For anyone like me who didn’t live through it, the images of workers and students facing down soldiers with dustbin lids in the Paris uprising of May 1968 evoke an extraordinary time. The students demanded a political revolution, but in the wider youth rebellion that took in lifestyle, drugs and Eastern spirituality, others disagreed that politics was the answer.

When I became a Buddhist as a teenager I found myself around people who were still fired by the radicalism that had inspired the Paris students. They also felt that something was fundamentally amiss in conventional society, but they said that changing the world started with changing people. The revolution they wanted was a transformation in human consciousness. 

The combination of social idealism and spiritual practice I saw in these ex-hippy Buddhists excited me. It was important to me that, as well as sitting down, tuning in and dropping out, they were also acting. Along with older Buddhist teachers, many from the Sixties generation hadn’t just founded Buddhist movements and established retreat centres, they were also exploring alternative ways of living and working. In that way, a small but significant Buddhist world has developed in western countries, and for many years I lived in Buddhist communities, working co-operatively and sharing the belief that we were developing a model for deep social change. 

These experiments express a serious principle. The Buddha’s key insight was that everything humans create, from war and injustice to the belief systems that underlie our societies, express our fundamental emotions. ‘Everything we experience,’ he said ‘is led by mind and produced by mind.’ A better world therefore requires better people; and revolutions that don’t take this into account risk replacing one form of oppression with another. 

Turning ideals into practice has proved an arduous process for western Buddhists. Many movements, my own included, have had their own problems; and, even if we do offer an alternative to mainstream society, do we really alter it?

It’s hard to know which actions have what consequences, but last Autumn I spoke to a meeting of parliamentarians from fifteen countries who are developing mindfulness groups in parliaments around the world, inspired by the well-established group in Westminster. They aren’t revolutionaries and they aren’t Buddhists; but behind the meeting was the idea that creating a more compassionate and thoughtful world means attending to our problems at their root – in the human heart and mind. That starts with ourselves; so Vive La Revolution!