From SGIUSA, I'm Cassidy Bradford and this is bootability.

The weekly series where I talk with Buddhists from all walks of life about the power

we each have to change our lives and the world around us.

Do you ever open up social media and then immediately close it?

If not, maybe you're more of a doom scroller.

No matter which direction we look, though, we see the issues facing our world.

Climate change, war, income inequality, racial injustice, and the list goes on and on. Everything can feel

so big. And us, so small. But what does Buddhism say? Buddhism teaches that at the core is the

lack of respect for the dignity of life. The 13th century Buddhist reformer, Nitran Dishonan, dedicated his life to studying and sharing the teachings of the Lotus Sutra.

During his lifetime, feudal Japan was plagued with problems like famine and war.

He identified three poisons in the human heart as the cause. These poisons are greed,

anger, and foolishness, which is essentially ignorance. He writes, famine occurs as a result of greed,

pestilence as a result of foolishness, and warfare as a result of anger.

So what do these three poisons look like?

Greed can be described as selfish desire and the delusion about the relationship between us

and the environment.

Anger is our destructive impulses and arrogance.

It's the delusion about the relationship between ourselves and others.

Foolishness or ignorance is misunderstanding and a lack of wisdom about how best to live.

This is the delusion about how the law of cause and effect works in our lives.

While global issues might seem separate from the individual, they're ultimately

caused by the human heart. Of course, changing the structures and systems of our world is important

...