During the recent earthquake which affected the city of Yushu (Kyerku in Tibetan) and the surrounding areas, the monks from our Shechen monastery, located under 150 km away, were among the first of many groups of Buddhist monks who joined the other rescue teams. In particular, the Shechen monks were able to pull off alive a young girl from the rubbles.

Our association, Karuna-Shechen, has been active in the area for the last 10 years. At Yushu itself, we have been supporting a surgical clinic that is taking care of many destitute patients. Although we are still awaiting more detailed news, a few conversations we had with local friends indicate that the clinic has been more or less destroyed.

In many such natural catastrophes, two dramas usually occur: first the immediate tragedy, with a great number of victims in need of immediate help. A few months later, the plight of the people is often forgotten by the medias and aid agencies dedicated to urgent interventions.

In Yushu, the Chinese government has intervened quickly and quite efficiently, a number of foreign NGOs are at work on site, and great numbers of volunteers, including monastic communities, who are traditionally well organized, have come to the rescue.

We are therefore planning a mid-term assistance when our collaborators will visit the area next June. We will then identify a few projects to assist some of those who will still be greatly in need of help. We will also consider participating in the rebuilding of the surgical clinic that we have been supporting so far.

The Karuna-Shechen website will provide news about these projects during the summer.

A well researched Greenpeace* investigation reveals that the group made up of the two Koch brothers, who together are worth 30 billion dollars, has spent 44 million dollars to finance disinformation campaigns on global warming and its causes.

The American tycoon Steve Forbes announced on FOX TV, a demagogic television channel, “To change what we do because something is going to happen in one hundred years is, I would say, profoundly weird” (October 18, 2009), and the head of the U.S. meat industry said that what matters is that they sell their meat and that what happens in fifty years is none of their business (BBC World Service, January 8, 2010).
In short, the motto of exalted individualism goes like this, “My money now; I don’t care a dam for what happen after I am gone.”

In France, a former minister, Claude Allege, despite being supposedly a sound intellectual, adopted a Sarah Palin style to denounce global warming relying on irrelevant scientific sources and attributing to some distinguished scientists opinions that they denied.

All of this comes from a deep-rooted tendency toward a complacent laziness in the face of danger because our egotism is for the moment not at risk of being bruised. The future does not hurt, at least not yet, so we might as well pat ourselves on the back for ignoring it.

How should I lead my life? How should I live in society? What is knowable? These three questions have been puzzled over through the ages.  Ideally, our lives should lead us to a feeling of plenitude, so that we have no regrets at the moment when we die. Life in society should inspire us with a sense of universal responsibility. Knowledge should teach us about both the nature of the world around us and about our own minds.

These same questions lie at the heart of the practice of science, philosophy, politics, art, social work and spirituality. Artificially compartmentalizing these activities, as so often happens in our lives today, leads inevitably to diminished perspectives.  Without a wisdom bred of altruism, science and politics are double-edged swords, ethics is blind, emotions run wild, and spirituality becomes self-delusion.

The main difference between the pursuit of knowledge in science versus in Buddhism is their ultimate goals. In Buddhism, knowledge is acquired essentially for therapeutic purposes. The objective is to free ourselves from the suffering that is caused by our undue attachment to the seeming reality of the external world and by our servitude to our individual egos, which we imagine reside at the center of our being. Buddhism is basically a science of Enlightenment.

There are many signs of success in the contemplative life. But the most important is that after a few months, or years, your self-centeredness has lessened and our altruistic love has increased. If grasping, animosity, pride and envy still remain as strong as before, then we have wasted our time.

Buddhism’s way of looking at the world allows us to draw up a priority list covering our goals and activities, and thus take control of our lives. Its analysis of the mechanisms of happiness and suffering clearly shows the divergent results of selfishness versus altruism.

We are like birds that have lived too long in a cage to which we return even when we get the chance to fly away.

We have grown so accustomed to our mental habits that we can barely imagine what life would be like without them: the vast sky of change makes us dizzy.