July 15, 2001 Home Back Issues

Shambala Warrior Armed with Compassion Reflections on Joanna Macy's work by Diane R. Schulz

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Shambala warriors are defenders of the "mythical kingdom described in the Tibetan Kalachakra Tantra as a source of learning and center of enlightened culture." Compassion is their only weapon.

I was introduced to Joanna Macy's ideas at a workshop I attended a couple of years ago at Mills College in Oakland, as a part of their annual day-long Women's Leadership Conference. During the hour and half workshop, we were led by a woman who had studied the concepts of Deep Ecology as expressed by Macy. She led us through various simple bonding exercises with each other, such as turning to the woman immediately next to you and telling her something personal about your fears, joys and concerns for the world. At the end we joined hands in a circle and repeated a simple song and round dance step called the Elm Dance, a healing technique developed by Macy. When she did "despair work" with the people of Chernobyl in 1992, the Elm Dance took on special meaning. As they danced, they began to express their sorrow at the loss of their forest. After the melt down at the nuclear plant in 1986, and subsequent radiation poisoning of the surrounding area, the people are no longer allowed to go into the forest as they always had, because wood holds radiation for a very long time. After my participation in the workshop, I didn't pursue Macy's ideas, but recently I read her autobiography, Widening Circles, A Memoir, and discovered that she had received her inspiration originally from Tibetan Buddhism. While she and her husband and family were with the Peace Corps in India in the 1960's, Macy began her study of Dharma, the Way of the Buddha. She continued to follow this dharma after they had moved on to Africa and then resettled in America for a few years.  She returned to graduate study in the Religion department of at Syracuse University. She saw her personal spiritual path "as part of a larger paradigmatic shift in the West, as an urge arising within the Western mind -- the urge to reconnect." (pg. 133) At the outset of her studies, she found herself immersed in the typical analytical style of Western education, until she discovered "the Mother of all Buddhas." The next semester a teaching and a presence broke into my life -- as happened for Buddhist India too, back in the first century of the Common Era. I was reading a scripture from the dawn of Mahayana Buddhism, a Perfection of Wisdom sutra. That was her name too: Prajna Paramita, Perfection of Wisdom. She was not a historical figure, but the symbolic embodiment of true insight. As such she was called the Mother of All Buddhas. It as she who brought them forth and nursed them to enlightenment. As I became familiar with this text of hers, dauntingly entitled Perfection of Wisdom in 8000 Lines, I imagined her blowing into the scholastics' debates, scattering their arguments like dry leaves. I could almost hear her impatient maternal voice: "Just stop it! This analytic exercise is not what it's about. You don't break free of the self by dissecting it into its components. The separate dharmas, with which you busy your minds, are empty! They're as empty of their own reality as the self is, and as all concepts and conjectures are... Wisdom is not about bits and pieces, she said, it's about relationship. It's about the compassion that comes when we realize our deep relatedness. (pg. 135) It's all connected. Through her pioneering work in Deep Ecology, Macy has developed workshops which open the heart to this sense of connection. She believes that we all suffer the grief of our stressed planet, but because it's so overwhelming, we numb out as we go about our business of staying alive in the world. Alas, the grief does not evaporate, but burrows down deep within like a mole, irritated periodically by the latest news from Greenpeace, but heavily asleep. Macy helps us reach into that grief and face it. With renewed courage, we find that there are ways we can get into the action. Making that effort just feels better than giving up. Macy seems for the most part unpolitical. She has never declared herself a feminist, nor has she spoken out against globalization, but rather her work encompasses Nuclear Stewardship, which she says involves a three-part strategy. "We called them the three S's: study, strategy, and spiritual practice. "The second strand -- strategy -- was political in nature. We learned about the corporations and government agencies, the laws and regulations, that determine the fate of nuclear waste....We showed up at public hearings, offered testimony, and learned a lot there, too." But the third aspect, spiritual practice, is definitely the focus of her life and work. She calls herself an "eco-philosopher," with the stress on activism through the Buddhist lens of compassion for all beings. Whatever she chooses to call herself, Macy is an eloquent and inspired teacher working tirelessly for the earth. If her memoirs are not as exciting as one might wish, her leadership in the teachings of compassion and respect for all beings is a noteworthy and original contribution to the task facing us: to transform the consciousness that is making such a deep, deadly imprint on the world, and change the course of history. Order this book from Powell's For more information on Joanna Macy's philosophy, her travel and speaking itinerary, please visit her website at: http://www.joannamacy.net/index.htm