[wordup] Stephen Batchelor - Spaces in the Sky

[Adam Shand]

Via: http://suicidegirls.com/news/culture/22223/
Source: http://www.stephenbatchelor.org/online%20articles/spaces.htm

Spaces in the Sky

This reflection on the events of September 11, 2001, was published in  
the Winter 2001 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

In July 1972, I climbed a narrow passageway in a sandstone cliffside  
and emerged to stand on the head of a 180-foot-tall Buddha in Bamiyan,  
Afghanistan. Twenty-nine years later, in July 2001, I stayed on the  
fourteenth floor of the Marriott Hotel between the twin towers of  
Manhattan's World Trade Center as a participant in Tricycle's tenth- 
anniversary conference, "Buddhism: Does It Make a Difference?" In  
March Taliban forces had shelled the Bamiyan statue and reduced it to  
rubble; in September, suicide bombers brought down the twin towers and  
in so doing reduced the Marriott to rubble. Places where I and others  
had once stood, whether admiring the gentle Afghan countryside or the  
urban grandeur of New York, were now just spaces in the sky.

Long before the Taliban came to power, the Bamiyan statue had already  
been defaced by Muslim armies. As justification for his widespread  
destruction of Buddhist shrines and monasteries in India in the  
eleventh century, Sultan Mahmud declared: "That in proportion as the  
tenets of the Prophet are diffused, and his followers exert themselves  
in the subversion of idolatry, so shall be their reward in heaven."  
Whether such a belief is a legitimate interpretation of Islamic  
teachings, it may have given the terrorists who steered Boeing jets  
into the twin towers the strength of will to commit their acts of  
murder.

The Buddhist response, both in eleventh-century India and in twenty- 
first-century America, has been a consistent refusal to resort to  
violence. "Hatred will not cease by hatred," said Buddha in the  
Dhammapada, "but by love alone. This is the ancient law." One can  
imagine this verse being intoned by Indian Buddhist monks while their  
monasteries burned, just as now devout e-mail messages are dispatched  
to the White House urging restraint and compassion. And just as its  
sentiments were ineffective in turning back the tide of Muslim  
aggression in India, so they may be equally ineffective in halting the  
course of violent retaliation against latter-day Islamic terrorism.

That "hatred will not cease by hatred but by love alone" is true  
because the statement is a tautology. If an old lady were being driven  
to distraction by noisy neighbors, how would she benefit from being  
solemnly told: "Noise will not cease by noise but by silence alone"?  
The Dhammapada verse, like this hypothetical advice to the woman, is  
true at such a level of generality that it offers little help in  
dealing with specific situations. It merely states the conditions  
under which a long-term solution to hatred would be possible. It may  
reinforce one's faith that human beings can relinquish hatred and  
inspire one to seek to love others unconditionally, but it doesn't  
answer the question of how to respond to an act of violence that  
threatens one's way of life here and now.

The challenge for Buddhists is not to let a commitment to the  
principle of nonviolence blunt one's critical acumen or deflect one's  
gaze from looking steadily into the nature and origins of violence. It  
is far too simplistic to think of violence as originating solely in  
the psychology of hatred and anger. Violence is intrinsic to the  
function of the nation-state. Our freedoms and privileges in a liberal  
democracy are ultimately guaranteed by the willingness of the state to  
use violence to protect them. It is conceivable that a president or  
general could launch a devastating military attack on an enemy who  
threatened their country's way of life without any anger or hatred at  
all. When everything else fails, a nation-state will resort to  
violence to protect the interests of its citizens. One needs to  
acknowledge that there may be a contradiction between one's heartfelt  
commitment to nonviolence and one's enjoyment of the wealth and  
freedoms of a modern democratic power.

Historically, Buddhist states have struggled with the dilemma of  
protecting the rights and lives of their citizens while upholding the  
principle of nonviolence. Three times Buddha managed to dissuade King  
Virudhaka of Kosala from taking vengeance against Shakya (Buddha's  
homeland), but in the end Virudhaka invaded. To uphold the Buddhist  
precept of not killing, the inhabitants let themselves be massacred,  
and Shakya was destroyed. In the more recent case of Tibet, the  
Buddhist state put itself under the military protection of either its  
Mongolian or Chinese patrons. Whether or not this compromise was  
strictly in keeping with the principle of nonviolence, it succeeded in  
securing the integrity of Tibet until the rules of the geopolitical  
game suddenly changed in the twentieth century. Tibet was caught  
unawares and found itself defenseless against a "protector" that  
violently turned against it.

Buddhists have traditionally justified nonviolence even at the cost of  
their own lives and the destruction of their countries, because in the  
greater scheme of future lifetimes they would ultimately gain from  
having acted with impeccable morality. This is the same kind of  
otherworldly logic (albeit premised on very different beliefs) that  
could justify the violent acts of a Muslim suicide bomber. As long as  
this life is seen either as a brief moment in an infinite succession  
of lives or a mere prelude to eternal heaven or hell, in the end the  
fate of this world can become a matter of relative indifference. If  
Buddhism is to make a difference in this world today (as is the avowed  
aim of at least the "Engaged Buddhist" movement), then it will need  
consciously to switch its ultimate priorities from the hereafter to  
the now.

In other historical situations, however, Buddhists have at times  
resorted to violence to resolve social and political conflicts. China  
was freed from Mongol rule in 1368 by an uprising spearheaded by  
Buddhist "freedom fighters" of the White Lotus Society, headed by a  
former monk who became first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Brian  
Victoria has shown in his book Zen at War the extent to which Zen  
masters justified the imperial Japanese war effort in the name of  
Buddhist teachings. Although no harm was caused to others, the self- 
immolation of Buddhist monks to protest the Vietnam war was an act of  
violence against themselves. Yet given the 2,500-year history of  
Buddhism, such episodes have been mainly regional and fairly sporadic.  
The counter-rhetoric of nonviolence in the tradition is so pronounced  
that it is difficult to envisage a full-scale war or military crusade  
ever being launched in the Buddha's name.

This has not been the case with the monotheistic faiths.  
Christianity's crusades against Islam, inquisitions against heretics,  
and missions to convert heathens were all carried out in the belief  
that these acts were fulfilling God's will. Although state- and church- 
sponsored Christian aggression has largely faded away, the  
legitimization of violence by appeal to the authority of God is a key  
element in today's crisis in the Middle East. Many orthodox Jews  
believe that they have a God-given right to the biblical lands of  
Israel that allows them to settle irrespective of other claims of  
ownership. If they are attacked, the state will enforce their "rights"  
by violence. Their Muslim opponents then justify their violent  
response by appealing to the authority of the Qur'an.

Although moderate Muslims would argue that the bellicose language of  
the Qur'an applies only to the time of Muhammad and should now be  
understood symbolically as a war against evil within one's own heart,  
a member of an Islamic terrorist movement would find ample vindication  
in this text for killing perceived opponents of Islam. We read, for  
example, that "God does not love the unbelievers" (3:29), who are "the  
vilest of all creatures" (98:1). One should not befriend them, since  
"they will spare no pains to corrupt you" (3:118). "Let not the  
unbelievers think they will ever get away," says another passage.  
"They have not the power to do so. Muster against them all the men and  
cavalry at your command, so that you may strike terror into the enemy  
of God and your enemy" (8:59). "Strike off their heads, strike off the  
tips of their fingers!" (8:12).

As a Buddhist unbeliever, reading the Qur'an is a sobering experience.  
Despite the deeply human and peaceful sentiments of other passages,  
the text keeps returning to the divisive and warlike language of "us"  
versus "them." For Muslims this text is not merely sanctioned by God  
but dictated by Him word for word to the Prophet as His final  
testament to humankind. It is unsettling to read passages composed by  
a just and merciful deity that include such explicit incitements to  
violence. The nonviolent and inclusive tone that runs through the  
Buddhist sutras could not be in starker contrast. By no stretch of the  
imagination could a hypothetical Buddhist terrorist find comparable  
justification for killing people by reading the Pali canon.

Yet if a Buddhist regards all sentient beings as "us," then he or she  
cannot treat even those who hijack civilian aircraft and turn them  
into guided missiles as "them." However difficult, we have to be able  
to empathize not only with their victims but also with the terrorists  
themselves. Condemning acts as evil does not entail condemning the  
people who committed them as evil. One has to try to understand the  
origins of their suffering and the reasons that led them to commit  
appalling acts of violence. It is probable that the men who flew the  
planes into the twin towers and the Pentagon believed that they were  
doing good, possibly out of sincere religious motives.

For nineteen apparently intelligent and educated men to conceive and  
carry out an act that they knew would end in their deaths implies a  
faith and dedication that, under other circumstances, one might find  
admirable. And although we may deplore their course of action, we  
might nonetheless find ourselves in agreement with aspects of their  
analysis of the problems they were seeking to resolve.

To defuse the impulse of violent retribution, one needs to try to  
understand how one or one's society is perceived by others. If you  
were a young Palestinian teenager in a refugee camp or the Iraqi  
mother of a starving child, how might you perceive America and other  
affluent Western societies? You would see that their economy is  
dependent on oil from Muslim countries; that they are willing to  
ensure access to that oil by the use of military force; that they  
support and arm undemocratic and often repressive regimes in order to  
maintain "stability" in the region; that they control television and  
other media that bombard one with images of a materialistic lifestyle  
that offend one's religious sensibilities. It is understandable that  
one's frustration and rage at these perceived injustices might lead  
one to contemplate or condone extreme acts, especially when coupled  
with grinding poverty and little if any access to democratic avenues  
of political expression.

Understanding why people would be led to commit an extreme act,  
however, does not absolve them of moral responsibility for that act.  
The very fabric of our moral language begins to break apart as soon as  
we try to explain individual human behavior as the quasi-inevitable  
results of impersonal historical, economic, and political forces.  
American government policy in the Middle East can no more be held  
morally responsible for some people's violent responses to it than it  
can for others' quiescent acceptance of it. Moral responsibility  
belongs only to those who intentionally commit an act in order to  
achieve a desired result. Until the very last minute, the terrorists  
could have changed their minds, averting the death and destruction  
they wrought. They and those who supported them alone are morally  
culpable.

But each of us is to some extent implicated in contributing to the  
conditions from which these acts of violence arose. By tolerating the  
way our governments behave abroad, by making investments in the  
corporations that sustain the global economy, by consuming fossil  
fuels, we are complicit in the intricate web of relationships that  
sustains the world as it is. The sheer complexity, scale and speed of  
these interactions can make one feel utterly confused and powerless.  
The challenge is to respond to that confusion without lapsing into the  
oppositional rhetoric of "us" versus "them" or retreating to a  
mystical equanimity that trusts that everything is part of a divine  
plan or the working out of karmic consequences beyond our individual  
comprehension.

The attacks in New York and Washington burst my complacent Buddhist  
bubble. I found myself facing urgent and overwhelming questions for  
which the broad truths of Buddhism did not seem to provide an adequate  
response. Is an open society that tolerates dissent even possible  
without its being underwritten by violence? For if dissent were to  
take the form of violently seizing others' lives and property, with  
what resources would a nonviolent society respond? Is a sustainable  
human society therefore inescapably dependent on the threat of  
violence? And if so, is the Buddhist commitment to nonviolence but a  
noble aspiration whose goal can never be reached on this earth?  
Despite all their talk of love and compassion, do Buddhists have the  
capacity and resolve to imagine and realize a truly nonviolent world?  
Or is nirvana, after all, the only peace we can hope for?