeper layers of pain may be reduced by mindfulness. Just watching the actual physical pain for a while, paying close attention to it without exerting the slightest effort to relieve the pain or fight it, itself creates a healing effect. In  my experience, what happens is the pain tends to atomize, to break into small bits, so that the overall pain becomes much less monolithic, and much more a phenomenon of twinkling bits of sensation through which awareness can flow like water through a gorge.

In the Common Ground mediation room, reflecting in this way, I remembered a time in my life when I was bedridden for several months, dealing with severe pain during all of my waking hours. I remember how hard it was to deal with the pain. I was able to do it, but only by basically meditating all day long. Every time my mindfulness slipped, the pain returned, and I was reminded to get back in the moment, back to seeing things the way they were right now. I had mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I was intrigued by the experience and the wisdom I seemed to be gaining. On the other, since my life at the time, including the people around me, weren't set up to support a person basically meditating all day, I felt like a fish out of water. I could put my ambivalent feelings into the same meditative hopper -- "this is the way it is right now" -- but I never felt fully reconciled.

In any case, as the hour of meditation progressed this evening, I felt more and more open, rawer and rawer as time went on. All of this remembering of pain, and of the mindfulness I mustered to counter the pain, was making me feel painful and open. This deepened my feeling for the monks. To a new depth, I felt I could understand how those monks are feeling in their heart of hearts, and it can't be easy for them. They are surely feeling big pain. They are surely trying to muster big mindfulness to counter that pain, but they must be feeling ambivalent too, and struggling with that.

Tomorrow, I'll sign and send onwards an Internet petition that's going around, and I'll send a fax of protest to the Burmese embassy. When my own sitting group meets tomorrow night, I'll suggest that we reflect on the monks of Burma, as a possible prelude to further action. But whatever I do, I know I'll act with greater compassion than before, because this is what arose when I brought mindfulness to the pain within myself. The gap that opened between myself and pain, was suddenly filled with compassion. For myself, yes, but for others too.

Figuring out how to skilfully recognize, accept and direct that compassion, seems to me my next task. We'll see what happens.

Buddha #1: Josh Swiller

A famous Tibetan Buddhist training is to regard everyone you meet in the world as the Buddha.  That is, everyone you meet has something profound to teach. Figuring out what the teaching is, is your job.

I don't know if it's just me, but I've been finding Buddhas all over the place recently. The Tibetan training encourages you to find the Buddha even in horrible, vile people who act precisely opposite to the way you would expect the Buddha to act. That's not the kind of person I'm finding.

The kind of person I'm finding talks like the Buddha talks. They seem like actual living Buddhas, people who at least in one sphere of their lives have gained real wisdom, and have the ability to share their wisdom in a compelling way. 

My favorite person of this type is the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Milan. Time after time in his National Geographic TV program, Cesar walks into a home riven with human anxieties that the house pet has picked up and is acting out. With his patented "calm assertive energy" Cesar proceeds each time to cooly diagnose the problem and settle things down, usually dispensing gems of Buddhistic wisdom in the process. I'll write about Cesar and his wisdom gems of peace and tranquility soon.

And, I'll start adding a feature to The Journalist and the Buddha, of quick snapshots of all the Buddhas I meet and learn from along my own life's path.

Let's start with Buddha #1, a young man named Josh Swiller, interviewed the other day on NPR (thanks to my friend Alexa Olesen in Beijing for the link). Josh was profoundly deaf for most of his life until three  years ago, when he received a cochlear implant. Now he hears almost 100 percent.

Here is an exchange between NPR's Scott Simon and Swiller:

Simon:  Are there times, now that you are hearing the whole cacophony of sounds that is our world, that you sometimes miss the quiet?

Swiller:  Oh, sure. One of the most amazing things about deafness and the signing deaf community is that when you are deaf without hearing aids or implants you are alone with your thoughts a lot. And I think being alone with your thoughts, it promotes empathy for other people. Because you get to see that having a mind with all its complaints and thoughts and worries is not an easy  thing for anyone. If you ever spend time in the deaf community, it’s one of the most wonderful, compassionate communities. I think maybe with all of the noise we have in our modern world that gets lost a little bit.

The Buddha couldn't have said it better himself. It sounds to me as if profound deafness naturally nurtures the insights one seeks through vipassana or "insight" meditation. One such insight being what a huge  pain in the ass it is to have a human mind, endlessly storming off in all directions.

The theory of Buddhist insight meditation is that such insights tend to cause compassion to arise. And here we have Josh Swiller, saying this often happens for people who are stone deaf.

For the full interview click here.

Amazing.