Inner & Outer Nonviolence
Non-harming, or nonviolence, is at the heart of the Buddhist path. One way we might understand the instructions is that awakening and liberation from suffering is the natural consequence of becoming profoundly devoted to non-harming and protecting oneself from further states of distress.
Restraining our impulses when they might lead to harm for ourselves or others is what keeping the precepts is about. And then learning to orient the mind/heart toward wholesome states continues that process, restraining and unlearning the patterns of cognition that perpetuate anxiety, fear, and delusion.
If the inner process begins with material renunciation and then develops naturally into cognitive repatterning, the outer process has exactly the same trajectory. Regulation and legislation support material renunciation on the part of powerful social entities, and then the deep work of cultural repair is the cognitive repatterning.
Cultures shift slowly, just as our own minds take a long time to learn new patterns. Unlearning war as a reaction to tribal threat is like unlearning hatred as a reaction to fear. Because fear is a very deep root system for us, more surface level work on reactivity, restraint, and restoration of empathy has to happen first. The uprooting of fear is very nearly the same thing as liberation. Again, I think the same pattern will be apparent in the geopolitical and social spheres.
The Buddha beautifully intuited the connection between inner and outer practice, recognizing that renouncing violence gives others freedom from fear, and that this is a precondition for the practitioner themself realizing the absolute freedom from fear that is the fruit of the path.
