Self-Responsibility and Social Development in Buddhism : หน้า 142/164

Suzanne Jeffrey And that’s where we close the circle. We do it for ourselves because we have to develop ourselves before we can develop anything else … but everything about us affects all of the people in our own six directions, who, in turn, affect everyone around them. “In Western culture, you learn to think of others before you think of yourself. But that is where you lose the sense of self-responsibility. When we are born, when our umbilical cord is cut, we have to think of ourselves – and that is the crisis of our lives. At that very moment, we become independent, so we must learn how to take the responsibility of our own actions. We need to be self-correcting, and self-dependent. And we need to do this step-by-step, one person at a time. We need to help people see the development and progress that have been made with Buddhism and the practice of Buddhism! “Khun Yai used to say, ‘I never worry because my boon will take care of me,’ and we need to help people understand this idea of boon, or pure energy, that they can obtain through doing three things: (1) doing good deeds, (2) giving up unwholesome practices, and (3) meditating. At the end of the day, it is all about developing our own mind because we are the center of our own six directions. And whatever we do, we should lay down our life for this goal. “Our responsibility is to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This principle is from the Buddha’s teachings. And this really is all about social responsibility. But the problem here is the greed that we get when we go out into the world; it is our defilement. In order for us to survive, we have to re-fuel, so to speak. Our defilements force us to use harsh speech, so we tend to say, and then to do, the wrong things. We also have defilements simply because we have to live in a society, and the more we live in society, the more our defilements grow. Defilements are really the same thing as [in Christianity] Satan. If people could only understand that they are the same, perhaps they would actually change. But the only way to change it is to see it, and that means that people have to meditate. “Moral standards are the boundaries that keep us, and our society, in check; holding it all together, so to speak. If we lose our moral standards, then we lose our battle with defilements, with Satan. Buddha wanted us to see the defilements of the mind in order to help us suppress them. But to see them, we must meditate: To see them means that we have to recognize that we need to change and that is not an easy thing to convince people to do.