by Carmel Shalev
When I was going through a personal crisis in the mid-’90s, I chose to attend a silent retreat in the hills of Jerusalem. This is where I met the dharma, and it happened to mark the inception of Tovana, the Israel Insight Meditation Society. After meditating at home between retreats for a few years, I became curious about formally studying Buddhism, but was not seeking a religion. Soon after, I met Stephen Batchelor and learned there was a path of secular Buddhism, which I have been investigating ever since, thanks to Bodhi College.
Where was I coming from? I had studied law and led an academic public interest career in the field of bioethics, from the beginning to the end of life. My education included a value system that endorsed human dignity, liberty, justice and equality for all human beings, without distinction. I explored the feminist notion of an ethic of care in my 1989 book Birth Power: The Case for Surrogacy, and I continue to explore what it means to live ethically as a decent, authentic person in the spirit of the dharma, with care and responsibility amid the ever-changing conditions and tragic imperfections all around.
For me, the dharma offers a pragmatic and grounded wisdom of the heart. The sangha – both here and around the world – hold and support me. Meditation gives respite from earthly travails, and allows me to recollect an inner sense of open-hearted stability and integrity. And from the very start, my introduction to the dharma included a socially-engaged practice of bearing witness to harmful injustice.
Nowadays I spend much of my time writing. I love words; writing is my passion and gift, as well as a practice of contemplation and creativity. With a friend, I translated Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs into Hebrew in 2015. Then, in 2020, after five years of inquiry with groups of study, practice and discourse, I published a book on ageing: In Praise of Ageing – Awakening to Old Age with Wisdom and Compassion. I have contributed occasionally to the Secular Buddhist Network newsletter, and worked with friends at BuddhaStiftung to develop an online course on Mindfulness Based Ethical Living (MBEL), which calls us to get up from sitting in meditation and apply the skill of mindfulness to our relationships with others as well as our actions in daily life, so we can do our best to make the world a better place for all.
A few months ago, I received an invitation from Tuwhiri to write a short book on ethics and secular dharma for the upcoming Buddhism In A Nutshell series, which I was happy to do. It seems only natural for me to now join Tuwhiri’s editorial board, and work with like-minded friends to spread the word of a socially engaged, secular Buddhism which addresses the challenges of the times we are living through.