From Prayer to Form
I grew up reciting prayers before I understood what they were asking of me.
In the Tibetan refugee school in India, we gathered our small bodies on hard floors while His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama led us in aspirations that were far larger than our lives. We chanted them rhythmically, faithfully, obediently. We learned the words before we learned their weight.
As long as space remains,
As long as sentient beings remain,
Until then, may I too remain
To dispel the miseries of the world.
As a child, I thought this was aspirational prayer.
As a teenager, I thought it was idealism.
As an adult—especially after coming to the West—I realized it was neither.
It was a political vow.
Bodhicitta Is Not Sentiment
In Western spiritual spaces, compassion is often reduced to a mood—soft, gentle, private, non-confrontational. A personal virtue. A self-care aesthetic. Something you feel, not something that reorganizes your life.
But Bodhicitta was never meant to be sentimental.
Bodhicitta is the mind that refuses liberation alone.
It is the refusal to step into freedom while others remain bound.
It is the radical recognition that there is no private salvation in a shared world.
Without Bodhicitta, enlightenment becomes escapism.
With it, awakening becomes responsibility.
Bodhicitta is not kindness divorced from power.
It is love with teeth.
The West Taught Me What the Prayer Meant
I don’t think I would have understood the profundity of those prayers had I not come to the United States.
The material abundance that once felt like salvation revealed itself as something else entirely—a constant anxiety disguised as comfort, a deep dissatisfaction humming beneath excess, a moral hollowing normalized as success.
This culture teaches you to pull wool over your own eyes.
It markets fantasies of greatness while hollowing out the commons. It sells freedom while normalizing domination. It worships individual achievement while collapsing collective responsibility. It calls greed ambition and labels care as weakness.
Donald Trump did not invent this.
He only removed the mask.
Just as he refused to acknowledge the millions in inherited wealth and public handouts that built his empire, this nation refuses to acknowledge that its wealth was extracted from Indigenous graves, Black bodies, immigrant labor, and the looting of the Global South.
The prayer suddenly became urgent:
May the frightened cease to be afraid.
May the bound be freed.
May the powerless find power.
This was no longer aspirational.
It was necessary for survival—human and more-than-human alike.
Silence Is Not Neutral
Bodhicitta collapses the fantasy of neutrality.
In a world organized around domination, silence is not peace.
It is alignment with power.
Many of us were taught that spirituality meant withdrawal—rising above politics, transcending conflict, cultivating inner calm while the world burned. But Bodhicitta does not permit that bypass.
Bodhicitta asks:
Who benefits from your silence?
What does your non-engagement protect?
What suffering continues uninterrupted because you chose comfort over courage?
This is where it becomes uncomfortable.
Because Bodhicitta does not allow us to locate all evil “out there.”
It demands we look inward—at how we participate, comply, benefit, and avoid.
Oppression does not thrive only because of villains.
It thrives because of unexamined habits.
Polarization Is the Last Refuge of Power
One of the most dangerous failures in contemporary activism is the hunger for a single villain.
We want clean lines.
Good and evil.
Us and them.
But systems of domination feed on polarization. They survive by pinning us against one another while remaining structurally intact.
His Holiness used to remind us:
Do not confuse people with policy.
The Chinese people were not our enemy.
Authoritarianism was.
This discernment requires maturity.
It requires sitting with pain without turning it into a weapon.
It requires the courage to hold complexity without collapsing into relativism.
Bodhicitta does not erase accountability.
It deepens it.
It insists that justice be rooted in truth—not vengeance.
That rage be metabolized into clarity—not reaction.
That love not become an excuse for passivity.
Hungry Ghost Politics
In Buddhist cosmology, hungry ghosts—pretas—are beings with enormous bellies and pinhole mouths. They are endlessly consuming, never satisfied.
This is the perfect metaphor for modern political economies.
We live inside hungry ghost systems:
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endless growth on a finite planet
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extraction without regeneration
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accumulation without care
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consumption without satiation
Capitalism without conscience.
Power without humility.
Freedom severed from responsibility.
Bodhicitta is the antidote because it addresses the root condition: forgetfulness.
The forgetting that we are interdependent.
The forgetting that harm echoes.
The forgetting that what we do to the earth, we do to our children.
Fire Alone Will Not Get Us Home
There are nights when rage feels righteous.
When lashing out feels like power—especially if your heart has been frozen by fear for a long time.
But rage alone will not get us home.
Grief alone will not get us home.
Bodhicitta teaches elemental balance.
Fire must purify, not consume.
Water must cleanse, not drown.
Wind must move, not scatter.
Earth must root, not harden.
Space must hold, not dissociate.
Set fire to your own rage,
fear, and hatred—
burn them down to their essence.
Indestructible love.
Skillful means.
This is not moral superiority.
This is discipline.
From Prayer to Action
Bodhicitta does not end on the cushion.
It moves through:
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your body
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your speech
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your choices
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your labor
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your refusals
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your willingness to be misunderstood
It asks you to hold your post.
Not everyone is meant to do the same work.
But if the message comes to you, it is yours to carry.
The future does not collapse because of a lack of information.
It collapses because of abdicated responsibility.
Look at your child’s face.
Really look.
If you love them, love must mean more than feeling.
It must mean restraint.
It must mean sacrifice.
It must mean choosing a livable future over convenience.
Bodhicitta Is Collective Liberation
Without Bodhicitta, there is no collective freedom.
No one is liberated while others are caged.
No one is safe while systems of domination persist.
No awakening is complete while the world is burning.
This is not a burden.
It is an honor.
To live as a conduit—
where prayer meets form,
where insight becomes action,
where love becomes structure.
May the supreme Bodhicitta
that has not arisen, arise.
May that which has arisen not diminish,
but increase forever more.
This is not a wish.
It is a vow.
And vows, once made, reorganize everything that follows.
Recommended Reading
The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva
