Thinking in Images: David Breuer Weil's 'The Project'

Vishvapani (Simon Blomfield)

One day when I went round to David’s room in Clare College Cambridge, where we were fellow English students in the mid-1980s, the floor was strewn with dozens of playing card-sized scraps of paper, on each of which was a drawing. They were of bald, naked human figures with lumpen and malformed bodies, their outlines quickly drawn in rough lines. They crouched, or curled foetally, or held arms above them as if to shield themselves from a blow. Figure after figure was an image of pain and vulnerability. And there was David, squatting among them and grinning broadly.

He and I spent a lot of time together as students, and there were many evenings in his room, which was also his studio, where canvasses were stacked in deep piles against every available bit of wall space. We played Mozart and Dylan, and I read or we talked about the books we were studying (me a good deal more assiduously than him) which included philosophy and psychology as well as the greats of English literature. And as we talked, he painted.

In the many hours I spent watching David paint what amazed me was his ability to conceive images, and the technical facility that enabled him to turn his ideas into paintings at an unbelievable speed. Before those naked figures appeared he had been producing elongated women in red ball-gowns who eerily mixed glamour and malevolence. In the weeks that followed came a stream of paintings in which the same forms were enlarged in whites, blues and purples. I don’t know if this was the first time such figures had appeared in David’s work, but after an absence of several years, they are there again, twelve years later, in ‘The Project’. And the women who disappeared from his work with their arrival are again absent.

Even the most casual observer of David’s paintings can hardly fail to be impressed by the strength and variety of his imagery. The human figures In ‘The Project’ are not always so wracked by anguish as were those in the Cambridge sketches, but there are no smiles here, and mostly they suffer. I was always perplexed by the contrast between David’s cheerfulness and vigour and the anguish that is often represented in his work. But David has no qualms and no inhibitions in this respect. He sketches continually, and he doesn’t censor what appears. He refuses to predetermine what images he would like to produce and he doesn’t conceptualise the result. He seizes on the elements in his drawings that have strength and energy, and he follows that strength where it leads him. He is always alert to images in the world around, but still more to those in his thoughts. He exemplifies Emerson’s advice that: ‘a man should learn to detect and watch the glimmer of light that flashes across his mind from within.’

There is a characteristically eccentric secret behind David’s images. As a child he invented a kingdom called ‘the Empire of Nerac,’ and he imagines that each pen he buys is the tool of a court artist of the Empire. When the pen stops working the artist has died, and another will take his place. The artists have varying styles, and their work develops through their careers, making this a phenomenal prompt to creativity. David has been producing Neracian drawings for almost thirty years, and perhaps even he doesn’t know how many albums have been filled with such work (it must be hundreds).

I didn’t realise it at the time, but the drawings I saw spread across David’s floor were Neracian images. Eventually he brought some of his old albums up to Cambridge and I discovered Nerac for myself. Many of the drawings depicted the Empire’s inhabitants. There were angular depictions of Archdukes and Grand Viziers holding themselves stiffly before ornate interiors adorned with occult symbols and cabalistic hieroglyphs. There was a veritable dynasty of crown princes and pretentious nobility with covetous, disdainful expressions in drawings that resembled baroque lithographs embossed onto postage stamp scraps. Through this fiction David combines his engagement with raw imagery with a childlike playfulness (these aren’t his drawings, they are the artist’s), and this combination of vigour and frivolity accounts for the imaginative freedom of his work, and perhaps the element of whimsy in some of it.

It is natural to ask who or what the figures in these paintings signify. At the time I saw those images scattered across his room my immediate association was with the shaven and shrunken figures that stare out from photographs of concentration camps. A few years ago I took part in a contemplative retreat in the grounds of Berkenau and, in reflecting on what had happened in the place where I was sitting, I found that David’s figures came to my mind. His 1990 Sotheby’s show, ‘Large Figurations’, contained huge canvasses of melding, interlocking figures in softened reds and blues. At the time he produced these I thought David had moved on from his preoccupation with suffering, but at Berkenau those images, too, came to my mind as eerily sublimated recapitulations of torsos piled on the floor of gas chambers.

In the most personal and characteristic parts of David’s work even overtly tranquil images seem shaded by something darker. One of the most powerful of the Project canvasses is ‘Crate’, in which figures stand in a honeycomb of cubicles and we peer down on their shaven heads and stifled bodies. Like ‘Perspective’, the similar painting of hands reaching up from cells, this is a powerful figuration of the pervasive isolation of our ennucleated lives. But it evoked for me a more visceral association: the tiny standing cells at Auschwitz in which prisoners were kept in a closely confined space for days and weeks on end, without room to sit.

But it would be a mistake to identify these images solely with the Holocaust. That would tie them to a concept, and David’s endeavour is to evade such literalism. His undergraduate dissertation was on Holocaust literature, and he shared George Steiner’s concern that Holocaust art would always be inferior to the awfulness of the simple historical truth, and that fictionalising or mythologising the victims’ experience risked violating it. That was one of the subjects we tossed backwards and forwards as I lay on the couch in his room, book in hand, and he painted. Perhaps behind that discussion lay the tensions in Jewish tradition (and David is a devout Jew) around the place of visual art in the light of the Second Commandment injunction against graven images. Does this express, alongside rejection of the literal idolatry that reduces the divine to a statue, a sense that any human depiction does an injustice to the inalienable truth, the mysterious ‘suchness’ of the world as it has been created—imaged—by God? I suspect that David’s imagination is endlessly haunted by the Holocaust, but that he evades the problem of violation by distilling some essence of that experience and deeply internalising it. David’s paintings are uninhibited expressions of the images that appear in his inner landscape, and he values them for their power as images, whatever historical, artistic or psychological forces may have produced them.

But concepts and images are closely tied. Aquinas says that we cannot think without images, and Freud (whom we both studied at Cambridge) tells us that resonant images are a kind of thought. At their best David’s paintings resonate, signify and communicate in ways that prompt interpretation. I don’t have much to say about his more overtly metaphorical works, except that I think he is much more of an expressionist than a satirist, surrealist or allegoriser. His works undoubtedly comment on modern society and contemporary art, but their fundamental concern is more with the soul than with the intellect.

The best guide to David’s paintings that I can think of is Kafka. Like the figures in David’s paintings Kafka’s characters are not preoccupied with life in general, and still less with historical events, but with the peculiar circumstances of the world they inhabit, which follow different rules from those to which we are accustomed. Kafka’s world is one where you may be tried and convicted but never told your crime, or you can wake up and find you have turned into a giant insect. The tortoise-man in the Project image ‘Shell’ could be a brother to Kafka’s insect, and many of David’s characters look lost, as if they have undergone a similar metamorphosis. Their expressions are strained, and they seem perplexed – and perhaps oppressed – by the strangeness of their circumstances.

David’s characteristic colours also contribute to the sense that the paintings create a dislocated world. In our second year at Cambridge we both lived across the road from Kettles Yard, the household-turned-gallery that is a shrine to the elegant subtlety of the European-influenced British art of the mid-Twentieth century. David commented on this work, ‘They use so much white!’ He meant that colours were typically softened by being mixed with white, and the Kettle’s Yard aesthetic is a harmonious combination of fabrics, muted colours, and rounded forms. Nothing could be further from David’s vision, which is ‘uncanny’ in Freud’s sense of ‘unheimlich’, literally meaning ‘unhomely’. He uses cold blues, strong reds and a great deal of purple as well as yellows and blacks. You cannot feel at home with these colours, and the figures in the world they create are also, in a powerful sense, not at home.

The protagonists of ‘The Project’ paintings most resemble Kafka’s heroes in being victims: caught in webs, or crushed under a boot, or pouring with humanity over a weir in a vast river. Kafka’s creed was patience, and David’s figures similarly bear their peculiar circumstances. Sometimes they seem like ghosts, waiting inside suitcases or beds, like the memory of the owners or the previous occupants. Or perhaps they are our own ghosts, waiting to emerge from our skulls while we are still living, or mysterious cabalistic spirits that suffer for us the consequences of our spiritual malaise. But whether they are images of ourselves as victims or they are victims of ourselves, they gaze out with a stoical dignity that is the result not of heroic resistance, but simply of being themselves. Because of their sufferings—not in spite of them—these figures endure, and they possess a strength such as that superbly expressed by Kafka in The Blue Octavo Notebooks: ‘Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or more accurately, being indestructible, or more accurately, being.’

Perhaps something of this indestructibility lies behind the massive calm and solidity of the most successful pieces in ‘The Project’—the superb large canvasses such as ‘Descent’, ‘Web’, ‘Fall’, and ‘Perspective’. Their compositional ambition makes them so complete and so intensely focused that the individual figures become part of a vision of the human condition. Their calm comes from the wholeness of that vision. Having known David’s work over the years, these paintings seem to me a peak of his achievement to date, uniting many elements that have been long germinating.

So powerful are the images that David produces that it is possible to ignore another dimension of his work, which for me is just as characteristic and just as expressive: texture. I spent hours watching as he built up with astonishing skill and rapidity the textures from which the images are constructed. Look closely at a detail of many of his paintings and you will see a fascinating abstract that combines his distinctive colouration with large, bold contrasts. For several years in the 1990s these textures were absent from his work, but they re-emerged in ‘The Project’, and for me this is essential Breuer-Weil. These textures are like a signature, the expression of a temperament and sensibility that is constantly present, whatever image may be in the foreground. Looking at his paintings you can focus in on the texture and let the image dissolve into it. Or you can step back, and allow the image to distil itself from the layers of paint. I can imagine the subject matter of David’s paintings going through many phases in coming years, but it is hard to imagine these textures disappearing.

They are there, too, in his lumpy, rough-worked sculpture, and in both media his work has a visceral quality that abets the immediacy of the imagery. He is capable of great subtlety in colouration, but I also watched as he slapped the paint on and then gouged great channels through it. And this isn’t just backgrounds: this is how he did faces. The physicality of the painting is an important reason why, for all the ideas that course across the canvasses, his work is anything but intellectual.

David’s work is expressionist not only in its echoes of other artists, but also in the root sense of being expressive. We observe a mind expressing in images what cannot be said in words, and for that reason the very strongest work earns the right to be contemplated for itself, not for the ideas that are drawn into its gravitational field. Although they excavate an inner landscape his paintings are not introverted or narcissistic. At their best they give us the world bodied forth as image, and they suggest the sense in which the world may be discovered through the images that appear to an attuned and reflective consciousness. Kafka, once again, says it best:

‘There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise: in raptures it will writhe before you.’

Dharma Life: First Editorial

Editorial of Dharma Life, Issue 1

Spring 1996

This magazine’s predecessor, Golden Drum, was launched 10 years ago. In his first editorial , Nagabodhi wrote: ‘The FWBO has, in a sense, come of age. And now it is time to speak out with a new voice. That voice is Golden Drum.’ For the launch of Dharma Life I would like us to speak out in our own voices. Those voices can be heard in Dharma Life.
As the magazine evolves, I hope it will articulate, to as wide an audience as possible, the Buddhist values on which the FWBO is based. In this sense the magazine will be spiritually committed. I am also determined to encourage people to speak for themselves.

Real Dharma

Dharma Life is a magazine written and largely produced by committed Buddhists. It is not ‘about’ Buddhism in an academic way. Nor is it hoping to popularize Buddhism, by linking it to spiritual fashions in a New Age manner. Its editorial policy is founded firmly on the principles of Buddhism and the experience of putting those principles into practice.

More specifically, Dharma Life has grown out of a particular Buddhist movement, the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. It also aims to reflect the FWBO’s values but Dharma Life is not for nor about the FWBO alone. Its values are simply the fundamental values of the Buddhist tradition imbued with the determination to bring them alive in the modern world. Thus the magazine is concerned with the encounter of Buddhism and Western culture and is for anyone interested in what Buddhists make of that encounter.

Real Life

Dharma Life is not the place for theoretical presentations of Buddhism an, in that sense, it is not intended to fulfill a teaching role. It expresses the experience of practising Buddhism in the modern world.

When teaching one is inevitably trying to present a clear exposition of the Buddha’s path and to encourage people to put it into practice. Too easily this can become a form of censorship, a quiet deletion of anything in the tradition, or in one’s experience, which might counteract that positive impression or raise questions to which there are no easy answers.
I am personally more interested in difficult questions than easy answers. And in Dharma Life I hope to publish writers who are able to express their Buddhist values by being prepared to speak up for what they believe to be the truth. I want to find committed writing that is new, true and considered.

I believe that an open-minded approach that is unafraid to take risks is the only one in keeping with the spirit of Buddhism, and indeed, of the FWBO. It is also an approach that allows the creative space for incisive writing and stimulating reading.
One potential pitfall is to look to ‘armchair experts’ for dispassionate, intellectual discussions of ‘Buddhism in the West’ (as if writers can be aloof from their subject). This would be quite wrong for a spiritually committed magazine – dispassion is the last thing we need. Instead Dharma Life will draw on the deep reserves we have developed among Western Buddhists.

If we can genuinely speak for ourselves we will find that we speak to others. I am confident that Dharma Life will be relevant far beyond the Buddhist community. It is traditionally said that spiritually committed people are essential to civil society because they point out ways in which it can grow beyond its existing limitations.

Buddhist ideas and experience are powerful indeed. The task is to unleash their potential.

The Ethics of Abortion & the Buddhist Perspective

In the grounds of the Purple Cloud Temple in Chichibu, Japan, stand row upon row of 2ft-high stone images. Each has robes, a shaven head and eyes closed in meditation to show it represents a Buddhist monk. They also wear a red bib, and many have toys – pinwheels spinning in the wind or miniature pianos. Not only are these figures monks, they are also children
These child-monk statues represent the spirit of an aborted child. Men and women visit them singly or in couples to perform rites of apology. As a child, the image represents a mizuko, the living being that was aborted. As a monk it is Jizo (a form of the Bodhisattva Kshitigarbha) who may guide the spirits of the departed children on their journey through the realm of the dead. They evoke sadness and hope, aspiration and pity.

Temples like Purple Cloud devoted solely to mizuko ceremonies marking the passage of an aborted fetus are common across Japan. The images are vivid expressions of the Buddhist belief that a fetus is a living being, and yet they occur in a culture in which abortion is common. This combination of elements seems natural in Japan, but strange in the West – although some American Zen teachers perform mizuko ceremonies. Such ceremonies do address the emotions that abortion provokes. But the danger is that the rituals may tacitly condone abortion. So what are the ethical issues that abortion raises for Buddhists the world over?

In recent years abortion has been debated in western countries with perhaps more passion than any other ethical issue. On one side the feminist lobby argues that a fetus is part of a woman’s body, and she should have the right to choose what happens to it. On the other side anti-abortion campaigners argue that the fetus is an independent being and that termination is murder. An extreme fringe of anti-abortionists in the us have even killed doctors who perform abortions, while in Ireland, where abortion is illegal, a referendum will soon be held on whether it should be legalised.

While many political debates are abstract and can seem remote from ordinary experience, abortion concerns the mysterious stirrings of life in the deep intimacy of the womb. It involves flesh, blood and tissue. It touches strong feelings, and choices made around it alter the course of lives. Readers of this article may have had an abortion, or considered having one, or have been closely involved with a friend or partner who faced the issue. It is perhaps the most acute ethical problem that many of us are likely to confront in our personal lives. I also think men can and should engage with the abortion issue. It affects men, too, and while the choice will be a woman’s, the issues it raises are human, not just personal and subjective.

Disagreements about the ethics of abortion point up deeper uncertainties in post-Christian societies. When is the start of life which we can recognise as human? What is life anyway? How do we balance ‘the woman’s right to choose’ against ‘the child’s right to life’? And in the absence of consensus on these questions, who decides? Political debate about abortion has tended to polarise, but between the opposing stances stand ordinary people, including Buddhists, trying to act ethically, wanting lives that are free and fulfilling, yet which do not cause suffering.

Sometimes reasons for having an abortion are intensified by issues of rape, sexual abuse or severe disability. But in the space of this article I want to focus on basic ethical principles. These, however, are not rules, and must be applied in individual circumstances with compassion and imagination. For those who look to Buddhism as a source of #wisdom, can the Buddhist approach to ethics point out a path through the maze?

Each day all around the world Buddhists place their hand together in a gesture of devotion and chant the Pali words panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami (I undertake the training principle of not taking life). This is the primary principle of Buddhist ethics, the first precept. It is alternatively rendered as the principle of non-violence, and the imperative to act from compassion, or love. This is perhaps Buddhism’s greatest contribution to ethics, a single great principle: do not cause harm. When I started researching Buddhist responses to abortion I expected to find a range of views, mirroring the disagreements in society at large. In fact I found widespread agreement that for a Buddhist abortion is a breach of this precept – it is taking life. What was less straightforward was how this view should be implemented, how it translates into the complex, difficult realities of life.

Damien Keown is a leading academic authority on Buddhist ethics, who in 1999 edited Buddhism and Abortion, the first scholarly study of the subject. Talking over a coffee in London, he emphasised that Buddhism has a clear response to abortion. ‘If you look at the canonical texts and the views of the scholars the position is clear. It falls squarely within the first precept.’ The overwhelming majority of Buddhist teachers echo the view that abortion is taking life. Ven. Vajirajnana, a senior Sri Lankan bhikkhu living in Britain repeats the traditional view. ’Abortion is very wrong, because it is taking a life,’ he said. ‘We have no authority to take life.’

Buddhist texts do not deal with the issue of abortion at length, but where it is touched upon it is seen as killing. The Vinaya monastic code specifically forbids monks and nuns to perform abortions, and other texts suggest its harmful consequences. One garish semi-canonical text (a Jataka) even describes a river flowing through Mahaniraya, the Buddhist hell, from which abortionists and those who oppress the weak cannot escape. Its waters are sharp and bitter, and swords cover its sides.
The Buddhist position, then, seems plain. But it should be added that in fact Buddhism has had little to say on the subject. While the principles are clear, coherent and sound, there is little in the tradition by way of practical guidance. And, put so starkly, there is also something lacking in its message. Faced with so fraught a subject its words seem abstract, even inhumane.

I want to know what these teachings have to say to a woman experiencing the pain of an unwanted pregnancy, and contemplating the hardship and thwarted hopes an unwanted child would bring. What can they say to the guilt and confusion of many who have had abortions? Do these teachings simply compound that guilt with yet more religious disapproval? And do they imply that abortion should be made illegal, when doing so pushes it into an unregulated, inequitable back-street economy?

Such questions cannot be fully answered in this article, but it is instructive to consider why they have not yet been formulated. Damien Keown (who is not a practising Buddhist) suggested the reason lies in Buddhism’s role in Asia. ‘The Buddha was not concerned with reforming society, and subsequently institutional Buddhism has been driven by monks who see these as issues for lay-people. So it has backed away from many hard problems in favour of
world-renunciation.’ One reason for this is related to its greatest strength. The emphasis of Buddhist morality lies in the cultivation of personal virtue. Buddhism has precise instructions – such as the metta bhavana (development of loving-kindness) meditation practice – for becoming more morally sensitive, and aware of others. But Keown remarks, ‘Buddhism has avoided commenting on moral questions by saying that if one has the requisite qualities one will know what to do.’

The result in some Buddhist societies, so far as abortion is concerned, is what Keown calls ‘schizophrenia’. His book contains studies of Thailand, Korea and Japan, where abortion is common among Buddhist women. But it has been hidden away, little discussed, a cause of shame. Keown explained that Buddhism is now being confronted by issues it has hitherto avoided. ‘In the West Buddhism is a non-monastic phenomenon and westerners want moral guidance. But in the absence of Buddhist ethical literature teachers don’t know where to look for answers. So you get a response like "it’s up to you, find your own
way". Perhaps worst is the Zen emphasis on emptiness and saying there is no right or wrong, which doesn’t help in a moral context. It is up to western Buddhists to develop a proper response. That will be the main growth area in Buddhist thought.’

The limitations of Buddhism’s practical ethics may come as a surprise to those who see it as an ideal religion with the virtues but without the faults of western religions. But the sincere ethical enquirer is likely also to be disappointed by the discussion of abortion that has taken place in the West, with its emphasis on rights, legal definitions, and appeals to science. In the remainder of this article I want to explore ways in which the encounter of Buddhism and the western abortion debate might be fruitful for both.

The key question in the abortion debate is, when is the start of life which we can recognise as human? Since Christian morality ceased to define a consensus, western societies have looked to science for guidance and to the law for judgement. The challenge for the law is to define a point at which a fetus should be under its protection. Before this a fetus is considered part of a woman’s body, and abortion is equivalent to surgery. After it, the fetus is considered to have an independent identity, and it may not be aborted.

But when should that point be? Virabhadra, a member of the Western Buddhist Order and a consultant gynaecologist, is aware of current scientific understanding such as when the brain can support a consciousness that can feel pain, and when a fetus is capable of surviving outside the womb. However, he emphasised that science cannot decide when a fetus is a being in its own right. For example, he said, ‘an embryo can’t survive without the mother until quite late in pregnancy, but the point at which a fetus can survive independently has come down as technology has advanced.’

Whatever point one chooses in the embryo’s development as constituting life seems arbitrary and artificial. It is one thing to describe changes, another to evaluate their significance, and yet another to decide how one should act upon them. As Virabhadra said, ‘Science cannot tell us what life is, nor whether it should be taken.’

The traditional Buddhist answer is more clear cut. Buddhism teaches that life starts with the conjunction of sperm, egg and the gandabbha (the consciousness that is reborn). For most Buddhist commentators and for some western Buddhists, that decides the issue. But I wonder if this is adequate. If the Buddhist position on abortion depends on a belief in rebirth, it will have nothing to say to those who do not share a conviction that rebirth occurs. This includes western society at large (including many western Buddhists) which is uncertain, agnostic or sceptical about rebirth.

The more one studies what Buddhist traditions have said about rebirth the more mysterious it seems. How can a very simple organism, such as a recently fertilised egg, be conscious in any recognisable sense of the term? And is it meaningful to speak of a consciousness that is seeking to express itself through such an organism? An embryo is a potential human being, but this is different from saying that something has been reborn. So Buddhists use metaphors that combine ideas of presence and potentiality, such as saying there ‘is’ a ‘seed’ of consciousness. However, an alternative Buddhist tradition (described in the Theravadin Katthavattu) argues that rebirth is a progressive process, lasting 11 weeks, that occurs as the fetus develops. So what implications might this have for abortion during that time?

It seems best to say that consciousness and human life are mysteries, and one looks in vain to Buddhism for explanations that clarify the mystery. Both Buddhism and science assert that the life of a human is a process which starts with conception. But to draw ethical conclusions one must consider the significance of the stages in that process. A plant is a form of life, and one’s fin#er is ‘alive’. But it isn’t unethical to dig up a potato, nor to cut one’s finger. The issue is not so much whether it is life but whether it is something we call human. The ethical question turns on when this ‘life’ becomes an ‘individual’ that will be affected by our actions.

Reflection on Buddhist teachings may suggest why the topic is elusive. If there is no soul or permanent, abiding self, and consciousness is a flux, then how can one speak of what it is to be alive and conscious? One can formulate cogent doctrinal descriptions, but there is something irreducible in the experience of being an individual separate from others, yet connected with them. What is it to think, to experience, to live? How, then, can one say what is reborn? When I reflect on the process of conception, gestation and birth I feel amazement and – to be honest – fear at nature’s mysterious power.

From this perspective one plainly cannot pin down questions of selfhood and identity. Similarly the question of when one should start to treat the fetus as human depends on conscience or moral sensibility. And one thing Buddhism can offer is an approach to learning how to listen to that conscience, and develop that sensibility.

I have asked many Buddhists from various traditions about their views on abortion and, while the overwhelming majority felt abortion was an ethical breach, their reasoning turned on a gut-felt, intuitive response to the question of when life starts. At the London Buddhist Centre Vimalachitta is responsible for working with women who are mitras or ‘friends’ in relation to the Western Buddhist Order. Mitras undertake to follow the five Buddhist precepts, including the precept of not taking life, with its implications for abortion. Vimalachitta reported that in her many conversations on abortion, rebirth rarely figures. She told me, however, that because of intuitive factors this issue is rarely a problem.

‘When people start meditating they almost always come to feel that an abortion would be taking life. There are concerns about what would happen in an extreme case (such as a pregnancy resulting from rape) but that is understandable. It helps when I explain that this is not a political statement, and when I say it does not mean you are condemning people who do choose to have abortions.’

This intuitive response to ethics seems to me to point to a dimension that has been missing from debate in the West. Buddhism can learn from the western tradition of ethical reasoning. Learning to think about ethical issues seems to be an important aspect of preparing ouselves to meet them: a crisis such as an unwanted pregnancy is probably the worst time to try to think clearly about right or wrong. But ethics usually concerns human relationships, and understanding these requires intuition, sensitivity and an emotionally integrated awareness of others. Then we need clarity and courage to draw conclusions and stick by them.

While researching this article I spoke to women who have had abortions, and I think their testimonies are important. I have space for just one case study. Lisa (not her real name) is an ordained Buddhist who teaches meditation and Buddhism in England. She had an abortion aged 28, before she became a Buddhist. ‘I was a student and a committed feminist trying to understand what it meant to be a woman at that time, the 1970s. I had no desire for kids, and ‘the woman’s right to choose’ was an article of faith for me; and for medical reasons there was also a chance that I would have a spontaneous abortion. So I immediately decided to have one. Moral considerations did not enter at all.’

However the abortion affected Lisa in unexpected ways. ‘I really underestimated the emotional impact. After the operation my response was, “Oh no, how dreadful.” The emotional distress I felt stayed with me a long time. I had made my decision intellectually, but in retrospect I think I cut off from my emotional responses. I had not anticipated that I would feel grief, and that there had been a death.’

Talking with other women who have had abortions I found frequent echoes of Lisa’s experience. They were unprepared for the actual experience of having an abortion, the instinctive sense that the fetus was alive. One person’s experience can never represent everyone’s, and responses to having an abortion do vary. Some women feel sadness, but not regret. Some say they would do the same thing again, given similar circumstances. Others wouldn’t. Intuitions are not arguments, but it seems important to value emotionally-aware responses such as Lisa’s and I wonder what happens when political views overlay them.

Ethical decisions involve value judgments, so it is inevitable that subjective factors enter. Scientists’ descriptions and legal definitions cannot tell us when humanity starts. The doctrines of Buddhism will persuade us only if we already have faith in them. But perhaps the feeling that abortion is wrong helps us to draw closer to a truth. For Buddhists it is ironic that the law seeks to define identity through separatenes. Buddhist ethics are based on the idea that we are not separate, all life is dependent on other life, and for that very reason it is natural to care about each other. Even after a baby is born it could not survive without the sustenance and protection of its mother. The language – of rights and legal identity – in which the abortion debate is framed seems inadequate to the subtle connections between mother and fetus, fetus and baby.

If reality is subtle and changing, then our understanding of it cannot be definitive or absolute; yet it seems wise to err on the side of ensuring that one is not causing harm. I do not know to what extent animals can suffer, but I choose to be vegetarian because I feel that they can, because there is some evidence that they do, and because I know that they might. So I may not be able to prove that a fetus has consciousness, can experience pain, or should be regarded as a human individual, but the fact that this may be the case is a decisive consideration for me.

Western discussions of abortion have been identified with the legal question of whether abortion should be permitted. This pulls it into a political arena, which is hardly suited to open-hearted reflection on the nature of life. It also mixes legal and moral issues. We tend to think that if abortion is legal that means it is right, but all it does is to move moral responsibility from the state to the mother. We speak of an individual’s ‘right to choose’ whether to have an abortion, but we speak too little of what that choice involves.

I like the suggestion of the Buddhist commentator in his book Inner Revolution. ‘Aware of the serious moral, physical and psychological consequences [of abortion], we should offer every facility and advantage to the woman who chooses to bring her baby to term … great honour and respect, excellent health care, good adoption programmes …’. This seems more constructive than the violent protests of American pro-lifers, but I am also aware that the facilities which Robert Thurman advocates are not available to many of those confronted by an unwanted pregnancy.

Abortion presents a challenge to our compassion. This compassion must include the baby and the aborting mother, holding together their conflicting perspectives and their sad collision. So I would add to Thurman’s wish-list the kind of sensitive counselling for women considering abortion that helps the decision to be made in an atmosphere free from panic, fear or guilt. The days of ‘coffee-break abortions’ are long gone, and the decision to have an abortion is rarely taken without strong reasons. I am not arguing for making abortion illegal. The fact that debate has continued unresolved suggests there is genuine room for disagreement.

Damien Keown says, ‘Buddhism cannot offer a middle way on abortion, because it has already taken sides.’ Its contribution is a single, clear principle, the ethical precept of not taking life. But as I have explored this issue, spoken to those who have views on it, talked with women who have faced abortions, and considered the traditional teachings, I have understood more fully that the way this principle is implemented is as important as the principle itself. Perhaps the most important thing Buddhism can contribute to this ethical debate is a compassionate and engaged sensibility that seeks to be true to life’s difficulty and complexity.

Culture's Peak: an interview with Harold Bloom

by Vishvapani

When I first encountered Harold Bloom’s work, I discovered a remarkable mixture. Bloom is Professor of Humanities at Yale University, and is widely considered America’s leading literary critic. His many books combine an enormous breadth of reading with a great depth of response. He is both an upholder of western literary tradition and a radical critic of the ways it has been interpreted. He is ironic and sceptical, but in books such as the Anxiety of Influence and The Western Canon, he has championed an approach to literature that is based upon the concerns of spiritual life. In this way he opens up possibilities of looking to the western literary and spiritual traditions to fill the gap left by the conventional religions.

Bloom’s most recent book, Omens of Millennium, explores the preoccupations of contemporary spirituality in the light of the western mystical traditions of Gnosticism, the heretical counterpart of early Christianity; Sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam; and kabbala, or Jewish mysticism.

Central to Bloom’s approach to both literature and religion is the idea of ‘the imaginal’, which he draws from Henri Corbin, the French writer on Sufism. This idea suggests the richest and deepest kinds of experience that can only be expressed in poetry or religious symbols. The imaginal, according to Bloom, ‘is a middle reality between ordinary perceptions and the realm of the divine. This middle world of angelic perception is equated with the human world of the awakened imagination, the dwelling place of sages and poets – and all of us in certain exalted or enlightened moments when we see, think and feel most lucidly’.

I first became familiar with the idea of the imaginal through the writing of Sangharakshita, my own Buddhist teacher, who emphasises the importance of cultivating ‘the imaginal faculty’, the ability to enter the world of an artistic or religious image, through meditation and aesthetic appreciation. Bloom’s approach has much in common with Buddhism, and offers a way to discern what is most valuable in western traditions, in the arts, and perhaps even in Buddhism itself. However, Bloom still uses traditional western religious terms, including God and ‘the self’.
Fulfilling a long-held ambition, I visited Bloom at his home in Connecticut, to explore the similarities and differences.

Dharma Life: In Omens of Millennium you speak of your rejection of the major western religious traditions, including their view of God, and you explore alternative ways of thinking about spiritual life. What did you reject?
Harold Bloom: I was raised in the Judaic tradition, but I am totally alienated from it. I have increasingly seen it as a terrible parody of what I regard as the authentic Jewish religion. What we call ‘normative Judaism’ is based on a very strong misreading of the Hebrew Bible, propagated in the 2nd century ce in Palestine by rabbis who were trying to meet the needs of the Jewish people under Roman occupation. To think that 1,800 years later it answers the realities of Jewish (or anyone’s) existence is preposterous. It accounts for so much of what is wrong with Israel and what is wrong with Jewish life in the us.
But I think that nothing can be done about this. A historical imposture that has lasted for 1,800 years will not be undone, just as the imposture of what absurdly calls itself Christianity, and has lasted 1,900 years, is not going to be undone. It seems that Buddhism is not so contaminated among most of its adherents by a false reading of its original texts as every variety of Christianity that I know.

V: In looking for viable spiritual alternatives you draw on the esoteric traditions of western religion – Gnosticism and kabbala. Why are you so drawn to these seemingly arcane traditions?
HB: I cannot hope to understand the religious history of the East. Hinduism is impenetrable to me. A number of my friends have become Buddhists – I estimate there must now be several million Buddhists in America. But for me Buddhism is barely available – I have tried, but I don’t think I understand it. So I am confined to the western tradition. That means I look at Judaic tradition, and what came after it in Christianity and Islam. And I find that all I can identify with are the heterodox elements – the traditions of ‘gnosis’ or ‘knowing’ in its various manifestations.
If I look at Classical thought, I can only identify with a particular strain in Platonism, which in turn engenders the vast neo-Platonic tradition, and then rejoins the Gnostic tradition, in Hermetism. The early Hermetic circles were confined to a very few people who were evidently secular, philosophical and scholarly, but they have had a vast influence on western literature. Again and again when you have poetry that is aware of itself as poetry, Hermetic elements reappear. This happens with William Blake, with the French Symbolists, with the High Romantics, with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the us. That seems to be most available to me.
What fascinates me about Sufi texts as expounded by Henri Corbin – the indispensable guide to Sufi tradition and a grand writer – is that they turn invariably on the notion of the imaginal, which they speak of as ‘the angelic world’. It is a notion implicit in Hermetism, which I first came to know through my study of Kabbala. The imaginal is that realm which is available to us in many guises, aesthetic and not at all aesthetic, which is neither the super-sensible nor the empirical. It is what Corbin calls ‘the middle territory’.

V: ‘The imaginal’ suggests the realm of the imagination. But when you speak of the angelic realm, I am reminded of Wallace Stevens’s phrase ‘the necessary angel’, which suggests there are some truths and experiences that can only be expressed through images or symbols. Why are angels ‘necessary’? Why do we need images to apprehend the spiritual?
HB: The traditions of western heterodox spirituality that fascinate me have always been concerned with image-thinking. Poets do not conceive without imaging. Plato himself is the most powerful of image-thinkers. The Yahwist [the original biblical writer], who is the gateway to a more archaic Jewish religion, is a great image-thinker. Jacob’s encounter with the angel cannot be regarded as literal, and therefore must be seen as an enormous image. The Yahwistic account of the creation is an ironically humorous image. God makes a mud-pie, and breathes into it! I don’t know if any spiritual traditions are possible without images. In every Buddhist text I know there is extraordinarily beautiful image-thinking.

V: The implication seems to be that if we ponder such images deeply enough we can have access to the realms of experience from which they arise. Could you say something about your own explorations of the imaginal in your engagement with western literature?
HB: I have used the concept very much in my work, though I have found alternative ways of talking about it. I am now writing – you see the evidence piled up around me – a vast book on Shakespeare and Imagination, which I have been trying to write for the past 11 or 12 years. I don’t think I will actually use the term ‘imaginal’ in the book, but I will use the concept, drawing my terms from Shakespeare himself.
Shakespeare is the greatest inventor of character, and I believe he is the inventor of the human as we know it in the West. I think Shakespeare’s also the greatest master of the imaginal. For instance, the world of the Romances, where we think of things as supernatural or preternatural, is simply the exercise of the imaginal. This is perhaps more suggestive than anything in Dante because it is so ambiguous. There is a kind of glancing upward from the human condition to something beyond the human condition.

V: This implies that in investigating poetry you are also investigating how the human mind makes sense of reality in ways that go beyond ideas and concepts. Could you talk about how this process works?
HB: In his death poem, Of Mere Being, Wallace Stevens uses the image of ‘the palm at the end of the mind’. I don’t know if he was aware that it was a Sufi image. The Sufi Ibn Arabi says, when God formed Adam from the moistened red clay into which he breathed, there was a certain lump left over that he couldn’t put into the Adam figure and from which he made the palm tree. Stevens says:

The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance … on the edge of space

Here we are surely in the realm of the imaginal. It is a reaching towards what would have to be called the super-sensible, yet Stevens is a wholly secular and naturalistic poet. Simply because he executes the full range of the poetic imagination, he finds himself again and again in the imaginal realm. He defines the imaginal in the America of his day. Just before he left for the hospital to die of cancer, Stevens wrote the last lines of the poem:
The bird sings, its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in its branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
The last words of a master. ‘Fire-fangled’ means fashioned out of fire, so the bird is a kind of phoenix. He did not overtly think the poem was about resurrection, but I interpret it implicitly in that highly Gnostic sense of resurrection. As the Gnostic Valentinian gospel says: ‘Christ was resurrected, he rose, and then he died’. The resurrection takes place in this life. That view is purely American. The American relation to Jesus is one of knowing yourself resurrected in this life. By being ‘born again’ American Christians mean something much more graphic than European Christians ever meant.

V: When we move from the sphere of literature to the sphere of religion, one of the differences is that religion in the West has traditionally involved belief. Your emphasis on the imaginal seems to be an alternative approach, and yet from a Buddhist point of view it is striking that you use certain terms (such as God and the self) drawn from the theistic traditions, which Buddhism would reject. Why bring God into it?
HB: The deepest influence on me since my own ‘middle of the journey’ crisis around 1965 has been Emerson. I am always battling with friends like Richard Poirier who, like myself, argue for Emerson’s centrality in American literature, thought and existence, but who want to despiritualise him. It is Emerson who insists on bringing God into it, because he says, ‘it is God in you who speaks to another or hears his own words on the lips of another’.
But also it is an experiential matter for me, as it was for Emerson. I do believe – in fact I know – there is a best and oldest part of oneself, and that best and oldest part seems to me definitive of God. That hardly means I am sitting here as a representative of God. I am certainly no such thing. Finding that best and oldest part of one, that spark or pneuma as the Gnostics call it, is not easy. I can’t get at it. There is so much rubble in the self. You have to burrow down and try to get at the original spark and usually the effort does not work. Occasionally it does manifest itself, but most of the time I am not in communion with the best and oldest part of myself – alas. I am far too imperfect an old wreck for that.

V: You say that to understand literature or religion ‘the only method is the method of the self’ – experience is the only touchstone. Can you say more?
HB: I think everything else is a delusion, or an imposition, or yielding to someone else’s self. Anything else is inauthentic.

V: Your critics say that by insisting on this you deny social and political realities, and even risk falling into solipsism or relativism. When one moves from questions of literary response to questions of religious truth, many people would find the method of the self inadequate if it denies the possibility of ‘objective’ truth.
HB: We cannot get at anything ultimately authentic outside of ourselves – outside our experience – so we have to look into what we understand by the self. Here my understanding of the self comes out of the complexities in Gnosticism. There are two selves. One is a self-aggrandising, or outward self, which is what Meister Eckhart meant when he said so fiercely that ‘only the self burns in hell’. But the other self is what Whitman calls ‘the real Me, or Me myself’, what Emerson calls ‘part or particle of God’. Emerson does not mean the outwardly aggressive, accumulative self. He means something else, and I do also.
When I use the term I mean what Gnosticism calls the individual spark or breath, which is what remains of the authentic God in one. But my academic critics, who are preoccupied with what they assert are communal (i.e. political) concerns, are not going to understand this. That is why you get the developments in modern academic life, which I call ‘the school of resentment’. In a Buddhist context, where I would agree with the rejection of the limited self, I do not think I would face so many misunderstandings.

V: There seems a strong tendency to literalise images, which is perhaps the origin of conventional religion. Instead you try to see the imaginal in its own terms. Most writers on religion or literature, however, tend to ‘interpret down’ something that is expressed in images and symbols into a system of rational thought.
HB: Far from understanding poetry to be ‘spilled religion’, as Matthew Arnold considered it, I’ve always thought religion is spilled poetry. I try to interpret religious or poetic symbols upwards – to apprehend at a distance those elements in the imaginal which really do intimate something that goes beyond the realm of the aesthetic and seems to knock at the gates of the super-sensible.
In my writing and thinking I try to establish a ‘modern Gnostic’ version of the imaginal. I draw on Romantic and post-Romantic literature for my vocabulary because of its intense implicit Gnosticism – its insistence on the direct experience of knowing, which creates its own images. I utilise that as a vocabulary for the imaginal. But I cannot say that I have as yet made such a project cohere, though I am trying, with help from Shakespeare.

V: Your recent work in religious criticism has grown out of your career as a literary critic. How did that change take place? Was it because you came to see poetry in more or less religious terms?
HB: I would emphasise that my work is religious criticism, not religious writing. I have not learned to cross the divide – I am far too limited in the religious sphere. I want to make the right distinctions and help others to do so. But I cannot become a religious teacher because I have no light of my own to dispense.
I am not so sure there has been any fundamental change in my approach to poetry, but my work has moved into new areas and I think Shakespeare has made the difference. The distinction between secular and sacred vanishes when you invoke Shakespeare. He is not a Christian dramatist, and yet he is not an anti-Christian dramatist. GK Chesterton brilliantly said that although he wanted to make Shakespeare into a Catholic writer, he couldn’t because what Shakespeare essentially shows is ‘great spirits in chains’. And that isn’t the Christian vision. I agree.

V: In The Western Canon you are highly critical of recent developments in academic approaches to literature, such as ‘cultural materialism’, which are mainly concerned with political agendas. Does literary study still offer this training in the imagination?
HB: There is always the hope that we might revive the study of literature as one which takes the images of literature seriously again. But I think that is a dream. The study of literature in the West has been effectively destroyed. It will certainly not revive in the academies. It is by no means dead among common or general readers, as my correspondence shows. Every time a new translation of The Western Canon appears I am deluged with letters from readers who dislike what the academic study of literature has become, because it belies their experience.
Traditional literary study teaches you not to reduce the image. It takes images very seriously indeed as ways of structuring reality. The leading literary critics of the 20th century – Wilson Knight, Northrop Frye, even a secular figure like Kenneth Burke – taught that everything depends upon the sanctity of the image. It must not be reduced or discarded, and one must not try to find a cognitive substitute for it.

V: Can the tradition of western literature provide an alternative canon to that of theistic traditions, a source of spiritual nourishment from within western culture?
HB: That is a fascinating suggestion and it runs counter to current fashion in the us and Britain, particularly in the universities. It is what I suppose I stand for, or battle for. But it is an extremely optimistic notion. People who are supposed to be students of literature and scholars of the literary canon have turned against it with a horrible odium.
None the less, what is still most available to us, as a gateway to the imaginal, is indeed the literary tradition – if only we knew how to get at it. When you read texts from kabbala, Sufism or Gnosticism, they retain an arcane aspect. Something that does not lose the aura of the esoteric is, in a sense, never fully ‘available’. But the literary tradition is not arcane, even if its spiritual aspects are becoming arcane, because it has been so hideously politicised and it is so badly taught – where it is taught at all.
Shakespeare is available. So is Dante, though to fewer people as he is more abstruse. Blake is available, though not perhaps when he is most fully himself in the Prophetic Books; Whitman is available, though he has been so badly expounded and it has become difficult to see that he is indeed a religious writer. The idea of aesthetic experience still has a universal aspect.
So, for me at least, the aesthetic can provide a gateway to the imaginal. I find myself happiest and most at home when I teach Shakespeare. In trying accurately to expound Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear or the high comedies, it seems as if I am closest to my own spiritual experience. I cannot regard Blake as other than a spiritual preceptor on the one hand, and on the other hand a very great aesthetic phenomenon. What moves me in the Hermetic writings, or Sufi texts, is the image-making power that is involved. To me the aesthetic is the imaginal. The heterodox tradition in the West is the imaginal, and the two fuse.

first published in Dharma Life 5, Summer 1997

Interview With Palden Gyatso

Palden Gyatso has put on weight since the first press photos were taken shortly after his escape from Tibet, where he spent 33 years in Chinese-run prisons. The flesh is no longer so cruelly shrunken on his face, the lines etched by decades of hunger and suffering are less clearly visible. That was the first thing I noticed when we met to talk about his newly published memoir, Fire Under The Snow. As he greeted me, his face shone with an extraordinary warmth, before settling back into a stern, grave sobriety.

Following Palden’s release from prison in 1995, the Tibetan underground smuggled him out of the country along perilous escape routes over the Himalayas. They hoped he would tell the world about his experiences in the Tibetan gulag. In the two years since then he has testified before a United Nations tribunal, addressed pro-Tibetan protests in the West and, with the help of his translator Tsering Shakya, written a book.

Fire Under The Snow is a prison memoir in the genre of Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi, the story of how a man’s humanity survives the extreme inhumanity of his captors. With Palden, however, there is a Buddhist twist. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the book is his lack of resentment towards his tormentors. How had he been able to avoid hating the Chinese? After Tsering had translated my question, Palden shook his head vigorously. I had not understood.

‘It is not that I was without hatred. Especially when I was being tortured by my guards, I had immense hatred against them because I was being hurt. But, as a religious person, after the event I could reflect on what had happened, and I could see that those who inflicted torture did so out of their own ignorance. As a religious person I have to sit back and ask myself, what is all this? Buddhist teachings say, don’t let your calm be disturbed and do not respond to anger with anger.’

Theory is one thing, but Palden’s ability to put this into practice is remarkable. Before the Chinese takeover he was a monk at Drepung, the largest monastery in Tibet. Palden was caught up in the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule, arrested and sent to a prison camp. As he came from a wealthy family, Palden was singled out for beatings and torture. Prisoners were put to forced labour and many died of starvation in the famine that affected the whole of China.

Palden escaped with several companions and had nearly reached the border with Bhutan when he was recaptured. ‘At first I thought, this is it, they will execute me. But they didn’t. Then feelings of anxiety and fear overcame me. I began to remember all the terrible things we had en-dured before – the beatings, the starvation. I thought, now all that will be repeated.’ As part of a ritual humiliation in front of all the prisoners, Palden was knocked over and his face was ground into the earth while his attacker shouted: ‘The earth is the Party, the blue sky is the people, and between the earth and the blue sky there is no escape for you.’

Communist propaganda had always been drummed into prisoners, but once the Cultural Revolution started the prisoners were subjected to savage re-education sessions called thamzing. They were forced to ‘confess’, and learnt to use the language of Communist rhetoric against themselves. Palden mentions that he would confess to having gone to the latrine too frequently to avoid work, thus subverting socialism and hampering production. Most serious were the times when prisoners were forced to denounce each other. Often these meetings ended in mass beatings of the accused prisoner.

Having spent half of his life under Communism, what does Palden think of it? ‘If you were to read the teachings of Marxism, you would get the impression it is very peaceable and compatible with Buddhism. But in Communism, the emphasis is on the material world and material gain; in this way it is fundamentally different to Buddhism. Secondly, the Party has become more important than the ideas, and the ideas of equality, justice, freedom are used as a means to keep the Party in power.’

One of the harshest truths to emerge from Fire Under The Snow is the extent to which many Tibetans have co-operated with the Chinese and are sometimes the cruellest agents of Communism. Near the end of his captivity Palden was tortured by a Tibetan guard called Paljyor, who beat him with an electric baton and eventually thrust it into his mouth. Palden woke up in a pool of blood and vomit, and over the next few weeks his teeth fell out. How did Palden view Tibetans like Paljyor? ‘When I wrote about Paljyor I merely wanted to illustrate what happened to me. These people are caught in a system that encourages such actions. They exist because the system urges them to be that way.’

The end of Palden’s first prison term in 1979 coincided with a period of political liberalisation. Palden returned to Drepung monastery where, amid crumbling buildings, former monks were trying to revive some of its former life, although they were still under tight Communist control. Palden used his brief taste of relative freedom to write wall-posters, which were posted in Lhasa, demanding independence for Tibet and denouncing the destruction the Chinese had caused.

Before long Palden was re-arrested and, now classified as a hardened opponent of the regime, was given another long sentence. I asked Palden if during this second 15-year stretch he had ever regretted his protests: ‘I never regretted what I did. I did not put up the posters to alleviate my own suffering, but for the good of Tibet. The whole country was in prison, so it was not important what happened to me’.

How had he been able to sustain himself through all his difficulties? ‘I was always able to practise Buddhism. It is not a question of merely reciting prayers and moving your lips. It is a question of inner development. Meditation can be done under any circumstances. When you drink tea with compassion, that is also meditation.

‘You may just be walking along, but if you have a purpose, and your mind is on the Buddha-dharma, that can be a spiritual practice. I was helped enormously by the teaching I had received on understanding human nature, and also the little meditation I had learnt. This enabled me to control my body and my feelings.’

In 1989 Lhasa was swept by a wave of protests led by students and young people. Palden and the older prisoners found this new generation of protesters deeply encouraging. ‘These young people had been brought up in a completely materialistic way under Communism. And yet many were monks. Even after 30 years of Chinese rule they showed a hunger for Buddhist teaching, not for material wealth. This amazed me.’

Palden is convinced the Tibetans are still a deeply Buddhist people and that brain-washing by the Chinese has not been effective. ‘Buddhism is there even in children who were born under Communist rule and went to Communist schools. We say the first words a Tibetan child learns are om mani padme hum. That mantra is a natural sound in Tibet.’

Although in the Tibetan literary tradition biographies tend to be the inspiring lives of religious practitioners, Palden insists that in writing Fire Under The Snow he was merely hoping to share his experience as an ordinary man with a story to tell. The book is written simply, but very well. It is a vivid evocation of the fate of the Tibetan monks who were unable to escape the country. Nevertheless it leaves the reader with a deep admiration for the author.

Asked what he intends to do now he is free, Palden said he will devote himself to campaigning for Tibetan freedom. ‘Having been fortunate enough to survive, I now have the chance to struggle for the freedom of Tibet. This is what I will dedicate myself to.’ With Fire Under The Snow Palden has made a powerful contribution to western awareness of the experience of the Tibetans. I hope he also finds time to pursue his Buddhist practice in peace. He deserves it.

Fire Under The Snow is published by Harvill Press, 1997, £17 h/b

Responses to September 11th

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington last year airport security was dramatically tightened. News reports showed proud security guards parading huge piles of penknives, letter openers and kitchen knives they had confiscated from hapless travelers.

There was a buzz on the Buddhist circuit, too. Everyone felt affected, and we all wanted to have a response. Governments spoke of revenge and plotted war, while Buddhists expressed shock: ‘We stand against all this,’ commentator after commentator pronounced. And ‘all this’ included not only terrorism, but also western warmongering.
But these responses – the photo-opportunities, the e-mails, the peace marches – were made in the heat of the moment. In retrospect they seem like ways of restoring our sense of identity, and telling ourselves we are in charge after all. The wave of nationalism that has engulfed America is an attempt to restore the equilibrium of those whose identity depends upon the solidity of American culture. But the converse is true of those whose sympathies are counter-cultural (including most Buddhists in the West), and their automatic opposition to the responses of governments seems no less an emotional reaction.
Perhaps, many months on, it is time for us to reconsider. The worst time to think about issues of war and peace is when a war is underway. We are caught in a maelstrom of nationalist and anti-nationalist sentiment, and deluged by media images and comment that includes both propaganda and the wariness of journalists afraid of being used.

Our reactions came from trauma. I watched aghast as those great towers crumbled, and found myself buffeted by a whirl of images, and swirling speculation: the faces, the deaths and, above all, the sense that for a couple of hours the world was out of control. Like many others I felt I had undergone a horrifying experience. Only I hadn’t. Not directly. That sense of involvement came from the deceptive immediacy of television. Across the world we felt disproportionately affected as our categories collapsed along with those towers.

I have no answers to whether or not wars are ever justified, but I would like to make two points. Firstly, our shock at September 11 suggests we have paid insufficient attention to the Buddha’s teaching of dukkha. Life is full of suffering, he said. That means the world is the kind of place where terrorist attacks occur, and wars are waged in response: there are atrocities and disasters every day that fail to capture our attention because they are absent from the media, or affect less iconic targets. The Buddha told us that such things happen, have always happened, and that we cannot stop them from happening again.

This acknowledgement is not callous or cynical. Being simply the truth, it is the only possible basis for the calm the Buddha also recommended. The fact that evils are endemic does not mean that we shouldn’t try to prevent them, but merely that the latest one need not throw us, however graphically it is presented. Such equanimity is a basis for finding a wise and compassionate response that goes beyond impotent assertions that ‘Hatred is not overcome by hatred, hatred is only overcome by love’.

This cannot be just a matter of forming an opinion for or against when war breaks out. The whole of our lives needs to be a response to dukkha – namely cultivating awareness of suffering and trying to do something about it. To my surprise, I noticed that some of those who feel most confident that they are leading meaningful lives which address suffering and its causes were least affected by the events of September 11.

Secondly, we need to inoculate ourselves against simple, moralising responses to complex events. The principal contribution that Buddhists can offer the world is exemplifying an alternative way of life to conflict and hatred. And we can hardly advocate or support war without compromising this example. However, we must pause before jumping into opposition. Military action is not necessarily blind belligerence and it may sometimes find a legitimate justification in such reasons as deterrence and prevention. Anglo-American military action in Afghanistan has caused death and bloodshed. But would there be less violence in the world if nothing had been done?

It is too easy to adopt a purist opposition to military action, when we have no responsibility for the consequences of choosing or not choosing it. We must resist the consolations of the sense of rectitude this offers. The forces that lead to war often cannot be circumvented or transcended; world politics is intractably complex and demonstrates a second key Buddhist teaching ­– that everything arises in dependence upon conditions. We cannot judge September 11 or the War on Terrorism in isolation. Each is an aspect of a vast web of conditions and connections.

I recently encountered the following scenario when I re-read the poet John Milton. The Palestinians (aka Philistines) have conquered Israel, and rule it from Gaza City. Samson, the Israeli resistance leader, (a ‘terrorist’ to his foes) has been captured through the covert action of a Philistine agent, Delilah. In violation of human rights, he is tortured, blinded and assigned to forced labour at Gaza Mill. Yet he still exacts a fearsome revenge against the Philistines’ twin towers.

‘As with the force of winds and waters pent
When mountains tremble, these two massy pillars
With horrible convulsions to and fro
He tugged, he shook, till down they came and drew
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath.’
(Samson Agonistes)

Is this past, present or future? The world has spun for eternity. We wish it would stop, and that the tensions of history might settle into a loving harmony. But the wheel won’t stop – although Buddhism tells us that we can step off it – and political leaders have to cope with its chaotic motion. We are legatees of the past and debtors of the future. And thus the whirligig of time brings in its revenges.

A Meeting with Helena Norberg Hodge

In 1975 when Helena Norberg-Hodge first met her friend Tsewang Paljor in a Ladakhi village, Tsewang told her, ‘We don’t have any poverty here.’ That was before Ladakh, the remote Himalayan region that is politically part of India but culturally part of the old Tibetan Buddhist civilisation, had had much contact with the West. Just eight years later Tsewang pleaded to Helena, ’If you could only help us Ladakhis, we are so poor ...’ What had happened in the intervening years to change so radically the Ladakhis’ perceptions of themselves? How had economic development created this sense of poverty?

Norberg-Hodge went to Ladakh in 1975 to compile the first Ladakhi dictionary. Like other westerners she fell in love with the country, but her command of the language enabled her to go beyond superficial impressions, and develop an intimate understanding of its exuberant, contented people, and its centuries-old way of life. Now based at Schumacher College, on the Dartington Estate in Devon, she runs the International Society for Ecology and Culture (isec). She told me how she had been able to identify so strongly with the Ladakhis’ experience.

‘I grew up in Sweden, and then lived or worked in many western countries. In Ladakh I experienced a way of being in the world that is closer to nature, and embedded in community.’ From that vantage point she saw the effect of Ladakh’s contact with the West, and Ancient Futures is a vivid and accessible account of how it was affected.

One dimension of these changes was economic. The new ethos of ‘development’ meant buying goods and technology from abroad. That meant a shift from a subsistence economy to one based in trade, so Ladakh developed a money economy. But although the Ladakhis had previously had what they needed, they discovered that in the world economy they were poor. Eventually, villagers could no longer afford traditional clothes that had previously cost nothing.

These developments profoundly affected the Ladakhis’ values. In the new money economy, anything that could be exchanged was increasingly defined by its monetary value. In the past people had happily shared the work of gathering the harvest, but the money economy requires that labour is paid. Now the employer wanted to pay as little as possible, whereas the person receiving wanted as much as possible. Some of the virtues Norberg-Hodge had observed in traditional villages, such as contentment and generosity, started to disappear as Ladakhi society became increasingly based on competition.

Although visitors continued to be charmed by the Ladakhis’ qualities, Norberg-Hodge told me that ‘beneath the charming exterior is culture-wide confusion and mental illness’. She defines the essence of this illness as self-hatred that is based on rejection of the Ladakhis’ traditional culture. Young people who leave the villages are embarrassed by their ‘primitive’ conditions, and impatient with their parents’ attachment to the old ways. Young men ape western style, abandoning traditional dress for jeans and sunglasses; while women often use ‘fair and lovely’ skin whitener, in pursuit of a new western-oriented beauty ideal.

Norberg-Hodge also shows how many political and ethnic tensions are the products of modernisation. Young people are drawn to cities where they earn more, but find themselves part of a labour pool, in competition with thousands, even millions, of others. Previously most affairs could be organised at village level - where many voices could be influential - the pull towards centralisation makes Ladakhis dependent on a system controlled by distant forces.

The only way to mitigate this is through the development of new political structures, yet power remains in the hands of a few. As those few tend to favour members of their own communities, ethnic tensions rise. In 1989 the politicisaton of Ladakh resulted in fighting between the Muslem minority and the Buddhist majority, who had lived together peacefully for centuries.
The clash between traditional cultures and modern ‘civilisation’ has been observed and debated since 1492. The case of Ladakh stands out because the contact is so recent, the traditional culture, with its basis in Buddhist values, was (at least to the author’s eyes) so admirable, and the change was so swift. Ladakh’s experience helps reveal many of the forces at work in the world today. The ethical issues raised by imperialism and slavery are clearer today than when they were prevalent, but we are too much in the midst of globalisation to see its character. For Norberg-Hodge, Ladakh is a mirror to the modern world.

Some of her most striking observations concern the changing role of women in Ladakhi society. When she first arrived she was struck by the confidence and happiness of Ladakhi village women. Although men held public offices this was less important than we might think in a decentralised culture where there was little need for communal decision making. Women made decisions about household matters and, as Norberg-Hodge commented, ‘In rural communities most power is at a household level, so when a woman is central there, she is central to that society.’

She maintained that: ‘Women in traditional Ladakhi society have a stronger position than in any other culture I know.’ Their roles were different to men’s but this did not signify a lower status as ‘the male and female energies were in a wonderful balance.’ But when women moved to cities the balance changed. The life of a house-bound mother in a nuclear family whose husband goes out to work lacks a context. There is no extended family, community relationships are attenuated, and there is no meaningful work. Furthermore, consumer values elevate individual choice and create a sexual market, with all its attendant anxieties about appearance.

By observing such trends, Norberg-Hodge started to draw comparisons with the forces at work in the West. ‘The desire to look like Barbie-doll is a global problem,’ she told me. ‘In the West the pressures have been continuing for much longer, so we don’t see the cause. Therapists look at problems like eating disorders in an individual way, in a child’s relationship with her mother. But this ignores economic forces: the combination of the ideal of slimness that is presented through advertising, and the availability of an incredible array of tempting food.’

Similarly, western ‘gender wars’ can be seen as the product of economic pressures, rather than an inevitable power struggle. Norberg-Hodge commented, ‘In the West the household has become an empty shell where no significant decisions are made. So leaving a woman behind in that household is a kind of death. We read that experience back into traditional societies, and think that if a woman does not have power in the formal sector she has no power at all. Rather than trying to regain power by proving that "women are just like men" we should argue that men and women are different and have complementary qualities.’

Some critics have suggested that Norberg-Hodge’s picture of traditional Ladakhi society is idealised, and others have warned against assuming that its virtues are shared by other traditional cultures.  None the less, the insights in Ancient Futures resonate far beyond Ladakh, and Norberg-Hodge insists that she should not be pigeon-holed as a ‘Ladakh expert’.
Much of her work in the past decade has been raising awareness of the threat of globalisation in the West, and promoting the need to revive local economies and communities. She sees this issue as of over-riding importance for the whole world. ‘My first target is the well-intentioned movements of people in the West, such as Buddhists, who are devoting their lives to making the world a better place. They need to become more aware that the direction of progress is being shaped by an economic system.’

Norberg-Hodge has evolved from a linguist into an adviser to the Ladakhis, and now a political activist, a vehement foe of globalisation. She believes that the virtues of Ladakh’s traditional society suggest an alternative to the western model of economic development. ‘Leaders, institutions and governments exert a pressure to impose a homogenising economic model. This is a type of centralised planning, with one World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organisation which have been imposing a particular kind of economics on cultures and ecosystems. This cannot but destroy diversity.’

Norberg-Hodge is not concerned with party politics, ‘I am not interested in changing the minds of Tony Blair or Bill Clinton – I’m not even sure it would do any good. By definition, when you have power you rely on a mediated view of the world that is expressed in statistics, hypotheses and supposition. Things have speeded up, as we have to live at the pace of the available technology. So there is more time pressure, and therefore more reliance on a mediated view of the world. This is not the fault of individuals; it is a structural problem.’

Although Norberg-Hodge’s lifestyle – running projects on two continents and connected with other campaigners across the globe – is paradoxically cosmopolitan, she insists that real change can only come from the grass roots. Her message is an alternative way of thinking. ‘At the bottom are ordinary people, not linked to power, whose sense of the world is drawn from their human relationships and daily social interactions, and such people are more willing to promote a shift to alternatives.’
In England, isec has been involved in the local food movement, establishing markets for local produce. In Ladakh, Norberg-Hodge founded the Ladakh Project, which has raised awareness among the Ladakhis of the value of their own culture, and the limitations of the western model. For instance, they have organised ‘reality tours’, which take Ladakhis to western countries to witness environmental damage and the stresses of urban life.

The greatest success in recent years has been the 4,000-strong Ladakhi Women’s Alliance, which campaigns on environmental issues. Women are Norberg-Hodge’s most likely allies. ‘Perhaps because they usually have less power in the public domain, women tend to be more closely embedded in the social and natural system, and feel more allegiance to place than men.’

25 years after her first visit to Ladakh, Norberg-Hodge sees signs that her work to influence Ladakhi attitudes is bearing fruit. ‘It has been heart-rending to watch the changes over the years, but on my visit last year there was a sea-change in consciousness. The leading spiritual figures came out in support of our work, and there are so many projects trying to curtail the effects of change.’

The key for Norberg-Hodge is education. ‘All round the world, education promotes faith in the values of economic development. If the Ladakhis can stick to a different set of values they are still in a position to be a model of a different path.’
Despite the power of the destructive forces Norberg-Hodge describes so clearly, she is optimistic for the future. ‘For all its power the global economic system is vulnerable because the vast majority of people are being excluded. The model masquerades as a force of nature, but it persists largely because most people don’t think about it. We need to recognise the connections between economics and ethics, culture and psychology.

‘The kind of localisation we are promoting is about becoming whole again, reconnecting the heart and the mind. I love the Buddhist emphasis on the interconnection of wisdom and compassion. The head without the heart is dangerous. As is the heart without the head.’ The mindful, heartfelt lives of traditional Ladakhis have much to teach us.