Charles Johnnson chapter on “Mindfulness and The Beloved Community” may very well be the pivot point of his offering on people and hate. The beloved community as an idea is utopian. It is because it suggests that the hate we espouse is of our own creation and we don’t even see this to be the case.
What is Slavery? Historically capturing people to serve happened in stealing wives, children, and in the “Spoils of War.”
Imagine a group of people being captured and made into “tools.” People of Africa people were made slaves as early as 3000B.C. In the 1400s, They were packed efficiently into containment-ships and moved slowly to a location across the Atlantic Ocean. Thirty percent died while all the others were damaged. PTSD we call it today. Then these “tools” were chained, beaten, isolated and Because they were not as human. These inhuman/tools survived and created a culture that knew love and kindness, and survived for over four hundred years.
Mindfulness is to see clearly and beloved community is action to reduce the hate and harm caused when anyone is an imprisoned-tool. Buddhism meets an image of the real and illusionary: “The Promised Land or the Beloved Community.”
“ The task of Right Mindfulness is to clear-up the cognitive field…” (p.80)
We cannot know what is like for another person, their family, nor their ancestors. We live our lives. The only way to know a human is to love humans. This can only occur when barriers of lies are removed. Buddhism as a way of life is removing self-induced pain driven by greed, hate and delusion. In 1957 SCLC Founding When registering the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Dr.King explicitly stated in its founding documents that its ultimate aim was “to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America.”Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Beloved Community – Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox
Holistic fluidity is one way to describe Johnson’s message. Slaves continued being human and the same as Jews in concentration camps. Victor Frankl “In Search for meaning writes about how one found interconnectedness in limitations and pain. Fostering a sense of meaning. This was both practicable and hopeful. There is also the strength of numbers in that the more people who share the meaning the better. https://www.shortform.com/summary/mans-search-for-meaning-vb13747-g-summary-viktor-frankl?
Where all of this comes together is interactions that lose their need. In the Heart Sutra, we pass over to the other shore to reach Nirvanna. It is an ideal. It becomes real only when greed, hate, and delusion are replaced with compassion, loving-kindness, joy and equanimity.
On page 80 Dr. Johnson closes with:
Yet when those Delusions and desires are extinguished, we as a people, will know greater joy, freedom, and abundant creativity: and we will realize as the poet Bunan, the transcendent beauty and liberation and liberation that lies that live behind a false sense of dualism:
The Moon’s the same old moon
The flowers exactly the way they were,
Yet I’ve become the thingness
Off all the things I see
Sangaku