Be Peace Embodied
Charles
Johnson on the principles of enlightened politics
During this presidential
election year, which many political commentators tell us may prove to be one of
the most polarizing, divisive and rancorous in American history, followers of
Buddhist dharma will, like all citizens, be faced with what philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre once called "the agony of choice." To my eye, this is the most
glorious of civilization's regular trials, one that defines the nature of a democratic
republic. For when the framers of the Constitution declared that the nation's
president "shall hold his office during the term of four years," they
ingeniously guaranteed that a healthy degree of quadrennial change, suspense,
tumult, renewal and spirited debate would be inscribed into our political and
social lives. Put another way, American voters, if they take their civic duty
seriously, can never rest. Every four years they must decide on the direction
of their collective destiny. Twenty-five times in each century they must define
for themselves their understanding of the "good life," and vote for
candidates and proposals that embody their vision of what this country and its
influence on the world should be.
Yet for all its virtues, this necessary process,
which the media frequently presents as a highly competitive "battle"
or "war," can fuel the most ugly partisan passions, fears, frustrations,
incivility and forms of dualism we are likely to find in the realm of samsara.
If perceived through the distorting lens of conflict-laden language and concepts
that deliberately pit one citizen against another ("Speech has something
in it like a spider's web," Thomas Hobbes once remarked), politics divides
people on election night into "winners" and "losers," and
creates bitterness and attachment that can cloud consciousness and cripple spiritual
development, though one of our greatest American leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., proved time and again that this need not be so.
On December 20, 1956,
the day the Montgomery bus boycott ended, King-whose model for nonviolent civil
disobedience in Alabama drew inspiration from Gandhi's struggle with the British-said,
"We must seek an integration based on mutual respect. As we go back to the
buses, let us be loving enough to turn an enemy into a friend." Though his
home was bombed and his wife and baby endangered during the campaign to end segregation
in the "Cradle of the Confederacy," the 26-year-old King never forgot
that "all life is interrelated," nor that we are all "caught in
an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever
affects one directly, affects all indirectly." He called this the "beloved
community," which in my view is simply sangha by another name.
If we can,
through the kind of mindfulness exhibited by Dr. King during one of the most revolutionary
moments in American history, remember that politics is merely the skin of social
life beneath which we find a more profound experience of ourselves and others,
then our Constitution-mandated sea change every four years can potentially be
an uplifting experience rather than a spiritually debilitating one. For as the
Buddhist nun Jingnuo wrote four centuries ago, "If you bring to everything
an illumined mind, you won't get lost."
The buddhadharma captures such
course-correcting illumination in the terse Pali description of existence known
as "the three marks": anicca, dukkha, anatta, often translated as, "Life
is transient, sorrowful and selfless." In this eidetic formulation about
the marks that stain all phenomena, anatta reminds us that the belief in a substantive,
enduring self is an illusion, while dukkha emphasizes the first noble truth of
universal suffering based on selfish desire and clinging to the things of this
world (including our thoughts and feelings about those things). Both the latter
terms are experientially and logically grounded in the first mark, anicca, which
means "impermanent," and speaks to Shakyamuni Buddha's insight that,
"whatever is subject to arising must also be subject to ceasing."
With
that general statement, the Buddha is referring to everything in our experience-all
material and immaterial objects, men and women, societies and states of mind,
legislation and governments. Any physicist would add that even the thirteen-billion-year-old
universe itself will one day be reduced to black holes that will eventually disintegrate
into stray particles, and these, too, will decay. From the moment of our so-called
"birth" we have been dying, "changing all the time," says
Thich Nhat Hanh, "Not a single element remains the same for two consecutive
moments." In essence, we are verbs, not nouns; processes, not products. Therefore,
the Diamond Sutra ends with this memorable verse:
Thus shall ye think of all
this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning
in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
We can all
understand this. There is nothing particularly mystical about the fundamental
nature of reality being change, process and transformation. Nor is there anything
esoteric in the wisdom that we err if we desire or try to cling to evanescent
phenomena that change faster than we can chase them. In the buddhadharma, the
true nature of things is shunyata, Sanskrit for "emptiness." But we
would be wrong if we interpreted this emptiness as a lack, or as vacuous. In his
outstanding book Nonduality, scholar David Loy provides a concise account of shunyata:
"It comes from the root shunya, which means "to swell" in two senses:
hollow or empty, and also like the womb of a pregnant woman. Both are implied
in the Mahayana usage: the first denies any fixed self-nature to anything; the
second implies that this is also fullness and limitless possibility, for lack
of any fixed characteristics allows the infinite diversity of impermanent phenomena."
Those who experience shunyata know that all things have eternally been in a perfect
state of tranquility, and that as Buddhaghosa says in the Visuddhimagga:
Suffering
alone exists, none who suffers;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana
is, but no one seeking it;
The Path there is, but none who travel it.
In
The Buddhist Vision, Alex Kennedy points out that the recognition of impermanence
or emptiness necessarily leads to the nonconceptual intuition that all perceived
conditioned and transitory things are interdependent. Thich Nhat Hanh's word for
this is "interbeing," a neologism he coined to express the traditional
Buddhist understanding of the concatenated links in dependent origination. Kennedy
says, "When we analyze any object, we can never come to a substance beyond
which our analysis cannot penetrate. We can never find anything conditioned which
has an underlying substantial reality
. All things, whether subject or object,
are processes linked together in an intricate network of mutual conditions
.
The ordinary man is distracted by the bright surface of the world and mistakes
this for reality."
All things are empty in themselves, only existing-as
Dr. King said-in a delicate "network of mutuality" where, as we are
told in the Visuddhimagga, "it is not easy to find a being who has not formerly
been your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, your son, your daughter."
After awakening, or the experience of nirvana, which in Sanskrit literally means
to "blow out" selfish desire and the illusory belief in a separate sense
of one's life, the student of the Way experiences ultimate reality as a "we-relation."
"Perfect peace," said Shakyamuni, "can dwell only where all vanity
has disappeared."
However, in Buddhism we must acknow-ledge two levels
of truth. First, there is ultimate, ontological truth. In The Long Discourses
of the Buddha, Maurice Walshe explains that on this level, existence is experienced
as "a mere process or physical and mental phenomena within which, or beyond
which, no real ego-entity nor any abiding substance can be found." Secondly,
there is conventional or relative truth, described by Walshe as the samsaric world
"according to which people and things exist just as they appear to the naïve
understanding." For myself, I enjoy thinking of these two truths in terms
of our knowing the subatomic realm of electrons and positrons exists, but in our
everyday lives we necessarily conduct ourselves in terms of Newtonian physics,
because if we step out a tenth floor window or in front of a fast-moving truck,
we will go splat.
The great dialectician Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamaka
school, demonstrated that these two truths are not in conflict, because samsara
is nirvana. The sacred is the profane. The everyday is the holy. The dream world
of samsara, which is the world of so much suffering and the world of relative
truth, is the projection of our delusions and selfish desires onto nirvana. Yet
samsara is logically prior to and necessary for the awakening to nirvana. The
important point here, says John Blofeld in The Zen Teachings of Huang Po, is that
"the enlightened man is capable of perceiving both unity and multiplicity
without the least contradiction between them." His words echo in the lambent
verse of Jingnuo, which appears in the wonderful book edited by Beata Grant, Daughters
of Emptiness: Poems by Buddhist Nuns of China: "Everything is in the ordinary
affairs of the everyday world." That is, if one is guided by mindfulness,
the transcendent is found no less in quotidian tasks such as serving tea, motorcycle
maintenance or the arranging of rock gardens than in the recitation of mantras;
no less in washing the dishes, writing this article or actively participating
in mercurial political affairs than in the oldest monastic rituals.
Insofar
as Buddhist practitioners grasp reality as a we-relation, they are unshakeable
in the experience of the Other as themselves. Thus, in the social and political
world of samsara, there can be but a single proper response to all sentient beings,
regardless of their political affiliations or views: compassion and lovingkindness.
That ethical posture is codified in the bodhisattva vows and Shantideva's A Guide
to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life:
First of all I should make an effort
To
meditate upon the equality between self and others:
I should protect all beings
as I do myself
Because we are all equal in (wanting) pleasure and (not wanting)
pain.
Hence I should dispel the misery of others
Because it is suffering,
just like my own,
And I should benefit others
Because they are sentient
beings, just like myself.
When both myself and others
Are similar in that
we wish to be happy,
What is so special about me?
Why do I strive for my
happiness alone?
For those following the Way, individual salvation is never
enough; they work tirelessly for the liberation, not just of men and women, but
of all sentient beings. Politics, therefore, offers the opportunity to use samsaric
means for nirvanic ends-or what Shakyamuni might call "skillful means"
that adapt the dharma to those imperfect tools we are obliged to work with in
the relative-phenomenal world. The step on the Eightfold Path called "right
conduct" demands such conscientious involvement in the relative-phenomenal
realm, for we ourselves are inseparable from that world and can live here and
now, nowhere else. But it is how the dharma student works in the world that is
of all importance.
He or she will, I believe, bring one dimension of "right
view" to the political arena-that is, the understanding that our perspectives
and views on a particular issue are not the only veridical or possible ones. The
follower of the Way will practice civility and "right speech," which
the Mahasatipatthana Sutra says involves "refraining from lying, refraining
from slander, refraining from harsh speech, refraining from frivolous speech."
He or she will listen with full empathy to the political Other, listening as carefully
as they do when following their own breaths and thoughts in meditation, for egoless
listening is one of the attributes of love.
They will dispassionately examine
evidence, tame their minds, know where their thoughts have come from, and be able
to distinguish what in the mind is the product of past conditioning and received
opinion (political ads, propaganda), what thoughts are genuinely their own, and
what their desires may be projecting on reality. (We all learned the hard way
the importance of this kind of epistemological humility when members of the current
administration, driven by their desire for change in the Middle East, rushed into
a war with Iraq based on less than reliable "intelligence.")
And
if peace is their goal, they will in the field of politics be themselves peace
embodied. They will work indefatigably in the present moment, but without the
beggarly attachment to reward, recognition or future results. And when disappointment
comes, as it must-as it did so often to those unsung heroes of the Civil Rights
movement-Buddhists doing political work would do well not to despair, thinking,
"I have lost, they have won," but remember that no victory won for the
sangha or "beloved community" can last forever (nor any defeat), because
every worldly thing is stained by anicca. In "defeat," if it comes,
they might find solace in a judicious distinction that my friend, mystery writer
Candace Robb, a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner in Seattle, makes when she says,
"Pain is something that comes in life, but suffering is voluntary or optional."
(Or on their refrigerator door they might tape this quote from 75-year-old Chan
master Sheng Yen: "I follow four dictates: face it, accept it, deal with
it, then let it go.")
Finally, they will take as a reliable guide for
spiritually informed political action the statement Dr. King made in his stirring
Nobel Prize acceptance speech exactly forty years ago:
Civilization and violence
are antithetical concepts. Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial and moral
question of our time
.The foundation of such a method is love
. I have
the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for
their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and
freedom for their spirits.
Dr. King's political objectives in 1964 were, at
bottom, of a piece with bodhisattva goals, and they complement nicely the ones
Buddhists in the countries of the Far East have traditionally worked to achieve.
In Inner Revolution, Robert Thurman informs us that Nagarjuna was the mentor of
a great king of a dynasty in southern India, King Udayi Shatavahana, sometime
between the first century b.c.e. and the second century c.e. Nagarjuna first instructed
the king on what he needed to know for the king's own liberation, then he advised
him on how a ruler should oversee an enlightened society. He said, "O King!
Just as you love to consider what to do to help yourself, so should you love to
consider what to do to help others!" According to Thurman, Nagarjuna "taught
his friend the king how to care for every being in the kingdom: by building schools
everywhere and endowing honest, kind and brilliant teachers; by providing for
all his subjects' needs, opening free restaurants and inns for travelers; by tempering
justice with mercy, sending barbers, doctors, and teachers to the prisons to serve
the inmates; by thinking of each prisoner as his own wayward child, to be corrected
in order to return to free society and use his or her precious human life to attain
enlightenment."
Thurman says, "This activism is implicit in the
earlier teachings of the Buddha, and in his actions, though his focus at that
time was on individual transformation, the prerequisite of social transformation."
In our brief passage through this life, we must have both inner and outer revolutions,
since the former is essential for deepening the latter. When we no longer divide
the great emptiness, shunyata, into "this" and "that," we
are empowered to reduce without discrimination the suffering of all sentient beings
in the six realms of existence, as Thich Nhat Hanh and his monks demonstrated
so beautifully during the Vietnam War, coming to the aid of orphans, widows and
the wounded on both sides of the civil war that devastated their country.
Naturally,
lay Buddhists will need the support of their sangha as they engage in political
action. No one understands better the importance of taking refuge in the community
of dharma followers than Buddhist monk and mendicant Claude AnShin Thomas. Last
year he completed the building of a meditation center in Florida as a place where
activists can momentarily retire to refresh and renew themselves.
Thomas understands
suffering as a teacher and "sangha as the entire spectrum of the universe."
In his upcoming memoir, At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace,
he says, "As a Buddhist, I cannot think myself into a new way of living,
I have to live myself into a new way of thinking." That wisdom is captured
concisely in his reflections on how dharma followers approach the goal of peace:
Peace
is not an idea. Peace is not a political movement, not a theory or a dogma. Peace
is a way of life: living mindfully in the present moment
. It is not a question
of politics, but of actions. It is not a matter of improving a political system
or even taking care of homeless people alone. These are valuable but will not
alone end war and suffering. We must simply stop the endless wars that rage within
.
Imagine, if everyone stopped the war in themselves-there would be no seeds from
which war could grow.
Charles Johnson, a professor of English at the University
of Washington in Seattle, has written four novels, including Middle Passage, for
which he won the National Book Award. He has also written two short story collections
and a number of nonfiction books, including Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism
and Writing.