Venerable Yifa is a nun belonging to the religious order Fo Guang Shan, which was founded by Venerable Master Hsing Yun in Taiwan and seeks to make Buddhist practice relevant to contemporary life. She is the author of Safeguarding the Heart: A Buddhist Response to Suffering and September 11. In this handy and cogent paperback, Venerable Yifa examines our mad dash to accumulate and to accomplish more things. She calls this junk:
"The things we fill our lives and occupy our time with, but which provide us with little sustenance; the thoughts and emotions that distract us, cause us and others consternation and trouble, and over which we seem to have no control."
In a chapter on junk food, the author takes a hard look at the speed with which we consume breakfast and lunch and sometimes dinner as we hunch over our desks at work or in front of our televisions. And when we do eat out, we purchase a value pack or supersized version of something. This approach to food is a far cry from that recommended by Thich Nhat Hanh who would have us offer the following blessing over our meals: "In this food, I see clearly the presence of the entire universe supporting my existence."
Junk products are throwaway trinkets or poorly made novelty items. They are usually produced in sweatshops by women or children forced into slave labor. Their production strips the Earth of precious resources and then they are dumped in other countries because they are toxic. The Budddhist perspective of attention challenges us to become more aware of the consequences of our purchases.
The junk communication of our times, according to the author, is overwhelming: the ads on television and in magazines, the spam on our computers, the frivolous emails we send or receive, and the gossip which plays in our consciousness thanks to the omnipresent pop culture. The result is that we end up being the collection of other people's impressions of us:
"Our advanced capitalist society has built upon that self-forgetfulness to create economic and social compartments where we can be measured, analyzed, sold to, or rated. We're consumers and not citizens; demographic and economic units rather than individuals; laborers, line-managers, supervisors, and workers rather than artisans and creators; Soccer Moms, Nascar Dads, values voters, liberal elites, and so on, rather than . . . human beings."
The Venerable Yifa also covers junk relationships (including the need to be noticed which lies behind the rise of social networks on the Internet), junk emotions (such as anxiety, anger, greed, and hatred), and junk thoughts (resentment, jealousy, flattery, arrogance, and the like). The challenge here is to get back to our authentic selves and to live in the world without attachment, to pay attention to what is showing itself in our lives rather than mindlessly plunging forward.
