Source: https://tricycle.org/article/buddhism-social-action
Practicing the wisdom energies
The fourth is the wisdom of causality. We act in a certain way, and this produces happiness or suffering. In short, all actions produce effects. So we must take great care of how we act because our actions will produce positive or negative consequences. Understanding this wisdom, we can practice four specific actions in any environment we find ourselves in. The first action is to avoid being disturbed by the appearances we encounter, which is not easy. The second is to seek to calm the environments we navigate, which can be challenging. Third, we try to improve the circumstances of whatever environments we are in. And fourth, we avoid negative actions, help others, and seek to support others in performing positive actions (and avoiding negative actions).
- avoid being disturbed by the appearances we encounter
- seek to calm the environments we navigate
- try to improve the circumstances of whatever environments we are in
- avoid negative actions, help others, and support others in performing positive actions and avoiding negative actions
Our life will crucially depend on how we luminously construct the constellation of things we relate to. The base of our mind is free, allowing a variety and infinity of things to arise without limit. As we navigate the world, things look solid but are not really solid. They appear solid along with our mind, but our mind is free and can construct other things.
When we see the difficulties in imagining a positive future in the face of environmental destruction and profound social and political crises, we can see this is simply our constructed mental categories appearing. These worlds that we live in are nothing but the mental creations of previous generations. We have the ability, in this generation, to imagine the world differently and construct new realities and mental categories for our planetary and ecological age. Many new possible directions are emerging simultaneously, and though we don’t know which directions have stability or are the best for our new world, the five wisdoms can serve as our basis.
==When you practice the five wisdoms, you will discover energy, or lung in Tibetan Buddhism, arising within you. When we understand, support, and collaborate with others, there is a glow within us. ==This glow is a happiness not bound by attachments but a happiness that springs from the lucid perspective of the five wisdoms. When we understand things as they are and act in skillful ways, seeing everything deeply, an awareness shines within us. Cultivating the five wisdoms can bring about our happiness and collective flourishing for all beings in the world.
At the CEBB communities [a Buddhist network of retreat and study centers in Brazil], we practice the five wisdoms together as a form of social and ecological transformation. We invite people to sit down in a circle together, listen deeply to each other, and begin luminously visioning and dreaming new worlds. This collective visioning and dreaming is the practice of mandala. The mandala is the five wisdoms in action that bring together individual visions and create and build collective dreams. 1