UnMind 98. Death & Disaster, Dialog & Dharma II

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Inevitable —
Yet so unnecessary!
Enough suffering.

As mentioned in the first segment of this series, one Sunday at the Zen center we conducted a dialog on the recent school shootings and general dystopian state of affairs, as a kind of “dharma combat,” an open and frank discussion of how Zen practice does or does not address the ongoing chaos of modern life in America. In this and the two following segments we will close out this discussion, largely quoting the question-and-answer dynamic that transpired online and in person that day. As usual in Zen dialog, the answers more often than not raise more questions than they provide any pat answers.

Master Dogen, in Shobogenzo Bendowa — A Talk About Pursuing the Truth — includes a section of questions and his answers at the end. The format I have chosen, “Someone asks: I say:” below is adopted from that approach. After my brief introductory recap of the subject, quoting a couple of the paragraphs from the prior segment, we opened the floor for discussion. The following is what ensued.

Someone asks: What is the best we can do in a situation like this? How can we be centered in dharma without being numb to what’s going on around us? Where does the rubber meet the road between practice and avoidance?

I say: Mastuoka Roshi was once asked this question, regarding “engaged Zen.” He simply took the zazen posture, saying “This is the most you can do.” What I think he meant is that unless you gain clarity on the cushion, and resolve your personal conflicts with regard to life and death, you cannot really enter the fray in the public realm without adding to the confusion. As long as you have preconceptions, or a bias as to the outcomes, you cannot really engage in a balanced and compassionate manner. If on the other hand you can see both sides of the issue — or in today’s context, the many sides of the issue — you may be able to help.

Clarification is what we go for in zazen, but the path to it is fraught with confusion and frustration. In pursuing clarity in zazen, one thing that becomes clear is our own complicity, and the degree of responsibility we share in the details of our complex lives. We may be complicit in sharing the karma of our community, but not the direct responsibility, e.g. of the shooter as the proximate cause. Both can be true at once. We are complicit in, but not responsible for, the specific event. But we are definitely responsible for what we do about it now. Karma and its consequences continue through the Three Times — past future & present — according to Zen Buddhism. What we do in the present will probably comprise the most appropriate action, if we thoroughly examine the situation in zazen.

Zazen is not a panacea. It does not change anything by “spooky action at a distance” or magical thinking. But in terms of psychology it helps us to see ourselves and our place in this situation.

Someone asks: Is there any actual realistic thing we can do to face this situation? What can we do?

I say: I think we have to take the long view. This is not to say that we should not rise up in arms, and change everything we can change that is part of the problem. But if you look back on Japan — where our Zen teachers come from — during WWII, Japan and the United States were at each other’s throats. We witnessed the calamity of dropping nuclear bombs on civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the former of which was Matsuoka Roshi’s family home. And which to this day I don’t agree had to be done, and a lot of other people disagree with that atrocity as well. Nonetheless, Japan and USA are now allies We’re, quote, “friends.” So you have to look back on 50 years and say, Well, what was that all about then? It took generations dying off, for us to recover the relationship on a normalized basis between the two countries.

So I think that reflects the kind of patience that we learn to practice in Zen. The kind of patience that is not associated with outcomes. Parents with their children, children with their aging parents, et cetera, practice patience with each other and within society. We do, but it’s always connected to the outcome. I am going to count to ten, hold my breath, hold my tongue. I am going to be patient in this situation, because it’s going to work out the way I want it to.

In Zen I think we practice the kind of patience that says this may never work out the way I want it to. And yet I will practice patience with that, because that’s the nature of the beast. It’s suffering. It is impermanent, it’s imperfect, insubstantial, et cetera — all the teachings of Buddhism apply here.

I think what we are doing as practice leaders and practitioners is, as Matsuoka Roshi said, the most you can do. We are hopefully teaching people how to deal with their own ignorance, and potentially how to overcome it, by practicing meditation. It’s not passive. It is not a retreat from reality. It’s a way of girding your loins to go out and go back into battle, you could say. I think we are training armies of soldiers who can go into tough situations, and do probably closer to the right thing that has to be done.

I think that’s the mission of Zen. It could eventually lead to world peace, if we survive long enough, if we don’t blow the planet up entirely. And I think it’s our only hope for world peace, personally. I think that the other religions have largely failed. Not intentionally, not because of any particular fault that they have. Politics has failed, as well. From my perspective, the only thing that we have left is Zen.

I think we are already doing what we should do about it. It is just, Can we catch up to it in time? We are training individuals to think independently, and to act interdependently. That is the most we can do. The people we’re training, they will go out and take action. It is not my place to tell people what they should or should not do. For my part, I need to spend all my time training people this way. So that they will go out and become political, they will go out and join the movement. But the action they take will be from a more compassionate or wise, universalist kind of perspective, than from trying to help my team win, in this situation. Which is what we see with all of the so-called movements.

Matsuoka Roshi taught that Zen can bridge East and West. I think Zen can bridge this problem as well. It takes time, and we all have to do our best. Any chance I get I will speak out, as Matsuoka Roshi did, as you know if you’ve read his collected talks. He spoke out about Vietnam, about WWII, civil rights. He was very much a peacemaker and bridge-builder. It’s incumbent upon us to do everything we can, whatever we can.

Someone asks: When it comes to universalism — the ideas of emptiness and compassion — to me it seems logical that they would help people to understand that they don’t have to be so selfish, they don’t have to be so narcissistic and hateful. But how can we help people like that banish some of those delusions? Is there any way we can help them, even in a gentle way?

I say: Again, my opinion is, Zen can help. I’ve tried things like joining the Fulton County Interfaith committee. I was co-chair of the board of that committee for a year, when I began to see that what I was trying to do was never going to happen. I was trying to get the county to introduce meditation into the schools. I think: get them early. If you start people sitting in meditation when they are young, in middle school, elementary grade levels, then by the time they get to high school they might be more capable of dealing with things like hormonal rage, and all the rejection they receive from people around them. They might be able to have more of a sense of humor about it, and see it for what it is, and not take it personally. I sound like Johnny-one-note, but my answer is, get the kids sitting on the cushions.

I spoke about this a little bit on my recent podcast, about the “incels” the “involuntary celibates” at certain ages, adolescents primarily. They watch porn on TV or social media, and see that all the girls “want it” and so forth. And then they turn to their local community, and no one wants to have anything to do with them. And so their frustration mounts. The sexuality, the hormones, the social construct that we have, the religious backdrop, these are all contributing factors, as well as probably the killer, shoot-‘em-up computer games. Everything has something to contribute.

And it all seems, to my way of thinking, to be part of the same problem, like different koans. In Zen, there are 1700 classical koans, and they are all pointing to the same truth. The way I look at this problem, every dimension of it, like facets of a diamond, they are all part of it. And so it’s very difficult to get to the root cause, to the core of it. But I think Buddha identified that.

It’s the sense of self, needing to defend that self. Needing to empower and consume, for that person to have power and wealth, and to consume what everybody wants. It’s predictable — if you take a bunch of conscripts in their teens and twenties from Russia, and send them to invade a country with weaponry — it’s predictable what they are going to do. Because you have to dehumanize the population that you are invading, to begin with.

So none of this is surprising. Buddha would not be surprised by any of this. He would just be aghast at the scale of everything. And how, to this point, Buddhism has failed. We have failed to adopt these principles, the Precepts, Paramitas, et cetera. This is why we aspire to buddha nature — to wake up — and not to human nature. We are seeing human nature on display. Some people would probably resent that. They say, No, no, that’s inhumane. But look at how we treat the rest of the species — livestock and wildlife — and how we treat the planet. It’s human behavior. It’s humanity. And that’s not pessimistic. It’s not overly optimistic, either. It's realistic.

To be continued.