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Non-violence.Social Service
Practice of non-violence took shape in self-help villages modelled on the kibbutz, where family plots and community lands coexist. Tools like tractors and vehicles belong to the whole community, yet each family may borrow them for its own needs. Deep relationships arise from sharing resources and combining collective and individual efforts without large expenditures.
Engaged Buddhism—“a lotus flower that bloomed in a sea of fire”—was born in wartime Vietnam through the School of Youth for Social Service (1964), which centered its work on four areas:
- rural education
- rural health
- rural economics
-
rural organization
Social workers trained to win hearts by adopting a respected family, playing with children under a tree, inviting temple cooperation, respecting all faiths, and mobilizing villagers to build schools, dispensaries and cooperatives. Pilot villages, full-moon festivals and libraries brought joy and helped retain youth in the countryside.
Social work became a nonviolent army of love and compassion, enduring danger, loss and massacres without hate. To sustain calm and effectiveness, practitioners must transform their own suffering through daily mindfulness. Thay proposes:
- an Institute for the Happiness of One Person—one year of mindfulness training before marriage
-
an Institute for the Happiness of More Than One Person—for monastics serving many
and urges that all helping-profession schools (teaching, nursing, medicine, law, psychotherapy) include mindful living as a core subject.
Part of the following collection
1963 – The Fire of Compassion and Brotherly Love