Right Intention and the Bush Administration

April 20, 2007 at 7:12 pm | Posted in buddhism, George W. Bush | Leave a comment

Right Intention follows Right View in the Eightfold Path. I’ll link to Access to Insight again for an explanation:

The Buddha explains right intention as threefold: the intention of renunciation, the intention of good will, and the intention of harmlessness. The three are opposed to three parallel kinds of wrong intention: intention governed by desire, intention governed by ill will, and intention governed by harmfulness. Each kind of right intention counters the corresponding kind of wrong intention. The intention of renunciation counters the intention of desire, the intention of good will counters the intention of ill will, and the intention of harmlessness counters the intention of harmfulness.

The Bush Administration claims to be governed by “Compassionate Conservative” or “Christian Conservative” principles. It claims to be the heir of the “small government” school of thinking.

If George Bush had gone to the White House with Right Intention, we would be in a much different position today. Renunciation is the opposite of desire, and who would not prefer a government that renounced rather than a government that desired? Renunciation is the path to peace, desire is the path to war. Renunciation is the path to fiscal stability, desire is the path to debt and ruin. Renunciation is the path to appointing those who will do the job they need to do for the common good, desire is the path to appointing those who will work only to benefit themselves and those in power.

Good Will reduces purposeless partisanship. Good Will creates meaningful debate that has, at its center, the interests of the nation at its heart.

The Intention of Harmlessness may strike some as dangerous, after all, a nation must defend itself. There are some people who believe that the only way to be strong and safe is to be a bully. As we all know, though, they who live by the sword, die by the sword. The Intent of Harmlessness means that your actions are done with the intent of peace. As a nation, this means increasing foreign aid, intervening in genocides, and working against nuclear proliferation. These make a nation more secure. Torture, indiscriminate killing of civilians, ignoring a drowning American City, this can only be done with the Wrong Intention.