Equanimity Is Not Neutrality

10 Ethical Imperatives for Buddhist Institutions—But First, How They Are Failing This Moment

✦ A Closed Circuit of Silence

In a recent Zen Peacemakers Podcast episode, Tricycle Editor-In-Chief James Shaheen defended his magazine’s limited engagement with the ethnic cleansing being committed by Israel against the people of Gaza.

The interview was framed as a contemplative conversation about bearing witness, kindness, and equanimity. But what it revealed instead was something more troubling: a closed circuit where two influential Buddhist organizations use their platforms to subtly affirm each other’s avoidance, not just of political partisanship, but of moral clarity.

This is not spiritual humility. It’s not wise restraint. It’s a feedback loop to sanctify their silence. At best, it’s fear of controversy. At worst, it reifies the racial and geopolitical biases that dehumanize Palestinian life.

✦ Bread and Starvation

The episode opens with Shaheen describing a passage from WWII Soviet Jouirnalist Vasily Grossman. A woman offers bread to a retreating German soldier. Shaheen calls this a “kernel of kindness” and likens it to Buddha nature. But there is no acknowledgment, much less irony, that this interview was being recorded while Palestinians in Gaza are being systematically starved to death.

What does it mean to speak about the irreducible goodness of the human heart while ignoring a campaign of deliberate deprivation, which the UN and human rights experts have called a war crime? And what bread exactly are the Palestinians supposed to be offering to their oppressors?

✦ Not-Knowing or Not-Looking?

When Tricycle claims that not taking a stance is an act of editorial integrity, and Zen Peacemakers nod along in the name of “not-knowing” or “bearing witness,” the result is not depth, it is deflection.

“These days, it feels like we’re either being pulled to take a side or we’re numbed out completely.” – Zen Peacemakers Podcast

These are supposed to be some of our most authoritative voices on practice. This moment is exactly what we practice for: staying grounded in clarity so that when crisis arises, we can respond without hesitation, without confusion, without fog.

✦ The Collapse of Loving Action

You can identify a statue of Kuan Yin because because one leg is folded, while the other is upright with a flexed calf. She is poised, not in passive stillness, but in readiness to rise and respond to the cries of the world. That is the Bodhisattva Vow: not just presence, but presence that moves. When compassion is real, it is not static. It responds.

Zen Peacemakers’ Three Tenets—Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Loving Action—are intended to be a spiritual arc towards response. The first opens the mind. The second opens the heart. The third opens the hands.

But in the face of Gaza, the hands of so many Buddhists with spiritual authority have remained closed.

Zen Peacemakers know how to bear witness—to the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, the Native American Genocide. But in Gaza’s case, the leg stays folded, the calf relaxed. The silence remains seated. The “loving action” never comes.

They’ve walked in Auschwitz. They’ve chanted the names of the dead. They’ve shown the world that Buddhists can face atrocity with solemnity, humility, and depth.

But is that bravery if it only arrives after the fact? If it only faces the atrocity endured by some?

Because here, now, an actual ethnic cleansing is happening in real time, and they say nothing. The same moral imagination that can hold the weight of the Holocaust falters in the face of a genocide carried out by a U.S.-backed state against Muslims and Arabs.

✦ Selective Care in American Buddhism

The failure to respond to Gaza is not just about two institutions. It reflects a wider pattern within white American Buddhism: a pattern of selective care. Only when suffering is comfortably removed in time, or domesticated into an acceptable moral narrative, do Buddhist teachers speak up.

But when suffering challenges the racial and political assumptions of the Maha sangha (wider sangha)? Silence.

Back in 2016, during another time of instability and threat, leading Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield published a statement in Lion’s Roar titled “Now Is the Time to Stand Up.” He wrote:

“Whatever your political perspective, now is the season to stand up for what matters. To stand against hate. To stand for respect. To stand for protection of the vulnerable. To care for the natural world... Do not believe that meditation and contemplation are the fulfillment of the Buddhist Path.”

If that was true when a U.S. president threatened civil liberties, how is it not even more urgent now, when the U.S. is funding and defending the slaughter of an entire population?

✦ The Suttas Say: Wake Up

If we are to speak of Buddhism at all—of equanimity, of non-reactivity, of presence—then we must also speak of the teachings that ground these ideals. And the suttas do not offer cover for silence in the face of harm. Quite the opposite. Again and again, they call us to clarity, discernment, and compassionate engagement.

In the Saleyyaka Sutta (MN 41), the Buddha warns that someone may dwell in calm while engaging in or enabling unwholesome action, and that such equanimity is not praised by the noble ones. This is a direct repudiation of the idea that stillness, on its own, is virtuous. Stillness without ethical clarity is not liberation. It’s concealment.

In the Mahāgopāla Sutta (AN 6.63), the Buddha offers a subtler teaching. He compares the practitioner to a cowherd who remains calm because he is attentively watching his herd. But the implication is crystal clear: if a predator appears, the cowherd would act. He would not pause to weigh both the cow’s side and the tiger’s side. He would not stay seated to protect his composure. He would rise. He would respond. That’s what equanimity in the service of life looks like.

✦ Editorial Silence Is Not Neutral

These teachings aren’t obscure. They aren’t advanced doctrine. They are foundational instructions for how to live a spiritual life without abandoning our responsibility to protect one another. Equanimity is delusion if it is weaponized to excuse ourselves from action. Applied rightly, it is the ground that allows us to act with stability, clarity, and heart.

What Tricycle is calling neutrality often looks, in practice, like editorial risk aversion. A fear of appearing too activist. A discomfort with anger. A reluctance to disrupt the comfort of the readership combined with blind spots around their own colonial racism. This isn’t just a stylistic choice. It’s a moral one.

The Buddha did not shy away from speaking hard truths. He challenged caste supremacy. He confronted abusive power structures. He offered teachings to kings and outcasts alike. And his silence, when it appeared, was intentional and precise, never a refusal to engage.

He never said, “We’re not going to speak about this because it’s too political.” He urged us to speak what is true, what is timely, and what ends suffering.

It’s easy to chant peace in the park. It’s harder to say “stop the bombing” when your institution relies on donor comfort and board risk-aversion. When your sangha isn’t ready to face its Islamophobia.

This is what we mean when we say Dharma must take sides. Not against people, but against harm. Not as political theatre, but as ethical integrity. Silence in the face of genocide isn’t contemplative. It’s cowardice.

✦ Silence Is a Stance

As a former editor and staff writer, I know how editorial decisions are made. How stories get shaped, which pitches move forward, what language gets softened or cut. I also know where the pressure often comes from: board members, major donors, reader backlash, brand optics.

But editorial choices are biased. What we don’t say is often just as consequential as what we do. Who we give our platform to reveals what we endorse. And silence is never neutral. It’s a stance with consequences.

So to those who say “we’re just not taking a side,” I would say: you already have.

When a Buddhist magazine or a Buddhist “peacemakers” organization chooses not to call for an end to the slaughter in Gaza while people are being killed for seeking food, children are buried beneath rubble, journalists are assassinated, that is not neutrality. It privileges which lives are considered worthy of protection. It privileges whose suffering can be watched in silence.

✦ This Moment Demands Clarity

This is not a call for reactive partisanship. It is a plea for integrity.

This is a reminder that the Dharma is meant to relieve suffering, not maintain spiritual brand identity.

This is a call to hold suffering at the center, not opinion management, not nonprofit optics, not marketplace Dharma.

We must ask: Who does our not-knowing serve? Who benefits from our witnessing, when it never moves to act? What does it mean to claim loving action when we do nothing?

This is not a moment for subtle positioning or moral vagueness. It is a moment that calls for clarity, courage, and care.

Because equanimity is not the absence of care. It is what makes real care possible. And real care takes sides. Not against people, but always against harm.

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✦ 10 Ethical Expectations for Buddhist Institutions

Below are a set of ethical imperatives for Buddhist institutions that claim to center compassion, justice, and liberation.

1. Name the Genocide: Publicly acknowledge the mass killing, starvation, and displacement in Gaza as a genocide. Use the word. Use it clearly. Refusing to name it perpetuates harm and delays justice.

2. Call for an Immediate Ceasefire and an End to U.S. Military Aid: Issue a statement calling for a permanent ceasefire and the cessation of U.S. military funding and weapons transfers that enable mass killing.

3. Center Palestinian Voices: Publish, host, and amplify Palestinian Buddhist practitioners, scholars, and allies. Invite their teachings, grief, anger, and vision into Buddhist spaces.

4. Acknowledge and Confront Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Bias in Sanghas: Create clear internal processes for examining how white sanghas and Buddhist institutions replicate anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias, especially when masking that bias as “complexity” or “neutrality.”

5. Educate Sanghas on the Dharma Roots of Compassionate Action: Offer public teachings, panels, and reflections that clarify how Buddhist texts, from the Saleyyaka Sutta to the Bodhisattva Vows, explicitly link wisdom with action, and equanimity with discernment, not detachment.

6. Refuse False Balance: Stop framing the occupation of Palestine and the bombing of Gaza as a symmetrical “conflict” between two sides. The Dharma does not require us to be neutral between oppressed and the oppressor.

7. Practice Right Speech with Moral Clarity: Use platforms, including magazines, podcasts, dharma talks, and community newsletters to speak with honesty, timeliness, and care. Do not allow vagueness, euphemism, or both-sides language to take the place of Right Speech.

8. Organize Visible Action: Host meditations, rituals, and memorials for lives lost in Gaza. Organize dharma-centered protests, letter-writing campaigns, or fundraising efforts. Make compassion legible in the public square.

9. Recommit to the Bodhisattva Vow in Public and in Practice: If you have taken the Bodhisattva Vows to free all beings and to end all suffering, then act accordingly. Publicly revisit the vows. Use them as a guide for right action.

10. Engage in Reparative Action and Karmic Accountability: If Buddhist communities are to speak now, after months of silence while more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, they must do more than offer aid.

    
    They must examine the personal and institutional karma that enabled that silence. That means naming the fear, the attachments, the racism, the professional positioning, the donor appeasement, and the spiritual bypassing that led to complicity while a genocide unfolded in real time.

    Reparative action includes:

    • Publishing curated lists of resources for study, action, and mutual aid.

    • Opening platforms—not as charity, but as redistribution of visibility and power.

    • Donating funds, visibility, and space to Palestinian-led aid efforts, organizing groups, and healing practitioners.

But none of this matters if it is not paired with public acknowledgment of what was repressed, and why. Without that reflection, the sangha is ethically bankrupt. True repair begins with truth.

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