Introduction

After his great awakening, Shakyamuni Buddha arose from his seat under the bodhi tree on the banks of the Neranjara River. He took to the dusty road and came upon five friends in the Deer Park at Isipatana. Right away they could see the glow of enlightenment and they asked him for a teaching. The Buddha offered his friends a discourse on the Four Noble Truths, his great dharma discovery. They became his first disciples. There, among good friends, the Buddha turned the dharma wheel for the first time.

Elsewhere in the Axial Age—that extraordinary, pivotal era of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism, Mahavira, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, and the Jewish prophets—the world experienced the simultaneous flowering of rationalism, monotheism, science, social justice, and standards for ethical behavior. The prophet Ezekiel had a vision of a wheel within a wheel, our world spinning like a gyroscope within the divine itself. We are heir to all these turnings. The wheel of life turns continuously. Beings are born and die. Dharmas arise and fall away. The Buddha awakened to the reality of impermanence. He (or she) is still helping us wake up to suffering and the end of suffering. The Biblical prophets saw a different version of the wheel, one that turned by faith and justice. Gary Snyder wrote about these two turnings in his seminal 1960s essay on engaged Buddhism, "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution." He says, "The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both."

These two mercies turn together in the heart of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship—honoring and learning from our Asian roots, while not forgetting the teachings of Judaism and Christianity in which many of us were born. Each of us cultivates our dharma practice in meditation and faith. We also cultivate a common vision of peace and social harmony. We become attuned to the ways we create suffering for ourselves as individuals, and we learn how we co-create structures of oppression and privilege that generate the various "isms" and wars that plague the world. We need stories of transformation as much as we need theories of social change. In the summer of 1991, as the Gulf War was ending and oil wells were still smoldering in Kuwait, the first issue of the newly named Turning Wheel rolled off the presses. Editor Susan Moon recalled Ezekiel's vision in a song we both remember from childhood.

Ezekiel saw the wheel,
Way up in the middle of the air.
And the little wheel turns by faith,
And the big wheel turns by the grace of God.

Her editor's column closed with these words: A wheel doesn't have a top or a bottom. You keep turning it, but you can't tell where one revolution ends and the next one begins, unless the wheel is calibrated, and I don't think the dharma wheel is. So you can't tell whether you've made "progress" in turning the wheel, you just have to go on faith. You just have to keep forever turning the wheel of dharma, way up in the middle of the air.

Turning Wheel has a noble pedigree. From BPF's founding in 1978, it had a Newsletter that linked engaged Buddhists and BPF chapters with each other and with the world. Buddhist Peace Fellowship and Turning Wheel are rooted in a kind of international Buddhist ecumenism. BPF has eschewed identification with any particular school or sect of Buddhism (although some might legitimately complain that there are too many Zen types hanging around the office). The earliest issues of the BPF Newsletter featured first-person reports on liberation struggles in Tibet, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. It made connections between these seemingly distant conflicts and the policies of U.S. corporations and militarism. There were teachings from Thich Nhat Hanh, Joanna Macy, Robert Aitken, and other well known teachers. And, as with BPF itself, there was an emphasis on grassroots activism that called for individuals and groups to look for truth in their own experience rather than in institutions and hierarchies.

Over time, the look and content of the BPF Newsletter evolved. By the middle 1980s, with Fred Eppsteiner as editor, the Newsletter developed a serious and professional look. This was matched by the quality of material between the covers. Arnold Kotler was editor from 1986 to 1989. At the same time that he was getting Parallax Press off the ground and editing Thich Nhat Hanh's books, Arnie poured his considerable editorial and networking skills into making the BPF Newsletter an essential resource for Buddhist activists. I remember some of those days. I worked at Parallax and recall Arnie putting in long days and nights in front of his Macintosh screen while the telephone rang ceaselessly and computers crashed even more frequently than they do today.

As Parallax and the newly established Community of Mindful Living (an organization founded to support individuals practicing in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition) took more and more of Arnie's attention, he put the Newsletter into the hands of David Schneider. David had been a fellow Zen student at San Francisco Zen Center, and was an excellent writer and editor. He had already helped out with the Newsletter for a year, so it was a natural fit. As I read through old issues, it becomes clear to me that David's editorial vision and Larry Watson's design eye created a look that we are still working with in Turning Wheel —a magazine that is at once attractive and serious, aimed at engaged Buddhists rather than scholars or dharma tourists. In the autumn of 1990, as the United States and allies were girding their loins for the first war with Iraq, Susan Moon took the Newsletter's editorial reins from David Schneider. Larry Watson, then working as art director at Yoga Journal, stayed on as our designer. Larry had earlier designed BPF's "lotus in hand" logo. Now, many years later, he is still tending to our covers, graphics, and design. Sue's first issue featured our first-ever color cover, a brush painting by Kaz Tanahashi with blood red splattered across a jagged black stroke, and the words "if we go to WAR . . . " In her first editor's column, Sue wrote, "Engaged Buddhism is about the bodhisattva's understanding that no one is really free until everyone is free. Let's listen to each other's stories, so we can help each other."

During this period I became increasingly involved with BPF, and began, in January of 1991, to serve as BPF's executive director. By the end of that year, it became clear to all of us at BPF that we had something more than a "newsletter" on our hands. Susan Moon's vision was of a journal that was linked to BPF's work and mission, with its own editorial identity. It needed a name of its own. We thought up many possibilities: two that I remember are Attention and This Is It. At last we settled on Turning Wheel. And it has been turning ever since, four issues a year, regular as clockwork.

Turning Wheel and Not Turning Away are impossible to imagine apart from the clear editorial vision of Susan Moon. She has been at it for nearly fourteen years now, going back to the time when each issue was carved on stone tablets in cuneiform. Actually, one of the things I most admire about Sue is how she has steadfastly maintained the human scale of Turning Wheel , while having to reckon with the ceaseless march of technological complexity in the world of publishing. In the midst of cyberspace she has kept an eye on the words and the story.

Sue has the dubious honor of being BPF's longest extant employee. It has always been a great pleasure to work together, through life's various ups and downs—health crises, arrests, child-rearing, and hairstyles. As friends and practitioners, we see eye to eye. Our common love for the work of BPF goes very deep.

As an editor, she has a gift for seeing which words are extra. She subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) helped me polish columns and reviews in every issue of TW. As a writer, Sue is attuned to stories. Stories, like people, embody "emptiness," which is a Buddhist way of speaking about the interdependent nature of all being. This kind of everyday storytelling, as much as anything, sets Turning Wheel apart from other Buddhist publications.

I took part in the selection process for Not Turning Away. We looked at many wonderful pieces and struggled to distill twenty-five years of the BPF Newsletter and Turning Wheel into one manageable volume. Sue and her eager corps of readers have tried to select pieces that both stand the test of time and illuminate the life and practice of socially engaged Buddhism. We had an embarrassment of literary riches to choose from. The hardest part was having to narrow it down to the final selection—not just because there were so many excellent articles, but because each piece speaks of and from a whole world of suffering and liberation. If, as the sutras preach, there are 108,000 sufferings and 108,000 doors of liberation, only a handful can be represented here. But this is part of our dharma practice as well: recognizing and accepting that things in life are necessarily incomplete, and continuing to turn our lives toward freedom in spite of incompleteness.

Turning Wheel is what most people know best about BPF. Like many of you, I read the BPF Newsletter for years before becoming involved in the organization's work. I felt a little guilty about my lack of involvement, but this reading planted many seeds. I learned about actions and practices and places I never would have known about without these writers' and editors' efforts. We hope the same will be true for many of you as you read this anthology. Zen Master Dogen, our thirteenth-century Japanese Soto Zen ancestor, offered this commentary on the bodhisattva precept of telling the truth: "The Dharma Wheel turns from the beginning. There is neither surplus nor lack. The sweet dew saturates all and harvests the truth." Truth, or dharma, has many faces, many forms. We sense that our own age is what Joanna Macy calls the "Great Turning." Joanna explains, "The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization." If we and our planet are to survive, we will have to make this shift. Sometimes it feels like a race against time. Which will come first? Will we save the world or will we turn it into a barren rock? Truth-telling is the necessary essence of this turning, the essence of life. From beginning to end of Not Turning Away, countless faces shine through the pages. These are beings, like ourselves, dedicated to turning the wheel. We are encouraged by their actions and inspired by their lives. We turn again to the hard and joyous work of liberation.
—Alan Senauke