The Garden of Liberation

Socially engaged architecture in the northern hemisphere has historically been motivated by a model of activism based on Western metaphysical dualism or the philosophical distinction between matter and spiritualism that dominates the history of modern European thought. ¹ This model has asserted that without property in the self, there can be no political agency (Descartes 1980; Haraway 1991). Engaged Buddhism suggests another approach to activism in which liberal conceptions of the “self” are in fact an obstacle to social liberation. The term “engaged Buddhism” is thought to have been coined by the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1950s during the Cold War–era escalation of political violence in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese term used by Thich—dao phat di vao cuoc doi—literally referred to “entering into life, social life.” Engaged Buddhism, according to Thich, had two meanings. It referred to both the quotidian practice of Buddhism and the cultivation of wisdom that responded to contemporary events. “As a mindfulness practitioner,” he wrote, “we have to be aware of what is going on in our body, our feelings, our emotions, and our environment” (Thich 1964, 30–31). ² Thich’s call to connect across the scales of “inner peace” and “world peace” had a powerful effect, particularly in nearby Thailand, where the majority of the population practices a form of Theravada Buddhism. The Thai monk Phra Thepwethi (P. A. Payutto) contributed to this discourse of engaged Buddhist practice by arguing that human rights are a compromise rather than an ideal. He traced their historical emergence as a concept to the development of a minimum level of morality that prevented Protestants and Christians from killing one another in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European wars of religion (Phra Thepwethi 1996, 71; Jeffreys 2003, 274). For Payutto, human rights were a useful convention for navigating the environment but did not support the deeper aims of Buddhism to uproot greed, hatred, and delusion. As such, they were not capable of alleviating suffering.