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INSPIRED LIFESTYLES NEWSLETTER September 22, 2001 Issue #58
Sponsored by Inspired Living - http://www.inspiredliving.com
Copyright 2001 Carol A James. All rights reserved. This
publication may be freely redistributed if copied in its ENTIRETY.
=========================================================
TABLE OF CONTENTS
* Inspiring Quote for This Issue
* A New Holy War Against Evil? A Buddhist Response
* Belief Makes Everything Possible.
* Big Mud Puddles and Sunny Dandelions
BACK ISSUES CAN BE FOUND AT http://www.egroups.com/list/inspiredlifestylenews/
=========================================================
INSPIRING QUOTE FOR THIS ISSUE:
"The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that
the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and
more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear
of being hurt." --Thomas Merton
-------------------------------------------------------
This was written by David R. Loy, an American professor at a Buddhist
University in Japan, and he welcomes people to share it.
A NEW HOLY WAR AGAINST EVIL?
A Buddhist Response
Like most other Americans, I have been struggling to digest the events of
the last week. It has taken a while to realize how psychically numbed many
of us are. In the space of a few hours, our world changed. We do not yet
know what those changes will mean, but the most important long-term ones
may well be psychological.
Americans have always understood the United States to be a special and
uniquely privileged place. The Puritans viewed New England as the Promised
Land. According to Melville, We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people.
In many parts of the globe the twentieth century has been particularly
horrible, but the continental United States has been so insulated from
these tragedies that we have come to think of ourselves as immune to them
although we have often contributed to them.
That confidence has been abruptly shattered. We have discovered that the
borderless world of globalization allows us no refuge from the hatred and
violence that predominate in many parts of the world.
Every death reminds us of our own, and sudden, unexpected death on such a
large scale makes it harder to repress awareness of our own mortality. Our
obsessions with such things as money, consumerism, and professional sports
have been revealed for what they are: unworthy of all the attention we
devote to them. There is something valuable to learn here, but this reality
nonetheless makes us quite uncomfortable. We do not like to think about
death. We usually prefer to be distracted.
Talk of vengeance and bomb them back to the stone age makes many of us
uneasy, but naturally we want to strike back. On Friday President Bush
declared that the United States has been called to a new worldwide mission
to rid the world of evil, and on Sunday he said that the government is
determined to rid the world of evil-doers. Our land of freedom now has a
responsibility to extirpate the world of its evil. We may no longer have an
evil empire to defeat, but we have found a more sinister evil that will
require a long-term, all-out war to destroy.
If anything is evil, those terrorist attacks were evil. I share that
sentiment, but I think we need to take a close look at the vocabulary. When
Bush says he wants to rid the world of evil, alarm bells go off in my mind,
because that is what Hitler and Stalin also wanted to do.
I'm not defending either of those evil-doers, just explaining what they
were trying to do. What was the problem with Jews that required a final
solution? The earth could be made pure for the Aryan race only by
exterminating the Jews, the impure vermin who contaminate it. Stalin needed
to exterminate well-to-do Russian peasants to establish his ideal society
of collective farmers. Both were trying to perfect this world by
eliminating its impurities. The world can be made good only by destroying
its evil elements.
Paradoxically, then, one of the main causes of evil in this world has been
human attempts to eradicate evil.
Friday's Washington Post quoted Joshua Teitelbaum, a scholar who has
studied a more contemporary evil-doer: Osama bin Laden looks at the world
in very stark, black-and-white terms. For him, the U.S. represents the
forces of evil that are bringing corruption and domination into the Islamic
world.
What is the difference between bin Laden's view and Bush's? They are mirror
opposites. What bin Laden sees as good an Islamic jihad against an impious
and materialistic imperialism Bush sees as evil. What Bush sees as good
America the defender of freedom bin Laden sees as evil. They are two
different versions of the same holy-war-between-good-and-evil.
Do not misunderstand me here. I am not equating them morally, nor in any
way trying to excuse the horrific events of last Tuesday. From a Buddhist
perspective, however, there is something dangerously delusive about the
mirror-image views of both sides. We must understand how this
black-and-white way of thinking deludes not only Islamic terrorists but
also us, and therefore brings more suffering into the world.
This dualism of good-versus-evil is attractive because it is a simple way
of looking at the world. And most of us are quite familiar with it.
Although it is not unique to the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam it is especially important for them. It is one of the reasons why
the conflicts among them have been so difficult to resolve peacefully:
adherents tend to identify their own religion as good and demonize the
other as evil.
(Historically, the dualism seems to have originated with the Persian
religion of Zoroastrianism, which saw this world as the battleground of a
cosmic war between good and evil, and anticipated an apocalyptic victory
for the forces of good at the end of time. The Jews probably absorbed this
idea during their Babylonian captivity, and both Christianity and Islam got
this dualism from them.)
It is difficult to turn the other cheek when we view the world through
these spectacles, because this rationalizes the opposite principle: an eye
for an eye. If the world is a battleground of good and evil forces, the
evil that is in the world must be fought by any means necessary.The
secularization of the modern West did not eliminate this tendency. In some
ways it has intensified it, because we can no longer rely on a supernatural
resolution. We have to depend upon ourselves to bring about the final
victory of good over evil as Hitler and Stalin tried to do. It is unclear
how much help bin Laden and Bush expect from God.
Why do I emphasize this dualism? The basic problem with this way of
understanding conflict is that it tends to preclude thought, because it is
so simplistic. It keeps us from looking deeper, from trying to discover
causes. Once something has been identified as evil, there is no more need
to explain it; it is time to focus on fighting against it. This is where
Buddhism has something important to contribute.
Buddhism emphasizes the three roots of evil, also known as the three
poisons: greed, ill will and delusion. The Abrahamic religions emphasize
the struggle between good and evil because for them the basic issue depends
on our will: which side are we on? In contrast, Buddhism emphasizes
ignorance and enlightenment because the basic issue depends on our
self-knowledge: do we really understand what motivates us?
According to Buddhism, every effect has its web of causes and conditions.
This is the law of karma. One way to summarize the essential Buddhist
teaching is that we suffer, and cause others to suffer, because of greed,
ill will and delusion. Karma implies that when our actions are motivated by
these roots of evil, their negative consequences tend to rebound back upon
us. The Buddhist solution to suffering involves transforming our greed into
generosity, our ill will into loving-kindness, and our delusions into wisdom.
What do these Buddhist teachings imply about the situation we now find
ourselves in? The following is from today's statement by the Buddhist Peace
Fellowship: Nations deny causality by ascribing blame to others'
terrorists, rogue nations, and so on. Singling out an enemy, we
short-circuit the introspection necessary to see our own karmic
responsibility for the terrible acts that have befallen us. . . . Until we
own causes we bear responsibility for, in this case in the Middle East,
last week's violence will make no more sense than an earthquake or cyclone,
except that in its human origin it turns us toward rage and revenge.
We cannot focus only on the second root of evil, the hatred and violence
that have just been directed against the United States. The three roots are
intertwined. Ill will cannot be separated from greed and delusion. This
requires us to ask: why do so many people in the Middle East, in
particular, hate us so much? What have we done to encourage that hatred?
Americans think of America as defending freedom and justice, but obviously
that is not the way they perceive us. Are they just misinformed, then, or
is it we who are misinformed?
"Does anybody think that we can send the USS New Jersey to lob
Volkswagen-sized shells into Lebanese villages -- Reagan, 1983 -- or loose
'smart bombs' on civilians seeking shelter in a Baghdad bunker -- Bush,
1991 -- or fire cruise missiles on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory --
Clinton, 1999 -- and not receive, someday, our share in kind?" (Micah Sifry)
In particular, how much of our foreign policy in the Middle East has been
motivated by our love of freedom and democracy, and how much has been
motivated by our need our greed for its oil? If our main priority has been
securing oil supplies, does it mean that our petroleum-based economy is one
of the causes of last week's attack?
Finally, Buddhist teachings suggest that we look at the role of delusion in
creating this situation. Delusion has a special meaning in Buddhism. The
fundamental delusion is our sense of separation from the world we are in,
including other people. Insofar as we feel separate from others, we are
more inclined to manipulate them to get what we want. This naturally breeds
resentment both from others, who do not like to be used, and within
ourselves, when we do not get what we want. . . . Is this also true
collectively?
Delusion becomes wisdom when we realize that no one is an island. We are
interdependent because we are all part of each other, different facets of
the same jewel we call the earth. This world is not a collection of objects
but a community of subjects. That interdependence means we cannot avoid
responsibility for each other. This is true not only for the residents of
lower Manhattan, now uniting in response to this catastrophe, but for all
the people in the world, however deluded they may be. Yes, including the
terrorists who did these heinous acts and those who support them.
Do not misunderstand me here. Those responsible for the attacks must be
caught and brought to justice. That is our responsibility to all those who
have suffered, and that is also our responsibility to the deluded and
hate-full terrorists, who must be stopped. If, however, we want to stop
this cycle of hatred and violence, we must realize that our responsibility
is much broader than that.
Realizing our interdependence and mutual responsibility for each other
implies something more. When we try to live this interdependence, it is
called love. Love is more than a feeling, it is a mode of being in the
world. In Buddhism we talk mostly about compassion, generosity, and
loving-kindness, but they all reflect this mode of being. Such love is
sometimes mocked as weak and ineffectual, yet it can be very powerful, as
Gandhi showed. And it embodies a deep wisdom about how the cycle of hatred
and violence works and about how that cycle can be ended. An eye for an eye
makes the whole world blind, but there is an alternative. Twenty-five
hundred years ago, the Buddha said:
"He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me" -- for those who
harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease.
"He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me" -- for those who
do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease.
In this world hatred is never appeased by hatred; hatred is always appeased
by love. This is an ancient law. (Dhammapada, 3-5)
Of course, this transformative insight is not unique to Buddhism. After
all, it was not the Buddha who gave us the image of turning the other
cheek. In all the Abrahamic religions the tradition of a holy war between
good and evil coexists with this ancient law about the power of love. That
does not mean all the world's religions have emphasized this law to the
same extent. In fact, I wonder if this is one way to measure the maturity
of a religion, or at least its continuing relevance for us today: how much
the liberative truth of this law is acknowledged and encouraged. I do not
know enough about Islam to compare, but in the cases of Buddhism and
Christianity, for example, it is the times when this truth has not been
emphasized that these two religions have been most subverted by secular
rulers and nationalistic fervor.
So where does that leave us today? We find ourselves at a turning point. A
lust for vengeance and violent retaliation is rising, fanned by a leader
caught up in his own rhetoric of a holy war to purify the world of evil.
Please consider: does the previous sentence describe bin Laden, or
President Bush?
If we pursue the path of large-scale violence, bin Laden's holy war and
Bush's holy war will become two sides of the same war.
No one can foresee all the consequences of such a war. They are likely to
spin out of control and take on a life of their own. However, one sobering
effect is clearly implied by the ancient law: massive retaliation by the
United States in the Middle East will spawn a new generation of suicidal
terrorists, eager to do their part in this holy war.
But widespread violence is not the only possibility. If this time of crisis
encourages us to see through the rhetoric of a war to exterminate evil, and
if we begin to understand the intertwined roots of this evil, including our
own responsibility, then perhaps something good may yet come out of this
catastrophic tragedy.
David R. Loy
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
18 September 2001
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BELIEF MAKES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE.
(c) Mentor Max
In order to succeed, you must first believe that you can.
The only thing that stands between you and what you want from life,
is the will to try it and the faith to believe that it's possible.
The only true limit to your realization of tomorrow
will be your doubts of today.
The moment you carry the conviction of belief,
in that moment your dream will become reality.
If you think you can, you can.
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BIG MUD PUDDLES AND SUNNY DANDELIONS
(Author Unknown)
When I look at a patch of dandelions, I see a bunch of weeds that are going
to take over my yard. My kids see flowers for Mom and blowing white fluff
you can wish on.
When I look at an old drunk and he smiles at me, I see a smelly, dirty
person who probably wants money and I look away. My kids see someone
smiling at them and they smile back.
When I hear music I love, I know I can't carry a tune and don't have much
rhythm so I sit self-consciously and listen. My kids feel the beat and move
to it. They sing out the words. If they don't know them, they make up their
own.
When I feel wind on my face, I brace myself against it. I feel it messing
up my hair and pulling me back when I walk. My kids close their eyes,
spread their arms and fly with it, until they fall to the ground laughing.
When I pray, I say thee and thou and grant me this, give me that. My kids
say, "Hi God! Thanks for my toys and my friends. Please keep the bad dreams
away tonight. Sorry, I don't want to go to Heaven yet. I would miss my
Mommy and Daddy."
When I see a mud puddle I step around it. I see muddy shoes and dirty
carpets. My kids sit in it. They see dams to build, rivers to cross and
worms to play with.
I wonder if we are given kids to teach or to learn from?
No wonder God loves the little children!! Enjoy the little things in life,
for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
I wish you BIG MUD PUDDLES and SUNNY YELLOW DANDELIONS
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