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Taking Responsibility
An address delivered by Robert Aitken Roshi
to the Buddhist Peace Fellowship 2006 Membership Gathering
June 23, 2006
Entering an Epoch Time
Hi everybody: I am pleased
to be able to address you, and thus have some part in your convocation.
It is appropriate that we should be meeting, high time, in fact.
It is a point in our religious history, indeed in our secular
history, for us to understand, to grasp and to internalize and
make our own.
Make no mistake. The Neo-Cons
are in power and are betraying us and our political heritage.
In just a short period, the ideals, groundwork and bulwarks of
social justice set in place by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his
supporters seventy years ago have been wiped away so that our
very Constitution is called into question. Even trees and deer,
protected by another Roosevelt a generation earlier ago, are endangered.
At the same time, our nation has been launched on a ruthless course
of murderous imperialism.
We are in an important place
in our religious history as well. Scandals rock the Catholic Church;
Protestant churches are popular here and there for what seem to
be superficial reasons, and here and there for what seem benighted
reasons. Buddhist founders in the West are either dead or on the
point of dying, and their successors seem just to be finding themselves,
to speak generously in some instances. Muslims and Jews are mired
in a bloody war.
Spengler called such historical
points as the one we have reached, “epochs,” giving
appropriate weight to turns that might otherwise seem just to
be part of the scene. I view the present political and religious
crisis in Mahayana terms, but we in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship
are made up of many kinds of Buddhists. Those of you who find
your home in the Theravada or the Vajrayana tradition will have
to reach for an analogy. You are stuck with someone brought up
in the Zen tradition of the Mahayana, and I trust that you will
be able to use my words in correspondence to points that are more
familiar, and to realize that the present moment is indeed an
epoch for us all.
It is possible to show that
in the course of history, epochs have marked the Mahayana with
an unfolding of the religion steadily toward the intimate. Beginning
with the Buddha’s experience under the Bodhi Tree, the movement
has enabled students to take the twinkle of the Morning Star and
the universe of its implications more and more to heart. You and
I would not be here without the blood shed in the efforts of work
horses of the past to take the steps necessary to make, for example,
this gathering possible and appropriate.
The Legacy of Baizhang
Huaihai
Scanning our heritage tree,
important names stand out. Baizhang Huaihai stands out for me.
Born just seven years after the death of Huineng, the Sixth Ancestor,
and a Dharma heir of Mazu Daoyi, he was thus a part of the great
flowering of early Chan that was also fertilized by such illustrious
figures as Yunyan Tansheng and Nanquan Puyuan.
Classical Buddhism evolved
along in parallel with the teaching of those early figures. Disciples
of the Buddha and their successors over many hundreds of years
have kept the teaching of their founder as a closed system, with
lay followers looking forward to rebirth as monks who have the
true word—meantime supporting the fortunate monks of their
time by taking care of their upkeep. Western Theravada teachers
are breaking new ground in this field, and I would invite them
to speak for themselves.
When Baizhang was active,
in the late eighth and early ninth centuries of our era, there
were still Mahayana monks who applied the ancient precepts to
their exclusive limit:
A monk asked, “In
cutting down plants, chopping wood, and digging the earth, will
there be any form of retribution for wrongdoing?”
Baizhang said, “One
cannot definitely say that there is wrongdoing. How can one definitely
say that there is no wrongdoing?” (1)
Wrongdoing is not something
out there. It lies in your intention, if it is there at all. Somebody
has to clear the brush and chop the firewood. Your question is
literally Classical. It is time to open the system. You are not
a special fellow who can hold himself aloof from bad karma by
getting somebody else to do your evil deeds.
Baizhang clarifies his point
in a dialogue with Yunyan, who went on to be an ancestor of the
Soto School:
Yunyan asked, “Everyday
we have hard work. For whom do we do it?”
Baizhang said, “There
is someone who requires it.”
Yunyan said, “Why
not let that person do it?”
Baizhang said, “He
has no tools.” (2)
What is the antecedent of
the pronoun “he?” It could be “she,” of
course, depending on who is asking. The Mahayana rises with this
question. He or she is already embodied, of course, embodied but
not acknowledged. It is only when he or she is acknowledged, once
and for all, that the Dharma can manifest. It is only as he or
she under-stands that the Chan Buddha Dharma can manifest.
Some of the contemporaries
of Baizhang simply occupied wings in esoteric or Tiantai monasteries.
According to tradition, it was Baizhang who formulated the first
monastic code for the independent Chan monastery, the code that
still under-girds the rules and regulations of Zen monastic living.
When Baizhang was in his
eighties his monks felt that he should rest, and not turn out
with the others at samu time. They hid his garden tools, and this
gave him a chance to deliver himself of his most famous dictum.
At the next meal he locked himself in and refused his food, saying,
“A day without work is a day without eating.” This
led to the expression in connection with samu,: “all invited.”
Everybody turns out.
Taking Responsibility
This puts responsibility
for the Dharma on each individual student, where it belongs. It
has taken millennia of process and more to bring this change into
being, and the end is by no means yet. The process is laicization.
I remember thirty or so years ago when I visited the Zen sanghas
of Los Angeles and San Francisco. In question periods I would
be asked about lay practice. This was a bit like asking a fish
how it is there in the sea. The question simply never came up
in the exclusively lay Diamond Sangha.
It was, however, entirely
natural in the SFZC and the ZCLA where there were dual tracks
of training, lay and clerical. The lay track was inferior to that
of the clerical, and at the same time the upward path sometimes
excluded realization. I remember the modest expostulation of a
new director of the San Francisco sangha that she had not had
a glimpse of the Great Matter. That is, she had not a glimpse
of what the Buddha saw, sitting there under the Bodhi Tree long
ago. All of the Mahayana has evolved from that glimpse, the emptiness
of everything, the inclusion of everything in each being, and
the precious nature of each being in itself—all a closed
book to the new executive whose successes rested on her being
a really nice person with administrative skills that were sharply
honed through a lifetime of experience of interaction in the sangha.
I run the risk of another
kind of conceit here. While it is important that our Mahasangha
be salted with realized people, there are some who see the point
of jokes of Hakuin and Dogen, who at the same time don’t
feel comfortable in a rope-bottom chair as teachers. These are
the luminaries to whom the Dalai Lama, for example, turns in his
dilemmas. Fulfillment in the Dharma does not require a certain
social position.
Furthermore it is important
not to be caught up in false tradition. Tracing our history back
through the Far East, it is clear that we inherit the presumption
that students of the Dharma do not involve themselves in political
action. I am convinced that this is a kind of hold-over like sexism
that is not essential to the Dharma. The movement of the Mahayana
clearly has enabled us to touch the Iraq and the Darfur in ourselves
and me, and a concern for those parts of ourselves surely is shared
in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. It behooves us to keep up with
our reading of Robert Fisk and Antonia Juhasz and to speak out
and act out accordingly.
The folks who feel they
must continue to search for connections should do just that, but
it is in reading and in conversation with friends and teacher
that such searches are fulfilled. These undecideds must recognize
that they will water down the function if they insist that the
Buddhist Peace Fellowship slow up and serve as a means for their
search. Our process is slow and equivocal enough as it is.
Just as the United States
is still seeking to live up to the proclamations of Abraham Lincoln,
so Mahayana Buddhism and its followers still seek to live up to
the visualizations of Eighth Century Buddhist genius, which really
rest on the Buddha’s own proclamations. The ancient vows
taken for us are no more than profound common sense. The fact
that Iraqis are my sisters and brothers doesn’t need to
be swathed in saffron robes.
The Buddhist Peace Fellowship
is our vehicle, just as the other various modes of Buddhism are
vehicles. Let’s use it as a vehicle for the most common
sense we can conjure up. Our model can be the Dukabors, who burn
down their houses and parade stark naked by way of making their
commonsensical human points. Don’t dismiss them as Dukabors.
They are brothers and sisters, bare dicks and tits and all. They
are their own vehicle and can teach us something.
Trikaya: The Three
Bodies of the Buddha
The “Three Bodies
of the Buddha,” the trikaya, can be proved in the dimension
of bare dicks and tits, otherwise what are we doing here? Just
rallying behind a banner and beating tambourines? Namu Myoho Renge
Kyo! We’ve all done it and it was fun. But now with human
culture going down the drain, with Sessho and Bach and Shakespeare
going “glug glug,” it’s time to take off our
saffron robes and set forth our naked, vehement resistance.
Okay, the trikaya. To begin
with there is no essential self, no soul. The Dharmakaya is not
made up of angels chanting “Hail Mary,” the Nembutsu
or whatever. Right away we are faced with the difficulties of
comparative religion. It is hard to reach harmony with Muslims
by a study of the Koran and its Bronze Age kind of social justice.
The Muslims themselves have reached harmony by judicious use of
accommodation and metaphor in the Perennial Wisdom movement. Even
as leaders of that movement. This is a large constellation extending
from Theosophy to include such luminaries as Mercia Eliade and
Ananda K. Coomaraswami. It is a formidable constellation, and
not always completely convincing.
It is much easier to find
harmony in bed, murmuring “Goojee goojee goo.” Ask
the many couples in Thailand who are Muslim and Buddhist. They
won’t tell you about their pillow talk, but their smiles
and the smiles of their children make the point.
Then there is the Sambhogakaya.
You want “soul?” There is only one place where there
is soul, and that is where it is shared, and not just with folks.
Progressive biologists conjecture that every leaf of every tree
contains universal memory. The child is ready to be assured that
the horned toad and the rattlesnake are good mothers until adults
persuade her otherwise. The whole universe is jumping with intercourse
as well, in a fascinating montage of union. The birds do it; the
bees do it—because the union is already there, impelled
to be confirmed again and yet again, each momentary touch another
confirmation of the Buddha’s own vision of how things were
at the beginning.
Finally, the Nirmanakaya.
This is the point—not the empty point or the all-inclusive
one—the point itself:
One day Baizhang and Mazu
were taking a walk. Suddenly a wild duck flew up. Mazu said, “What
was that?”
Baizhang said, “A
wild duck.”
Mazu said, “Where
did it go?”
Baizhang said, “It
flew away.” Mazu laid hold of Baizhang’s nose and
gave it a sharp twist. Baizhang cried out in pain. Mazu said,
“Why! When did it ever fly away?” (3)
This is Baizhang’s
kensho story, but as with most students, kensho was only the beginning
for Baizhang. [Turn to the endnotes of this paper and follow through
for the continuation.] Turn to your own experience. There is nothing
be-all and end-all with kensho, and those who imply to the contrary
know not whereof they speak. Point-after- point arise out there,
and in the mind as well. How lucky it is to be a human being!
Most people have learned
to treat the points as a continuum. They elide the spaces between
the dots, and end up with just a line that smears the dots and
the spaces too. What a great pity! It is this point! Ouch! Ding!
What to do? Buddhist
Anarchism!
Some points can be turning
points, and I’d like to think that this convocation is such
a chance. Everything is on the table. It was put there for us.
As a nation we are on a downward path, invading the world, as
Antonia Juhasz says, one economy at a time (4). Are we in a place
where we can speak out?
If we are a tax-exempt organization,
we are not in a place where we can speak out. We are constantly
on guard to protect our status, and therefore we don’t say
or do what we mean, and after a while we actually do say and do
what we mean, and it is something benighted the evil conspirators
in charge can live with. Anarchist base communities become centers
to train people to be volunteers in tax-exempt organizations,
for example. What to do?
In preparing this talk,
I asked myself, what would Emma Goldman do? What would Dorothy
Day do? What would Kathy Kelly do? What would Baizhang Huaihai
do? That’s easy. I can’t conjecture about Baizhang,
of course, but the others wouldn’t be tax exempt to start
with. But if they were tax exempt (as we are), what then? I devised
a scheme in my head of subdividing the Alcatraz Avenue property
in Berkeley and a bunch of us chipping in and buying a little
piece. Then we would rent our lot to folks who don’t want
tax exemption anyway.
No, that would be pretty
devious and contrived, probably subject to question at tax time.
It is better for a bunch of us within the Fellowship to call ourselves
the Buddhist Anarchist Caucus or something like that and just
meet for coffee around somebody’s kitchen table somewhere.
Why “anarchist?” Because we’re Buddhist.
Buddhism is anarchism, after
all, for anarchism is love, trust, selflessness and all those
good Buddhist virtues including a total lack of imposition on
another. During the 19th and even early 20th century, European
and then American anarchists occupied respected podiums on lecture
circuits from Boston and New York and across the continent to
Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles At length that roster of
distinguished speakers included the anarchist Har Dayal, author
of The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Sanskrit Literature, an important
text that belongs in all our libraries, who came to the American
lecture circuits from India by way of London to edify our grandparents
and their parents.
Today we’re up against
the iron face of carefully crafted public opinion. From the Haymarket
tragedy in 1886 to the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1921, there
was in the United States almost half century of concerted, bloody
minded, and ultimately successful endeavor to erase anarchism
and its devotees from civilized discourse. To this day, even in
a gathering like our own, the very word “anarchist”
evokes an unkempt foreigner with a bomb about to go off in his
back pocket. It might seem better to keep the two words in separate
little boxes.
That doesn’t work.
Go to Google, type in the words “Buddhist Anarchism,”
and stand back. The number of hits will surprise you. Moreover,
except for references to Gary Snyder’s article by that name
in the first Journal for the Protection of All Beings back in
1962, all the hits will be in Classical Buddhism, in the Buddha’s
own words. Gary’s piece referred to the Huayan Sutra—well
taken, but there is a world of other possible Mahayana references.
The “Three Bodies of the Buddha,” for example. Everything
really is empty, personally interconnected, and precious in itself.
We don’t need some guy in saffron robes to tell us so. Apart
from Google hits and from any kind of Buddhism, our ordinary common
sense tells us so. Anarchism makes sense, for all the iron faces,
for all the nooses of the Haymarket tragedy and all the subsequent
ruthless persecutions and prosecutions and executions. The lonely,
quavering voice of Lucy Parsons puts us to shame (5).
It’s time to put ourselves
in a position where we have nothing to protect. No group ego.
No name, no slogan. Like King Christian X of Denmark we can all
wear the yellow star. We can all wave the black flag, no color
and no design. It is design that does us in. There is only one
thing that works in the face of the iron faces, and that is decency.
By being decent, I don’t mean being nice. I mean Mahayana
responsibility. It isn’t nice to block the doorway. Decent
Mahayana conduct means behaving appropriately. It is surely appropriate
in these days of justifying torture and white phosphorous as weapons,
to hold up an inexorable mirror to the fiends who are raising
hell in our name—and then following through with an essential
agenda that is not necessarily legal, like smuggling medicine
to Iraqi people—the program of Voices in the Wilderness
until the situation became too dangerous—or setting up a
half-way house for recently released prisoners, like the Olympia
Zen Center, or feeding the poor, five days a week, week in and
week out for years and years, like Catholic Worker houses across
the country. The essential agenda is not a hobby, after all.
Footnotes:
1. Thomas Cleary, trans.,
Saying and Doings of Pai-Chang: Ch’an Master of Great Wisdom
(Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1978), p. 42.
2. Ibid., p. 26.
3. Nelson Foster and
Jack Shoemaker, The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader (Hopewell,
NJ: The Ecco Press, 1996), p. 59.
4. Antonia Juhaz, The
Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a time (New York:
Regan Books, 2006). This is a concisely written book, meticulously
annotated, that cries out for reading, assimilation and action.
5. Lucy Parsons, the
widow of Albert Parsons, carried on his work against great odds
after his execution in the Haymarket affair. I am glad to report
that to this day the Lucy Parsons Center, a collectively-run book
store and community center, is open to visitors and customers
in Boston's South End.
Please visit BPF.org
for more information about becoming a member of The Buddhist Peace
Fellowship.
