Composed by Vishvapani
1. Worship
Om namo bhagavatyai aryaprajñaparamitayai
Om namo bhagavatyai aryaprajñaparamitayai
Om namo bhagavatyai aryaprajñaparamitayai
Bright queen of the sky,
Radiant in glory,
Brilliant you shine
Like the sun at its height.
And far spread your beams
Through infinite space.
Piercing the gloom
Like dawn's gentle rays.
O bringer of vision
To those who are lost,
And stumble in darkness
In the thick night;
O beacon of wisdom,
Dispeller of darkness,
Destroyer of craving -
Illumine my life.
mantra: om ah dhih hum svah
2. Salutation
Gold is your body
Like ripening corn;
Blue are your eyes,
Gazing far inward;
And dark is your hair
As it falls by your side.
Jewels adorn you
And silks flow upon you.
You are seated serene,
Poised in Samadhi,
Perfectly still
In the infinite sky.
3. Confession
Om svabhava suddha sarvadharmah svabhava suddho ham
Om svabhava suddha sarvadharmah svabhava suddho ham
Om svabhava suddha sarvadharmah svabhava suddho ham
Mother of Buddhas
And all of the wisdoms,
Knower of essence,
And bearer of jñana,
Sunyata's emblem:
Please hear me confess.
When I have been unskillful with my body
I have forgotten you;
When I have been unskillful with my speech
I have forgotten you;
When I have been unskillful with my mind
I have forgotten you;
In many ways, at many times, in many places,
I have forgotten you.
I confess all my failings,
My weakness, my blindness
O hear my confessions
And grant me your blessing!
4. Entreaty
Om namo bhagavatyai arya prajñaparamitayai
Om namo bhagavatyai arya prajñaparamitayai
Om namo bhagavatyai arya prajñaparamitayai
O silent one, wise one
O knower of secrets,
Whisper to me
The sound before silence.
Enter my heart
With the wisdom of dhih.
May dhih fill my heart.
May dhih fill my speech.
May dhih fill my mind.
Oh, wide is my heart,
Please grant me your teaching!
Recitation of Heart Sutra
5. Completion
O, great Lady Prajñaparamita,
May I rest in your beauty.
Suffuse me, O bright one,
With you golden light.
May dhih pervade me,
Transforming defilements.
May it shine through me
With the warmth of compassion.
Now, and at all times.
May your secret light
Illumine my mind.
May it guide me to the truth.
mantra: gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
6. Concluding Mantras
om mani padme hum
om a ra pa ca na dhih
om vajrapani hum
om tare tutare ture swaha
om amideva hrih
om muni muni maha muni shakyamuni svaha
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
om santi santi santi
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Pilgrimage to Auschwitz
When I announced I was going to do a retreat at Auschwitz, I met many responses. Some people were shocked, as if uttering ‘Auschwitz’, was an intrusion or an assault. It is a harsh sound, which I, too, soon started to avoid. A look of pain crossed my father’s face when I told him, as if I had touched a wound. ‘What good can come of it? What will you do with that experience?’ One Buddhist friend asked, ‘It is bound to be traumatic, but what is the value of trauma? And what effect will it have on your state of mind?’ Jewish friends said, ‘I couldn’t go myself. I couldn’t bear it.’ But others were fascinated by the idea. Many people turned out to have family connections with Jews or Germans and felt fear, guilt or fascination with the Holocaust. For some it was a living presence in their lives, as it has been in mine: not a historical event; not a moral conundrum; not a metaphor for personal suffering, but a part of the world. A shadow. A possibility.
When I heard about the retreat my response was instant: I wanted to go. This was the third retreat at Auschwitz/Birkenau organised by the Zen Peacemakers’ Order (zpo) and led by Roshi Bernie Glassman. I had met Glassman the previous year and liked him. As a Buddhist from a Jewish background I felt intrigued by his freedom in mixing the two traditions. While I have left Judaism behind, I have never stopped feeling a sense of Jewishness – a cultural and historical association rather than a religious one. My Jewishness seems to manifest whether I like it or not, in the friends I make, my sense of humour, and my way of expressing myself. I have never known what to do with that connection, but in the us a movement has started, inspired by Glassman and others, of Jewish Buddhists exploring their identities. I was also attracted by Glassman’s philosophy of ‘bearing witness’, which means facing the truth, and seeing one’s response to it without any desire to fix things. That seemed the right way – the only way – to approach Auschwitz.
Then there was my family connection with the Holocaust. Shortly before leaving I visited my father and we took out the photograph album of his childhood in Berlin. The more questions I asked about Fritz, his father, and Sarah, his grandmother, the quieter he grew. What had happened to Fritz? My father only knew that he had been deported to Minsk in the Ukraine, and that the letters had stopped. Sarah could have gone to Palestine but she chose to stay, and in the end was deported to the Warsaw ghetto. And then? ‘Who knows. She was 70.’ My father left Germany in March 1939 aged 10, travelling alone to England under the kindertransport scheme. His scars are plain to see, but I wonder how they have been passed on to me. How I have been affected by this family history, by growing up with the knowledge that the world could contain such cruelty?
In the weeks before the retreat I read some of the extraordinary literature that has grown up around the Holocaust. After reading the accounts by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi I would dream about concentration camps, as if my mind needed to replay in unconsciousness what it was being told by the books. I felt I was not large enough to contain this truth: the systematic murder of millions of people by dedicated state machinery. I lacked the imagination or the depth to encompass it. Going to a concentration camp was an extension of this encounter; and the retreat, I hoped, would be a chance to work it through.
As people gathered at the hotel in Krakow on a clear November day, I saw there would be another dimension to the retreat: the other people, and all the complexities of being with 150 strangers. More than half of those attending were Americans; around the same proportion were Jews, and most were Buddhists, of many denominations and with various overlaps between these groups.
On the first evening a bunch of us visited a restaurant in Kazimiertz, the old Jewish quarter and I talked to Jinny. Her father had been in Auschwitz, but he had never spoken about it, and he exerted a tyrannical discipline over the family. When he did mention the camps it was as a basis for emotional blackmail. ‘Why do you need new shoes? When I was in the camps we would have done anything for shoes like you are throwing away!’ Now she runs an organisation that brings together the children of survivors and of ss officers. In her terms I qualified, as she called my father ‘a survivor’. I’d never thought of him that way.
Over the next few days I met many people with similar stories. There was Eva, who had left on the kindertransport, like my father, but she had travelled on to the us where she had become a literature professor. She was now finding the courage to explore the fate of the family she left behind. Early on I made friends with Rod, a Theravadin Buddhist from Manchester, and also Jewish – a kind, quiet man who felt drawn to attend but confused about his reasons for doing so. I also got to know Nancy Baker, a philosopher and Zen teacher from New York, who spoke of her near-death experience as a child, after she was thrown through the car window, and who has worked with dying people for many years. For her, coming to Auschwitz was a further encounter with death.
Many of those on the retreat were from Zen groups connected with Roshi Maezumi, Bernie Glassman’s teacher, and some came each year. Soon I felt like a stranger at a class reunion, a party where everyone knew everyone except for me. In the restaurant Jinny was talking to Heinz, a German Zen teacher, and they swapped tales about last year’s retreat. ‘It’s funny to see you looking happy and relaxed in a restaurant,’ she said. ‘For five days last year you looked like you wanted to commit suicide!’
On the first day of the retreat we visited the Jewish areas of Krakow. A guide described how the Nazis had gradually increased the restrictions on the Jews. After the laws banning them from working came the yellow stars, and then transfers to the ghetto, where a few streets housed 15,000 people in incredible squalor. Finally the ghetto was cleared and they were deported to Auschwitz. At every stage the inhabitants retained a vestige of optimism, and even believed the Germans when they were told that they were being sent to a new life in the Ukraine. Things seemed so bad that people thought they could not get worse. Few had the courage or the insight to realise just how bad they actually were.
The sense of being trapped by a vast, insuperable power was my overwhelming impression from the Holocaust accounts I had read. On my first day in Poland I read Fragments by Benjamin Wilkomirski, an evocation of childhood memories of the camps, which gave me fresh nightmares. After the war Wilkomirski believed the outside world was, in fact, the camp, but disguised. It is a peculiar, infectious mentality and on the journey to Oswicien (the town the Germans renamed Auschwitz) I found myself jumping at words like ‘transport’ and ‘Reichsbaum’. It was as if all the hidden, mysterious forces that make the world function, and on which we depend without awareness or comprehension, were turned hostile and malevolent. Later I read that Wilkomirski’s memories were most likely fantasies, and he had never been in a camp at all. But the book retained its hallucinatory effect. The bus travelled on through a thick fog, past increasingly bleak landscapes, weather-fended buildings and straggly pine forest. I dozed most of the way, then woke with a jolt and a rush of anxiety, the severe brick buildings looming outside the window: ‘This is Auschwitz’.
We were assigned rooms in a flurry of confusion and then assembled in small groups. Frank Ostaseski, the group leader, established an atmosphere of openness and warmth: ‘Speak from the heart’, he said, ‘speak spontaneously’. He is an impressive man who founded a Buddhist hospice in San Francisco. Each morning at 7am we met as a group to share our experiences. When my turn came I was moved, even choked, speaking of my family and my motivations for coming.
The next day we toured Auschwitz and Birkenau. Auschwitz was the original camp, housed in a converted Austrian barracks, and now maintained as a museum. The displays have the artificiality of any museum, but still they overwhelmed me with a mass of impressions. Spectacles taken from the dead, like a huge pile of insects; human hair in an incredible quantity, all the same colour – shocked white by age, fear and chemicals; a standing cell in the punishment block where four people were squashed together, upright for days on end; the famous sign ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’.
We gathered at the Execution Wall. The square in front of the wall is a place of unutterable bleakness, surrounded by sheer walls, their windows blanked out – a prison inside a prison. One woman buckled at the knees, tears streaming down her face; and Rabbi Don Singer led Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. At first I bridled at this, with my old resistance to Judaism, but as the singing continued I realised, to my surprise, that I knew the words and I joined in, moved by their melancholy beauty.
Birkenau was the concentration camp of my imagination, the one I had been dreaming about for weeks, the one I had pictured from films, documentaries and photographs. When the Nazis decided on the Final Solution of the ‘Jewish problem’ in 1942 they chose Oswicien as its centrepiece, and two miles from the original camp they constructed Birkenau. It was both a work camp and a death camp. While Auschwitz housed 20,000, Birkenau eventually contained three times that number.
Rows of barracks stretched beyond the barbed wire fence, and the railway tracks stretched ahead. I was unprepared for its vastness, or the desolation this brought; for the camp’s oppressive orderliness: the barbarous symmetry; the hideous symbolism of the rails leading through the camp to the gas chambers; the barbed wire taut and implacable; the wretchedness of the barracks. Yet the occupants were the lucky ones, saved from immediate extermination to form a vast slave army and worked to death for the sake of the German economy.
As I walked beside the tracks I recalled the pictures and books I had read, and tried to open myself to what had happened here. This is where the trains stopped and the selections took place – right for labour, left for death. This is where they walked, the condemned, thinking they had been chosen for light work. And this is where they died, where the tracks end at the gas chambers, which now lie in ruins. One and a half million people, in an endless stream. A huge factory of death. But even standing on the very spot of their deaths I could not encompass such suffering. People around me cried severally, each sparked by a specific detail – or a different point in the accumulation of details. By the end of the afternoon I felt numb.
In the evening we met as one large group and Eve Marko of the zpo stood in for Bernie Glassman, who had not arrived. She spoke movingly about the Peacemaker precepts. The first is ‘Not Knowing’, staying open to the reality of the situation, free from preconceptions. She said we all had a question in coming here, whether that was ‘How could people do this to other people?’ Or ‘Why did this happen?’ ‘Stay with that question,’ she said, ‘and don’t try to answer it too quickly. That question is also the question of your life, the mystery at the heart of you.’
It had been a long day, and Eve was exhausted. She asked Rabbi Singer to sing from the Psalms. Then, in an ecumenical gesture, he asked two Christian nuns to join him. They seemed rather on show, so they got some others to stand up. Then someone said, ‘Come on! Everybody join in!’ and suddenly the whole mass of people was on its feet, dancing in a huge circle around the auditorium. I left. It wasn’t possible to stay without joining in, and others left, too. Only Rod stayed sitting in the middle, crying quietly and oblivious to what was happening. Eva came out in tears. ‘I joined in because everyone else was having such a good time and I didn’t want to spoil it.’ In past years a sense of celebration had mysteriously emerged from the contemplation of the darkness in Auschwitz. Now people seemed to be trying to recreate that transcendence of suffering, but it felt to me like an evasion, an escape that inadvertently became a descent into schmaltz.
The next day we set up our meditation cushions in a ring around the tracks at Birkenau. This was the focus for the next three days. We sat in a circle, buttressed against the Polish winter by layers of clothes. Some of the time – not enough for me – we just sat quietly, absorbing the atmosphere. Each day we chanted names of people who had died from a book that lists 60,000, a mere fraction of the victims. But chanting names personalised the statistics: ‘Stephan Kulczyk, Joseph Kulda, Wladislaw Kulejwski’. Each one seemed for a moment to stand before us. Sometimes the same name was read again and again: ‘Max Cohen, Max Cohen, Max Cohen’.
One day as we recited names I heard, ‘Bloom, Bloom, Bloomberg, Bloomenbaum.’ My heart skipped a beat as the reader approached my family’s name: ‘Blumenfeldt, Blumenfeldt’. I could not make out the first names. Could Fritz have been there? When the readings ended I jumped up to find the reader. She had gone, but I explained what I wanted to the people who had been next to her. My knees weakened and tears came.
Later I wandered through the camp sitting in the ruins of huts, in the barracks, by the gas chambers. The buildings have hardly changed, and the former inhabitants seemed close by. Birkenau is an awesome product of massive energy and powerful intelligence; testimony to the human capacity for methodical, premeditated sadism. Forgiveness seemed a distant idea – premature, even impertinent. How could I forgive on behalf of the dead? In any case, what I felt was not hatred as much as sadness and bewilderment.
Each of us, it seemed, was struggling to make sense of our experience. One man described asking a German on the retreat if he could imagine having been a guard. The German replied that he could well imagine that. ‘So if we were both back there. I think you would have shot me.’ ‘Most probably, yes.’ Another wondered how he would have acted if he had been in the camp. ‘Would I have been a kapo (a prisoner organising camp affairs for the Germans)? Would I have learnt how to survive?’ Another Jewish man described walking through Auschwitz with two non-Jewish friends thinking, ‘If this was back then, you’d be all right, and he’d be all right, but I’d be in deep shit!’ We are all troubled by the ignorance of the people who went to the gas chambers thinking they were taking a shower. ‘Why didn’t someone yell out: “You are going to your deaths!”?’
Auschwitz was a spiritual test. People talked about the moral issues it raised, or what it told one about human nature. But for me asking ‘How could people do this?’ seemed an abstraction. I wanted simply to witness the suffering that had taken place in the camp. Sometimes, as I sat, I was confronted with images of that pain, and felt a raw, visceral sympathy. I wanted to stay with that rawness, without evading or interpreting it. But my mind would slip off into its usual preoccupations, or be attracted or irritated by others on the retreat. When a German man said to me, ‘Being here reminds me that I have a concentration camp inside myself,’ I felt insulted, even angry. ‘He may have some emotional blocks,’ I thought, ‘But how can you equate the two? Is Auschwitz for him just a psychological metaphor?’
The next day I expressed my frustrations to my group. ‘I feel critical of the ways we make sense of our experience: of the tendency to psychologise, as if the significance of Auschwitz is that it puts you in touch with your personal griefs; or to dramatise, making stories out of our responses, with moments of pathos and irony to provide appropriate light and shade; and of the desire to move beyond horror into love and joy. I just want to stay with the reality of what happened. But I can’t; it keeps slipping away; I can’t maintain that state for long.’ Frank said, ‘Be mindful in all of your actions. If you are walking, walk more slowly – halve the pace. And have a sense of continuity, the flow of experience. Savour each moment in the short time we have here.’
Meditating in the grounds I experimented with different practices. Before leaving Britain I had taken up the Vajrasattva practice, invoking a Buddha whose healing radiance blesses and purifies all beings. The mantra of Vajrasattva is a potent invocation, but at Birkenau the sounds seemed empty. I reverted to simpler practices – radiating love, or just sitting with my experience. Sometimes in meditation I had a sense of a vast, brooding, unquiet spirit, or a distant moan. I saw images of writhing bodies. One day as I meditated I felt that roots might grow down from my body, deep into the earth, and that I could not be overwhelmed by Birkenau’s horror. That evening I was filled with exhilaration and energy. Spending my time meditating and reflecting, seeking to understand myself, and to gain a sympathetic understanding of others, I was doing what I most want to do with my life. Tantric yogis in India would live in cremation grounds, surrounded by the remnants of corpses and the spirits of the dead, and there they would confront their deepest fears. Birkenau is a modern cremation ground in the most literal sense.
As the retreat drew to an end, I spoke to others about their experience. Nancy Baker told me it had helped her to resolve issues she had been struggling with for years. ‘I felt I came into contact with a bottomless well of tears, and I was overwhelmed by a compassionate weeping, without knowing why. This seemed to wash me clean of whatever aversion I have to death. I feel I have come away as a bigger container for suffering.’
Frank Ostaseski drew on his hospice experience. ‘In my work I look at death and I believe that to be fully alive means to be prepared to see death. It is the same with evil. I don’t believe in ‘the Hitler within’, but I can be cruel and critical, and unchecked these tendencies could lead to evil. One way of bringing awareness to that is to look at evil outside – it helps us to see what is good and whole and makes us face ourselves very frankly. This is a raw place, and it needs to be kept raw, not tidied up or made comfortable. There are places of great inspiration in the world, but here we see the wound, and that helps to make us more whole.’
The most moving part of each day for me was reciting the Kaddish. It seemed to possess a profound resonance that the Sanskrit chants lacked here. Standing by the gas chambers, we chanted in Hebrew, and read the verses in many languages. The words of the Kaddish continued to echo when I returned to Britain. ‘Oseh shalom bim’romav, hu ya’se shalom, alenu v’alkol Yisrael, v’imru amen.’ (The one who has given a universe of peace gives peace to us, to all that is Israel, to all humanity. And say, yes. Amen.) We lit candles for the dead. ‘Fourteen thousand a day,’ Rabbi Singer said. ‘A vast stream of humanity, men, women and children, all jostled together. And they knew. Some at least knew what was happening. “What’s that coming out of the chimney”, one woman asked. “That’s us,” came the reply.’
Bernie Glassman arrived late, coming straight from a solitary retreat he had been on for the seven months since his wife’s death. He did not take a lead, but when he spoke on the retreat’s penultimate night he drew many strands together. He quoted the advice of his friend, the Jewish Cabbala teacher Zalman Schachter, about the retreat: ‘Go for the souls, not for your own transformation’. That crystallised what I wanted to do myself,: to remember and to grieve. Primo Levi writes that the ss guards taunted the prisoners by saying that not only would they be killed, but that all evidence of their fates would be obliterated. And, if by some chance, word of the camps got out, it would not be believed. That threat of oblivion was the worst humiliation. One thing I could do was bear witness to the Holocaust through my silent vigil
© Vishvapani, 2006
This article is also published in the book, Challenging Times
When I heard about the retreat my response was instant: I wanted to go. This was the third retreat at Auschwitz/Birkenau organised by the Zen Peacemakers’ Order (zpo) and led by Roshi Bernie Glassman. I had met Glassman the previous year and liked him. As a Buddhist from a Jewish background I felt intrigued by his freedom in mixing the two traditions. While I have left Judaism behind, I have never stopped feeling a sense of Jewishness – a cultural and historical association rather than a religious one. My Jewishness seems to manifest whether I like it or not, in the friends I make, my sense of humour, and my way of expressing myself. I have never known what to do with that connection, but in the us a movement has started, inspired by Glassman and others, of Jewish Buddhists exploring their identities. I was also attracted by Glassman’s philosophy of ‘bearing witness’, which means facing the truth, and seeing one’s response to it without any desire to fix things. That seemed the right way – the only way – to approach Auschwitz.
Then there was my family connection with the Holocaust. Shortly before leaving I visited my father and we took out the photograph album of his childhood in Berlin. The more questions I asked about Fritz, his father, and Sarah, his grandmother, the quieter he grew. What had happened to Fritz? My father only knew that he had been deported to Minsk in the Ukraine, and that the letters had stopped. Sarah could have gone to Palestine but she chose to stay, and in the end was deported to the Warsaw ghetto. And then? ‘Who knows. She was 70.’ My father left Germany in March 1939 aged 10, travelling alone to England under the kindertransport scheme. His scars are plain to see, but I wonder how they have been passed on to me. How I have been affected by this family history, by growing up with the knowledge that the world could contain such cruelty?
In the weeks before the retreat I read some of the extraordinary literature that has grown up around the Holocaust. After reading the accounts by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi I would dream about concentration camps, as if my mind needed to replay in unconsciousness what it was being told by the books. I felt I was not large enough to contain this truth: the systematic murder of millions of people by dedicated state machinery. I lacked the imagination or the depth to encompass it. Going to a concentration camp was an extension of this encounter; and the retreat, I hoped, would be a chance to work it through.
As people gathered at the hotel in Krakow on a clear November day, I saw there would be another dimension to the retreat: the other people, and all the complexities of being with 150 strangers. More than half of those attending were Americans; around the same proportion were Jews, and most were Buddhists, of many denominations and with various overlaps between these groups.
On the first evening a bunch of us visited a restaurant in Kazimiertz, the old Jewish quarter and I talked to Jinny. Her father had been in Auschwitz, but he had never spoken about it, and he exerted a tyrannical discipline over the family. When he did mention the camps it was as a basis for emotional blackmail. ‘Why do you need new shoes? When I was in the camps we would have done anything for shoes like you are throwing away!’ Now she runs an organisation that brings together the children of survivors and of ss officers. In her terms I qualified, as she called my father ‘a survivor’. I’d never thought of him that way.
Over the next few days I met many people with similar stories. There was Eva, who had left on the kindertransport, like my father, but she had travelled on to the us where she had become a literature professor. She was now finding the courage to explore the fate of the family she left behind. Early on I made friends with Rod, a Theravadin Buddhist from Manchester, and also Jewish – a kind, quiet man who felt drawn to attend but confused about his reasons for doing so. I also got to know Nancy Baker, a philosopher and Zen teacher from New York, who spoke of her near-death experience as a child, after she was thrown through the car window, and who has worked with dying people for many years. For her, coming to Auschwitz was a further encounter with death.
Many of those on the retreat were from Zen groups connected with Roshi Maezumi, Bernie Glassman’s teacher, and some came each year. Soon I felt like a stranger at a class reunion, a party where everyone knew everyone except for me. In the restaurant Jinny was talking to Heinz, a German Zen teacher, and they swapped tales about last year’s retreat. ‘It’s funny to see you looking happy and relaxed in a restaurant,’ she said. ‘For five days last year you looked like you wanted to commit suicide!’
On the first day of the retreat we visited the Jewish areas of Krakow. A guide described how the Nazis had gradually increased the restrictions on the Jews. After the laws banning them from working came the yellow stars, and then transfers to the ghetto, where a few streets housed 15,000 people in incredible squalor. Finally the ghetto was cleared and they were deported to Auschwitz. At every stage the inhabitants retained a vestige of optimism, and even believed the Germans when they were told that they were being sent to a new life in the Ukraine. Things seemed so bad that people thought they could not get worse. Few had the courage or the insight to realise just how bad they actually were.
The sense of being trapped by a vast, insuperable power was my overwhelming impression from the Holocaust accounts I had read. On my first day in Poland I read Fragments by Benjamin Wilkomirski, an evocation of childhood memories of the camps, which gave me fresh nightmares. After the war Wilkomirski believed the outside world was, in fact, the camp, but disguised. It is a peculiar, infectious mentality and on the journey to Oswicien (the town the Germans renamed Auschwitz) I found myself jumping at words like ‘transport’ and ‘Reichsbaum’. It was as if all the hidden, mysterious forces that make the world function, and on which we depend without awareness or comprehension, were turned hostile and malevolent. Later I read that Wilkomirski’s memories were most likely fantasies, and he had never been in a camp at all. But the book retained its hallucinatory effect. The bus travelled on through a thick fog, past increasingly bleak landscapes, weather-fended buildings and straggly pine forest. I dozed most of the way, then woke with a jolt and a rush of anxiety, the severe brick buildings looming outside the window: ‘This is Auschwitz’.
We were assigned rooms in a flurry of confusion and then assembled in small groups. Frank Ostaseski, the group leader, established an atmosphere of openness and warmth: ‘Speak from the heart’, he said, ‘speak spontaneously’. He is an impressive man who founded a Buddhist hospice in San Francisco. Each morning at 7am we met as a group to share our experiences. When my turn came I was moved, even choked, speaking of my family and my motivations for coming.
The next day we toured Auschwitz and Birkenau. Auschwitz was the original camp, housed in a converted Austrian barracks, and now maintained as a museum. The displays have the artificiality of any museum, but still they overwhelmed me with a mass of impressions. Spectacles taken from the dead, like a huge pile of insects; human hair in an incredible quantity, all the same colour – shocked white by age, fear and chemicals; a standing cell in the punishment block where four people were squashed together, upright for days on end; the famous sign ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’.
We gathered at the Execution Wall. The square in front of the wall is a place of unutterable bleakness, surrounded by sheer walls, their windows blanked out – a prison inside a prison. One woman buckled at the knees, tears streaming down her face; and Rabbi Don Singer led Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. At first I bridled at this, with my old resistance to Judaism, but as the singing continued I realised, to my surprise, that I knew the words and I joined in, moved by their melancholy beauty.
Birkenau was the concentration camp of my imagination, the one I had been dreaming about for weeks, the one I had pictured from films, documentaries and photographs. When the Nazis decided on the Final Solution of the ‘Jewish problem’ in 1942 they chose Oswicien as its centrepiece, and two miles from the original camp they constructed Birkenau. It was both a work camp and a death camp. While Auschwitz housed 20,000, Birkenau eventually contained three times that number.
Rows of barracks stretched beyond the barbed wire fence, and the railway tracks stretched ahead. I was unprepared for its vastness, or the desolation this brought; for the camp’s oppressive orderliness: the barbarous symmetry; the hideous symbolism of the rails leading through the camp to the gas chambers; the barbed wire taut and implacable; the wretchedness of the barracks. Yet the occupants were the lucky ones, saved from immediate extermination to form a vast slave army and worked to death for the sake of the German economy.
As I walked beside the tracks I recalled the pictures and books I had read, and tried to open myself to what had happened here. This is where the trains stopped and the selections took place – right for labour, left for death. This is where they walked, the condemned, thinking they had been chosen for light work. And this is where they died, where the tracks end at the gas chambers, which now lie in ruins. One and a half million people, in an endless stream. A huge factory of death. But even standing on the very spot of their deaths I could not encompass such suffering. People around me cried severally, each sparked by a specific detail – or a different point in the accumulation of details. By the end of the afternoon I felt numb.
In the evening we met as one large group and Eve Marko of the zpo stood in for Bernie Glassman, who had not arrived. She spoke movingly about the Peacemaker precepts. The first is ‘Not Knowing’, staying open to the reality of the situation, free from preconceptions. She said we all had a question in coming here, whether that was ‘How could people do this to other people?’ Or ‘Why did this happen?’ ‘Stay with that question,’ she said, ‘and don’t try to answer it too quickly. That question is also the question of your life, the mystery at the heart of you.’
It had been a long day, and Eve was exhausted. She asked Rabbi Singer to sing from the Psalms. Then, in an ecumenical gesture, he asked two Christian nuns to join him. They seemed rather on show, so they got some others to stand up. Then someone said, ‘Come on! Everybody join in!’ and suddenly the whole mass of people was on its feet, dancing in a huge circle around the auditorium. I left. It wasn’t possible to stay without joining in, and others left, too. Only Rod stayed sitting in the middle, crying quietly and oblivious to what was happening. Eva came out in tears. ‘I joined in because everyone else was having such a good time and I didn’t want to spoil it.’ In past years a sense of celebration had mysteriously emerged from the contemplation of the darkness in Auschwitz. Now people seemed to be trying to recreate that transcendence of suffering, but it felt to me like an evasion, an escape that inadvertently became a descent into schmaltz.
The next day we set up our meditation cushions in a ring around the tracks at Birkenau. This was the focus for the next three days. We sat in a circle, buttressed against the Polish winter by layers of clothes. Some of the time – not enough for me – we just sat quietly, absorbing the atmosphere. Each day we chanted names of people who had died from a book that lists 60,000, a mere fraction of the victims. But chanting names personalised the statistics: ‘Stephan Kulczyk, Joseph Kulda, Wladislaw Kulejwski’. Each one seemed for a moment to stand before us. Sometimes the same name was read again and again: ‘Max Cohen, Max Cohen, Max Cohen’.
One day as we recited names I heard, ‘Bloom, Bloom, Bloomberg, Bloomenbaum.’ My heart skipped a beat as the reader approached my family’s name: ‘Blumenfeldt, Blumenfeldt’. I could not make out the first names. Could Fritz have been there? When the readings ended I jumped up to find the reader. She had gone, but I explained what I wanted to the people who had been next to her. My knees weakened and tears came.
Later I wandered through the camp sitting in the ruins of huts, in the barracks, by the gas chambers. The buildings have hardly changed, and the former inhabitants seemed close by. Birkenau is an awesome product of massive energy and powerful intelligence; testimony to the human capacity for methodical, premeditated sadism. Forgiveness seemed a distant idea – premature, even impertinent. How could I forgive on behalf of the dead? In any case, what I felt was not hatred as much as sadness and bewilderment.
Each of us, it seemed, was struggling to make sense of our experience. One man described asking a German on the retreat if he could imagine having been a guard. The German replied that he could well imagine that. ‘So if we were both back there. I think you would have shot me.’ ‘Most probably, yes.’ Another wondered how he would have acted if he had been in the camp. ‘Would I have been a kapo (a prisoner organising camp affairs for the Germans)? Would I have learnt how to survive?’ Another Jewish man described walking through Auschwitz with two non-Jewish friends thinking, ‘If this was back then, you’d be all right, and he’d be all right, but I’d be in deep shit!’ We are all troubled by the ignorance of the people who went to the gas chambers thinking they were taking a shower. ‘Why didn’t someone yell out: “You are going to your deaths!”?’
Auschwitz was a spiritual test. People talked about the moral issues it raised, or what it told one about human nature. But for me asking ‘How could people do this?’ seemed an abstraction. I wanted simply to witness the suffering that had taken place in the camp. Sometimes, as I sat, I was confronted with images of that pain, and felt a raw, visceral sympathy. I wanted to stay with that rawness, without evading or interpreting it. But my mind would slip off into its usual preoccupations, or be attracted or irritated by others on the retreat. When a German man said to me, ‘Being here reminds me that I have a concentration camp inside myself,’ I felt insulted, even angry. ‘He may have some emotional blocks,’ I thought, ‘But how can you equate the two? Is Auschwitz for him just a psychological metaphor?’
The next day I expressed my frustrations to my group. ‘I feel critical of the ways we make sense of our experience: of the tendency to psychologise, as if the significance of Auschwitz is that it puts you in touch with your personal griefs; or to dramatise, making stories out of our responses, with moments of pathos and irony to provide appropriate light and shade; and of the desire to move beyond horror into love and joy. I just want to stay with the reality of what happened. But I can’t; it keeps slipping away; I can’t maintain that state for long.’ Frank said, ‘Be mindful in all of your actions. If you are walking, walk more slowly – halve the pace. And have a sense of continuity, the flow of experience. Savour each moment in the short time we have here.’
Meditating in the grounds I experimented with different practices. Before leaving Britain I had taken up the Vajrasattva practice, invoking a Buddha whose healing radiance blesses and purifies all beings. The mantra of Vajrasattva is a potent invocation, but at Birkenau the sounds seemed empty. I reverted to simpler practices – radiating love, or just sitting with my experience. Sometimes in meditation I had a sense of a vast, brooding, unquiet spirit, or a distant moan. I saw images of writhing bodies. One day as I meditated I felt that roots might grow down from my body, deep into the earth, and that I could not be overwhelmed by Birkenau’s horror. That evening I was filled with exhilaration and energy. Spending my time meditating and reflecting, seeking to understand myself, and to gain a sympathetic understanding of others, I was doing what I most want to do with my life. Tantric yogis in India would live in cremation grounds, surrounded by the remnants of corpses and the spirits of the dead, and there they would confront their deepest fears. Birkenau is a modern cremation ground in the most literal sense.
As the retreat drew to an end, I spoke to others about their experience. Nancy Baker told me it had helped her to resolve issues she had been struggling with for years. ‘I felt I came into contact with a bottomless well of tears, and I was overwhelmed by a compassionate weeping, without knowing why. This seemed to wash me clean of whatever aversion I have to death. I feel I have come away as a bigger container for suffering.’
Frank Ostaseski drew on his hospice experience. ‘In my work I look at death and I believe that to be fully alive means to be prepared to see death. It is the same with evil. I don’t believe in ‘the Hitler within’, but I can be cruel and critical, and unchecked these tendencies could lead to evil. One way of bringing awareness to that is to look at evil outside – it helps us to see what is good and whole and makes us face ourselves very frankly. This is a raw place, and it needs to be kept raw, not tidied up or made comfortable. There are places of great inspiration in the world, but here we see the wound, and that helps to make us more whole.’
The most moving part of each day for me was reciting the Kaddish. It seemed to possess a profound resonance that the Sanskrit chants lacked here. Standing by the gas chambers, we chanted in Hebrew, and read the verses in many languages. The words of the Kaddish continued to echo when I returned to Britain. ‘Oseh shalom bim’romav, hu ya’se shalom, alenu v’alkol Yisrael, v’imru amen.’ (The one who has given a universe of peace gives peace to us, to all that is Israel, to all humanity. And say, yes. Amen.) We lit candles for the dead. ‘Fourteen thousand a day,’ Rabbi Singer said. ‘A vast stream of humanity, men, women and children, all jostled together. And they knew. Some at least knew what was happening. “What’s that coming out of the chimney”, one woman asked. “That’s us,” came the reply.’
Bernie Glassman arrived late, coming straight from a solitary retreat he had been on for the seven months since his wife’s death. He did not take a lead, but when he spoke on the retreat’s penultimate night he drew many strands together. He quoted the advice of his friend, the Jewish Cabbala teacher Zalman Schachter, about the retreat: ‘Go for the souls, not for your own transformation’. That crystallised what I wanted to do myself,: to remember and to grieve. Primo Levi writes that the ss guards taunted the prisoners by saying that not only would they be killed, but that all evidence of their fates would be obliterated. And, if by some chance, word of the camps got out, it would not be believed. That threat of oblivion was the worst humiliation. One thing I could do was bear witness to the Holocaust through my silent vigil
© Vishvapani, 2006
This article is also published in the book, Challenging Times
Shakespeare’s Tragic Imaginings
An essay on Shakespearean Comedy and Tragedy
The editors of the 1623 Folio, in which most of Shakespeare’s plays were first published together, divided them into Comedies, Tragedies and Histories. The ten plays included among the tragedies, in rough order of composition, are Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens; the four great tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth - and then Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. The Folio’s method of dividing them has so influenced subsequent views of the plays that it is easy to forget that it was an interpretation of the relationships between them that was based on the conventions of classical drama. In many cases the categorisation does not tell us much about the play. The range of genres that Shakespeare actually used and the difficulty of distinguishing them is better suggested by Polonius’ famous description of the players in Hamlet:
‘the best actors in the world either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, or tragical-historical-pastoral...‘
Although in his earliest plays Shakespeare followed the generic conventions of classical models, he gradually learned how to mix the genres, introducing comic elements into tragedies and sadness into comedy.
Why was Shakespeare not content simply to operate within inherited conventions? The answer lies in the way genre determines the subject matter of a play and limits the range of ways that subject matter can be explored within the conventions of plot, characterisation within a genre. Oscar Wilde wittily said that Hamlet’s description of art ‘holding a mirror up to nature’ is intended by Shakespeare to show that Hamlet really has gone mad. Art, as a Renaissance playgoer would have understood, does not reflect external realities, it creates its own, and writing within a genre means accepting a set of rules about the nature of the reality that can be created. A work of art is a world in itself, that strives for internal consistency and characters can only operate within the terms of that world. A character in a comedy inhabits a comedic world; a character in a tragedy inhabits a tragic one, and it is absurd to imagine a character being transposed from one to the other.
The simplest definition of dramatic comedy, for example, might follow another Wildean witticism - Lady Bracknell’s definition of fiction in Wilde’s pastiche of Shakespeare’s comic forms, The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘The good end happily and the bad end unhappily. That’s why it is called fiction.’ In creating a character in a play written according to such a formula the writer would be constrained by the need not to bring the attitude underlying it into question, and would be forced to tailor their characterisation accordingly. This would impose limits on the range of experience that it was possible to portray in such a context - and this might indeed be said of characters in early comedies such as Much Ado About Nothing, or A Comedy of Errors.
As Shakespeare developed, however, he explored an increasing broad, and deep range of experience and he developed ways of expanding the possibilities of comedy and tragedy so that they could accommodate this expanded range of experience. The happy endings of the later comedies are profoundly qualified by the deep and unresolved ambiguities in the plays. Jokes after all are usually at another person’s expense, and happy endings imply unhappy beginnings and middles. In the later comedies we are unable to forget the perspective of the character who are the butt of our laughter, or to ignore the sufferings that precede the final resolution. The unhappy endings of tragedies also possess a greatly expanded significance that take the plays far beyond the bare outlines of what makes a play a tragedy - that it depicts the suffering and fall of a great man.
One way Shakespeare was able to allow the plays to outgrow their schematic foundations was in the development of his characterisation. It is surely these characters, who are so compelling and have provesd so real to audiences and readers for four centuries, and who have the unprecedented quality of changing in the course of the plays, that mark out what is truly distinctive in these plays. Shakespeare’s genius was to seize upon a characteristic of drama that helped in the creation of autonomous characters - the absence of an authorial voice. All we have in the plays are the words and actions of individual characters. Shakespeare never speaks in his own voice, we are not told by him how to interpret what the characters say and none of his characters, not even Hamlet or Prospero, can be entirely seen as a self portrait. Shakespeare exploited this in learning to create characters who possessed greater and greater powers of introspection and interpreted their roles for themselves. The Merchant of Venice, marks a crucial stage in this development in Shakespeare’s characterisation. The Folio editors categorised it as a comedy, presumably because the two lovers at the play’s centre survive the difficulties the plot throws up and marry at the end. However, Shylock, the play’s Jewish villain-victim, is himself a complex character who articulates a quite different interpretation of what happens. It is therefore possible to look at the play’s events from his perspective, in which case it appears as a tragedy
An interest in exploring the protagonist’s experience was crucial from the outset of Shakespeare’s career as a writer of tragedy. In Titus Andronicus Titus loses wealth, position and status and witnesses the sufferings of his family that culminate in the rape and mutilation of his daughter Lavinia. This all happens in the first half of the play, and does not make convincing drama, but it seems that Shakespeare is interested in something other than telling a believable story. In the manner of God heaping sufferings on Job, it seems that Shakespeare wants to place Titus under the greatest imaginable strain and then see how he responds. Or rather, as Shakespeare is the author of Titus’ character as well as of his torments, he wishes to test his own ability to encompass such suffering, to articulate it, and to explore its implications.
In writing tragedy, therefore, it seems that Shakespeare was seeking a way to explore human experience, by creating circumstances that would take that experience to its limits. Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello pass through some form or other of madness, and each is driven by internal and external compulsion to extreme action and this affords a unique perspective on each of them and the worlds they inhabit. Titus’ circumstances are comparably extreme, but his experience is none the less limited, because he is limited. The difference in the later figures is their complex, and diverse minds, and the consequent expansion of their capacity for emotion and reflection. Their ‘tragic’ situations mean that the potentialities of those minds are explored and articulated to the fullest degree imaginable.
Each of these characters possesses, to a greatly expanded degree, the quality of self-awareness that stops Shylock from being a straightforward comic stage villain. Each is able to consider his experience, in particular through soliloquy. These famous speeches are moments at which, by definition, nothing is happening in an external sense, and yet they are the centre of the plays providing their most vivid language. They represent an unprecedented depiction of human thought process and an examination of human psychology.
Each of the great tragedies takes one into a distinct world that is not simply the world of historical and empirical realties. It is a world in which action and thoughts resonate with psychological, ethical, indeed symbolic meanings. The soliloquies are dramatic poems describing intense processes of image-thinking. To understand the thoughts of Hamlet or Macbeth in their soliloquies we must attend to their metaphors in their own terms, seeing the images those metaphors create. These image-thoughts are concerned with the great themes of time, loss, death, impermanence, desire, duty conscience, and so on, that pervade the Tragedies. Their intensity compels one to consider these themes in the light of the images.
Macbeth stricken by conscience while contemplating Duncan’s murder does not speak abstractly about right and wrong. He imagines an apocalyptic future in which knowledge of his crime is spread by the trumpets of angels and by:
‘pity like a naked new-born babe
striding the blast...’
Hamlet, mortified by the unseemly haste of his mother’s re-marriage wishes viscerally that:
‘ this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew...’
Othello is a somewhat lesser imaginer than either of these, more constrained by the conventionality of his metaphors. And yet, tormented by jealousy, his description of his perceived dishonour has a comparable intensity:
‘alas to make me
The fixed figure for the time of scorn
To point his slow and moving finger at.’
Lear does not have many soliloquies, but once he has withdrawn into the solitude of madness, all of his speeches have this quality of visionary metaphor. His denunciation of the libidinous selfishness of his daughters becomes an eschatological vision:
‘Down from the waist
They’re centaurs, though women all above,
But to the girdle do the god’s inherit
Below is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness,
There is the sulfurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption...’
Such metaphors (and not only those of the soliloquies) induct one into a vision of existence in which the literal setting is perceived symbolically as a cosmological battle-field where Shakespeare’s universal themes can be fully unfolded.
Another dimension is added to the plays’ symbolic character as, especially in Macbeth and King Lear, the literal settings themselves take on a symbolic force. Shakespeare’s geographical and historical settings always have a profound influence on the kind of experience the plays contain. Thus the Roman world of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus offers a setting where political and social questions can be considered. The fantasised settings of Ilyria and Bohemia are the appropriate location for the liberating possibilities of romance and pastoral. By setting King Lear in prehistoric Britain, Shakespeare found an imaginative space in which it was possible to explore primal themes of humanity and inhumanity outside the conceptual frameworks of Christian ethics or historical societies. This is epitomised by the blasted heath to which Lear is exiled, that comes to represent a primal wilderness, emptied out of all social forms and meanings, that offers a resting place from which those forms can be reviewed. Macbeth is set on the cusp of the pre-historic and the historic and depicts a world that contains both Christian values and pagan alternatives and whose entire character changes depending on their relative ascendancy. The supernatural is a reality in Macbeth’s Scotland in ways that are not possible in plays set in Shakespeare’s own time.
In these plays the whole drama becomes a giant metaphor, or at least a metaphorical canvas that expresses and contains the conflicts that are focused on the experience of the hero. This is less the case in Othello, set in a modern world, albeit on the geographical frontier between Christian civilization and its enemies. Othello is a domestic tragedy that gains much of its strength from its translation of Shakespeare’s exploration of violence and evil to a familiar setting.
Hamlet is set in a court, an imaginative space in which its hero’s hyper-sophisticated and perpetually modern mind might exist, and yet in which it cannot have free rein. The reverberations of Macbeth’s tragedy are externalised in the chaos his world is swept up in. The reverberations of Hamlet’s tragedy have as much force, but the more naturalistic setting means that they are turned inwards, and this emphasises their origin in the imagination. ‘Denmark’s a prison’. Hamlet tells the courtier Rosencrantz, who has been sent, along with his friend Guildenstern, to find out his intentions. ‘Then is the world one,’ Rosencrantz replies, seeking to deflect the force of Hamlet’s metaphor. But that metaphor actually gains force from Rosencrantz’ parry. Hamlet’s world is, indeed, a prison in the same way that Blake’s London is filled with the sound of ‘mind-forged manacles’. The world a prison?
‘Hamlet: A goodly one in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my Lord.’
Indeed not, and by now Rosencrantz can no longer keep up with the game. Thinking in terms of Hamlet’s metaphor would mean submitting to the vision of life it entails. But there is no escape for Rosencrantz back into the literal because Hamlet knows that such literalism is merely a metaphor for a lack of imagination.
‘Hamlet: Why then ‘tis not so to you. There’s no thing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me ‘tis a prison.’
Unable to cope with Hamlet’s image, Rosencrantz can only protest that if Hamlet’s mind feels trapped in a prison, it must be that the mind is a too big, rather than that the world is too small. He hopes to deny the imaginative necessity of Hamlet’s metaphor, by asserting that the mind can itself be seen in the metaphor’s terms.
‘Rosencrantz: Why then your ambition makes it one; ‘tis too narrow for your mind.’
What he has forgotten is the imaginative priority of Hamlet’s vision. His view of Denmark as a prison is not a whimsical fancy. Hamlet is compelled to view it in that way, because that way of viewing it is more true. Denmark is indeed more like a prison than it is like liberty. Hamlet cannot determine what he imagines, and the imagination cannot offer any consoling solipsistic alternatives to this implacable image:
‘Hamlet: Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the King of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, that sees the events of Hamlet from the viewpoint of the courtiers seeks to establish their imaginative perplexity as a norm against that the rest of the play should be measured. This is an attempt to read the play as a Becketian irony rather than a Shakespearean tragedy. Hamlet himself is wiser than Stoppard or Becket, Rosencrantz or Guildenstern and when he tells them that the mind makes the difference between tragedy and travesty also implies that the deepest perspective will be found in the deepest mind. This depth is what Hamlet searches for, what he sometimes speaks from, and is the only norm that the play provides. However illusive this quality of consciousness may be, it none the less underlies the sense that the play reveals the significance of the events it describes. This quality is itself an argument against the Becketian meaninglessness of the world of Stoppard’s play. This is why Hamlet is a tragedy and his Tragedy.
If we wish to apprehend the significance of Hamlet we must firstly attempt the difficult task of opening ourselves to the compelling yet vertiginous perspectives that are revealed by its hero. And if we wish to gain an alternative perspective on Hamlet himself we must conduct a similar process of engagement with Ophelia, Polonius, Gertrude and Claudius - indeed, all of the other characters, who possess their own, though lesser subjectivities.
Shakespearean Tragedy remains the crucial imaginative test for any reader, critic, actor, director or theatergoer. The point is not so much the unhappy endings of the protagonists; so much as the intensity that is created by their sufferings. On the basis of this intensity the imaginative significance of those sufferings is revealed through the heroes’ perception and by the context of the play. The test is of one’s ability to apprehend that significance - and it is a test that one inevitably fails.
Hamlet’s mind, like the mind revealed in Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, is not only too big for Denmark, it is too big for us.
One way that Shakespeare and especially King Lear, is a masterpiece of parallel plotting, in which the protagonists experience is balanced and tested against the experience of others. Lear’s experience is counterpointed with Gloucester’s, underscored by Kent, the Fool and Poor Tom, and mirrored in Edgar’s conflict with Edmund. Lear has a dominating, centripetal presence, and yet the experience of the other characters, even the most minor, is not wholly absorbed into his. Towards the end of the play a soldier is dispatched to murder Cordelia in prison. This is surely a ‘small part’ for an actor, and yet his response intimates a world of experience:
‘I cannot draw a cart
Nor eat dried oats. If it be man’s work, I’ll do it.’
However without the depth of the central characters, all of this perspectivising would leave us with epic rather than tragedy - vast stories told on vast canvasses. We would have something akin to the emphasis in Brecht’s epics on the social context within that individual struggles are enacted. Brecht’s Coriolanus may even be an improvement of Shakespeare’s play of the same name, but this is precisely because of the limitations of Shakespeare’s protagonist, ‘a character without an inside’, in the words of one critic. A Brechtian Macbeth would be a mere shadow because Shakespeare’s play is so profoundly concerned with the hero’s subjective experience.
In seeking to identify the distinctive genius of these plays one may, therefore, look to the tension between the breadth created by the multiplication of perspectives and the depth created by the protagonists’ huge capacity for experience. Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello each charts the suffering and eventual demise of a central protagonist. This is largely what gives them a more defined focus and there fore a greater intensity than the love tragedies, Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra that have two central characters. Each of the protagonists of the great plays undergoes a journey that makes possible an enlarged understanding of human experience, and any reading of the plays that hopes to learn from that enlarged understanding must seek to follow those journeys. It must explore the imaginative world that the plays create through exploring their suffering.
© Vishvapani, 2006
Buddhism and the Arts: http://web.mac.com/vishvapani/iWeb/writingonbuddhism/Arts.html
www.vishvapani.org
The editors of the 1623 Folio, in which most of Shakespeare’s plays were first published together, divided them into Comedies, Tragedies and Histories. The ten plays included among the tragedies, in rough order of composition, are Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens; the four great tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth - and then Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. The Folio’s method of dividing them has so influenced subsequent views of the plays that it is easy to forget that it was an interpretation of the relationships between them that was based on the conventions of classical drama. In many cases the categorisation does not tell us much about the play. The range of genres that Shakespeare actually used and the difficulty of distinguishing them is better suggested by Polonius’ famous description of the players in Hamlet:
‘the best actors in the world either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, or tragical-historical-pastoral...‘
Although in his earliest plays Shakespeare followed the generic conventions of classical models, he gradually learned how to mix the genres, introducing comic elements into tragedies and sadness into comedy.
Why was Shakespeare not content simply to operate within inherited conventions? The answer lies in the way genre determines the subject matter of a play and limits the range of ways that subject matter can be explored within the conventions of plot, characterisation within a genre. Oscar Wilde wittily said that Hamlet’s description of art ‘holding a mirror up to nature’ is intended by Shakespeare to show that Hamlet really has gone mad. Art, as a Renaissance playgoer would have understood, does not reflect external realities, it creates its own, and writing within a genre means accepting a set of rules about the nature of the reality that can be created. A work of art is a world in itself, that strives for internal consistency and characters can only operate within the terms of that world. A character in a comedy inhabits a comedic world; a character in a tragedy inhabits a tragic one, and it is absurd to imagine a character being transposed from one to the other.
The simplest definition of dramatic comedy, for example, might follow another Wildean witticism - Lady Bracknell’s definition of fiction in Wilde’s pastiche of Shakespeare’s comic forms, The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘The good end happily and the bad end unhappily. That’s why it is called fiction.’ In creating a character in a play written according to such a formula the writer would be constrained by the need not to bring the attitude underlying it into question, and would be forced to tailor their characterisation accordingly. This would impose limits on the range of experience that it was possible to portray in such a context - and this might indeed be said of characters in early comedies such as Much Ado About Nothing, or A Comedy of Errors.
As Shakespeare developed, however, he explored an increasing broad, and deep range of experience and he developed ways of expanding the possibilities of comedy and tragedy so that they could accommodate this expanded range of experience. The happy endings of the later comedies are profoundly qualified by the deep and unresolved ambiguities in the plays. Jokes after all are usually at another person’s expense, and happy endings imply unhappy beginnings and middles. In the later comedies we are unable to forget the perspective of the character who are the butt of our laughter, or to ignore the sufferings that precede the final resolution. The unhappy endings of tragedies also possess a greatly expanded significance that take the plays far beyond the bare outlines of what makes a play a tragedy - that it depicts the suffering and fall of a great man.
One way Shakespeare was able to allow the plays to outgrow their schematic foundations was in the development of his characterisation. It is surely these characters, who are so compelling and have provesd so real to audiences and readers for four centuries, and who have the unprecedented quality of changing in the course of the plays, that mark out what is truly distinctive in these plays. Shakespeare’s genius was to seize upon a characteristic of drama that helped in the creation of autonomous characters - the absence of an authorial voice. All we have in the plays are the words and actions of individual characters. Shakespeare never speaks in his own voice, we are not told by him how to interpret what the characters say and none of his characters, not even Hamlet or Prospero, can be entirely seen as a self portrait. Shakespeare exploited this in learning to create characters who possessed greater and greater powers of introspection and interpreted their roles for themselves. The Merchant of Venice, marks a crucial stage in this development in Shakespeare’s characterisation. The Folio editors categorised it as a comedy, presumably because the two lovers at the play’s centre survive the difficulties the plot throws up and marry at the end. However, Shylock, the play’s Jewish villain-victim, is himself a complex character who articulates a quite different interpretation of what happens. It is therefore possible to look at the play’s events from his perspective, in which case it appears as a tragedy
An interest in exploring the protagonist’s experience was crucial from the outset of Shakespeare’s career as a writer of tragedy. In Titus Andronicus Titus loses wealth, position and status and witnesses the sufferings of his family that culminate in the rape and mutilation of his daughter Lavinia. This all happens in the first half of the play, and does not make convincing drama, but it seems that Shakespeare is interested in something other than telling a believable story. In the manner of God heaping sufferings on Job, it seems that Shakespeare wants to place Titus under the greatest imaginable strain and then see how he responds. Or rather, as Shakespeare is the author of Titus’ character as well as of his torments, he wishes to test his own ability to encompass such suffering, to articulate it, and to explore its implications.
In writing tragedy, therefore, it seems that Shakespeare was seeking a way to explore human experience, by creating circumstances that would take that experience to its limits. Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello pass through some form or other of madness, and each is driven by internal and external compulsion to extreme action and this affords a unique perspective on each of them and the worlds they inhabit. Titus’ circumstances are comparably extreme, but his experience is none the less limited, because he is limited. The difference in the later figures is their complex, and diverse minds, and the consequent expansion of their capacity for emotion and reflection. Their ‘tragic’ situations mean that the potentialities of those minds are explored and articulated to the fullest degree imaginable.
Each of these characters possesses, to a greatly expanded degree, the quality of self-awareness that stops Shylock from being a straightforward comic stage villain. Each is able to consider his experience, in particular through soliloquy. These famous speeches are moments at which, by definition, nothing is happening in an external sense, and yet they are the centre of the plays providing their most vivid language. They represent an unprecedented depiction of human thought process and an examination of human psychology.
Each of the great tragedies takes one into a distinct world that is not simply the world of historical and empirical realties. It is a world in which action and thoughts resonate with psychological, ethical, indeed symbolic meanings. The soliloquies are dramatic poems describing intense processes of image-thinking. To understand the thoughts of Hamlet or Macbeth in their soliloquies we must attend to their metaphors in their own terms, seeing the images those metaphors create. These image-thoughts are concerned with the great themes of time, loss, death, impermanence, desire, duty conscience, and so on, that pervade the Tragedies. Their intensity compels one to consider these themes in the light of the images.
Macbeth stricken by conscience while contemplating Duncan’s murder does not speak abstractly about right and wrong. He imagines an apocalyptic future in which knowledge of his crime is spread by the trumpets of angels and by:
‘pity like a naked new-born babe
striding the blast...’
Hamlet, mortified by the unseemly haste of his mother’s re-marriage wishes viscerally that:
‘ this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew...’
Othello is a somewhat lesser imaginer than either of these, more constrained by the conventionality of his metaphors. And yet, tormented by jealousy, his description of his perceived dishonour has a comparable intensity:
‘alas to make me
The fixed figure for the time of scorn
To point his slow and moving finger at.’
Lear does not have many soliloquies, but once he has withdrawn into the solitude of madness, all of his speeches have this quality of visionary metaphor. His denunciation of the libidinous selfishness of his daughters becomes an eschatological vision:
‘Down from the waist
They’re centaurs, though women all above,
But to the girdle do the god’s inherit
Below is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness,
There is the sulfurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption...’
Such metaphors (and not only those of the soliloquies) induct one into a vision of existence in which the literal setting is perceived symbolically as a cosmological battle-field where Shakespeare’s universal themes can be fully unfolded.
Another dimension is added to the plays’ symbolic character as, especially in Macbeth and King Lear, the literal settings themselves take on a symbolic force. Shakespeare’s geographical and historical settings always have a profound influence on the kind of experience the plays contain. Thus the Roman world of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus offers a setting where political and social questions can be considered. The fantasised settings of Ilyria and Bohemia are the appropriate location for the liberating possibilities of romance and pastoral. By setting King Lear in prehistoric Britain, Shakespeare found an imaginative space in which it was possible to explore primal themes of humanity and inhumanity outside the conceptual frameworks of Christian ethics or historical societies. This is epitomised by the blasted heath to which Lear is exiled, that comes to represent a primal wilderness, emptied out of all social forms and meanings, that offers a resting place from which those forms can be reviewed. Macbeth is set on the cusp of the pre-historic and the historic and depicts a world that contains both Christian values and pagan alternatives and whose entire character changes depending on their relative ascendancy. The supernatural is a reality in Macbeth’s Scotland in ways that are not possible in plays set in Shakespeare’s own time.
In these plays the whole drama becomes a giant metaphor, or at least a metaphorical canvas that expresses and contains the conflicts that are focused on the experience of the hero. This is less the case in Othello, set in a modern world, albeit on the geographical frontier between Christian civilization and its enemies. Othello is a domestic tragedy that gains much of its strength from its translation of Shakespeare’s exploration of violence and evil to a familiar setting.
Hamlet is set in a court, an imaginative space in which its hero’s hyper-sophisticated and perpetually modern mind might exist, and yet in which it cannot have free rein. The reverberations of Macbeth’s tragedy are externalised in the chaos his world is swept up in. The reverberations of Hamlet’s tragedy have as much force, but the more naturalistic setting means that they are turned inwards, and this emphasises their origin in the imagination. ‘Denmark’s a prison’. Hamlet tells the courtier Rosencrantz, who has been sent, along with his friend Guildenstern, to find out his intentions. ‘Then is the world one,’ Rosencrantz replies, seeking to deflect the force of Hamlet’s metaphor. But that metaphor actually gains force from Rosencrantz’ parry. Hamlet’s world is, indeed, a prison in the same way that Blake’s London is filled with the sound of ‘mind-forged manacles’. The world a prison?
‘Hamlet: A goodly one in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my Lord.’
Indeed not, and by now Rosencrantz can no longer keep up with the game. Thinking in terms of Hamlet’s metaphor would mean submitting to the vision of life it entails. But there is no escape for Rosencrantz back into the literal because Hamlet knows that such literalism is merely a metaphor for a lack of imagination.
‘Hamlet: Why then ‘tis not so to you. There’s no thing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me ‘tis a prison.’
Unable to cope with Hamlet’s image, Rosencrantz can only protest that if Hamlet’s mind feels trapped in a prison, it must be that the mind is a too big, rather than that the world is too small. He hopes to deny the imaginative necessity of Hamlet’s metaphor, by asserting that the mind can itself be seen in the metaphor’s terms.
‘Rosencrantz: Why then your ambition makes it one; ‘tis too narrow for your mind.’
What he has forgotten is the imaginative priority of Hamlet’s vision. His view of Denmark as a prison is not a whimsical fancy. Hamlet is compelled to view it in that way, because that way of viewing it is more true. Denmark is indeed more like a prison than it is like liberty. Hamlet cannot determine what he imagines, and the imagination cannot offer any consoling solipsistic alternatives to this implacable image:
‘Hamlet: Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the King of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, that sees the events of Hamlet from the viewpoint of the courtiers seeks to establish their imaginative perplexity as a norm against that the rest of the play should be measured. This is an attempt to read the play as a Becketian irony rather than a Shakespearean tragedy. Hamlet himself is wiser than Stoppard or Becket, Rosencrantz or Guildenstern and when he tells them that the mind makes the difference between tragedy and travesty also implies that the deepest perspective will be found in the deepest mind. This depth is what Hamlet searches for, what he sometimes speaks from, and is the only norm that the play provides. However illusive this quality of consciousness may be, it none the less underlies the sense that the play reveals the significance of the events it describes. This quality is itself an argument against the Becketian meaninglessness of the world of Stoppard’s play. This is why Hamlet is a tragedy and his Tragedy.
If we wish to apprehend the significance of Hamlet we must firstly attempt the difficult task of opening ourselves to the compelling yet vertiginous perspectives that are revealed by its hero. And if we wish to gain an alternative perspective on Hamlet himself we must conduct a similar process of engagement with Ophelia, Polonius, Gertrude and Claudius - indeed, all of the other characters, who possess their own, though lesser subjectivities.
Shakespearean Tragedy remains the crucial imaginative test for any reader, critic, actor, director or theatergoer. The point is not so much the unhappy endings of the protagonists; so much as the intensity that is created by their sufferings. On the basis of this intensity the imaginative significance of those sufferings is revealed through the heroes’ perception and by the context of the play. The test is of one’s ability to apprehend that significance - and it is a test that one inevitably fails.
Hamlet’s mind, like the mind revealed in Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, is not only too big for Denmark, it is too big for us.
One way that Shakespeare and especially King Lear, is a masterpiece of parallel plotting, in which the protagonists experience is balanced and tested against the experience of others. Lear’s experience is counterpointed with Gloucester’s, underscored by Kent, the Fool and Poor Tom, and mirrored in Edgar’s conflict with Edmund. Lear has a dominating, centripetal presence, and yet the experience of the other characters, even the most minor, is not wholly absorbed into his. Towards the end of the play a soldier is dispatched to murder Cordelia in prison. This is surely a ‘small part’ for an actor, and yet his response intimates a world of experience:
‘I cannot draw a cart
Nor eat dried oats. If it be man’s work, I’ll do it.’
However without the depth of the central characters, all of this perspectivising would leave us with epic rather than tragedy - vast stories told on vast canvasses. We would have something akin to the emphasis in Brecht’s epics on the social context within that individual struggles are enacted. Brecht’s Coriolanus may even be an improvement of Shakespeare’s play of the same name, but this is precisely because of the limitations of Shakespeare’s protagonist, ‘a character without an inside’, in the words of one critic. A Brechtian Macbeth would be a mere shadow because Shakespeare’s play is so profoundly concerned with the hero’s subjective experience.
In seeking to identify the distinctive genius of these plays one may, therefore, look to the tension between the breadth created by the multiplication of perspectives and the depth created by the protagonists’ huge capacity for experience. Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello each charts the suffering and eventual demise of a central protagonist. This is largely what gives them a more defined focus and there fore a greater intensity than the love tragedies, Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra that have two central characters. Each of the protagonists of the great plays undergoes a journey that makes possible an enlarged understanding of human experience, and any reading of the plays that hopes to learn from that enlarged understanding must seek to follow those journeys. It must explore the imaginative world that the plays create through exploring their suffering.
© Vishvapani, 2006
Buddhism and the Arts: http://web.mac.com/vishvapani/iWeb/writingonbuddhism/Arts.html
www.vishvapani.org
American Beauty - Review
American Beauty, Dir. Sam Mendes, Dreamworks Studios, 1999
Reviewed by Vishvapani
What is beauty? What is American Beauty? Well, an American beauty is a kind of rose, and this becomes an emblem for the American beauty, pubescent nymphette Angela. Lester, the film’s hero, sees her when he goes to watch Jane, his daughter, cheer-leading at a basketball match - and love bursts out in a rose-festooned fantasy. This propels him into a rejection of his suburban life as an advertising drone and the material values of his wife Carolyn. It sets him on the trail of an abstraction – American Beauty, meaning both the beauty of America, and the beauty Americans perceive. The movie, American Beauty, is a cause for rejoicing: a sharp portrait of American society, a wise investigation of character, and a moving exploration of beauty – how we need beauty, yet blind ourselves to it, and how we might learn again to find it, even in the most banal of cultures.
The film is many things. It has elements of farce, yet it is sad and touching. It is a satire on suburban America, but its affection for and understanding of its characters saves it from cynicism. It is a whodunnit, but one seen from the perspective of the victim – who does not mind having been killed – after his death, reviewing the events which led to it (so really it’s a ‘who’ll-do-it’). It invokes all these genres, yet subverts them, peers beneath the conventions, and refuses to reduce human complexity to the stereotype that usually get from the media. There are three possible assailants in the film, but all of them are strange and complex. Character is unknowable. Motivation is mysterious.
But part of the film’s cleverness (and both the script and the direction are extremely clever) is its ability to work on several levels, and American beauty owes much of its popular success to the fact that it is very funny. The observant yet distanced sensibility it expresses is that of a generation reared on the America of soaps, sitcoms, and films like ET, as well as its debunkers like The Simpsons, and Soap. American Beauty observes with affectionate incredulity the verbal, physical, emotional and cultural contours of this landscape, seeing the grotesque in TV-fixated families, teenagers who drive BMW convertibles, and a credible but utterly pervasive materialism. Carolyn, Lester’s adulterous, materialistic real estate broker wife believes in this American dream, and has come to epitomise it, at a great, though secret, emotional cost. We see the desperation behind her manicured façade, but she never lets up. She ruins a romantic clinch - the one hope of reconciliation with Lester – by warning him not to spill his beer on the setee. ‘It’s just a couch!’ he shouts.’ And she shouts back, ‘It’s a $4,000 sofa upholstered in Italian silk!’
Lester’s vision of Angela turns him from a passive malcontent declining into middle age, into a reborn adolescent. He is saved by Ricky, the boy next door, an enigmatic outsider who listens to Pink Floyd and deals dope. More importantly he listens to Lester and refuses to play the games that designate social identity. Self-possessed and detached, Ricky is an observer to the extent of capturing everything he sees on video. But this is awareness, not voyeurism. He sees beauty in the things conventional eyes overlook, and records these images so he can remember them and recollect himself in them. The bag playing in the wind, which he considers the most beautiful thing he has shot, has become an instant icon of anti-materialism – the antithesis of the manufactured experiences we call ‘entertainment’. Ricky’s message is, it’s not what you see, it is how you look - an Emersonian creed which holds that at such moments, ‘its like God staring back at you, just for a second. And if you’re careful you can look right back.’
The gaze of Ricky’s camera, like that of his steel-blue eyes, disconcerts Lester’s daughter Jane He sees in her a beauty she cannot find in herself, just as he sees it in a dead bird, or a corpse. She fears him, yet is entranced – and there is, perhaps, a hint of something disturbed in Ricky. His desireless gaze offers a perspective from which suburban values appear ugly, yet for Ricky the world is overwhelmingly beautiful, and his camera connects him with a source of meaning. He tells Jane that on seeing the plastic bag, ‘I realised there was this entire life behind things and this incredibly benevolent force for goodness that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid.’
The quest for such authenticity drives Lester’s transformation. He throws in his job and works in a fast food joint. He stands up to his wife who, he says, ‘would prefer I went through life like a prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink.’ He smokes dope, listens to rock music, and works out in the hope of seducing Angela. It is not so much that Lester discovers an alternative to his lifestyle as that he finds a new attitude. He says, ‘It’s great when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do.’ He is on his way.
The culminating shift comes when Lester changes his view of Angela. At last he becomes a benign, paternal, mature man full of tenderness, but without desire. He is a man without a role, capable of being rather than doing, and of dwelling in the space of aesthetic appreciation that Ricky has indicated and embodied. Lester is filled with quiet happiness. In a culture built on greed, neurosis, and unstated conflict, he can again surprise himself with his new spaciousness. ‘I’m great,’ he says. And then, movingly, ‘Man, oh man, oh man…’ Then he is shot.
The film could have been a broad satire with awkward pretentions, but it works hard to lend depth to the characters. Angela’s glitzy, ambitious persona belies a fear that she is ordinary and boring. Carolyn is frustrated and insecure. Ricky’s violent, intense military father, Colonel Fitts, has secret, repressed drives. These motivations might still have seemed cheap psychologising, but the acting is extraordinary, and the characters are subtly developed. The identity of Lester’s murderer is revealed in a genuinely surprising twist, and the film’s message is the unpredictability of human nature, the mystery of life.
American Beauty is a marvellous conjuring act, finding beauty and meaning, while remaining rooted in witty social observation. There is not a single moment on screen that is not interesting and intelligent. It is sad and funny, sophisticated and sincere. These elements are kept together by a directorial tour de force, but one feels the tension residing between them. I am much taken by American Beauty and I think it articulates something important in a cultural language that belongs to my generation. I love it. But its limits appear when one asks if it has fully earned Lester’s epiphany. The film seems to me a brilliantly achieved sketch of an alternative vision of life.
Lester’s death is not tragedy, and it avoids melodrama. He is at peace with himself before his death and after it. He looks down on his life and watches the film with us from a post-mortem vantage point, that resonates with ‘The American Sublime’ described by Wallace Stephens:
‘the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.’
One could call this transcendence except that its message is the immanence of beauty in the every instant of life, especially in the things that cannot be quantified and served up to consumers. Lester’s final monologue itself has an eloquent American beauty.
‘I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me. But it is hard to stay mad when there is so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I am seeing it all at once and its too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… But then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every moment of my stupid little life.’
First published in Urthona magazine
Vishvapani's articles on the Arts: http://web.mac.com/vishvapani/iWeb/writingonbuddhism/Arts.html
Reviewed by Vishvapani
What is beauty? What is American Beauty? Well, an American beauty is a kind of rose, and this becomes an emblem for the American beauty, pubescent nymphette Angela. Lester, the film’s hero, sees her when he goes to watch Jane, his daughter, cheer-leading at a basketball match - and love bursts out in a rose-festooned fantasy. This propels him into a rejection of his suburban life as an advertising drone and the material values of his wife Carolyn. It sets him on the trail of an abstraction – American Beauty, meaning both the beauty of America, and the beauty Americans perceive. The movie, American Beauty, is a cause for rejoicing: a sharp portrait of American society, a wise investigation of character, and a moving exploration of beauty – how we need beauty, yet blind ourselves to it, and how we might learn again to find it, even in the most banal of cultures.
The film is many things. It has elements of farce, yet it is sad and touching. It is a satire on suburban America, but its affection for and understanding of its characters saves it from cynicism. It is a whodunnit, but one seen from the perspective of the victim – who does not mind having been killed – after his death, reviewing the events which led to it (so really it’s a ‘who’ll-do-it’). It invokes all these genres, yet subverts them, peers beneath the conventions, and refuses to reduce human complexity to the stereotype that usually get from the media. There are three possible assailants in the film, but all of them are strange and complex. Character is unknowable. Motivation is mysterious.
But part of the film’s cleverness (and both the script and the direction are extremely clever) is its ability to work on several levels, and American beauty owes much of its popular success to the fact that it is very funny. The observant yet distanced sensibility it expresses is that of a generation reared on the America of soaps, sitcoms, and films like ET, as well as its debunkers like The Simpsons, and Soap. American Beauty observes with affectionate incredulity the verbal, physical, emotional and cultural contours of this landscape, seeing the grotesque in TV-fixated families, teenagers who drive BMW convertibles, and a credible but utterly pervasive materialism. Carolyn, Lester’s adulterous, materialistic real estate broker wife believes in this American dream, and has come to epitomise it, at a great, though secret, emotional cost. We see the desperation behind her manicured façade, but she never lets up. She ruins a romantic clinch - the one hope of reconciliation with Lester – by warning him not to spill his beer on the setee. ‘It’s just a couch!’ he shouts.’ And she shouts back, ‘It’s a $4,000 sofa upholstered in Italian silk!’
Lester’s vision of Angela turns him from a passive malcontent declining into middle age, into a reborn adolescent. He is saved by Ricky, the boy next door, an enigmatic outsider who listens to Pink Floyd and deals dope. More importantly he listens to Lester and refuses to play the games that designate social identity. Self-possessed and detached, Ricky is an observer to the extent of capturing everything he sees on video. But this is awareness, not voyeurism. He sees beauty in the things conventional eyes overlook, and records these images so he can remember them and recollect himself in them. The bag playing in the wind, which he considers the most beautiful thing he has shot, has become an instant icon of anti-materialism – the antithesis of the manufactured experiences we call ‘entertainment’. Ricky’s message is, it’s not what you see, it is how you look - an Emersonian creed which holds that at such moments, ‘its like God staring back at you, just for a second. And if you’re careful you can look right back.’
The gaze of Ricky’s camera, like that of his steel-blue eyes, disconcerts Lester’s daughter Jane He sees in her a beauty she cannot find in herself, just as he sees it in a dead bird, or a corpse. She fears him, yet is entranced – and there is, perhaps, a hint of something disturbed in Ricky. His desireless gaze offers a perspective from which suburban values appear ugly, yet for Ricky the world is overwhelmingly beautiful, and his camera connects him with a source of meaning. He tells Jane that on seeing the plastic bag, ‘I realised there was this entire life behind things and this incredibly benevolent force for goodness that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid.’
The quest for such authenticity drives Lester’s transformation. He throws in his job and works in a fast food joint. He stands up to his wife who, he says, ‘would prefer I went through life like a prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink.’ He smokes dope, listens to rock music, and works out in the hope of seducing Angela. It is not so much that Lester discovers an alternative to his lifestyle as that he finds a new attitude. He says, ‘It’s great when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do.’ He is on his way.
The culminating shift comes when Lester changes his view of Angela. At last he becomes a benign, paternal, mature man full of tenderness, but without desire. He is a man without a role, capable of being rather than doing, and of dwelling in the space of aesthetic appreciation that Ricky has indicated and embodied. Lester is filled with quiet happiness. In a culture built on greed, neurosis, and unstated conflict, he can again surprise himself with his new spaciousness. ‘I’m great,’ he says. And then, movingly, ‘Man, oh man, oh man…’ Then he is shot.
The film could have been a broad satire with awkward pretentions, but it works hard to lend depth to the characters. Angela’s glitzy, ambitious persona belies a fear that she is ordinary and boring. Carolyn is frustrated and insecure. Ricky’s violent, intense military father, Colonel Fitts, has secret, repressed drives. These motivations might still have seemed cheap psychologising, but the acting is extraordinary, and the characters are subtly developed. The identity of Lester’s murderer is revealed in a genuinely surprising twist, and the film’s message is the unpredictability of human nature, the mystery of life.
American Beauty is a marvellous conjuring act, finding beauty and meaning, while remaining rooted in witty social observation. There is not a single moment on screen that is not interesting and intelligent. It is sad and funny, sophisticated and sincere. These elements are kept together by a directorial tour de force, but one feels the tension residing between them. I am much taken by American Beauty and I think it articulates something important in a cultural language that belongs to my generation. I love it. But its limits appear when one asks if it has fully earned Lester’s epiphany. The film seems to me a brilliantly achieved sketch of an alternative vision of life.
Lester’s death is not tragedy, and it avoids melodrama. He is at peace with himself before his death and after it. He looks down on his life and watches the film with us from a post-mortem vantage point, that resonates with ‘The American Sublime’ described by Wallace Stephens:
‘the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.’
One could call this transcendence except that its message is the immanence of beauty in the every instant of life, especially in the things that cannot be quantified and served up to consumers. Lester’s final monologue itself has an eloquent American beauty.
‘I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me. But it is hard to stay mad when there is so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I am seeing it all at once and its too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… But then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every moment of my stupid little life.’
First published in Urthona magazine
Vishvapani's articles on the Arts: http://web.mac.com/vishvapani/iWeb/writingonbuddhism/Arts.html
Rude Awakenings: Zen at War
The controversy roused by Zen at War and Buddhist complicity in Japanese militarism
When dawn broke over Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 it brought with it waves of Japanese bombers. Their surprise attack on the American naval base brought the us into the Second World War and initiated a conflict that ended only when nuclear bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every American schoolboy knows that much. But, while Americans counted
their losses and vowed revenge, Japanese Buddhists found a special cause for celebration:
‘December 8th [the date of the attack in Japan] is the holy day on which Shakyamuni realised the Way, and [for this reason] it has been a day for commemorating the liberation of humankind. It is exceedingly wonderful that in 1941 we are able to make this very day also a holy day for commemorating the eternal reconstruction of the world. On this day was handed down the Great Imperial Edict aimed at punishing the arrogant United States and England, and news of the destruction of American bases in Hawaii spread quickly throughout the world.’
These words by the Buddhist writer Hata Esho, which were published in a Zen journal called Dogen (named after the founder of the Soto Zen school), would not have surprised their readers. The Zen establishment, indeed the leadership of all the main Buddhist schools in Japan, had been enthusiastic supporters of their Meiji rulers since the late 1900s, and were wholeheartedly behind the Japanese war effort.
A generation later the sons and daughters of the servicemen who had fought the Japanese took to the streets and campuses of the us to protest against the Vietnam War. Their rebellion turned into a rejection of mainstream western society, and a whole generation looked outside its culture for guidance and meaning. Many were captivated by the mysterious tradition of Japanese Zen, with its philosophy of going beyond the rational mind – beyond all dualism – to reach the simplicity at the heart of life. They took up its practice of zazen, or formless sitting meditation; and were entranced by the benign figures of such Zen masters as Yasutani Roshi and the writer DT Suzuki.
Thirty years on, the sixties generation are leaders of the western Buddhism that has spread across Europe and the us. Many have yoked their Zen practice to their concern for social justice and have declared the emergence of a new ‘Engaged Buddhism’. But the repressed history of the complicity of Japanese Buddhism in the country’s militarism and nationalism has returned to trouble modern Buddhists. The process started in Japan, but it has spread to the West. After many years of declaring that ‘no war has ever been fought in the name of Buddhism’, western Buddhists are having to acknowledge that this is untrue.
The fuse was lit in the West in 1997 with the publication of Zen at War, a careful but implacable account of Japanese Buddhism’s complicity in the country’s fanaticism, militarism and war effort up to 1945. The author, Brian Victoria, started to practise Zen while in Japan in 1961 and formally entered the Soto Zen priesthood in 1964, receiving the Dharma name ‘Daizen’. For Victoria, commitment to Zen went hand-in-hand with opposition to violence, particularly the Vietnam War, and his activism took him across Asia. But one day Zen Master Niwa Rempo summoned Victoria to his office to inform him that he was must cease his peace protests or lose his priestly status, adding, ‘Zen priests don’t get involved in politics.’
Victoria ignored the warning and none the less remained a priest, but his interest had been aroused. What, he wondered, was the relationship between Zen and politics? As his research progressed he discovered a history that his Zen teachers had failed to mention and which they were reluctant to discuss – the deep yet hidden responsibility of his own religious tradition for Japanese militarism. Zen at War is the product of his researches over the following 25 years; he now teaches at the University of Adelaide in Australia. There is no space here to rehearse Victoria’s arguments in full, nor to present his evidence; I conducted an e-mail interview with him but I’m in no position to verify his assertions. It is worth knowing, however, that his work is buttressed by that of many other scholars, and that its essential truth has not been challenged.
The essence of the charge in Zen at War is that from the end of the 19th century until 1945, almost the entire Japanese Buddhist establishment – not just Zen Buddhists – were vigorous supporters of the war effort and the militaristic society from which it grew. For instance, during the Russo-Japanese war of 1906 the well-known Buddhist scholar-priest Inoue Enryo argued that ‘If [the Russian army] is the army of Christ, ours is the army of the Buddha’. By the 1930s Buddhist teachers were advocating an ‘Imperial Way’ Zen, based, as Zen Master Yamazaki Ekiju put it, on the belief that ‘Japanese Buddhism must be centred on the emperor. … Buddhism, including Shakyamuni’s teachings, must conform to the national policy of Japan.’
Buddhist leaders willingly dubbed Japan’s campaigns in World War Two ‘a holy war’, and played a significant role in maintaining morale: ‘If ordered to tramp: march, march, or shoot: bang, bang,’ as Harada Daiun, a famous Zen master wrote. ‘This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom.’
As the military situation deteriorated, and nationalism merged into desperation, Buddhist rhetoric even played its part in finding volunteers to be kamikaze pilots. One Soto priest wrote in 1943: ‘The source of the spirit of the Special Attack Forces lies in the denial of the individual self and the rebirth of the soul, which takes upon itself the burden of history. From ancient times Zen has described this conversion of mind as the achievement of complete Enlightenment.’ This, for Victoria, is the culmination of the military tradition of Zen – the equation of the pilot’s willing death with the highest goal of the spiritual life.
Victoria’s charge is not simply that Zen teachers were swept along by the nationalist tide. That would be unsurprising and understandable. During the First World War, for example, belligerent European nations on both sides had the support of churches of many denominations. Virtually all religions that have become the dominant faith of a nation have had to come to terms with the military dimension of the nation’s life. But Victoria told me that his forthcoming book Zen War Stories will demonstrate even more clearly that Zen teachings played a central role in instilling the military ethos and offering moral support to the military. ‘Japanese military leaders deliberately set out to inculcate a Zen-inspired attitude in Japanese troops as they raped and pillaged their way through Asia from 1931 to 1945, killing between 10 and 20 million men, women and children. This was done with the complete and unconditional support of all Japan's Zen leaders.’
It is easy to stand in disbelieving judgement on such behaviour, and it is important, of course, to place it in a historical context. The origins of Zen militarism lie far back in Japanese history, and even in the state support of Buddhist monasteries in imperial China. But the start of the road to Pearl Harbour can be located at the restoration of the Emperor Meiji to full authority in 1868. For 268 years Buddhism had virtually been Japan’s state religion, and state patronage meant that Buddhist schools traded independence for prosperity and security. The new Meiji regime was determined that Japan should catch up with the western powers, and that all the energies of its sophisticated civilisation should be dedicated to this aim.
Japanese pride was piqued by the realisation that it had fallen behind, and that the influence of western powers was expanding in East Asia, its own traditional sphere of influence. Uniquely among Asian countries Japan succeeded in catching up, and its extraordinary achievement, in just one generation, was revealed to an astonished world by its victory in the 1906 war with Russia.
But Japan’s transition to the modern world presented challenges to its entire culture. The result was the emergence of an ideology that enabled it to benefit from western technology and the efficiency of a centralised state, but without the ideas of democracy, human rights and social justice that had developed in western countries to mitigate their effect. Japanese culture had always emphasised obedience but, with the restoration of the Emperor’s authority, loyalties that had hitherto been diffused were focused solely on him and, by extension, on the Japanese state he ruled. The forces that eventually led to fascism in Europe had reached Japan, and Meiji ideology emphasised above all the value of unquestioning devotion to the Emperor and the state.
Buddhism was caught up in the revolution. In the years after the Meiji restoration the authorities promoted Shinto, with its nationalist associations and cult of devotion to the Emperor, at the expense of Buddhism. Tens of thousands of Buddhists temples were closed, and their priests forced to disrobe. Buddhist leaders faced a choice – subservience or persecution – and, once the initial onslaught had abated, they followed instincts instilled by centuries of patronage and their ethos of deference to authority. They opted to show their rulers that Buddhism could contribute to the nation’s life by promoting loyalty, and the new concordat gave Buddhist organisations a place in Meiji society.
Two issues cause alarm in the case of Buddhist support for imperial Japan: the identity of the supporters, and the nature of their support. The first has attracted most attention in responses to Zen at War. The book reveals that in addition to being a skilled communicator of Zen teachings for a western audience, DT Suzuki was an eloquent advocate of Buddhist support for the imperial cause. But the greatest upset was caused by an article in Tricycle magazine, in which Victoria described the wartime record and political views of Yasutani Roshi. Yasutani was the teacher to Philip Kapleau, Robert Aitken, Maezumi Roshi and others, who have been the most important transmitters of Buddhism to white America. Yet Victoria revealed that throughout his life – including the years after the War – Yasutani adhered to an extreme right-wing political agenda, including theories of Japanese racial superiority and (notwithstanding the Jewish ancestry of many of his American students) virulent anti-Semitism.
These revelations stimulated interest in Victoria’s book, and forced American Zen teachers to comment, but the ensuing debate has remained focused on particular teachers. My own interest was pricked by the inadequacy of responses printed in Tricycle magazine by Aitken, and Bernie Glassman, a Dharma heir to Maezumi Roshi, and others. Aitken pleaded for understanding of the political and cultural context in which Yasutani’s views had developed. He even suggested that Yasutani’s views might be linked to the fact that ‘his mother gave him up for adoption to a Buddhist priest when he was only five years old and that he then grew up to be an angry youth and adult’.
As Victoria commented, this seems like ‘making excuses’. A Zen teacher is proclaimed as Enlightened, having gained an unshakeable insight into the truth that Buddhism teaches, and been transformed by that truth. So either Yasutani was not Enlightened, in which case his successors cannot claim authority through his transmission of the Dharma to them, or else we must revise our ideas of Enlightenment.
The latter approach was taken by Bernie Glassman, a teacher (of Jewish birth) who runs imaginative and impressive retreats and social projects in Europe and the us. Yet his apologetics seemed, unwittingly, to indicate deeper causes of Zen’s compromises, and even to express the same weaknesses. Glassman wrote, ‘What I’ve learnt from my teachers is that all of us are one body. We are the stars, the moon, the trees, the death camps, the killers, and the killed. We are enlightenment and we are delusion … everything is enlightened as it is. … So if your definition of enlightenment is that there is no nationalism or militarism or bigotry in the state of enlightenment, you better change your definition of enlightenment. For the state of enlightenment is maha, the circle with no inside or outside, not even a circle, just the pulsating of life everywhere.’
To some, such sentiments will seem profound. I think they are transcendental platitudes, confusion raised to the level of metaphysics. Glassman’s way of seeing the mundane in terms of the absolute flattens distinctions and erodes values. What is missing is ethics, and Glassman’s inclusivity seems to me to culminate in a moral failure. But his comment that this is what he learnt from his teachers returns us to questions about Zen, rather than Glassman himself. Is there something lacking in the philosophy Glassman has imbibed, and was this what led to Zen support for militarism in the first place? Is there something in Zen, and particularly its view of ethics, that disposed it to support the Japanese imperial state?
When I put this question to Victoria he believed that only by confronting it can the lessons of Zen’s history be addressed. ‘I have long hoped that one or another Buddhist organisation would focus on this topic, for sadly not a single Zen-affiliated organisation has done so. Instead, leaders of western Zen-related organisations have almost exclusively focused on the fact that Japanese masters within their own Dharma lineage have been revealed as one-time fervent militarists. Since Zen at War revealed all Japanese Zen leaders to have been fervent supporters of Japanese militarism, the compelling question is what made it possible for these alleged masters to portray the Buddhadharma in a war-affirming, totalitarian-embracing manner?’
Thus we come to the second cause for concern in Zen involvement in Japan’s wars – the apparent lack of conflict between its teachings and the army’s actions, even when these included atrocities on a vast scale. Although the debate about Japanese Buddhism’s war record is new to the West, and although there has been little general discussion of it in Japan itself, a small but determined band of Japanese Buddhist scholars has attempted to critique their own tradition. My own comments on Zen teachings will draw on their work as well as on the arguments of Zen at War.
In the Meiji period Buddhist teachers found two main justifications for their support of the country’s military adventures. Firstly they argued that Japan’s wars were just. The notion of Japanese superiority to other races is deeply rooted in the culture, and the spectacle of western powers encroaching on Asia seemed a patent injustice. Buddhists followed the popular view that Japan had a right to pursue its trade interests as it saw fit and to punish those who prevented that. In other words, as Suzuki put it, the aim of Japan’s wars was to ‘punish the people of the country representing injustice, in order that justice might prevail’.
Heathens who impeded Japan, it was argued, were also standing in the way of the progress of humanity, and deserved punishment, not least because Japan was so deeply imbued with Buddhism that opposing its interests was tantamount to opposing Buddhism. Buddhists, along with other government propagandists, argued that the expansion of Japanese power into Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria and eventually the rest of China was for the benefit of the inhabitants of those countries.
The second Buddhist justification for the war underpinned the first. This was the argument that, from a Zen perspective, other ethical considerations did not apply. Throughout its history Mahayana Buddhism has taught the doctrine of ‘skilful means’, the notion that it is permissible to break religious rules if a greater good can be obtained. Furthermore the Mahayana teaches that reality is ultimately shunya – void or empty. Seen truly, life is mysterious, it cannot be grasped or defined, and it cannot be said to have a substantial existence in any way that can be expressed. But, if this is the ultimate nature of existence, what should we make of the ‘reality’ we experience in our daily lives? And what place is there for the basic teachings of Buddhism, such as its ethical precepts, that relate to this level? Some Mahayana traditions respond by insisting that the ‘two truths’ are both valid, and that ethics and the other ‘trainings’ of Buddhist practice are indispensable. Zen, however, is concerned to avoid dualism, and the Zen adept is said to inhabit a sphere beyond words and concepts, beyond the distinctions of good and evil.
So Zen is antinomian, seeing its teachings as transcending the moral precepts, and anti-rational. Some might imagine that this direct knowing would lead one naturally to the right way of acting. But in the world of particulars one must make choices, and there is a Zen attitude to such choices. As Suzuki writes:
‘[Zen] simply urges going ahead with whatever conclusion, rational or irrational, a man has arrived at. Philosophy may be left with intellectual minds; Zen wants to act, and the most effective act, once the mind is made up, is to go on without looking backward. In this respect, Zen is indeed the religion of the samurai warrior.’
This ‘irrationalism’ has attracted many in the West – from the Beat generation’s celebration of spontaneity to contemporary aversion to ‘being judgemental’. But the danger is that it simply makes one susceptible to whatever values prevail in one’s society. It seems that in wartime Japan the very characteristic of Zen that connotes freedom and spontaneity to westerners became the call for Japanese to do their duty, happily sacrificing their lives to the imperial cause. This was not just a civic virtue, it was the fulfilment of Zen.
If this is Zen, is it Buddhism? The first and most basic of the Buddhist ethical precepts is the undertaking to abstain from taking life or harming other beings, and to act with loving-kindness. Yet in Japan Zen had long been associated with the warrior ethos of bushido. Victoria pointed out that DT Suzuki wrote approvingly of the famous 17th-century Rinzai Zen master Takuan's instructions to one of his warrior patrons:
‘The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword. As each of them is of emptiness and has no 'mind', the striking man is not a man, the sword in his hands is not a sword, and the 'I' who is about to be struck down is like the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning.’
Victoria compared this quote with a verse from the Dhammapada, a text dating back to the Buddha himself. ‘All persons tremble at being harmed, all persons fear death; remembering that you are like unto them, neither strike nor slay.’ As Victoria commented, ‘In comparing these two quotations, it is difficult to believe that we are talking about the same religion. The alleged ability of accomplished Zen practitioners to transcend good and evil and kill as they saw fit is one of the most thoroughly un-Buddhist teachings that one can imagine.’
Zen offered the Japanese warrior class its unconditional support in return for their patronage. By the 20th century these attitudes had become coupled to a mechanised, unitary state bent on imperial expansion. Thus we find the famous Zen teacher Kodo writing an article entitled ‘On the True meaning of Zen Precepts’. This true meaning, he argues, is that when the cause is just and the mind is clear, ‘whether one kills or does not kill, the precept forbidding killing is preserved. It is the precept forbidding killing that wields the sword’. And Rinzai master Nantembo wrote there was ‘no Bodhisattva practice superior to the compassionate taking of life’.
Are such views simply propaganda, signs that ethics, like truth, is among the first casualties of war? An alternative possibility is that both ethics and truth had already been casualties of Zen. This had been argued by Zen’s critics from the time of its appearance in China, by both Confucian and Buddhist opponents. Since the war, a cogent analysis of the reasons underlying Zen’s war responsibility has been developed by Rinzai priest and scholar, Ichikawa Hakugen. Following Japan’s defeat he started to question his previous support for the war, and to consider which of Zen’s cherished doctrines had contributed to it. Zen’s appeal lies partly in its teachings of harmony and tolerance, but Ichikawa posed awkward questions:
‘With what has modern Japanese Buddhism harmonised itself? With state Shinto. With state power and authority. With militarism. Accordingly with war. Of what has modern Japanese Buddhism been tolerant? Of those with whom it harmonises. Of its own responsibility for the war.’
A more recent development has been ‘Critical Buddhism’, the work of scholars within the Soto school, who have sought to unravel the historical origins of Zen teachings that diverge from other Buddhist schools, arguing – in contrast to Zen’s anti-rational tendencies – that ‘Buddhism is criticism’. Perhaps this goes too far and creates an intellectualised religion that dispenses with Zen’s great spiritual heritage. It also ignores the fact that almost all Japan’s Buddhists shared its support for the state, and that many Buddhist schools have been compromised ethically over the centuries, often through their connection with state power.
None the less, some degree of critical re-evaluation of Zen is surely essential, given the depth of its compromise. This is needed in Japan where in the past decade the Soto school has issued statements of regret for its past actions, but the Rinzai has remained mute. It is also needed in the West where the new Buddhists are only just starting to examine the history of the schools they have joined.
For Brian Victoria a particular danger is the appeal of the warrior ethos. ‘The “natural” affinity of Zen and the martial arts has been so widely accepted in the West that practitioners of one see no contradiction in practising the other. Thus, the alleged “unity of Zen and the sword” is as alive in the West today as it always has been in Japan.’
Perhaps a more insidious danger lies in Zen’s irrationalism – a quality that is particularly appealing to intellectuals. Given the lack of ethical distinctions in Bernie Glassman’s type of Zen, how can practitioners with that approach distinguish between prevalent ideologies and the Dharma? Westerners who want to follow Buddhism must be prepared to examine the traditions inherited from Asia (not to mention those developing in the West). And they need a commitment to the ethical and spiritual values that lie at the heart of the Buddhist tradition.
Brian Victoria has moved away from exclusive commitment to Zen and says, ‘I now feel more a Buddhist and less a Zen Buddhist.’ However, he also cautions against criticising only Zen Buddhists for supporting the war. Buddhists of all schools, he points out, with very few exceptions, acted likewise, and the underlying causes relate not just to particular doctrines but to the close relationship existing between state and religion. He quoted a Japanese folk saying, ’If you rub against vermilion, you will become red.’
I find myself fully in agreement with his conclusion: ‘The moral of Zen at War is that all Buddhists, East or West, need to examine carefully the doctrines they teach to see if they promote liberation or bondage, whether individual or societal. I hope that Buddhism will always welcome a wide variety of practices that have been shown to promote spiritual growth in the individual while at the same time causing no harm to others. The mass killing of war can never be a part of this.’
The book also reminded me of George Santayana’s famous saying that has been placed above the entrance to the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum: ‘Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.’
by Vishvapani: www.vishvapani@fwbo.org
http://web.mac.com/vishvapani/iWeb/writingonbuddhism/Articles.html
First Published in Dharma Life Magazine Issue 14 www.dharmalife.com
When dawn broke over Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 it brought with it waves of Japanese bombers. Their surprise attack on the American naval base brought the us into the Second World War and initiated a conflict that ended only when nuclear bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every American schoolboy knows that much. But, while Americans counted
their losses and vowed revenge, Japanese Buddhists found a special cause for celebration:
‘December 8th [the date of the attack in Japan] is the holy day on which Shakyamuni realised the Way, and [for this reason] it has been a day for commemorating the liberation of humankind. It is exceedingly wonderful that in 1941 we are able to make this very day also a holy day for commemorating the eternal reconstruction of the world. On this day was handed down the Great Imperial Edict aimed at punishing the arrogant United States and England, and news of the destruction of American bases in Hawaii spread quickly throughout the world.’
These words by the Buddhist writer Hata Esho, which were published in a Zen journal called Dogen (named after the founder of the Soto Zen school), would not have surprised their readers. The Zen establishment, indeed the leadership of all the main Buddhist schools in Japan, had been enthusiastic supporters of their Meiji rulers since the late 1900s, and were wholeheartedly behind the Japanese war effort.
A generation later the sons and daughters of the servicemen who had fought the Japanese took to the streets and campuses of the us to protest against the Vietnam War. Their rebellion turned into a rejection of mainstream western society, and a whole generation looked outside its culture for guidance and meaning. Many were captivated by the mysterious tradition of Japanese Zen, with its philosophy of going beyond the rational mind – beyond all dualism – to reach the simplicity at the heart of life. They took up its practice of zazen, or formless sitting meditation; and were entranced by the benign figures of such Zen masters as Yasutani Roshi and the writer DT Suzuki.
Thirty years on, the sixties generation are leaders of the western Buddhism that has spread across Europe and the us. Many have yoked their Zen practice to their concern for social justice and have declared the emergence of a new ‘Engaged Buddhism’. But the repressed history of the complicity of Japanese Buddhism in the country’s militarism and nationalism has returned to trouble modern Buddhists. The process started in Japan, but it has spread to the West. After many years of declaring that ‘no war has ever been fought in the name of Buddhism’, western Buddhists are having to acknowledge that this is untrue.
The fuse was lit in the West in 1997 with the publication of Zen at War, a careful but implacable account of Japanese Buddhism’s complicity in the country’s fanaticism, militarism and war effort up to 1945. The author, Brian Victoria, started to practise Zen while in Japan in 1961 and formally entered the Soto Zen priesthood in 1964, receiving the Dharma name ‘Daizen’. For Victoria, commitment to Zen went hand-in-hand with opposition to violence, particularly the Vietnam War, and his activism took him across Asia. But one day Zen Master Niwa Rempo summoned Victoria to his office to inform him that he was must cease his peace protests or lose his priestly status, adding, ‘Zen priests don’t get involved in politics.’
Victoria ignored the warning and none the less remained a priest, but his interest had been aroused. What, he wondered, was the relationship between Zen and politics? As his research progressed he discovered a history that his Zen teachers had failed to mention and which they were reluctant to discuss – the deep yet hidden responsibility of his own religious tradition for Japanese militarism. Zen at War is the product of his researches over the following 25 years; he now teaches at the University of Adelaide in Australia. There is no space here to rehearse Victoria’s arguments in full, nor to present his evidence; I conducted an e-mail interview with him but I’m in no position to verify his assertions. It is worth knowing, however, that his work is buttressed by that of many other scholars, and that its essential truth has not been challenged.
The essence of the charge in Zen at War is that from the end of the 19th century until 1945, almost the entire Japanese Buddhist establishment – not just Zen Buddhists – were vigorous supporters of the war effort and the militaristic society from which it grew. For instance, during the Russo-Japanese war of 1906 the well-known Buddhist scholar-priest Inoue Enryo argued that ‘If [the Russian army] is the army of Christ, ours is the army of the Buddha’. By the 1930s Buddhist teachers were advocating an ‘Imperial Way’ Zen, based, as Zen Master Yamazaki Ekiju put it, on the belief that ‘Japanese Buddhism must be centred on the emperor. … Buddhism, including Shakyamuni’s teachings, must conform to the national policy of Japan.’
Buddhist leaders willingly dubbed Japan’s campaigns in World War Two ‘a holy war’, and played a significant role in maintaining morale: ‘If ordered to tramp: march, march, or shoot: bang, bang,’ as Harada Daiun, a famous Zen master wrote. ‘This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom.’
As the military situation deteriorated, and nationalism merged into desperation, Buddhist rhetoric even played its part in finding volunteers to be kamikaze pilots. One Soto priest wrote in 1943: ‘The source of the spirit of the Special Attack Forces lies in the denial of the individual self and the rebirth of the soul, which takes upon itself the burden of history. From ancient times Zen has described this conversion of mind as the achievement of complete Enlightenment.’ This, for Victoria, is the culmination of the military tradition of Zen – the equation of the pilot’s willing death with the highest goal of the spiritual life.
Victoria’s charge is not simply that Zen teachers were swept along by the nationalist tide. That would be unsurprising and understandable. During the First World War, for example, belligerent European nations on both sides had the support of churches of many denominations. Virtually all religions that have become the dominant faith of a nation have had to come to terms with the military dimension of the nation’s life. But Victoria told me that his forthcoming book Zen War Stories will demonstrate even more clearly that Zen teachings played a central role in instilling the military ethos and offering moral support to the military. ‘Japanese military leaders deliberately set out to inculcate a Zen-inspired attitude in Japanese troops as they raped and pillaged their way through Asia from 1931 to 1945, killing between 10 and 20 million men, women and children. This was done with the complete and unconditional support of all Japan's Zen leaders.’
It is easy to stand in disbelieving judgement on such behaviour, and it is important, of course, to place it in a historical context. The origins of Zen militarism lie far back in Japanese history, and even in the state support of Buddhist monasteries in imperial China. But the start of the road to Pearl Harbour can be located at the restoration of the Emperor Meiji to full authority in 1868. For 268 years Buddhism had virtually been Japan’s state religion, and state patronage meant that Buddhist schools traded independence for prosperity and security. The new Meiji regime was determined that Japan should catch up with the western powers, and that all the energies of its sophisticated civilisation should be dedicated to this aim.
Japanese pride was piqued by the realisation that it had fallen behind, and that the influence of western powers was expanding in East Asia, its own traditional sphere of influence. Uniquely among Asian countries Japan succeeded in catching up, and its extraordinary achievement, in just one generation, was revealed to an astonished world by its victory in the 1906 war with Russia.
But Japan’s transition to the modern world presented challenges to its entire culture. The result was the emergence of an ideology that enabled it to benefit from western technology and the efficiency of a centralised state, but without the ideas of democracy, human rights and social justice that had developed in western countries to mitigate their effect. Japanese culture had always emphasised obedience but, with the restoration of the Emperor’s authority, loyalties that had hitherto been diffused were focused solely on him and, by extension, on the Japanese state he ruled. The forces that eventually led to fascism in Europe had reached Japan, and Meiji ideology emphasised above all the value of unquestioning devotion to the Emperor and the state.
Buddhism was caught up in the revolution. In the years after the Meiji restoration the authorities promoted Shinto, with its nationalist associations and cult of devotion to the Emperor, at the expense of Buddhism. Tens of thousands of Buddhists temples were closed, and their priests forced to disrobe. Buddhist leaders faced a choice – subservience or persecution – and, once the initial onslaught had abated, they followed instincts instilled by centuries of patronage and their ethos of deference to authority. They opted to show their rulers that Buddhism could contribute to the nation’s life by promoting loyalty, and the new concordat gave Buddhist organisations a place in Meiji society.
Two issues cause alarm in the case of Buddhist support for imperial Japan: the identity of the supporters, and the nature of their support. The first has attracted most attention in responses to Zen at War. The book reveals that in addition to being a skilled communicator of Zen teachings for a western audience, DT Suzuki was an eloquent advocate of Buddhist support for the imperial cause. But the greatest upset was caused by an article in Tricycle magazine, in which Victoria described the wartime record and political views of Yasutani Roshi. Yasutani was the teacher to Philip Kapleau, Robert Aitken, Maezumi Roshi and others, who have been the most important transmitters of Buddhism to white America. Yet Victoria revealed that throughout his life – including the years after the War – Yasutani adhered to an extreme right-wing political agenda, including theories of Japanese racial superiority and (notwithstanding the Jewish ancestry of many of his American students) virulent anti-Semitism.
These revelations stimulated interest in Victoria’s book, and forced American Zen teachers to comment, but the ensuing debate has remained focused on particular teachers. My own interest was pricked by the inadequacy of responses printed in Tricycle magazine by Aitken, and Bernie Glassman, a Dharma heir to Maezumi Roshi, and others. Aitken pleaded for understanding of the political and cultural context in which Yasutani’s views had developed. He even suggested that Yasutani’s views might be linked to the fact that ‘his mother gave him up for adoption to a Buddhist priest when he was only five years old and that he then grew up to be an angry youth and adult’.
As Victoria commented, this seems like ‘making excuses’. A Zen teacher is proclaimed as Enlightened, having gained an unshakeable insight into the truth that Buddhism teaches, and been transformed by that truth. So either Yasutani was not Enlightened, in which case his successors cannot claim authority through his transmission of the Dharma to them, or else we must revise our ideas of Enlightenment.
The latter approach was taken by Bernie Glassman, a teacher (of Jewish birth) who runs imaginative and impressive retreats and social projects in Europe and the us. Yet his apologetics seemed, unwittingly, to indicate deeper causes of Zen’s compromises, and even to express the same weaknesses. Glassman wrote, ‘What I’ve learnt from my teachers is that all of us are one body. We are the stars, the moon, the trees, the death camps, the killers, and the killed. We are enlightenment and we are delusion … everything is enlightened as it is. … So if your definition of enlightenment is that there is no nationalism or militarism or bigotry in the state of enlightenment, you better change your definition of enlightenment. For the state of enlightenment is maha, the circle with no inside or outside, not even a circle, just the pulsating of life everywhere.’
To some, such sentiments will seem profound. I think they are transcendental platitudes, confusion raised to the level of metaphysics. Glassman’s way of seeing the mundane in terms of the absolute flattens distinctions and erodes values. What is missing is ethics, and Glassman’s inclusivity seems to me to culminate in a moral failure. But his comment that this is what he learnt from his teachers returns us to questions about Zen, rather than Glassman himself. Is there something lacking in the philosophy Glassman has imbibed, and was this what led to Zen support for militarism in the first place? Is there something in Zen, and particularly its view of ethics, that disposed it to support the Japanese imperial state?
When I put this question to Victoria he believed that only by confronting it can the lessons of Zen’s history be addressed. ‘I have long hoped that one or another Buddhist organisation would focus on this topic, for sadly not a single Zen-affiliated organisation has done so. Instead, leaders of western Zen-related organisations have almost exclusively focused on the fact that Japanese masters within their own Dharma lineage have been revealed as one-time fervent militarists. Since Zen at War revealed all Japanese Zen leaders to have been fervent supporters of Japanese militarism, the compelling question is what made it possible for these alleged masters to portray the Buddhadharma in a war-affirming, totalitarian-embracing manner?’
Thus we come to the second cause for concern in Zen involvement in Japan’s wars – the apparent lack of conflict between its teachings and the army’s actions, even when these included atrocities on a vast scale. Although the debate about Japanese Buddhism’s war record is new to the West, and although there has been little general discussion of it in Japan itself, a small but determined band of Japanese Buddhist scholars has attempted to critique their own tradition. My own comments on Zen teachings will draw on their work as well as on the arguments of Zen at War.
In the Meiji period Buddhist teachers found two main justifications for their support of the country’s military adventures. Firstly they argued that Japan’s wars were just. The notion of Japanese superiority to other races is deeply rooted in the culture, and the spectacle of western powers encroaching on Asia seemed a patent injustice. Buddhists followed the popular view that Japan had a right to pursue its trade interests as it saw fit and to punish those who prevented that. In other words, as Suzuki put it, the aim of Japan’s wars was to ‘punish the people of the country representing injustice, in order that justice might prevail’.
Heathens who impeded Japan, it was argued, were also standing in the way of the progress of humanity, and deserved punishment, not least because Japan was so deeply imbued with Buddhism that opposing its interests was tantamount to opposing Buddhism. Buddhists, along with other government propagandists, argued that the expansion of Japanese power into Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria and eventually the rest of China was for the benefit of the inhabitants of those countries.
The second Buddhist justification for the war underpinned the first. This was the argument that, from a Zen perspective, other ethical considerations did not apply. Throughout its history Mahayana Buddhism has taught the doctrine of ‘skilful means’, the notion that it is permissible to break religious rules if a greater good can be obtained. Furthermore the Mahayana teaches that reality is ultimately shunya – void or empty. Seen truly, life is mysterious, it cannot be grasped or defined, and it cannot be said to have a substantial existence in any way that can be expressed. But, if this is the ultimate nature of existence, what should we make of the ‘reality’ we experience in our daily lives? And what place is there for the basic teachings of Buddhism, such as its ethical precepts, that relate to this level? Some Mahayana traditions respond by insisting that the ‘two truths’ are both valid, and that ethics and the other ‘trainings’ of Buddhist practice are indispensable. Zen, however, is concerned to avoid dualism, and the Zen adept is said to inhabit a sphere beyond words and concepts, beyond the distinctions of good and evil.
So Zen is antinomian, seeing its teachings as transcending the moral precepts, and anti-rational. Some might imagine that this direct knowing would lead one naturally to the right way of acting. But in the world of particulars one must make choices, and there is a Zen attitude to such choices. As Suzuki writes:
‘[Zen] simply urges going ahead with whatever conclusion, rational or irrational, a man has arrived at. Philosophy may be left with intellectual minds; Zen wants to act, and the most effective act, once the mind is made up, is to go on without looking backward. In this respect, Zen is indeed the religion of the samurai warrior.’
This ‘irrationalism’ has attracted many in the West – from the Beat generation’s celebration of spontaneity to contemporary aversion to ‘being judgemental’. But the danger is that it simply makes one susceptible to whatever values prevail in one’s society. It seems that in wartime Japan the very characteristic of Zen that connotes freedom and spontaneity to westerners became the call for Japanese to do their duty, happily sacrificing their lives to the imperial cause. This was not just a civic virtue, it was the fulfilment of Zen.
If this is Zen, is it Buddhism? The first and most basic of the Buddhist ethical precepts is the undertaking to abstain from taking life or harming other beings, and to act with loving-kindness. Yet in Japan Zen had long been associated with the warrior ethos of bushido. Victoria pointed out that DT Suzuki wrote approvingly of the famous 17th-century Rinzai Zen master Takuan's instructions to one of his warrior patrons:
‘The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword. As each of them is of emptiness and has no 'mind', the striking man is not a man, the sword in his hands is not a sword, and the 'I' who is about to be struck down is like the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning.’
Victoria compared this quote with a verse from the Dhammapada, a text dating back to the Buddha himself. ‘All persons tremble at being harmed, all persons fear death; remembering that you are like unto them, neither strike nor slay.’ As Victoria commented, ‘In comparing these two quotations, it is difficult to believe that we are talking about the same religion. The alleged ability of accomplished Zen practitioners to transcend good and evil and kill as they saw fit is one of the most thoroughly un-Buddhist teachings that one can imagine.’
Zen offered the Japanese warrior class its unconditional support in return for their patronage. By the 20th century these attitudes had become coupled to a mechanised, unitary state bent on imperial expansion. Thus we find the famous Zen teacher Kodo writing an article entitled ‘On the True meaning of Zen Precepts’. This true meaning, he argues, is that when the cause is just and the mind is clear, ‘whether one kills or does not kill, the precept forbidding killing is preserved. It is the precept forbidding killing that wields the sword’. And Rinzai master Nantembo wrote there was ‘no Bodhisattva practice superior to the compassionate taking of life’.
Are such views simply propaganda, signs that ethics, like truth, is among the first casualties of war? An alternative possibility is that both ethics and truth had already been casualties of Zen. This had been argued by Zen’s critics from the time of its appearance in China, by both Confucian and Buddhist opponents. Since the war, a cogent analysis of the reasons underlying Zen’s war responsibility has been developed by Rinzai priest and scholar, Ichikawa Hakugen. Following Japan’s defeat he started to question his previous support for the war, and to consider which of Zen’s cherished doctrines had contributed to it. Zen’s appeal lies partly in its teachings of harmony and tolerance, but Ichikawa posed awkward questions:
‘With what has modern Japanese Buddhism harmonised itself? With state Shinto. With state power and authority. With militarism. Accordingly with war. Of what has modern Japanese Buddhism been tolerant? Of those with whom it harmonises. Of its own responsibility for the war.’
A more recent development has been ‘Critical Buddhism’, the work of scholars within the Soto school, who have sought to unravel the historical origins of Zen teachings that diverge from other Buddhist schools, arguing – in contrast to Zen’s anti-rational tendencies – that ‘Buddhism is criticism’. Perhaps this goes too far and creates an intellectualised religion that dispenses with Zen’s great spiritual heritage. It also ignores the fact that almost all Japan’s Buddhists shared its support for the state, and that many Buddhist schools have been compromised ethically over the centuries, often through their connection with state power.
None the less, some degree of critical re-evaluation of Zen is surely essential, given the depth of its compromise. This is needed in Japan where in the past decade the Soto school has issued statements of regret for its past actions, but the Rinzai has remained mute. It is also needed in the West where the new Buddhists are only just starting to examine the history of the schools they have joined.
For Brian Victoria a particular danger is the appeal of the warrior ethos. ‘The “natural” affinity of Zen and the martial arts has been so widely accepted in the West that practitioners of one see no contradiction in practising the other. Thus, the alleged “unity of Zen and the sword” is as alive in the West today as it always has been in Japan.’
Perhaps a more insidious danger lies in Zen’s irrationalism – a quality that is particularly appealing to intellectuals. Given the lack of ethical distinctions in Bernie Glassman’s type of Zen, how can practitioners with that approach distinguish between prevalent ideologies and the Dharma? Westerners who want to follow Buddhism must be prepared to examine the traditions inherited from Asia (not to mention those developing in the West). And they need a commitment to the ethical and spiritual values that lie at the heart of the Buddhist tradition.
Brian Victoria has moved away from exclusive commitment to Zen and says, ‘I now feel more a Buddhist and less a Zen Buddhist.’ However, he also cautions against criticising only Zen Buddhists for supporting the war. Buddhists of all schools, he points out, with very few exceptions, acted likewise, and the underlying causes relate not just to particular doctrines but to the close relationship existing between state and religion. He quoted a Japanese folk saying, ’If you rub against vermilion, you will become red.’
I find myself fully in agreement with his conclusion: ‘The moral of Zen at War is that all Buddhists, East or West, need to examine carefully the doctrines they teach to see if they promote liberation or bondage, whether individual or societal. I hope that Buddhism will always welcome a wide variety of practices that have been shown to promote spiritual growth in the individual while at the same time causing no harm to others. The mass killing of war can never be a part of this.’
The book also reminded me of George Santayana’s famous saying that has been placed above the entrance to the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum: ‘Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.’
by Vishvapani: www.vishvapani@fwbo.org
http://web.mac.com/vishvapani/iWeb/writingonbuddhism/Articles.html
First Published in Dharma Life Magazine Issue 14 www.dharmalife.com
Monday, January 29, 2007
Embodying Engagement: Observations of Bernie Glassman, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Engaged Buddhism in the West
Vishvapani
Paper for Dr Ambedkar and the Modern World Conference, Nagaloka, October 2006
1. Introduction
Buddhism attracted many American and Europeans in the Nineteenth Century but their feelings were ambivalent and few became Buddhists. An important reason was that they believed it to be opposed to activism which has been defined as:
‘the tendency to emphasise the spiritual significance of vigorous moral action in the world … a concern to uplift individuals, reform societies, and participate energetically in the economic and political spheres.’
For this generation, ‘engaged Buddhism’ – which Christopher Queen defines as ‘the application of the Dharma, or Buddhist teachings, to the resolution of social problems’ – would have been a contradiction in terms. But since the 1950s many westerners have seen Buddhism as a viable option, and an important part of the western Buddhist world is engaged Buddhism which explicitly combines the inward-looking values of Buddhism with those of activism.
Over the last half-century observers have asked if engaged Buddhism in the West is a faithful re-expression of unchanged Buddhist values; if it is western liberalism in a new guise; if it is ‘a fourth yana’ that expresses ‘a world view and a praxis that is fresh and unprecedented in the history of Buddhism.’ With these questions In mind I want to consider the work of two prominent western engaged Buddhists – Bernie Glassman, founder of the Zen Peacemakers Order (ZPO), and Jon Kabat-Zinn, originator of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).
2. Bernie Glassman and The Zen Peacemakers Order
Roshi Bernie Glassman founded the Zen Peacemaker’s Order in 1994 and in 1997 I traveled to Yonkers – a small city up the Hudson River from New York – to see the social projects of the Greyston Mandala. Glassman started to practice Zen in 1960 and in 1979 his teacher sent him to Yonkers. Soon Glassman wanted to expand activities beyond meditation and Dharma study, and he established a bakery as a right livelihood business for Zen practitioners to work in. Then, as Glassman he responded intuitively to the vitality and poverty of the mainly black population of inner-city Yonkers, he decided to open the Buddhist projects to people from this community. He told me:
‘I asked the practitioners if they would be prepared to open up to the unemployed. It would be much more difficult. By then we had sort of learnt how to run the bakery, but to train people with no skills was a whole different prospect … [So] I stopped hiring Buddhists and the main focus of the bakery became to provide work for the unemployed.’
Greyston Bakery is now a profitable business providing training to formerly ‘hard-to-employ’ individuals, and its profits help fund other projects. Greyston provides permanent affordable housing for several hundred low-income and formerly homeless people, and Greyston Health Services offers help to people living with HIV/AIDS. Other Greyston projects are concerned with the arts, ‘seniors’, and ‘developing community gardens’. Altogether, Greyston has attracted tens of millions of dollars in funding.
Glassman was closely involved in the running of activities in Greyston’s early years, but by1997 he was preparing to move on. Glassman told me that he wanted Greyston to do much more than survive without him. From the outset he had wanted it to be a new embodiment of Zen:
‘I told my teacher I felt I had to let go of my training, to become part of the people here and wait until a new buddhadharma arose. It needed to be an appropriate model for the inner city. If we tried to pass on our forms, no matter how much we tried we’d be imposing a form upon them.’
His aim was to establish an interconnected community in place of the fractured society that was failing people, which he envisaged as ‘a monastery of the streets … where the whole environment is conducive to the raising of the bodhi-mind.’ I wondered if this was a fantasy: it seemed more likely that Greyston would go the way of many religious-based charities and offer good, useful, but essentially conventional social work. Glassman commented that the key was finding people in the community who could make his vision a reality:
‘I’m waiting for the leaders to arise, to be trained and to create the forms for Greyston … I need to work with those role models: people who are comfortable with what I’m doing but are steeped in their own culture, and aren’t looking to leap out into ours and leave the others behind.’
Nine years after my visit and several years after Glassman himself moved on from Greyston, I have not been back to Yonkers to see how the projects are faring. They seem to be thriving materially. I cannot say if they have fulfilled Glassman’s larger hopes, but Greyston has become renowned for its ethos. Most of the staff are not Buddhists, but they meditate or pray together before work; meetings begin with a few minutes of silence; and the entire organization closes down once a year for a staff retreat. Greyston staff aim to embed cooperation and effective communication in the day-to-day interactions of everyone involved in its work.
I learned more about the ethos underlying ZPO activities in my second contact with Bernie Glassman, when I attended a ZPO-led interfaith ‘bearing witness’ retreat at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where millions of people were systematically murdered by the Nazis. The heart of the retreat was several days spent silently meditating and performing simple rituals in the grounds of the camp. Like me, many of those attending had family connections with holocaust victims, so the event was emotionally charged, and it left us asking how to respond to this evidence of inhumanity. This question was pressing, yet imponderable and the impossibility of answering it suggests the ZPO’s first tenet: ‘not-knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe.’ Glassman explains that this teaching counteracts what he sees as a western emphasis on figuring out problems in order to fix them. As he writes:
‘Doubt is a state of openness and unknowing. It’s a willingness not to be in charge, to not know what is going to happen next. The state of doubt allows us to explore things in an open and fresh way.’
What you can do in this state of ‘non knowing’ is to practice the second peacemaker tenet: ‘bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world.’ As well as the usual connotations of mindfulness, bearing witness also suggests imaginative sympathy with others and a refusal to take sides. For example, ‘bearing witness to someone's kidnapping, assaulting, and killing a child means being every element of the situation,’ including the traumatised victim, the suffering relatives, the kidnapper and the police. It also implies placing oneself in real-life situations that confront one with difficult or uncomfortable aspects of reality. By engaging with the black community in Yonkers, Glassman stepped outside the comfortable surroundings of his Buddhist sangha. The Auschwitz retreats confront people with past suffering, and participants in the ZPO’s street retreats share the lives of the homeless for several days. In such events participants encounter their limitations and are encouraged to respond with patience and openness. As Christopher Queen notes, Glassman ‘identifies the encounter with suffering as the most powerful incentive to spiritual awakening.’
The third ZPO tenet is ‘loving actions towards ourselves and others.’ The implication is that bearing witness allows solutions to emerge as one develops an awareness of interconnectedness. As Glassman says: ‘If this is me and it’s bleeding, I take care of it. I don’t join a discussion group or wait till I am enlightened or go off to get trained.’
Since 1994 ZPO activities have expanded dramatically in many countries and the Peacemakers Community has become a widespread, interacting network of sympathetic projects whose directors feel at home with Glassman’s teachings and his freewheeling, collaborative approach. Independent projects can affiliate as ‘peacemaker villages’, and these include the Upaya hospice and environmental project, and the Latino Pastoral Action Centre in New York, while other projects are involved with prison meditation teaching, the arts, refugee relief. The network is becoming an important focus for engaged Buddhists in the US, and to some extent in Europe, and it attracts support and cooperation from many non-Buddhist individuals and agencies who are sympathetic to spiritually-based activism.
3. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
We are used to thinking of engaged Buddhist activities as those undertaken by Buddhists who are engaging with the material needs of society. ZPO projects differ from this by involving non-Buddhists within a Buddhist-influenced ethos; and another variant is found in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. He has adapted Buddhist mindfulness practices for use in the US healthcare system, and developed a training for patients called Mindfulness Based Stress Management, or MBSR. Kabat-Zinn is a long-term practitioner of ‘vipassana’ with the Insight Meditation Society, but he does not call himself a Buddhist. Nonetheless, MBSR is perhaps the most significant way in which Buddhist practices are being applied in mainstream western society.
Kabat-Zinn started the MBSR programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical School when he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The clinic has recently become the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society (CFM), which offers training, conferences and resources for a burgeoning network of hospitals and practitioners while 13,000 people have taken eight-week MBSR course at the CFM itself. MBSR has been adapted to address chronic pain, anxiety, eating disorders and other conditions and it has prompted other institutions and individual practitioners to offer a burgeoning range of mindfulness programmes not only in healthcare, but also in educational, sporting and corporate across the US.
MBSR is taught through a carefully structured eight-week course for groups of up to thirty that meet once a week to learn and practice techniques that develop mindful awareness. These include breathing meditation, a forty-five minute body scan (in which attention is taken sequentially through the parts of the body), simple hatha yoga exercises, and mindfulness of simple activities such as walking and eating. Other important elements are homework assignments, in which participants are asked to practice meditation and other activities each day, keeping a diary of their experience, and an all-day mindfulness session.
Participants typically embark on an MBSR course because they have a physical or mental problem. Some have chronic conditions which mainstream medicine has been unable to cure, leaving them with pain or impaired functioning while others experience anxiety, stress or depression. MBSR addresses the mental aspect of both physical and psychological suffering by training participants in responding differently to their experience. Asking participants to become more aware of their body and breath through meditation and gentle movement takes their attention away from unproductive thoughts, while awareness of the body tends to promote relaxation and connection with emotional experience. What makes MBSR more than a relaxation technique is its training in a ‘mindful’ attitude that is cultivated through noticing physical sensations and gently keeping the mind settled on them.
Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as ‘a particular way of paying attention: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.’ He adds that the attitude cultivated through mindful awareness and meditation includes patience, ‘beginner’s mind’, trust, non-striving, acceptance and letting go. In this way, mindfulness of the breath and body models a more desirable response to experience in general and students learn to adopt mindful attitudes in the whole of their lives. Especially important is the element of non-judgmental acceptance of experience:
‘Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences that we are normally caught up in, and learn to step back.’
An aspect of this process that is especially valuable for people whose thought patterns lead them into depression, or who respond to stress with an ‘automatic reaction triggered out of unawareness,’ is learning not to identify with thoughts.
‘Rather than regarding thoughts as necessarily true or as an aspect of the self, patients switched to a perspective within which negative thoughts and feelings could be seen as passing events in the mind that were neither necessarily valid reflections of reality nor central aspects of the self.
The notion of the decentered self mirrors concepts in cognitive therapy, but it is also a re-expression of the Buddhist teaching of anatta/anatman. In the spirit of this Buddhist context, Kabat-Zinn thinks that MBSR’s implications in students lives extend well beyond the treatment of pathology:
‘What we really offer people is a sense that there is a way of being, a way of looking at problems … that can make life more joyful and rich … and also a sense of being somehow in control. We call this way of being the way of awareness or the way of mindfulness.’
MBSR instructors also seek to embody mindful responses to problems in the way they deal with issues raised by students. They, too, adopt a stance of ‘non-judgmental enquiry’ and ‘curiosity’ rather than rushing to offer solutions. The mindful ways of being taught by MBSR is not only a solutions to particular difficulties; they are a more desirable way of living for all.
3. Is it Buddhism? And is it Engaged?
As this paper is written for a gathering of Engaged Buddhists, it seems fitting to ask of Kabat-Zinn and Glassman’s work, ‘Is it Buddhism?’ and ‘Is it engaged?’ Having come to prominence as a healthcare practitioner, Kabat-Zinn’s work is necessarily secular and he emphasises the universal character of mindfulness, while Glassman, for all his status within Rinzai Zen, has an ambivalent relationship with traditional Zen. But if Glassman and Kabat-Zinn are themselves reluctant to accept the label ‘Buddhist’, does their work nonetheless express Buddhist values?
In the case of MBSR, my reservation is that its concern with mindfulness leaves out other qualities that are valued within Buddhism. Kabat-Zinn stresses the adoption of attitudes such as patience and trust, he has little to say about affective qualities such as loving kindness (metta/maitri), the ethical precepts (sila/shila) or generosity (dana). The cultivation of wisdom (panna/prajna) perhaps lies beyond the scope of MBSR, but where Kabat-Zinn approaches this quality he speaks simply of extending mindfulness to include the whole of life. To offset this criticism we should note that Kabat-Zinn’s prioritization of mindfulness reflects a similar emphasis among his Buddhist teachers, and also that Kabat-Zinn never set out to share Buddhist teachings and practices as such, but only to offer mindfulness as a clinical treatment.
Glassman, too, stresses only a particular version of Buddhist qualities. His emphases grow from Zen and behind his teaching of bearing witness with its implication of not taking sides is a Zen-derived non-dual philosophy in which subject and object, cause and effect are considered not-different. Critics of this view argue that it leaves no place for ethical judgments. Much more could be said on this subject, but I will simply note here that Glassman’s version of Buddhism is by no means everyone’s version.
As for engagement, both MBSR and the ZPO projects clearly grow from sensitivity to human suffering, but they emphasise the attitudes and qualities with which one perceives suffering rather than an enquiry, such as that undertaken by Dr Ambedkar, into ‘the systemic causes of suffering.’ This does not mean that the work of Glassman or Kabat-Zinn is not socially engaged, just that it limits the sphere of that engagement.
4. Conclusion: Pragmatic Re-expression
These reservations about Kabat-Zinn and Glassman’s work point to a tendency in both to emphasise personal experience avoid conceptual clarity. They are wary of ideas about experience, including Buddhist ones. In this respect, they operate in the tradition of American pragmatism, which locates the value of concepts and beliefs in their capacity to affect how we live and act. In his book, One Dharma, Joseph Goldstein identifies a modern expression of pragmatism in what he calls ‘the emerging western Buddhism’, which is developing as western Buddhist teachers and practitioners make their own sense of the Buddhist teachings, drawing on various strands of the tradition according to the ‘pragmatic’ needs that emerge through their practice.
In this spirit MBSR and bearing witness are pragmatic attempts to formulate what works in finding an effective response to suffering. If Victorian sympathizers of Buddhism were alienated by the absence of activism, Glassman and Kabat-Zinn have found a way to combine the two, albeit at the cost of conceptual and even ethical clarity and of leaving out some important Buddhist teachings. Their work shows how Buddhist teachings can have a transforming effect on a large scale if they are presented in universally accessible ways.
The key in both cases is the value they place on embodying attitudes such as mindful awareness and bearing witness. This is a useful reminder to other socially engaged Buddhists that it can mean more than just performing social work. Buddhism locates the source of social and political suffering in the minds of human beings, so the solution also lies in our minds. Glassman and Kabat-Zinn teach Buddhists who want to change the world to exemplify in their own lives the qualities they want to see in the world, and encourage others to do so as well. This change is the method of their engaged Buddhism and also its goal.
Vishvapani
Paper for Dr Ambedkar and the Modern World Conference, Nagaloka, October 2006
1. Introduction
Buddhism attracted many American and Europeans in the Nineteenth Century but their feelings were ambivalent and few became Buddhists. An important reason was that they believed it to be opposed to activism which has been defined as:
‘the tendency to emphasise the spiritual significance of vigorous moral action in the world … a concern to uplift individuals, reform societies, and participate energetically in the economic and political spheres.’
For this generation, ‘engaged Buddhism’ – which Christopher Queen defines as ‘the application of the Dharma, or Buddhist teachings, to the resolution of social problems’ – would have been a contradiction in terms. But since the 1950s many westerners have seen Buddhism as a viable option, and an important part of the western Buddhist world is engaged Buddhism which explicitly combines the inward-looking values of Buddhism with those of activism.
Over the last half-century observers have asked if engaged Buddhism in the West is a faithful re-expression of unchanged Buddhist values; if it is western liberalism in a new guise; if it is ‘a fourth yana’ that expresses ‘a world view and a praxis that is fresh and unprecedented in the history of Buddhism.’ With these questions In mind I want to consider the work of two prominent western engaged Buddhists – Bernie Glassman, founder of the Zen Peacemakers Order (ZPO), and Jon Kabat-Zinn, originator of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).
2. Bernie Glassman and The Zen Peacemakers Order
Roshi Bernie Glassman founded the Zen Peacemaker’s Order in 1994 and in 1997 I traveled to Yonkers – a small city up the Hudson River from New York – to see the social projects of the Greyston Mandala. Glassman started to practice Zen in 1960 and in 1979 his teacher sent him to Yonkers. Soon Glassman wanted to expand activities beyond meditation and Dharma study, and he established a bakery as a right livelihood business for Zen practitioners to work in. Then, as Glassman he responded intuitively to the vitality and poverty of the mainly black population of inner-city Yonkers, he decided to open the Buddhist projects to people from this community. He told me:
‘I asked the practitioners if they would be prepared to open up to the unemployed. It would be much more difficult. By then we had sort of learnt how to run the bakery, but to train people with no skills was a whole different prospect … [So] I stopped hiring Buddhists and the main focus of the bakery became to provide work for the unemployed.’
Greyston Bakery is now a profitable business providing training to formerly ‘hard-to-employ’ individuals, and its profits help fund other projects. Greyston provides permanent affordable housing for several hundred low-income and formerly homeless people, and Greyston Health Services offers help to people living with HIV/AIDS. Other Greyston projects are concerned with the arts, ‘seniors’, and ‘developing community gardens’. Altogether, Greyston has attracted tens of millions of dollars in funding.
Glassman was closely involved in the running of activities in Greyston’s early years, but by1997 he was preparing to move on. Glassman told me that he wanted Greyston to do much more than survive without him. From the outset he had wanted it to be a new embodiment of Zen:
‘I told my teacher I felt I had to let go of my training, to become part of the people here and wait until a new buddhadharma arose. It needed to be an appropriate model for the inner city. If we tried to pass on our forms, no matter how much we tried we’d be imposing a form upon them.’
His aim was to establish an interconnected community in place of the fractured society that was failing people, which he envisaged as ‘a monastery of the streets … where the whole environment is conducive to the raising of the bodhi-mind.’ I wondered if this was a fantasy: it seemed more likely that Greyston would go the way of many religious-based charities and offer good, useful, but essentially conventional social work. Glassman commented that the key was finding people in the community who could make his vision a reality:
‘I’m waiting for the leaders to arise, to be trained and to create the forms for Greyston … I need to work with those role models: people who are comfortable with what I’m doing but are steeped in their own culture, and aren’t looking to leap out into ours and leave the others behind.’
Nine years after my visit and several years after Glassman himself moved on from Greyston, I have not been back to Yonkers to see how the projects are faring. They seem to be thriving materially. I cannot say if they have fulfilled Glassman’s larger hopes, but Greyston has become renowned for its ethos. Most of the staff are not Buddhists, but they meditate or pray together before work; meetings begin with a few minutes of silence; and the entire organization closes down once a year for a staff retreat. Greyston staff aim to embed cooperation and effective communication in the day-to-day interactions of everyone involved in its work.
I learned more about the ethos underlying ZPO activities in my second contact with Bernie Glassman, when I attended a ZPO-led interfaith ‘bearing witness’ retreat at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where millions of people were systematically murdered by the Nazis. The heart of the retreat was several days spent silently meditating and performing simple rituals in the grounds of the camp. Like me, many of those attending had family connections with holocaust victims, so the event was emotionally charged, and it left us asking how to respond to this evidence of inhumanity. This question was pressing, yet imponderable and the impossibility of answering it suggests the ZPO’s first tenet: ‘not-knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe.’ Glassman explains that this teaching counteracts what he sees as a western emphasis on figuring out problems in order to fix them. As he writes:
‘Doubt is a state of openness and unknowing. It’s a willingness not to be in charge, to not know what is going to happen next. The state of doubt allows us to explore things in an open and fresh way.’
What you can do in this state of ‘non knowing’ is to practice the second peacemaker tenet: ‘bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world.’ As well as the usual connotations of mindfulness, bearing witness also suggests imaginative sympathy with others and a refusal to take sides. For example, ‘bearing witness to someone's kidnapping, assaulting, and killing a child means being every element of the situation,’ including the traumatised victim, the suffering relatives, the kidnapper and the police. It also implies placing oneself in real-life situations that confront one with difficult or uncomfortable aspects of reality. By engaging with the black community in Yonkers, Glassman stepped outside the comfortable surroundings of his Buddhist sangha. The Auschwitz retreats confront people with past suffering, and participants in the ZPO’s street retreats share the lives of the homeless for several days. In such events participants encounter their limitations and are encouraged to respond with patience and openness. As Christopher Queen notes, Glassman ‘identifies the encounter with suffering as the most powerful incentive to spiritual awakening.’
The third ZPO tenet is ‘loving actions towards ourselves and others.’ The implication is that bearing witness allows solutions to emerge as one develops an awareness of interconnectedness. As Glassman says: ‘If this is me and it’s bleeding, I take care of it. I don’t join a discussion group or wait till I am enlightened or go off to get trained.’
Since 1994 ZPO activities have expanded dramatically in many countries and the Peacemakers Community has become a widespread, interacting network of sympathetic projects whose directors feel at home with Glassman’s teachings and his freewheeling, collaborative approach. Independent projects can affiliate as ‘peacemaker villages’, and these include the Upaya hospice and environmental project, and the Latino Pastoral Action Centre in New York, while other projects are involved with prison meditation teaching, the arts, refugee relief. The network is becoming an important focus for engaged Buddhists in the US, and to some extent in Europe, and it attracts support and cooperation from many non-Buddhist individuals and agencies who are sympathetic to spiritually-based activism.
3. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
We are used to thinking of engaged Buddhist activities as those undertaken by Buddhists who are engaging with the material needs of society. ZPO projects differ from this by involving non-Buddhists within a Buddhist-influenced ethos; and another variant is found in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. He has adapted Buddhist mindfulness practices for use in the US healthcare system, and developed a training for patients called Mindfulness Based Stress Management, or MBSR. Kabat-Zinn is a long-term practitioner of ‘vipassana’ with the Insight Meditation Society, but he does not call himself a Buddhist. Nonetheless, MBSR is perhaps the most significant way in which Buddhist practices are being applied in mainstream western society.
Kabat-Zinn started the MBSR programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical School when he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The clinic has recently become the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society (CFM), which offers training, conferences and resources for a burgeoning network of hospitals and practitioners while 13,000 people have taken eight-week MBSR course at the CFM itself. MBSR has been adapted to address chronic pain, anxiety, eating disorders and other conditions and it has prompted other institutions and individual practitioners to offer a burgeoning range of mindfulness programmes not only in healthcare, but also in educational, sporting and corporate across the US.
MBSR is taught through a carefully structured eight-week course for groups of up to thirty that meet once a week to learn and practice techniques that develop mindful awareness. These include breathing meditation, a forty-five minute body scan (in which attention is taken sequentially through the parts of the body), simple hatha yoga exercises, and mindfulness of simple activities such as walking and eating. Other important elements are homework assignments, in which participants are asked to practice meditation and other activities each day, keeping a diary of their experience, and an all-day mindfulness session.
Participants typically embark on an MBSR course because they have a physical or mental problem. Some have chronic conditions which mainstream medicine has been unable to cure, leaving them with pain or impaired functioning while others experience anxiety, stress or depression. MBSR addresses the mental aspect of both physical and psychological suffering by training participants in responding differently to their experience. Asking participants to become more aware of their body and breath through meditation and gentle movement takes their attention away from unproductive thoughts, while awareness of the body tends to promote relaxation and connection with emotional experience. What makes MBSR more than a relaxation technique is its training in a ‘mindful’ attitude that is cultivated through noticing physical sensations and gently keeping the mind settled on them.
Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as ‘a particular way of paying attention: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.’ He adds that the attitude cultivated through mindful awareness and meditation includes patience, ‘beginner’s mind’, trust, non-striving, acceptance and letting go. In this way, mindfulness of the breath and body models a more desirable response to experience in general and students learn to adopt mindful attitudes in the whole of their lives. Especially important is the element of non-judgmental acceptance of experience:
‘Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences that we are normally caught up in, and learn to step back.’
An aspect of this process that is especially valuable for people whose thought patterns lead them into depression, or who respond to stress with an ‘automatic reaction triggered out of unawareness,’ is learning not to identify with thoughts.
‘Rather than regarding thoughts as necessarily true or as an aspect of the self, patients switched to a perspective within which negative thoughts and feelings could be seen as passing events in the mind that were neither necessarily valid reflections of reality nor central aspects of the self.
The notion of the decentered self mirrors concepts in cognitive therapy, but it is also a re-expression of the Buddhist teaching of anatta/anatman. In the spirit of this Buddhist context, Kabat-Zinn thinks that MBSR’s implications in students lives extend well beyond the treatment of pathology:
‘What we really offer people is a sense that there is a way of being, a way of looking at problems … that can make life more joyful and rich … and also a sense of being somehow in control. We call this way of being the way of awareness or the way of mindfulness.’
MBSR instructors also seek to embody mindful responses to problems in the way they deal with issues raised by students. They, too, adopt a stance of ‘non-judgmental enquiry’ and ‘curiosity’ rather than rushing to offer solutions. The mindful ways of being taught by MBSR is not only a solutions to particular difficulties; they are a more desirable way of living for all.
3. Is it Buddhism? And is it Engaged?
As this paper is written for a gathering of Engaged Buddhists, it seems fitting to ask of Kabat-Zinn and Glassman’s work, ‘Is it Buddhism?’ and ‘Is it engaged?’ Having come to prominence as a healthcare practitioner, Kabat-Zinn’s work is necessarily secular and he emphasises the universal character of mindfulness, while Glassman, for all his status within Rinzai Zen, has an ambivalent relationship with traditional Zen. But if Glassman and Kabat-Zinn are themselves reluctant to accept the label ‘Buddhist’, does their work nonetheless express Buddhist values?
In the case of MBSR, my reservation is that its concern with mindfulness leaves out other qualities that are valued within Buddhism. Kabat-Zinn stresses the adoption of attitudes such as patience and trust, he has little to say about affective qualities such as loving kindness (metta/maitri), the ethical precepts (sila/shila) or generosity (dana). The cultivation of wisdom (panna/prajna) perhaps lies beyond the scope of MBSR, but where Kabat-Zinn approaches this quality he speaks simply of extending mindfulness to include the whole of life. To offset this criticism we should note that Kabat-Zinn’s prioritization of mindfulness reflects a similar emphasis among his Buddhist teachers, and also that Kabat-Zinn never set out to share Buddhist teachings and practices as such, but only to offer mindfulness as a clinical treatment.
Glassman, too, stresses only a particular version of Buddhist qualities. His emphases grow from Zen and behind his teaching of bearing witness with its implication of not taking sides is a Zen-derived non-dual philosophy in which subject and object, cause and effect are considered not-different. Critics of this view argue that it leaves no place for ethical judgments. Much more could be said on this subject, but I will simply note here that Glassman’s version of Buddhism is by no means everyone’s version.
As for engagement, both MBSR and the ZPO projects clearly grow from sensitivity to human suffering, but they emphasise the attitudes and qualities with which one perceives suffering rather than an enquiry, such as that undertaken by Dr Ambedkar, into ‘the systemic causes of suffering.’ This does not mean that the work of Glassman or Kabat-Zinn is not socially engaged, just that it limits the sphere of that engagement.
4. Conclusion: Pragmatic Re-expression
These reservations about Kabat-Zinn and Glassman’s work point to a tendency in both to emphasise personal experience avoid conceptual clarity. They are wary of ideas about experience, including Buddhist ones. In this respect, they operate in the tradition of American pragmatism, which locates the value of concepts and beliefs in their capacity to affect how we live and act. In his book, One Dharma, Joseph Goldstein identifies a modern expression of pragmatism in what he calls ‘the emerging western Buddhism’, which is developing as western Buddhist teachers and practitioners make their own sense of the Buddhist teachings, drawing on various strands of the tradition according to the ‘pragmatic’ needs that emerge through their practice.
In this spirit MBSR and bearing witness are pragmatic attempts to formulate what works in finding an effective response to suffering. If Victorian sympathizers of Buddhism were alienated by the absence of activism, Glassman and Kabat-Zinn have found a way to combine the two, albeit at the cost of conceptual and even ethical clarity and of leaving out some important Buddhist teachings. Their work shows how Buddhist teachings can have a transforming effect on a large scale if they are presented in universally accessible ways.
The key in both cases is the value they place on embodying attitudes such as mindful awareness and bearing witness. This is a useful reminder to other socially engaged Buddhists that it can mean more than just performing social work. Buddhism locates the source of social and political suffering in the minds of human beings, so the solution also lies in our minds. Glassman and Kabat-Zinn teach Buddhists who want to change the world to exemplify in their own lives the qualities they want to see in the world, and encourage others to do so as well. This change is the method of their engaged Buddhism and also its goal.
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