Essays
Come Together: A Look at Service and the Self Through a Buddhist-Muslim Lens (2006) - Eboo Patel
The Dalai Lama and the imam greeted each other like old friends. They touched foreheads, the Dalai Lama tugged on his beard and they both started giggling. "This is a Tibetan Muslim leader," the Dalai Lama explained to the people who had gathered for the first-ever public dialogue between His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and the Muslim community. The meeting took place in San Francisco, the birth place of the United Nations, on one of the rare occasions that the Christian holiday of Easter, the Jewish observance of Passover and the Muslim celebration of Mawlid, the Prophet's birthday, occurred on the same weekend. People had come from as far away as Morocco, England, and India to take part. Some of America's most prominent scholars of religion, including Huston Smith and Robert Thurman, were present. "This dialogue with the Dalai Lama may be the one truly historic thing I do in my life," I overheard one Muslim leader say. The Dalai Lama told the story of his predecessor, the 5th Dalai Lama, who lived during the 17th century when Tibet was free (unlike today, when it is under Chinese occupation). From his palace in the city of Lhasa, he noticed a man climbing to the top of a hill five times a day and performing a series of prostrations. The Dalai Lama had the man brought to him. "What are you doing on that hilltop five times a day?" His Holiness asked the man. "I am performing my prayers. I am a Muslim," the man replied. The Dalai Lama was surprised to learn that there were people who followed religions other than Buddhism living in his country. He asked some questions about Islam, and how Muslims came to Tibet. The man told him about the Prophet and the Qur'an, and the Muslim emphasis on peace, unity, generosity, and tolerance. He said that Muslim traders had long been making the journey to Tibet and over the years some of them decided to stay. "Why do you perform your prayers on a hill?" the Dalai Lama asked. "Because I have no other place to pray. There is no mosque in this city," replied the man. The Buddhist leader then had a mosque built for the Muslim man and his community, and he sent one of his archers to the top of the hill where he had first seen the man praying. The archer let four arrows fly in four different directions, and the Dalai Lama decreed that these would be the four corners where Muslims could establish their community life in Lhasa. Muslims lived in peace and prosperity in Lhasa, often serving as butchers to the Tibetan Buddhists (many of whom will eat meat but not slaughter animals), until the Chinese army occupied the country in the 1950s. Some of them followed the 14th Dalai Lama when he fled Tibet for India in 1959, and helped him establish a government and community in exile in Dharamsala, where he makes his home today. And so, by meeting with Muslims, the Dalai Lama was following a tradition of dialogue and protection that extended back 400 years. Sheikh Hamza Yusef, one of Islam's most widely respected American scholars, was one of the first Muslims to speak at the historic gathering in San Francisco. He managed to get one sentence out before he had to choke back tears. "The Muslim community is in a very difficult period," he said. "Of all the religions, we have had the most problems with adapting to modernity. We are having a hard time controlling our extremists. Our public image is one of intolerance and violence. For you to reach out to us at this time and begin this dialogue, to say publicly that you seek a friendship with Muslims and that you see the compassionate heart of our religion, I don't think you can know how grateful we are for this." The Dalai Lama assured Sheikh Hamza and the other Muslims gathered that he knew Islam was a religion of peace. The experience of Buddhists and Muslims living together in Tibet for centuries was just one example. Moreover, the Dalai Lama had seen the 99 names Muslims call God, and listed some of them off — the just, the merciful, the compassionate. The Muslims he had come to know through other interfaith dialogues had embodied these attributes. "Every religion has some mischievous people who do bad things," he told the group. "They do not define the religion." The Muslims leaders could not have been happier. The Dalai Lama not only had a working knowledge of Islam, he understood the predicament of the Muslim community. Whatever ice had not been broken in the original greetings was now completely melted. The conversation turned to solutions, of which the most promising was interfaith cooperation. The Dalai Lama then began to discuss the basis for such work. "First," he said, "there has to be affection between faiths." Again, people laughed. If there was anyone in the world who knew how to show affection it was this man, with his contagious giggle and his touching of foreheads and tugging on beards. At an interfaith gathering several years earlier, I had seen His Holiness reach out and cuddle a young African-American Christian, an act that first took the young man and his colleagues by surprise, and then caused laughter and a hug in return. "Second," said His Holiness, "religions must realize they have core human values in common. These include compassion and kindness. Religions should discuss these values. Third, religions should act on these values together by doing service projects together." "You see," the Dalai Lama continued, "the different religions are all going to be with us for a long time. Previously, those religions were not in contact with each other, so there was no problem. But now they are in contact, so there are many problems. We have to see religions for what they truly are — instruments for the cultivation of compassion." The Dalai Lama made it clear that he believed all the religions were unique and he was by no means calling for a synthesis of them. "It is not that I am a believer in all these systems," he said. "But I have to respect them. To my Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other friends — respect." During the dialogue, the Dalai Lama made some important theological comments about the differences between the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths and his own non-theistic Buddhism. But he was absolutely convinced that a key quality of all religions was that they called on people to serve others, and he wanted to encourage people from the different religions to do that together as a way for each of us to be a better practitioner of our own religion, and for all of us to build understanding between religions. Towards the end of the dialogue, a Muslim woman asked, "What can Islam learn from Buddhism?" After a pause the Dalai Lama said, "The idea of interdependence is very important in Buddhism. I think the whole world can learn from this idea." And then, to close the session, a Nigerian Muslim leader was asked to say a prayer. He cupped his hands around his mouth and recited the Azan, the Muslim call to prayer, in his regal, sonorous African accent. Now it was my turn to get emotional. The tears welled up in my eyes and it was all I could do to prevent them from streaming down my face. I thought about the many parts of the world where I have been with Muslims, and the many accents I have heard the Azan called in: Turkish, Indian, English, Arab, North African, East African, South African, and now West African. I thought about the story of Bilal, a black slave during the period of the Prophet in early 7th Century Arabia. He was freed by the Companions of the Prophet, and the Prophet made this former slave a leader in his community by asking him to call the Azan for the prayer five times a day. I thought about the glories of Islam, its achievements in social justice and poetry and science and philosophy, the beauty and dignity in which most of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live their lives, and I prayed that the spirit established by this meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama and Muslim leaders would characterize interfaith relations in this century and beyond. I had first met the Dalai Lama eight years earlier, in August of 1998. Earlier that summer I had had the idea to start an organization that brings young people from different religions together to volunteer as a method of building interfaith understanding and encouraging more service to others. My mentor, a Catholic monk and dialogue partner of the Dalai Lama's, suggested that my friend Kevin and I, who were already planning a trip to India, go to Dharamsala to receive the blessing of His Holiness for our endeavor. In our audience in the guest room of his simple residence in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama had told me the same things that he was telling the larger group of Muslim leaders in San Francisco — that the religions had to be viewed as tools for cultivating compassion and that in a global age they had to learn how to do it together. It was also important, the Dalai Lama said, that people became more committed to their own religions in the process, even as the interfaith projects helped them learn about the religions other people followed. The Dalai Lama was delighted to know that Kevin was a Jew and I was a Muslim, and we had traveled through a predominantly Hindu country, sent by a Catholic, to receive the blessing of a Buddhist leader for the Interfaith Youth Core. I truly believe that the Dalai Lama's blessing played a key role in the success of my organization. From the seed of an idea, the Interfaith Youth Core has become an organization that has impacted tens of thousands of people on four continents. Our Chicago office has twelve staff and has nearly doubled in size each of the past four years. Our work has been featured in everything from Nickelodeon to CNN. Sometimes, the blessing of a religious leader is precisely what is needed to fertilize a new idea! In San Francisco, I watched the Dalai Lama embody in action his own teachings of how to do interfaith service. Interfaith service had to be based on affection, core values and concrete service. The Dalai Lama was enacting all three — laughing with his new Muslim friends, pointing out the shared value of compassion and encouraging people from the different religions to undertake tangible projects together. Moreover, the Dalai Lama made it clear that he was engaging in interfaith cooperation as a Buddhist. The Buddhist teaching of interdependence called him to do it. In a world where diverse religious traditions are in regular interaction, an interaction which too often leads to violence, a key component of future success on our planet had to include interfaith cooperation. Finally, by reaching out to Muslims, a community that was experiencing deep problems because of a combination of the high-profile violent acts of a small number of extremists and unfair stereotyping by the larger society, the Dalai Lama was showing profound courage. This act symbolically said, "Interdependence has to include everybody. Muslims, a community that many others are suspicious and afraid of, now more than ever need to know that we believe in the compassion that is at the heart of their religion and we want their positive contributions to our world." Strikingly, the concept of the "self" rarely, if ever, came up. The discussion was about shared values, religious traditions, global interdependence. The individual self was seen as a vehicle to express these values, a current in the broader river of a tradition, a stitch in the quilt of interdependence. The question was never, "What can I do?" It was, "What can we do?". Part of the reason for this is that both Islam and Buddhism, in different ways, view the self as less important than the community. Buddhists talk of "selfless service." The Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva exemplifies this — someone who achieves enlightenment but instead of entering into nirvana (and thus escaping from the world), returns to the material world to serve others and show them the way. For Muslims, the talk is always of the umma, the Muslim community, not the individual person. The way Muslims pray embodies this ethic. They stand shoulder to shoulder, hundreds even thousands bending and bowing as one. If you congratulate a Muslim on a job well done, she or he is likely to say, "Alhumdo Lilah" — Praise be to God. In other words, it was not he or she who accomplished the task, it was God's work; the individual was only a vehicle. At first glance, the American tradition seems to valorize the individual. We have this notion in our economics — the entrepreneur and the "self-made man." We have it in our literary tradition. Consider Thoreau living alone at Walden Pond, Emerson writing about the importance of self-reliance, Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." We certainly have a strong current of individualism in the cult of personality that is our politics — embodied, depending on your particular persuasion, by John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. I appreciate this tradition of individualism. I think it encourages creativity and visionary thinking. But I also think that too much individualism can lead to self-absorption and atomization. Moreover, I believe it puts an enormous amount of pressure on each of us. There is a tendency in America to think we each have to push our own stone up the mountain alone. But there is another tradition in America, one that has strong resonances with Islam and Buddhism. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted this in his work Democracy in America, that Americans seemed to be always joining with each other in voluntary associations, and that such organizations formed the backbone of an extremely vibrant civil society. Many of the people whom Americans consider to be true heroes lived and worked in community for most of their lives. Consider Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement or Jane Addams and Hull House. Moreover, these women, and so many others that we Americans regard as heroes (Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez), would be quick to remind anybody who praised their individual efforts that they were doing nothing more than answering the call of God. Finally, America's great musical traditions highlight the importance of community. Consider jazz, which requires the individual musicians to listen carefully to one another to create a collective beauty. There is also the great folk music tradition where, as Pete Seeger once said, the singer is only a tool for the song; it is the singing, often done by the whole group together, that counts, not the singer. Yes, the particular singer gives the song a unique voice — just as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dorothy Day answered God's call with their unique creativity — but it is the song that is eternal. If the singer does his or her job well, the song will be passed down for the next person to sing. In service, as in folk singing, I believe it is the service that counts, not the individual server. This is precisely why service can bring people together from dramatically different traditions — Buddhist and Muslim, American and Indian — and affirm a common ground. In doing service, as in any activity, it is tempting to focus on the question: "Who am I?" But listening to the Dalai Lama in San Francisco, I think a more powerful question might be: "What can we do together for the benefit of others?"
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Come Together: A Look at Service and the Self Through a Buddhist-Muslim Lens (2006) - Eboo Patel
The Dalai Lama and the imam greeted each other like old friends. They touched foreheads, the Dalai Lama tugged on his beard and they both started giggling. "This is a Tibetan Muslim leader," the Dalai Lama explained to the people who had gathered for the first-ever public dialogue between His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and the Muslim community. The meeting took place in San Francisco, the birth place of the United Nations, on one of the rare occasions that the Christian holiday of Easter, the Jewish observance of Passover and the Muslim celebration of Mawlid, the Prophet's birthday, occurred on the same weekend. People had come from as far away as Morocco, England, and India to take part. Some of America's most prominent scholars of religion, including Huston Smith and Robert Thurman, were present. "This dialogue with the Dalai Lama may be the one truly historic thing I do in my life," I overheard one Muslim leader say. The Dalai Lama told the story of his predecessor, the 5th Dalai Lama, who lived during the 17th century when Tibet was free (unlike today, when it is under Chinese occupation). From his palace in the city of Lhasa, he noticed a man climbing to the top of a hill five times a day and performing a series of prostrations. The Dalai Lama had the man brought to him. "What are you doing on that hilltop five times a day?" His Holiness asked the man. "I am performing my prayers. I am a Muslim," the man replied. The Dalai Lama was surprised to learn that there were people who followed religions other than Buddhism living in his country. He asked some questions about Islam, and how Muslims came to Tibet. The man told him about the Prophet and the Qur'an, and the Muslim emphasis on peace, unity, generosity, and tolerance. He said that Muslim traders had long been making the journey to Tibet and over the years some of them decided to stay. "Why do you perform your prayers on a hill?" the Dalai Lama asked. "Because I have no other place to pray. There is no mosque in this city," replied the man. The Buddhist leader then had a mosque built for the Muslim man and his community, and he sent one of his archers to the top of the hill where he had first seen the man praying. The archer let four arrows fly in four different directions, and the Dalai Lama decreed that these would be the four corners where Muslims could establish their community life in Lhasa. Muslims lived in peace and prosperity in Lhasa, often serving as butchers to the Tibetan Buddhists (many of whom will eat meat but not slaughter animals), until the Chinese army occupied the country in the 1950s. Some of them followed the 14th Dalai Lama when he fled Tibet for India in 1959, and helped him establish a government and community in exile in Dharamsala, where he makes his home today. And so, by meeting with Muslims, the Dalai Lama was following a tradition of dialogue and protection that extended back 400 years. Sheikh Hamza Yusef, one of Islam's most widely respected American scholars, was one of the first Muslims to speak at the historic gathering in San Francisco. He managed to get one sentence out before he had to choke back tears. "The Muslim community is in a very difficult period," he said. "Of all the religions, we have had the most problems with adapting to modernity. We are having a hard time controlling our extremists. Our public image is one of intolerance and violence. For you to reach out to us at this time and begin this dialogue, to say publicly that you seek a friendship with Muslims and that you see the compassionate heart of our religion, I don't think you can know how grateful we are for this." The Dalai Lama assured Sheikh Hamza and the other Muslims gathered that he knew Islam was a religion of peace. The experience of Buddhists and Muslims living together in Tibet for centuries was just one example. Moreover, the Dalai Lama had seen the 99 names Muslims call God, and listed some of them off — the just, the merciful, the compassionate. The Muslims he had come to know through other interfaith dialogues had embodied these attributes. "Every religion has some mischievous people who do bad things," he told the group. "They do not define the religion." The Muslims leaders could not have been happier. The Dalai Lama not only had a working knowledge of Islam, he understood the predicament of the Muslim community. Whatever ice had not been broken in the original greetings was now completely melted. The conversation turned to solutions, of which the most promising was interfaith cooperation. The Dalai Lama then began to discuss the basis for such work. "First," he said, "there has to be affection between faiths." Again, people laughed. If there was anyone in the world who knew how to show affection it was this man, with his contagious giggle and his touching of foreheads and tugging on beards. At an interfaith gathering several years earlier, I had seen His Holiness reach out and cuddle a young African-American Christian, an act that first took the young man and his colleagues by surprise, and then caused laughter and a hug in return. "Second," said His Holiness, "religions must realize they have core human values in common. These include compassion and kindness. Religions should discuss these values. Third, religions should act on these values together by doing service projects together." "You see," the Dalai Lama continued, "the different religions are all going to be with us for a long time. Previously, those religions were not in contact with each other, so there was no problem. But now they are in contact, so there are many problems. We have to see religions for what they truly are — instruments for the cultivation of compassion." The Dalai Lama made it clear that he believed all the religions were unique and he was by no means calling for a synthesis of them. "It is not that I am a believer in all these systems," he said. "But I have to respect them. To my Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other friends — respect." During the dialogue, the Dalai Lama made some important theological comments about the differences between the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths and his own non-theistic Buddhism. But he was absolutely convinced that a key quality of all religions was that they called on people to serve others, and he wanted to encourage people from the different religions to do that together as a way for each of us to be a better practitioner of our own religion, and for all of us to build understanding between religions. Towards the end of the dialogue, a Muslim woman asked, "What can Islam learn from Buddhism?" After a pause the Dalai Lama said, "The idea of interdependence is very important in Buddhism. I think the whole world can learn from this idea." And then, to close the session, a Nigerian Muslim leader was asked to say a prayer. He cupped his hands around his mouth and recited the Azan, the Muslim call to prayer, in his regal, sonorous African accent. Now it was my turn to get emotional. The tears welled up in my eyes and it was all I could do to prevent them from streaming down my face. I thought about the many parts of the world where I have been with Muslims, and the many accents I have heard the Azan called in: Turkish, Indian, English, Arab, North African, East African, South African, and now West African. I thought about the story of Bilal, a black slave during the period of the Prophet in early 7th Century Arabia. He was freed by the Companions of the Prophet, and the Prophet made this former slave a leader in his community by asking him to call the Azan for the prayer five times a day. I thought about the glories of Islam, its achievements in social justice and poetry and science and philosophy, the beauty and dignity in which most of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live their lives, and I prayed that the spirit established by this meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama and Muslim leaders would characterize interfaith relations in this century and beyond. I had first met the Dalai Lama eight years earlier, in August of 1998. Earlier that summer I had had the idea to start an organization that brings young people from different religions together to volunteer as a method of building interfaith understanding and encouraging more service to others. My mentor, a Catholic monk and dialogue partner of the Dalai Lama's, suggested that my friend Kevin and I, who were already planning a trip to India, go to Dharamsala to receive the blessing of His Holiness for our endeavor. In our audience in the guest room of his simple residence in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama had told me the same things that he was telling the larger group of Muslim leaders in San Francisco — that the religions had to be viewed as tools for cultivating compassion and that in a global age they had to learn how to do it together. It was also important, the Dalai Lama said, that people became more committed to their own religions in the process, even as the interfaith projects helped them learn about the religions other people followed. The Dalai Lama was delighted to know that Kevin was a Jew and I was a Muslim, and we had traveled through a predominantly Hindu country, sent by a Catholic, to receive the blessing of a Buddhist leader for the Interfaith Youth Core. I truly believe that the Dalai Lama's blessing played a key role in the success of my organization. From the seed of an idea, the Interfaith Youth Core has become an organization that has impacted tens of thousands of people on four continents. Our Chicago office has twelve staff and has nearly doubled in size each of the past four years. Our work has been featured in everything from Nickelodeon to CNN. Sometimes, the blessing of a religious leader is precisely what is needed to fertilize a new idea! In San Francisco, I watched the Dalai Lama embody in action his own teachings of how to do interfaith service. Interfaith service had to be based on affection, core values and concrete service. The Dalai Lama was enacting all three — laughing with his new Muslim friends, pointing out the shared value of compassion and encouraging people from the different religions to undertake tangible projects together. Moreover, the Dalai Lama made it clear that he was engaging in interfaith cooperation as a Buddhist. The Buddhist teaching of interdependence called him to do it. In a world where diverse religious traditions are in regular interaction, an interaction which too often leads to violence, a key component of future success on our planet had to include interfaith cooperation. Finally, by reaching out to Muslims, a community that was experiencing deep problems because of a combination of the high-profile violent acts of a small number of extremists and unfair stereotyping by the larger society, the Dalai Lama was showing profound courage. This act symbolically said, "Interdependence has to include everybody. Muslims, a community that many others are suspicious and afraid of, now more than ever need to know that we believe in the compassion that is at the heart of their religion and we want their positive contributions to our world." Strikingly, the concept of the "self" rarely, if ever, came up. The discussion was about shared values, religious traditions, global interdependence. The individual self was seen as a vehicle to express these values, a current in the broader river of a tradition, a stitch in the quilt of interdependence. The question was never, "What can I do?" It was, "What can we do?". Part of the reason for this is that both Islam and Buddhism, in different ways, view the self as less important than the community. Buddhists talk of "selfless service." The Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva exemplifies this — someone who achieves enlightenment but instead of entering into nirvana (and thus escaping from the world), returns to the material world to serve others and show them the way. For Muslims, the talk is always of the umma, the Muslim community, not the individual person. The way Muslims pray embodies this ethic. They stand shoulder to shoulder, hundreds even thousands bending and bowing as one. If you congratulate a Muslim on a job well done, she or he is likely to say, "Alhumdo Lilah" — Praise be to God. In other words, it was not he or she who accomplished the task, it was God's work; the individual was only a vehicle. At first glance, the American tradition seems to valorize the individual. We have this notion in our economics — the entrepreneur and the "self-made man." We have it in our literary tradition. Consider Thoreau living alone at Walden Pond, Emerson writing about the importance of self-reliance, Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." We certainly have a strong current of individualism in the cult of personality that is our politics — embodied, depending on your particular persuasion, by John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. I appreciate this tradition of individualism. I think it encourages creativity and visionary thinking. But I also think that too much individualism can lead to self-absorption and atomization. Moreover, I believe it puts an enormous amount of pressure on each of us. There is a tendency in America to think we each have to push our own stone up the mountain alone. But there is another tradition in America, one that has strong resonances with Islam and Buddhism. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted this in his work Democracy in America, that Americans seemed to be always joining with each other in voluntary associations, and that such organizations formed the backbone of an extremely vibrant civil society. Many of the people whom Americans consider to be true heroes lived and worked in community for most of their lives. Consider Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement or Jane Addams and Hull House. Moreover, these women, and so many others that we Americans regard as heroes (Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez), would be quick to remind anybody who praised their individual efforts that they were doing nothing more than answering the call of God. Finally, America's great musical traditions highlight the importance of community. Consider jazz, which requires the individual musicians to listen carefully to one another to create a collective beauty. There is also the great folk music tradition where, as Pete Seeger once said, the singer is only a tool for the song; it is the singing, often done by the whole group together, that counts, not the singer. Yes, the particular singer gives the song a unique voice — just as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dorothy Day answered God's call with their unique creativity — but it is the song that is eternal. If the singer does his or her job well, the song will be passed down for the next person to sing. In service, as in folk singing, I believe it is the service that counts, not the individual server. This is precisely why service can bring people together from dramatically different traditions — Buddhist and Muslim, American and Indian — and affirm a common ground. In doing service, as in any activity, it is tempting to focus on the question: "Who am I?" But listening to the Dalai Lama in San Francisco, I think a more powerful question might be: "What can we do together for the benefit of others?"
