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Purpose

The group sprang from a sense that within the wider Bodhi College community, we lack a forum where we can explore the practice of “engaged Buddhism”. Engagement starts with being able to acknowledge and open our hearts to the current state of the planet: war, genocide, pollution, depletion of natural resources, inequality, racism, climate change, economic slumps and so on. These issues of course evoke difficult feelings in us, but beyond emotions they also prompt inquiry into what counts as right action and right speech in modern society. What should be the source and foundation for social engagement with the world we find ourselves in?

Approach

We all have “views” and we cannot escape them. We can however do our best to be aware of and curious about the conceptual frameworks we take for granted and be open to listening to the views of others, even when they conflict with ours. This kinds of dialogue is not always be comfortable, but uncomfortable should not be equated with unsafe. The health of a group like this depends on there being a sense of trust; trust requires a commitment to turn up and be present and to gradually establish common ground.

Like Bodhi College more generally, we take much of our inspiration from the teachings of Early Buddhism, but also recognise the importance of approaches from later traditions. In particular, we recognise that dukkha is not just the product of the kilesas but also emerges from trying to live ethically in a highly extractive, unequal and unsustainable society.

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Who We Are

We are a small group of Dhamma practitioners who are also greatly concerned about events locally and globally in the world.

We seek to understand

  • How dhamma teachings can inform our views and actions around the social, political and environmental upheaval in the world today.
  • How awareness of changing political and social views can help us to understand and develop traditional teachings

We hope to expand our group and our dialogue both within the sangha and in our wider lives and activities

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Dhamma, engagement and sangha @ Bodhi College

Reflections on ‘the elephant group’

The ‘elephant’ group has been meeting for less than six months (since January 2026) as an ad hoc group within the sangha of Bodhi College. The group came together around a felt sense that it is desirable but difficult (for numerous reasons) to explore what kinds of contribution the dhamma - specifically, the early-teachings lens of Bodhi College - can be expected to make to living a life of ‘activism’ or ‘engagement’ in a time of manifest crisis. The ‘elephant’ tag came from John Peacock’s article The elephant in the dhamma hall - What is the place of politics in Buddhism? (March 2024).

At this point there is a sense that we might try to outline what the group is doing, in a way that might serve as an invitation to others to either join the group (if we expanded) or to assemble in a group of a similar kind with similar intentions. There is also a sense that we want to ask: What’s the contribution that a group like this might realistically expect to make to the sangha of Bodhi College, and its secular Buddhist programme, both of which we deeply value? Thirdly perhaps there’s a sense that the group should by now know what it’s up to, and a concern not to waste time or energy, or to be self-indulgent or lazy, and to ‘get on with it’.

These below are my personal responses, shared with the others in the group. It’s a group composed of four men, English-speaking, white, middle-age and upwards; none of them manual workers.

Training

I regard the group as a rare place where I can enquire with others into the personal training that ‘an activist’ might wisely undertake, within the dhamma, in order to stand, with wisdom and ease, in both a Buddhist sangha and an activist community in the world (in my case, climate activism, anti-Fascism, resistance in practice to the de-facto ‘Digital Coup’ by data oligarchs, anti-war organising, civil disobedience and abuses of the law by the State, etc etc). Matters that seem to ask for clarification include training is relation to use and abuse of privilege (white, male, global-North, professional-class, etc), equanimity and passivity, views/ditthi, right occupation, grieving and sorrow, legitimate and/or inescapable force, ‘the second dart’ of dukkha; etc etc. We explore such things and it’s a pleasure and relief to find we seem to do so without great difficulty or stumbling, but at this point we have by no means settled on ‘a shopping list’ for future sessions. The list of topics gets longer rather than shorter. And we might just be making a comfortable little (privilege-confirming) nest for ourselves.

Gender

I feel it’s unfortunate and somehow symptomatic that the group has ended up composed of four men, when the approach initially was sangha-wide and aspiring to be un-gendered; with gender as one of the aspects that might then be better explored - in relation to privilege, for example, inside and outside the College sangha. As this group was forming another mini- sangha also was forming, which seems to have assembled around some key feminist ‘safety’ themes, and which does have women as members. But as far as I know (I may be mistaken, there’s no communication across the groups) its focus in on forms of power within the sangha (including patriarchal power?) rather than challenges to powers in the world more broadly, including formal institutions such as States, corporations, markets or law. I would like us to better understand the situation within the College sangha, and make some moves with regard to some deep and powerful stereotypes, fears and real power differentials that probably are at work in this division of commitments having emerged as it has.

Activism

My own position as ‘an activist’ has been shifting across the 18 months that it’s taken to get to this point, commencing with the Bodhi College sangha gathering in London, December 2024. And others in the group have tended to feel that ‘engagement’ rather than ‘activism’ describes their field of intentions, though I’m unsure just what the nature of this distinction is.

At the present time I find that sorrow in the face of inescapable collapse, damage, danger and violence on a grotesquely orchestrated scale (for example, in the Gaza genocide; but of course not only there) is my most present experience, in my chosen fields of engagement: digital fascism and infrastructural and political takeover by alt-Right billionaire elites, climate, deaths of refugees as a consequence of national border enforcements and nation-to-nation violence, and abuse of ‘terrorism’ legislation and definitions by the State in the UK and the USA. I start to wonder, is it an ‘activist’ commitment, to bear public witness (Right Speech - or right demos) to collapse, damage, danger and grotesque violence, and to serve (sometimes very marginally) the communities - generally ‘faith communities’ - who undertake this more profoundly and at greater personal risk than I do; and to learn how to cultivate a practice of sorrow in a way that isn’t just ‘another dukkha, another ditthi, another Selfing’? That might be where my evolution is heading, hard to say, things are in transition.

With things so manifestly in transition, I myself feel no need to recruit to a small group that seems to work well enough for now. But perhaps it’s time to talk to the College about these intentions referred to above, even though the channels for doing so are unclear; and the admin Centre is hugely over-stretched and the College itself under some strain (financial, for example; also perhaps generational successions).