The Inner Net: How to find the Middle Path in a Silicon Society That Values Extremes

Rev. Heng Sure

During the New Year's weekend, the United Religions Initiative, a global interfaith network, organized peace walks around the San Francisco Bay Area. Two hundred people from 14 religions converged at Fort Point, a red-brick Civil War fortification on the southern shore of the Golden Gate Bridge, to pray at the millennium turning point. Halfway through the service, everybody Native Americans, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Earth-based religions and others joined in reciting the name of the Buddha Amitabha, seeking a blessing and release from suffering for all the people who had ended their lives by jumping off the bridge.

As we chanted, I looked out to the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, the geographical end of America's Manifest Destiny. Our national mantra, "Go West, young men and women," brought us to the Golden Gate, but few found a pot of gold. We arrived at the edge of the bay and found no more road left to walk. Simply getting here has not satisfied our disquiet. Looking out to that flat expanse of endless horizon, we saw only our own reflection staring back. The hunger for meaning still ached; the craving for identity, for belonging, was still somewhere beyond our grasp. The utter nothingness of the Pacific Ocean left no track, no handhold, and no reward.

Those roads we traversed hoping for the Golden State stopped here. It was a bitter shock to realize that the outward search had a physical limit; the promise of a golden tomorrow went as flat as the bay. A few people in despair, unable to stop the surging momentum that pushed us West, leaped into the void and destroyed the body that had let down the soul.

Contemplative religious teachings. East and West, instead of being discouraged by the nothingness at the end of the geographical search for happiness, turn the search for happiness around and look within. They speak of the Golden Mean, to show us how to find perfect balance in the Middle, avoiding extremes. Ancient wisdom technologies point out the "Inner Net" as a universal gate to finding meaning; selfless compassion and benefiting others is the enduring gold inside that gate.

If we fail to learn from the first gold rush, this second headlong race toward the promised Golden Future of technology's paradise may bring us collectively to a similar sudden shock at the lack of meaning in our electronic tools themselves. Once we establish the global communications network, ubiquitous connectivity cannot teach us what to say to our new neighbors. Leaping into emptiness, as much as attaching to material existence, are extremes that lead away from the Middle Path. Neither extreme delivers lasting satisfaction. Technology promises a means to satisfaction and happiness, but our minds must tell us when to stop and return.

As Webmaster for my organization in three languages (English, Chinese, and Vietnamese), I have come to appreciate the power of the Internet to create community. Our Q&A page, "Ask A Monastic," receives as many questions on Buddhist practice from Kuala Lumpur as from Kansas City. The Web brings unprecedented access to information. For instance, I can visit a Website in Taiwan from my Macintosh keyboard in the Santa Cruz, California mountains and have at my fingertips the complete text in Chinese of the "Book of Changes" and the "Confucian Analects." Emperors in China's Tang Dynasty gathered more than 600 monks to translate scriptures from Sanskrit to Chinese. Now with a search engine developed by nuns and monks in Taiwan, I can find online, with three clicks of the mouse, every instance of the name of a Buddhist Sage. No emperor's translation assembly ever had such kung fu, which is Cantonese for spiritual skill. Networking and speedy, convenient access to data are undeniable benefits of the Information Revolution.

At the same time, we need to use telecommunications wisely. By that I mean using electronic tools not as ends in themselves, but as digital chisels or means for carving meaning and happiness out of our existence. Sages of all religions have taught that the traveling is as important as the destination. On the other hand, we must lift our heads above the bustling marketplace and see clearly where the road leads ahead. Otherwise we risk living out the bumper sticker I saw on a sports car charging down U.S. Interstate Highway 280 in Silicon Valley: "I may be lost but I'm really moving."

Rev. Heng Sure is Director of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery in Berkeley. He is also a member of the Ahimsa Board. This paper is based on an article that first appeared in Business 2.0

Copied from AHIMSA VOICES, October 2002. http://www.ahimsaberkeley.org/newsletter/Oct02/sure.html