Justice, sustainability, and participation

Abstract

Vice Chancellor, dear friends, thank you for coming.Before I start, I would like offer my appreciations. I am honoured by the University and the School by my professorship. I am grateful to the School of Management for providing a home where I have been able to develop my thinking and educational practice. Diversity is a mark and a healthy ecosystem, and I think it is part of our strength that we provide space for those who want to think about questions of justice, sustainability, and participation as well as about profit and globalisation. I am also slightly overwhelmed by the kindness I have received.Justice, sustainability and participation are three huge words. When I was asked for a title for this lecture I chose them quite easily as representing the themes of my work. As I have attempted to craft them into a lecture for this diverse audience I have found out how complex they are. I want to talk about the state of our world and the way our mind frames and understands that world. Let me start with a story.Recently I went on a Buddhist meditation retreat in the Chinese Ch'an tradition. On this retreat, in addition to the usual meditation practice to calm and quieten our minds, we were invited to work with a koan. Ko ans, I learned, are short stories, usually of a paradoxical nature, that the trainee is invited to hold in the mind. Since the koan is essentially paradoxical, the point is not to solve it but to allow insights to arise as one watches the mind work with the koan. In the end, it is hoped, the paradox is cut through...The koan I worked with goes like this:It was a hot, summer day, the windows and verandahs of the Ch'an hall were open to the surrounding lawns and trees. The Master climbed the pulpit and raised his fly whisk (hossu) to indicate he was about to give his sermon. At that moment a bird began to sing in the garden. The Master stood with his hossu motionless. The bird went on singing. Eventually the song ceased. The Master lowered his hossu. He said, 'Oh monks: that will be all for today,' and returned to his room.This really is an everyday story of monastery life, but it has resonances in our own everyday culture. We are all from time to time startled from our everyday preoccupations by the sound of birdsong, by the sound of raindrops, or by the silence of snow. On Monday I was arrested, so to speak, by the sound of the hailstorm on the railway station roof. So what is this story about?I sat in meditation with this story for seven days.My first line of inquiry, which is linked to my theme of sustainability, is that the koan tells us that we can leam more from the more than human world than from the wise words of the Masters. Christ told us to 'consider the lilies of the field'. Meister Eckhart in the Christian Mystic tradition tells us that every creature is a word of God and a book about God (Fox, 1983, p. 14). The Sufi poet Hafiz wrote (Hafiz, 1999, p. 269), 'every being is God speaking... why not be polite and listen to him?But what is the birdsong saying to us and how are we to listen? Let's go a little deeperThe koan reminds me that today we have very little (consciously) to do with the other than human: we live with other humans, with our own humanmade technologies, with a human-made countryside. We can scarcely see the stars. This is a precarious situation, for 'We need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations... we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with that which is not human' (Abram, 1996, p. ix). And songbirds are in catastrophic decline, so this sweet story both masks and points toward the tragedy of the current loss of species. We must, I thought, leam to listen to the wild. But the bird is not in the wild, it is singing in a cultivated garden; and is heard through the windows and verandahs of the Ch'an hall by monks waiting to hear a sermon. How can we hear the wild if its voice is so radically filtered through our own frames and perspectives: through the 'windows of my mind', as Simon and Garfunkel put it. …