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Political Compassion: An End to Suffering
Politics intrudes into our daily lives. We’re inundated with reports of war, famine, death, and dying that also raise significant and challenging issues from a purely Buddhist perspective.
Rev. Jundo Gregory Gibbs of the Portland Oregon Buddhist Temple (who captivated many of us by his presentations in March at our Ohigan Seminar and service) recently talked about the importance of Buddhists being engaged in life and striving not to become detached by life’s events, political and otherwise, but rather to seek both "less rigid" attachments as well as a middle path of compassion. Rev. Gibbs recently opined that “Similarly, encountering Amida Buddha’s Compassion as one’s own utterance of his Name provides powerful inspiration to act in the world, including the realms of political and social action [emphasis added]. See “Existentializing and Radicalizing Shinran’s Vision by Repositioning It at the Center of Mahayana Tradition” as presented in the book entitled, Engaged Pure Land Buddhism (1998). To me, this translates directly into developing a willingness to hear (to deeply hear) political viewpoints sometimes bitterly different from our own, and finding a way to integrate such “political compassion” (not Rev. Gibbs' words) into our own worldview. Rev. Gibbs also teaches about the importance of including politics in Engaged Buddhism today but cautions not to presume that what is “politics” for one will be “politics” for another.
Shinran Shonin, the founder of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, and his teacher, Honen Shonin, were both branded political enemies by the feudal government at the urging of religious conservatives then in power (albeit declining) in 12th and 13th century Japan. This political (and religious) persecution resulted in the execution of some of their followers, and forced Shinran and Honen to escape to Echigo (Niigata) (located in a remote part of the Japanese coast) for their very survival. Greed, anger, and hatred seem to continually present obstacles to the development of our spiritual lives and that includes the political realities that are thrust upon us every day: War in Iraq; escalating threats from Iran; famine in Darfur; to name but a meager few. This was clearly an issue, historically, for Shinran and Honen, in their day, and perhaps it is an enigma for us as well. However, their life experience can point us towards a Buddhist path.
I suggest that political realities have more relevance in our 21st century world than ever before and forces many of us to answer personal questions, public and private, about politics, war, power, and the hatred, anger, and greed they generate from a Pure Land Buddhistic view.
Two years ago, Pankaj Mishra wrote a wonderful book entitled, An End To Suffering concerning his personal quest to answer some of these questions and to trace his journey to embrace Buddhism. He also suggested a “radically” different way of looking at political issues from a Buddhist viewpoint, and in this sense, he serves as a teacher in helping us find political compassion in our sometimes myopic domestic and world-view. His publisher, Picador (and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC) has gratefully granted us permission to reprint certain portions of Mr. Mishra’s book which may well be thought provoking for those of us trying to find a nexus between the horrors and political realities in which our planet is engaged, and the self awareness, compassion, and peace that Pure Land Buddhism teaches.
I had just got back then from Afghanistan and Pakistan. I had gone there partly to look for traces of Buddhism and also to learn more about the political situation in Afghanistan. It was not a good time to be doing so. Some months previously the Taliban had defaced the tall statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan valley and destroyed the Indo-Greek statues of the Buddha remaining in the museum of Kabul.
In the same place, a new kind of multinational religion and politics had grown in recent years. In squalid madrasas, where the Taliban had been given the most rudimentary education in the Koran, and where another generation of young men prepared themselves for jihad, men spoke calmly of how the oppressed Muslims of the world had come together in Afghanistan to destroy one superpower – the Soviet Union – and would, with the grace of god, also take care of America and Israel if they did not relent in their persecution of Muslims.
I went to an international conference of radical Islamists near the border with Afghanistan, where 200,000 men – many of them from North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia – listened to speeches on similar themes. The atmosphere there was of a medieval desert fair: thousands of men walking urgently around the sprawling township of tents under a vast cloud of dust, past the pushcarts with fresh sugarcane juice and piles of chewed-up canes, past the stalls selling beautifully illustrated copies of the Koran in Urdu and Arabic, along with posters of Osama Bin Laden, who was clearly the star of the event.
Many of the older men attending were Pakistani peasants who I later discovered had been paid, in the Indian subcontinental way, to swell the gathering. But the larger part of the crowd was made up of young men in their late teens and early twenties. These were students from the madrasas in the region south of Peshawar that borders Afghanistan. They had travelled to the conference in a variety of vehicles, crammed in cars, buses, pick-up trucks, three-wheeler tempos and even horse-drawn carts…
On the first day a ferocious dust storm blew down some of the tents. The long white shirts of the men flapped and rippled in the wind as they ran out from under the dangerously swaying tents; the new Afghan rugs lost their bright colour and blended into the dust-white ground. But the speeches remained fierce: speaker after speaker recounted a long history of humiliation and atrocity, the Crusades, Granada, Iran, Palestine, Kashmir, and urged Muslims to join the worldwide jihad against the United States and its allies.
Having lost the protection of their old moral order, their particular bonds and forms of authority, they hoped to stave off chaos and degeneration by joining such authoritarian movements as Hindu nationalism and radicalIslam, by surrendering their dreams to demagogues like Bin Laden.
It was obvious at the fundamentalist gathering that neither the angry speakers nor their fervent audience knew, or could know, much about America. Out of fear and confusion, they had built an arbitrary notion, to which they ascribed their own suffering, and all the evils in the world.
And, armed with the idea of the enemy, they had begun to dream the old western dream of revolution: the swift and complete transformation of society in all its aspects, economic, legal, political, religious and cultural, the making from scratch of a pure state and society which alone could guarantee human happiness and virtue, the utopia that could only come about after its corrupt adversary had been laid low. The dream of revolution came with an additional religious romanticism: of an Islam which had supposedly offered security and justice in the past, and which now held a blueprint for the ideal future.
Uprooted men from societies that were once small and close-knit trying to organize themselves into large collectives; a people falsifying their past and turning a privately and diversely followed faith into political ideology; focusing their rage against such imagined entities as 'America' and the 'West'; and working to rouse people the world over for the sake of revolution — it was hard not to see these men as trying to find their being within history and only floundering in vast empty spaces.
I was in my early thirties. I had written a few things. I had travelled a bit. Given my modest beginnings, it was hard not to see all this as a kind of achievement. For much of my life, I had been oppressed by the shame of being poor and ignorant and belonging to a backward-looking community, of not fully possessing a language, and of not having any clearly defined gift or talent.
Far from being unique or individual, as I had once imagined, my desires contained nothing of any vital importance or consequence. And I couldn't always suppress the quiet panic at the thought that the intellectual and spiritual vagrancy I had come to know was all I had to look forward to, no matter how much I knew or travelled.
For many years now I had read and thought about the Buddha's life and teachings. I was far from calling or thinking myself a Buddhist – I hadn't even attempted the hard and continuous self-scrutiny required of serious Buddhists…..
…..I had come to understand that the Buddha had offered an internally coherent set of ideas, in which abstruse-sounding theories were never far apart from practice, and I had given up much of my scepticism about them.
It was probably true that greed, hatred and delusion, the source of all suffering, are also the source of life, and its pleasures, however temporary, and that to vanquish them may be to face a nothingness that is more terrifying than liberating. Nevertheless, the effort to control them seemed to me worth making. I could see how, whether successful or not, it could amount to a complete vocation in itself, as close as was possible to an ethical life in a world powered mostly by greed, hatred and delusion.
What did the Buddha, who had lived in a simpler time, have to offer people fighting oppression, social and economic injustice, and environmental destruction? It was easier to say what he hadn’t promised…
…..His indifference to ambitious political projects was part of his belief in individually achieved, rather than collectively organized, redemption. An early Dalai Lama had said that the meditator faced with an intractable world starts with repairing his own shoes instead of demanding that the whole planet be covered immedi-ately with leather. But how did this assuage the political impotence felt by many people in the world today?
Ideology – democracy, freedom, Islamic virtue – gave them the moral certainty with which they spoke of the necessity of violence for remaking the world. It made them assume, almost as a matter of course – reverting on a terrible scale to the bloody rituals of tribal societies – that some must die so that others can live and be happy and free.
Given their immense power to manipulate and coerce, it was easy to see individuals everywhere reduced to spare parts of an imaginary humanity. But there was something missing in this bleak, compelling vision of individuals delivered to vast blind forces.
It was what I began to see more clearly that autumn in Mashobra: what the Buddha had stressed to the helpless people caught in the chaos of his own time: how the mind, where desire, hatred and delusion run rampant, creating the glories and defeats of the past as well as the hopes for the future, and the possibility for endless suffering, is also the place – the only one – where human beings can have full control over their lives.
This was the human condition that Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had also described, with much intellectual passion, anguish and irony. But the Buddha had not been content with vivid description or eloquent lament. He had not only diagnosed the new intellectual and spiritual impasse faced by human beings at a time of tumultuous change: he had also tried to overcome it. In the process, he undermined many assumptions that lie behind the political and economic arrangements of the modern era.
In a world increasingly defined by the conflict of individuals and societies aggressively seeking their separate interests, he revealed both individuals and societies as necessarily interdependent. He challenged the very basis of conventional human self-perceptions – a stable, essential identity – by demonstrating a plural, unstable human self – one that suffered but also had the potential to end its suffering. An acute psychologist, he taught a radical suspicion of desire as well as of its sublimations – the seductive concepts of ideology and history. He offered a moral and spiritual regimen that led to nothing less than a whole new way of looking at and experiencing the world.
I was to alter my view, but as a rigorous and subtle therapist the Buddha still belonged, in my mind, to the past. It was to take me much longer, and require more knowledge and experience, to discover him as a true contemporary.
I now saw him in my own world, amid its great violence and confusion, holding out the possibility of knowledge as well as redemption – the awareness, suddenly liberating, with which I finally began to write about the Buddha.
© 2008 West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple Online
