Engaged Buddhism is, as I see it, best understood as a movement among Western Liberals who are also Buddhists, and as such as primarily infused with Western liberal values. These are sometimes incidentally the best way to do good, but unlike EA they don’t explicitly target doing the most good, they instead uphold an ideology that values things like racial equality, human dignity, and freedom on religion (including freedom to reject religion).
As for (2), I’m not sure how much there is to learn. There’s likely some things, but I also worry that paying too much attention to Engaged Buddhism might be a distraction because it suffers common failure modes that EA seeks to avoid. For example, people I know who are part of Engaged Buddhism would rather volunteer directly, even if it’s ineffective, than earn to give, because they want to be directly engaged. That’s fine, but from what I’ve seen the whole movement is oriented more around satisfying a desire to help rather than actually doing the most good.
Kind of off topic, but I want to throw it out there anyways. If Engaged Buddhism is a social movement that
has an opinion on what the best way to do good is
is actually doing something in practice Then we (EA and EB) should probably be talking. There might be valuable things we can learn from eachother
I don’t think it actually has (1).
Engaged Buddhism is, as I see it, best understood as a movement among Western Liberals who are also Buddhists, and as such as primarily infused with Western liberal values. These are sometimes incidentally the best way to do good, but unlike EA they don’t explicitly target doing the most good, they instead uphold an ideology that values things like racial equality, human dignity, and freedom on religion (including freedom to reject religion).
As for (2), I’m not sure how much there is to learn. There’s likely some things, but I also worry that paying too much attention to Engaged Buddhism might be a distraction because it suffers common failure modes that EA seeks to avoid. For example, people I know who are part of Engaged Buddhism would rather volunteer directly, even if it’s ineffective, than earn to give, because they want to be directly engaged. That’s fine, but from what I’ve seen the whole movement is oriented more around satisfying a desire to help rather than actually doing the most good.