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Symposium

Theme of Symposium

COMPASSION IN ACTION:
CREATING LIFE AND HOPE IN DEATH

Some young people find it difficult to live in today’s society and take
their own lives. Mother Nature suddenly bares her fangs and disrupts our
peaceful everyday lives. We experience loneliness, sadness, despair…

Life is a precious, irreplaceable gift. Special speaker Joan Halifax
offers solace to those who find life hard – the bereaved, the desperate,
the lonely – and supports their lives, based on the wisdom and
compassion of Buddha.

Can the Buddha’s teachings help us find hope amidst the
pain and sadness of life and death? What does that hope
Consist of? That is what we will consider today.

Keynote Speaker

Title “The Strange and Necessary Case for hope”

This talk is an in-depth exploration of “wise hope”.

As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is abased in desire, wanting an outcome that
could well be different from what might actually happen. It is also is a subtle expression of fear
and thus a form of suffering.
If we look at hope through the lens of Buddhism, we discover that wise hope is born of radical
uncertainty, rooted in the unknown and the unknowable. Through another Buddhist lens, we
can see that wise hope reflects the understanding that what we do matters, even though how and
when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can really know beforehand.

As Buddhists, we share a common aspiration to awaken from confusion, from greed, from
anger in order to free others from suffering. The Bodhisattva Vows at the heart of the Mahayana
tradition are a powerful expression of radical and wise hope. This kind of hope is free of desire,
free from any attachment to outcome; it is a species of hope that is victorious over fear.

Hope in this talk will be presented as a means of personal and social transformation from
the point of view of socially engaged Buddhism, particularly work in the end-of-life care field
and in the prison system.

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RECORD OF PROCEEDING | THE 29 GENERAL CONFERENCE OF THE WFB
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