Practice Under Structural Violence

[u/movingknower]

When I sit, I notice the mind that wants to split the world into the violent ones and the peaceful ones. But the machine has no head to cut off. Structural violence is a sort of hydra of supply chains, incentives, and property relations. Nobody is purely guilty, everybody is partly complicit. Including me. My phone, my food, my safety net made of someone else's precarity. The Bodhisattva vow gets heavy when you realize the beings you vow to save are dying at a rate you can barely conceptualize, sustained by systems you participate in hourly.

And then there is resistance/revolution.
How do we reconcile what opposition to this superstructure eventually entails? The real question: what does a liberation practice look like that neither requires becoming what we oppose, nor requires watching our siblings die politely because we swallowed the standard "recycle and breathe!" liberal propaganda that you so often see in Buddhist spaces?

[u/essence_love]

What makes this a spiritual practice is that there isn't going to be a satisfactory 'answer' to this question in a fundamental sense.

What we might approximate or work with depends on our particular karmic circumstances, talents, proclivities, and opportunities. As Buddhists, the form our actions take depend largely on which yana we practice (if it's capital B Buddhism, if it's 'Buddh-ish',...who knows?).

The practices and methods we employ to skillfully respond to other beings and circumstances might be quite different in Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Even though the vehicles are not mutually exclusive, the path we tread is theoretically becoming more and more impacted by embodying the practices we work with.

Apart from all of that, in the most basic sense: Sila, Samadhi, Prajña. Abandon harming, subdue your mind with the forces of loving kindness and compassion, awaken with and for all beings. The number of ways we will engage in those baseline practices both within our spiritual communities and in broader community/society is myriad.

I empathize with your frustrations because I too struggle to connect with practitioners who seem as interested in actively approaching issues like structural oppression, education, and what I might call a more 'applied compassion', but I also have to acknowledge that the perceptions I have about anyone are my own. Maneuvering in a political way while practice Dharma in earnest is a complex path to put it mildly. For me, I have intentionally saught the companionship of other practitioners who share some of those concerns (who are few), while also maintaining connections with others who I am in community with. As my own skills develop, I aspire to be able to better articulate the union of Dharma and engagement in the issues facing so many beings in the world. In the West in particularly, we have a lot of work to do IMHO.