Hold your views as guides, not weapons

Care about a cause without turning your position on it into something to fight, despise or die for.

Warum es wirkt

The first two of the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings — Openness and Non-Attachment to Views — were written in wartime Vietnam, where Thích Nhất Hạnh saw people on every side ready to kill and die for an ideology. The training commits members not to be idolatrous about any doctrine, “even Buddhist ones,” and locates fanaticism in dualistic, discriminative perception. The Plum Village biography records that he meant the trainings as a direct answer to war and dogmatism. The working idea is that the hardening of a view, not the strength of the care behind it, is what turns a cause into a source of new violence — so the practice keeps the care and loosens the grip.

So gehst du vor

1. Pick one issue you care about strongly and write your position on it in a sentence.
2. Ask honestly: is this a guide that helps me understand and act, or something I would feel diminished to revise?
3. Write down one thing a thoughtful person on the other side sees that your position tends to leave out.
4. Recall the training’s line that present knowledge is not changeless, absolute truth, and notice whether your body tightens or eases.
5. Keep acting on your position — the training asks for openness, not neutrality — while staying curious about what you might be missing.

Evidenz

The wording of the first two trainings is on the Plum Village page for the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings; the biography gives their origin in 1966 and his description of them as an answer to war and dogmatism. The Interbeing book, first formulated during the war, is the trainings with commentary. Sallie King lists nonjudgmentalism among the principles of engaged Buddhism. Support is textual and practitioner-based. (anecdotal)

Non-attachment to views is easily misheard as having no views. The same trainings ask members to take a clear stand against oppression and injustice and to speak out about injustice even at personal risk; openness is about how a view is held, not whether one acts.

Quellen

• Plum Village. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing (revised version presented by Thich Nhat Hanh, February 2012). plumvillage.org.
• Plum Village. Thich Nhat Hanh: Full Biography. plumvillage.org.
• Thich Nhat Hanh. Interbeing (3rd edition, 1997). Berkeley: Parallax Press. ISBN 9781888375084.
• King, S. B. (2009). Socially Engaged Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Häufiger Fehler

Using “non-attachment to views” to stay out of every hard question — the trainings pair openness with a clear stand against injustice, so the practice is to act while holding your reasons loosely, not to stop acting.