Buddhism and Nonviolent Social Action
This
is a talk given on May 14, 1988 at the Zen Temple, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Graeme
MacQueen
I first encountered Buddhism in a university course on world religions.
Four emphases immediately drew me to Buddhism. First was the emphasis on suffering.
We begin with the experience of our own suffering, and we work from there. I thought
that was a good starting point.
Second was the emphasis on compassion. It isn't
just my own suffering that I am supposed to be concerned with, it is the suffering
of others -- all human beings, whatever race, culture, and society, and even nonhuman
living beings. They too suffer, and to be fully alive is to be sensitive to this.
Third
was the emphasis on awakening, or enlightenment, the idea that it is possible
in this world to achieve a breakthrough into the nature of things, and that doing
so will help us to overcome suffering. I discovered that there were Buddhists
who undertook this quest for the truth seriously, even passionately.
Finally,
what struck me was the down-to-earth, practical nature of Buddhism. I am in pain,
you are in pain. Let's not waste time theorizing; let's do something about our
suffering.
I became involved in Buddhism at two levels -- academic and personal.
The academic part took up more and more of my time, and I became a graduate student
in Buddhist Studies at Harvard from 1971 to '74. Most U.S. troops had been withdrawn
from Vietnam at that point but there was still massive bombing by the Air Force.
At Harvard there was an emphasis on dialogue with other religious traditions.
I lived in the Center for the Study of World Religions, and we spent a lot of
time dialoguing. There was a great deal of good in this, but in most of my dialogues,
the war -- which was historically significant, and fraught with suffering for
millions of people -- was hardly ever talked about, and never in a formal academic
setting.
So here I am, studying Buddhist culture and Buddhist religion and
Buddhist languages, and here are these millions of Buddhists being driven from
their homes by bombs, being deafened by bombs, being burned alive by the very
country in which I am staying, and we're not talking about it. I began to consider
the dialogue phony. The real dialogue was not a dialogue of words, but of bullets,
a dialogue of metal.
Not only was the dialogue bothering me, but also the quest
for truth, which supposedly we, as a university community, were there for. Ironically,
Harvard's motto is "veritas," the Latin word for truth. A noble motto
for a university. But why this silence about the war? Was Harvard's truth too
noble to be involved in tacky things like human beings being bombed by B-52s?
Something was wrong with Harvard's truth.
Maybe Harvard's truth was actually
being relayed on B52s to Southeast Asia. Maybe Harvard's truth was that white
male American culture and economic structures were what everyone must have, like
it or not.
It isn't as if Harvard had nothing to do with the war. Harvard gave
the world Henry Kissinger. And there was Samuel Huntington, another great "scholar"
from Harvard, who still has a high position there. Sam Huntington gave us the
theory of forced-draft urbanization. This means that if you want to modernize
and urbanize South Vietnam in a hurry, bomb the people out of their homes in the
countryside. That would force them into overcrowded cities like Saigon, where
they would become dependent on a foreign military power and foreign economic handouts.
They would thus be unable to support the "Viet Cong," the resistance
operating in the countryside. People like Huntington legitimized massive terrorist
activities by the U.S. Air Force.
And there was also Louis Fieser, who in 1942
as a Harvard prof gave the world the gift of napalm, for which as we all know,
Buddhists in Southeast Asia are so grateful. An alternative view was bravely put
forward, I later learned, by the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, but I
knew nothing of their existence while I was at Harvard.
As I reflected on these
things, my discomfort increased with universities and with the North American
study of Buddhism in general. When I came back to Canada in '74, my country, despite
its public image of purity and lofty ideals, was collaborating, and money was
being made on the war. Within the university itself, there was the same silence
about war. I began to see that major disease in the academic world -- careerism,
the notion that we're here in life to build our "careers," to achieve
status, to progress through the ranks.
I came into the study of Buddhism with
idealism, so the confrontation with careerism caused me pain. What happened to
my questions about suffering, compassion, insight, and practical solutions to
human problems -- the things that had attracted me to Buddhism? Was I not playing
a very different game? It seemed to me that the university had sold out. It was
saying to the political authorities: We want to be comfortable, so go ahead and
bomb these people. But don't challenge tenure, don't cut our budget. That would
upset us.
Around 1980, I saw that my life was going nowhere. I was not interested
in dedicating the rest of my existence to my career. Several events turned me
in a different direction. At the beginning of the 1980s, this massive anti-nuclear
movement began to ferment, touched off by the Reagan administration's talk of
theatre nuclear war in Europe. And Central America was on our minds. In 1980 came
the Rio Sumpul massacre in El Salvador:
The first major massacre was at the
Rio Sumpul on May 14th, when thousands of peasants fled to Honduras to escape
an army operation. As they were crossing the river, they were attacked by helicopters,
members of ORDEN, and troops. According to eyewitness testimony reported by Amnesty
International and the Honduran clergy, women were tortured, nursing babies were
thrown into the air for target practice, children were drowned by soldiers or
decapitated or slashed to death with machetes, pieces of their bodies were thrown
to dogs. Honduran soldiers drove survivors back into the hands of the Salvadoran
forces. At least 600 unburied corpses were prey for dogs and buzzards while others
were lost in the waters of the river, which was contaminated from the dead bodies;
bodies of five children were found in a fish trap by a Honduran fisherman.
I
read an account of that event that shattered my nonperception of suffering, my
careerism, my silent collaboration. I knew that the U.S. was behind that action
of the Salvardoran and Honduran armies. It was helping feed, clothe, train, and
equip those soldiers. I didn't yet understand that the massacre was a direct application
of American strategy (with which Canada has generally collaborated) aimed at the
exploitation of the region. But I knew that by not resisting, I was involved in
violence. People were being killed by me.
Picture those peasants, quietly entering
our room now and sitting, perhaps over there in those back seats. There's an old
man with a straw hat. A young woman with her child in this empty front seat. They
are going to sit there quietly and listen to us. They are the ones who are questioning
us about violence and nonviolence today. If our analyses and answers, our doctrines
and sayings, our quotations from scripture, do not address their situation, we
are not serious.
What do we do when we grasp the nature of structural violence
and collaboration? After reading that account of Rio Sumpul, I tried to respond
in a Buddhist way: to meditate, to sit down and do mindfulness practice, to try
to be aware of the state of my own body and mind, to try to get some clarity.
Nice
try. It didn't work. I had to get up from where I sat, throw open the door, and
run. I ran and ran until I was exhausted and couldn't run anymore. It isn't just
that I was a terrible meditator. At that point, meditating wasn't what I needed
and it sure as hell wasn't what those people in El Salvador needed. So I began
groping for an appropriate response. It took some time.
In 1983, I found myself
being thrown into a van, in handcuffs and shackles, with a couple of dozen other
people for having blocked the entrance to a company that was constructing counter-insurgency
training camps in Honduras.
I won't romanticize civil disobedience. I won't
pretend that it stopped what was happening in Central America. But I think it
was a lot more appropriate than anything I had done up to that point. It had an
impact on public perceptions and on what certain companies and interest groups
could get away with. The activities of the peace and justice movements of the
1980s did accomplish important things. I wasn't just an individual, I was part
of a social movement, which was enormous and which participated actively in history.
Furthermore,
there was a kind of peace that I achieved that day, lying on the ground in my
handcuffs in the November rain -- a kind of communion with the spirits of the
people killed at Rio Sumpul. I don't think this was just self-indulgence or fantasy,
though this is always a danger. I think I was starting to translate compassion
into genuine solidarity with those who suffer. Compassion without active solidarity
is barren. I was starting to get some integrity. Not that I was a saviour of the
world, but I was beginning to put into practice my moral and spiritual values.
That huge chasm between talk and action was beginning to be addressed in my life.
In
Mahayana Buddhism, one of the great spiritual beings honored is Kuan Yin, the
bodhisattva of compassion. I came to feel that there is Kuan Yin in each one of
us. We have to get in touch with Kuan Yin and feel what she calls us to do in
the world. The 1980s for me were a process of getting in touch with Kuan Yin within
myself.
I speak to you today as people who are interested in Buddhist spirituality.
The form of Buddhism known to most of you is Mahayana, from which Zen springs.
As you know, the bodhisattva is the central focus of Mahayana. A bodhisattva is
a being whose ultimate aims are full enlightenment -- that is, profound insight
into the world, and the compassionate liberation of living beings. If those are
your aims, then you are entering into the path of the bodhisattva. Buddhism, especially
Mahayana Buddhism, is frankly idealistic. It appeals to deep yearnings within
us.
So what does a bodhisattva in the United States or Canada do in 1988? Let
me distinguish between the "smiling bodhisattva" and the "unsmiling
bodhisattva." These are my own terms. By "smiling bodhisattva"
I mean someone who wants to achieve calmness, clarity -- a practitioner of meditation
and ritual. Someone who is not very interested in social action and who, when
the issue arises, tends to emphasize cooperation. Someone who, when asked to give,
gives; when asked to do, does. The smiling bodhisattva is emphasized in North
American Buddhism. Such people are often judgmental toward those with agitated
minds, who get angry, who rush about acting with their bodies, who protest, who
don't hang out in zendos and who may not have a clear mind.
On the one hand,
it makes sense in a frantic and distracted culture to try to achieve calmness.
We need it. The meditation tradition may contribute greatly to achieving a better
world-- not just through individual improvement but through social action. But
that's the subject of another talk, not this one.
Here's a quotation from a
Mahayana scripture. The passage is describing bodhisattvas: "Great compassion
takes hold of them. With the heavenly eye they survey countless beings and what
they see fills them with great agitation."
Agitation! They're not just
sitting there calmly with all this suffering. It is in the nature of great compassion
to sweep us along with other beings when they are being slaughtered. If we see
the slaughter and never get agitated, I have serious questions about our compassion.
Agitated
bodhisattvas are what I'm calling unsmiling bodhisattvas. They do not always have
their act together, and are sometimes confused, even in despair. This is because
their hearts have been torn open.
When it comes to social action, you'll find
the unsmiling bodhisattva present -- and not always cooperative. The unsmiling
bodhisattva tries not to cooperate with evil and, when asked by the forces of
death to give, refuses. This unsmiling bodhisattva does not act with words only,
but with the body, and puts his or her life on the line for living beings.
I'll
read from another Mahayana text -- not so you'll feel constrained by the "authority"
of the scripture. I don't believe in such authority, and there is plenty of skepticism
about this use of scripture in the Buddhist tradition. But I want you to know
that the resources for nonviolent praxis exist in this tradition. This text, from
the fourth century of the Common Era, is called Bodhisattva Bhumi -- "Stages
in the Development of a Bodhisattva." It's a practical manual for Buddhists.
First
quotation: "Bodhisattvas do not give themselves in service to others or in
servitude to others if this will result in others being harmed or being deceived."
Have you given your selves in service to an imperialistic state? To a nuclear
state? To a world economic order built on exploitation? To an order that deceives
to cover the suffering it perpetrates?
Second quotation: "As to external
objects, the bodhisattva does not offer harmful things such as poison, fire, weapons,
and liquor to those who ask when their requests are for the purpose of harming
themselves or others." There's a superficial way to understand this one.
I can say, "I'm not supposed to offer weapons to people. Fine. I won't hand
a revolver to anybody. That's easy."
Yes, it's easy. As a privileged,
white North American I can get by without literally handing poison or weapons
to people. But we know that this is a childish interpretation. Not giving weapons
for harming others means having radical relations with the political authorities
in our countries. What are we going to do when they ask for our taxes in order
to go build more weapons? Are we going to pay up?
Finally, the third quotation:
"And further, a bodhisattva does not offer others a thing belonging to someone
else or whose ownership is uncertain."
"Well," you say, "that's
obvious. You can't give something that doesn't belong to you. That's all the passage
says."
But aren't we being asked to give away things that don't belong
to us? Aren't we asked to give away the earth? Whole species? Whole ecosystems?
The futures of our children and other people's children? Do they belong to us?
Can I give my child's future to the leaders of my state to do with what they want?
Can I give the earth to a multinational company? No, because these things don't
belong to me. So what do I do when they ask me to hand these over or to collaborate
silently in the handing over of these things? I have to say no. I have to be an
unsmiling bodhisattva.
To try to embody nonviolence means to act from the compassion
that gives birth to solidarity, and to act from a careful perception of the way
the world works. To be nonviolent it is not enough that I refrain from overt violent
behavior.
It is fairly easy for us privileged North Americans to avoid overt
violence, but it won't do to feel pure and good because of this. It is the very
nature of privilege to be able to avoid such acts if we wish, to be able to be
"pure" in this sense. If I start to judge the poor and the oppressed,
either in my own society (it is mainly the poor that fill up our prisons) or in
Third World countries -- If I say, "These folks are violent, I'd better go
and teach them Gandhian principles or Buddhist principles," I'm missing the
point. It is precisely the poor who have overt violence shoved onto their backs,
who suffer it and who are put in a position where they have to engage in it. By
all means, let's offer them what we have in teachings on nonviolence, but let's
not teach smug "niceness" and call it Buddhism. Our challenge is to
remove the structural violence perpetrated by our societies and our "pure"
strata.
Finally, I'd like to read a passage of Mahayana scripture that is concerned
with what the bodhisattva is supposed to be.
"Bodhisattvas conceive the
idea that all beings, whether men or women, are their parents and their children,
and thus they go on the pilgrimage of the bodhisattva. They think this: As I myself
want to be free from sufferings, so do all beings want to be free from sufferings.
I must not abandon these beings." And the question for us is: What does it
mean in North America in 1988, not to abandon these beings?
Graeme MacQueen
teaches Religious Studies and Peace Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton,
Ontario.
Sources:
S. Huntington's article, "The Bases of Accommodation,"
Foreign Affairs, July 1968, 642-656. * The massacre description is from Noam Chomsky's
Turning the Tide (Montreal: Black Rose, 1987), p. 105. * Passages of the Bodhisattva
Bhumi are from the 9th chapter, as translated by James Mullens in his McMaster
Ph.D. thesis (in progress).* All other Buddhist quotations are from translations
of Edward Conze, Selected Sayings from the Perfection of Wisdom (London: The Buddhist
Society, 1955) and The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and its Verse
Summary (Bolinas: Four Seasons , 1973).
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