DHARMABYTE™
2023 November
I hesitate to add yet another voice to the cacophony of cries of agony, suffering, outrage and acrimony emanating out of Israel, Gaza, and surrounding Arab states, exacerbated by the 24/7 chattering class. Not to mention the ongoing carnage in Ukraine, which seems to have slipped under the global radar. But as Katagiri Roshi reminds us, “You have to say something.” And Matsuoka Roshi did not shy from taking on the atrocities of his day. Check out his collected talks.
I fear that if we in Zen do not try to address these terrible global realities in the context of Buddhism, it may be taken as an indication, or an admission on our part, that Zen, along with its teachings and practice, have finally faded into irrelevance, in the face of such intractable 21st century problems.
Actually, just the opposite is true: Zen is more relevant than ever. It is not that the Zen Way is a panacea, or that it offers a silver bullet that will somehow “fix” a situation that has been several millennia in the making. But Buddhism points to the fundamental origin of the problem, traditionally defined as “craving” or “thirst.” The difficulty is that we have to individually “abandon” that craving, in order to enable the cessation of suffering, not only for ourselves but for others. But the individuals directly affected by the war seem to have no power over, or protection from, the influence and actions of the masses.
So it would seem that our challenge may be to define the actual source of the conflict in the Middle East as originating in some form of craving, one that has been in force since long before the founding of Israel, just after the end of WWII. We must concede that the abandonment of that craving may or may not be possible, given the volatility of the situation and the likelihood that cooler heads will not prevail for some time.
According to my limited understanding of Buddhism, craving begins before birth, innate in the very desire to exist. This idea amounts to a pre-Enlightenment or proto-scientific hypothesis, an attempt to explain Nature’s overwhelming fecundity, the irresistible will to life, manifested as the innumerable cascade of seeds, sperm, spores, and other forms of burgeoning life populating the natural sphere in all corners of the planet.
In sentient beings such as humans, this craving is clearly inchoate–beginning before, or at, conception and continuing in the womb and arising out of basic ignorance of the causes and conditions of our own origins. Whatever level of awareness can be attributed to the developing embryo, it is of a relatively primitive nature compared to its later stages of maturation.
Buddha made a noble attempt to model the process of growth of sentient beings, arising from primordial ignorance under the influence of mental formations, slowly differentiating the senses, and finally segueing through birth, aging, and death; then beginning another round through rebirth in the teaching known as the “Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Co-Arising” (Skt: pratityasamutpada). Find the link to the illustration in the show notes for this segment.
Note that “mental formations” (#2) comprises the second link in the chain, arising in the womb out of the first link, the primordial sea of ignorance (#1) from which the universe arises. These formations are the motives, intentions, and desires that underly all other dimensions of life, and which underpin our natural consciousness (#3) as a sentient being. The growth of the fetus continues following its DNA blueprint, as we now know from modern genetics, resulting in a particular form (#4) of the organism which leads to development of the six senses (#5) and contact (#6) with the outer world. In the context of the mother’s womb, this would arise from subtle sensation (#7) and perhaps a level of subliminal perception (#8) such as hunger experienced as craving (#9), which then develops into clinging (#10), leading to becoming (#11), in the most general sense of the word, and finally to birth (#12), which ultimately reverts to aging and death (#13). Then, according to this hypothesis, the cycle begins all over again. Tradition has it that it takes three full cycles through the chain to complete the process.
So what does all this have to do with war, let alone the karmic consequences we might associate with war? Modern biology might find this model overly simplified, but I propose that we apply it to the arising of social awareness in the individual. We may find some linkage as to how a chain of conflicts arising between individuals can spread within a community, and between ethnic groups, eventually fueling international strife.
We held a conference in collaboration with the Department of Religion at Emory University in 2000, structured around the scholar-practitioner divide and focused on the teachings of Master Dogen. One of the guest speakers was asked during the Q&A following his address whether Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims, could truly engage in a dialog. His answer was, “No.” As long as they are Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims no dialog is possible.
At the risk of repeating myself, allow me to take this moment to point out the obvious: Buddha was not a Buddhist, any more than Christ was a Christian. These concepts came into the vernacular following their life and death on Earth. They have now become additional labels for identifying and differentiating the constructed self.
During his recent peacemaking trip to Israel, President Joe Biden was quoted as saying something like, “Whether you are Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, if you give up who you are, the terrorists have won.” But Buddhism suggests that we should do precisely that. We are to thoroughly examine the reality of this “who you are” — the imputed or constructed “self” — with judicious skepticism, particularly in meditation.
When we do so, we are told, we will see through the outer appearance of the self, penetrating to the emptiness at its core. This “emptiness” is an inadequate translation of the Sanskrit shunyatta, which points to the dynamic, ever-changing reality underlying all phenomena, and not a vacuous, woeful, or frightening void of nothingness, as it is sometimes interpreted.
Perhaps we can draw an analogous parallel between the progress of a single person through these stages of life, as articulated by Buddha, to that of the tribe, or community, a group of individuals united by a common gene pool and shared biological and geographical roots, as well as agreed-upon social mores and norms. When two such groups clash, the knee-jerk reaction is to point fingers and blame the other side for starting the current conflict. The response is always to reflect the blame back on the accuser, in a seemingly endless regress into the fog of history. Observers seem compelled to weigh in on one side or the other.
If we look at the suffering in an individual’s life, we might entertain the same question: Whose fault is this? Who started this? Whose idea was this? Theistic philosophies have a ready answer — that this life, with all its imperfections, is a reflection of God’s will — moving in mysterious ways that we cannot hope to comprehend. Applying this same nostrum to international strife seems largely an evasive maneuver, an avoidance of the responsibility of actually resolving the dispute in human terms.
In Zen, we embrace the idea that, if anyone is to blame for our individual life, it is us. The repentance verse expresses this notion concisely:
All my past and harmful karma
From beginningless greed, hate and delusion
Born of body, mouth, and mind,
I now fully avow.
“Avow” is a rather archaic term, meaning to assert or confess openly. In other words, we are owning it — assuming responsibility for the unintended consequences of our own behavior — and not blaming others. We might want to blame our parents, and their parents, another endless regress, as the proximate cause of our own existence. Good luck with that. Even if they are at fault, we cannot hold them accountable, at least not for long. After their demise, we are left to face the same reality, without the scapegoat.
Similarly, in international conflicts, which often amount to tribal warfare on steroids, it might be helpful for all sides to own up to their own culpability in what has come to pass, as President Biden did in recalling the overwrought reaction to the 911 crisis. This would amount to a simple recognition and acceptance of one of the seminal marks of dukkha: “imperfection.” Admitting that “mistakes were made” — before the situation accelerates to an irresolvable level of mutually-inflicted violence.
One of the black marks on U.S. exceptionalism — that of Hiroshima & Nagasaki — has become the mother of all mistakes that have ever been made on the global stage. The country that first dropped the Big Bomb on civilians is hardly in a position to lecture others on the morality of human decency in following the “laws of war,” the mother of all oxymorons. War is precisely the end of law, in any human sense of the term.
Where people — or, for that matter, any sentient beings of the same species — are separated, they tend to evolve in different directions. This principle of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” theory can explain a lot, such as the development of varying cuisines, dialects and languages, as well as the susceptibility of isolated populations to propaganda.
What if the appropriate authority, such as the United Nations, undertook a program of social exchange in all such closed-border situations as that of Israel and the Gaza strip? What that might look like would be providing safe passage from each side of the border to the other for limited groups of families or age groups, who would spend a limited amount of time in the company or homes of their counterparts in the “other” culture, the designated enemy. This is an old idea whose time may have come again. If people get to know each other on a personal, more intimate basis, and “break bread” together, they are a lot less likely to turn on each other for no reason, and to find common ground.
Wasting the opportunity of a lifetime in service of a questionable, survival-oriented self finds its analog in following political leaders who are similarly self-striving, finding at the end-of-the-day, or at the end of your life, that not only are they, your titular leaders, unappreciative of your loyalty, but that they even regard you with contempt, as part of the problem, or at best a pawn in their geopolitical chess game.
In the personal sphere of meditation you may fight your own war, and hopefully find your individual salvation. Then, and only then, you may be able to share it with others in, and outside of, your social sphere. Good luck with that. Don’t give up.
