“It’s fine to work on the origins of evil within me,” one might argue, “but what about all the evil happenings in the world – the atrocities of war, starvation, and unspeakable crimes that are plastered all over the media?” First, we have to be realistic. The only person we have a hope of changing in a fundamental way is ourself, and, as we know, that’s damn difficult to do. If we decide to do practical work to help end human suffering, we have to undertake it without the spirit of opposition that seems to escalate into the very thing we are trying to prevent. (It’s sadly funny to hear people arguing vehemently about war.)”

…  “This is the challenge of the middle way: to be compassionate without becoming overwhelmed and depressed by the suffering of the world, to be determined without becoming aggressive and anxious, and to have clarity of mind without becoming indifferent or cruel. We start with the most intimate work, the inner work. Then we move outward, working for peace in a milieu of nonopposition. We return always to emptiness, the Great Potential.”

How does this relate to starting or developing an art practice? As my friend Charles recently mused,  (paraphrasing a bit) :

“How do we align an urge to be a creative artist, which in a sense can be seen as a ridiculous, impractical indulgence–even a waste of resources–with the overwhelming necessity of opposing the unfolding moral and social disaster that seems to be continually present these days.”

In Mahayana Buddhism art practice has always had a strong cultural presence. Buddhism in Japan, China and Tibet has strong ties to the arts. In the Western Zen movement this seems much less true. Oh, there are a few groups that have art as a strong part of there formal practice. I’m thinking here of John Daido Loori’s Mountain and Rivers Order and Joan Halifax in Santa Fe. I’m sure there are others who stress the arts to varying degrees. I’d like to be wrong, maybe this will change as Zen continues to be assimilated into the West.

Take your awareness and focus it layer by layer — first, focus on self then move to family, to friends, to job, then expand to regional issues like the Grande Ronde aquifer depletion, then to US issues like that of political polarity, then to the Western hemispheric issues like over consumption, finally to the big problems of the world like climate change and war. By doing this you can see at each stage that any improvement in clarity and action has a karmic effect on the next stage. (In fact any growth and healing at any stage grows and heals all the other layers.) In this way we see that, that which grows and heals me, grows and heals everything else. “Me” is where we have the strongest influence and where I spend all of my time, so this is a great place work. There is no escaping, everywhere I go there I am. Moving from the small me to the “Big Self” is the best work I can do not just locally but universally.

Of course, other side of this coin is — Who is responsible for this mess? Like before, taking my awareness, looking at responsibility and slowly adding layers from myself to my family to my friends and onward to the Palouse the US and the world, I can see that each layer forms the next by karma conditions. One after the other. It started with here, right here exists the conditions for all my family issues and the Grande Ronde Aquifer depletion and the Darfur atrocities. Taking responsibility for the conditions of the moment means taking responsibility for it all. Move from the small me to the “Big Self”.

This is what I understand from Jan Chozen Bays’ commentary “Beyond Good and Evil” in the current issue of Buddhadharma that I quoted earlier.