With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labour, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends. So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?19
The Buddha seems far away from the world-historical events that preoccupied men like Rousseau, Smith, Marx and Valéry: the rise of the individual in a market society; the scramble for profits by the new individuals created by the break-up of old moralities; the creation of centralized states; the conquest and organized exploitation of peoples and their resources around the world; the violent revolutions based on the seizure of state power and private property.
In Indonesia one day, walking around Borobudur, I read a pamphlet a Thai monk was passing out. It contained the famous passage on the Buddhist sentiment of loving-kindness that the Buddha enjoined as a mental habit upon the laymen he spoke to:
Whatever beings may exist – weak or strong, tall, broad, medium or short, fine-material or gross, seen or unseen, those born and those pressing to be born – may they all be without exception happy in heart!
Let no one deceive anyone else, nor despise anyone anywhere. May no one wish harm to another in anger or ill-will!
Let one’s thoughts of boundless loving-kindness pervade the whole world, above, below, across, without obstruction, without hatred, without enmity!20
I read the lines, and couldn’t help wondering what, if anything, the Buddha would have thought of a place like East Timor where entire village populations were lined up and machine-gunned. Old age, disease, death, desiring and clinging – the most natural processes individuals know – proved to him the fact of suffering. To what extreme diagnoses and prescriptions would he have been provoked had he witnessed the twentieth century, the high intensities of suffering human beings inflicted and continue to inflict on other human beings, the wars, the massacres, the famines, the Holocaust, the Gulag? It was easy to imagine the Buddha from a simpler time who stressed the need for loving-kindness, and who could only be utterly bewildered in a historically more complex age by the enormous ordeals of human beings.
But there was plenty of suffering during the Buddha’s time too – and people had fewer distractions with which to dull the pain. There was the suffering of people uprooted from their native habitats and forced into cities. There was the suffering of loneliness caused by the breakdown of the old social order. There was also the suffering caused by wars of conquest: the large new armies of the big kingdoms of Kosala and Magadha overrunning the smaller republics. The Buddha’s own clan, the Shakyas, were slaughtered in one such war a few years before his death.
Organized greed, war, genocide – they were not unknown to the Buddha. They seem to have led him to his suspicion of the amoral individualism which was rapidly emerging in the India of his time, and which was reflected in the politics and the philosophical speculation of his peers. Their presence partly explains the obsessive way in which he tried to undermine the idea that there was anything like an autonomous or stable individual self.
Liberation from old bonds of caste and community was not the same as freedom for the Buddha. It could just as easily lead to nihilism, as the rise of discontented European masses proved. These masses, whose old certainties of belief, occupation and status had been destroyed in the process of enthroning the bourgeois individual, felt personal identity not as a relief but a burden. Their frustration and resentment channelled themselves into demands for greater equality, or levelling down; into violent revolutions. Seeking anonymity and uniformity, these uprooted and underdeveloped individuals became the primary ingredient of the totalitarian states of Europe and, later, Asia.
In his own time, the Buddha saw the men created by the new social and economic forces of North India. His primary audience existed in the urban centres where people felt most acutely their new individuality as a burden and were attracted to nihilism as preached by the new thinkers, such as the Ajivikas, who attacked the moral laws of karma. He could sense the dangers inherent in men freed from traditional morality and claiming to be self-directed individuals.
It is partly why he questioned the very premise of the autonomous self-directed individual: that he is someone who chooses and pursues his own desires, and thereby comes to possess his individuality – the hypothesis which lies even now, in an age where mass manipulation is a respectable industry, at the basis of modern civilization.
Like many modern thinkers, the Buddha, too, had begun with anatomizing the person driven and defined largely by desire, the habits of craving, or trishna, which did not normally cease until death. But he did not think that individuality or happiness could be achieved through these habits.
Trapped in its subjectivity, the self recognized each image of the world as something to be made use of or exploited. This is how it entered into a purely instrumental relationship with nature as well as with other human beings, whose subjectivity it did not acknowledge. In pursuit of its desires, it reduced everything in the world to the level of ‘things’, which were either an aid or a hindrance to the fulfilment of desire. The occasional fulfilment of desire strengthened the belief that one was a self, distinct from others; and such a belief fixed one further into the grid of such emotions as greed, hatred and anger.
The Buddha tried to reverse this process by advocating a form of mental vigilance that undermined the individual’s sense of a distinctive unchanging self with its own particular desires. To observe even temporarily the incessant play of desire and activity in the mind was to see how the self was a process rather than an unchanging substance; how it had no single identity across time; and when assumed to be unchanging could only cause suffering and frustration.
He hoped to bring about a fundamental change in the attitudes of men savouring their individuality: to prove to them that everything in the world is part of a causal process and cannot exist in or by itself; that things are interdependent, and that this is true as much for human beings as for physical phenomena.
Even Adam Smith feared that the market society driven by desire and the multiplication of needs would degenerate into chaos and violence if its citizens did not exercise self-control. He hoped that the individual living in it would be able to distinguish between what he wants and what he needs. But this was more an expression of optimism than a practical method to unravel altogether what Smith himself recognized as the deception of desire.
The Buddha, too, began with a biological image of man as ruled by impulses and desires – the same image that inspired Adam Smith and Hobbes. But he might have been puzzled by the assumption that the private satisfaction of these impulses and desires would not only somehow bring about an ideal state and society but also eventually make the individual more self-aware. His own attempt was to reveal how unchecked desire led to the individual’s alienation from both nature and human society.
It is partly why he did not try to envision the moral and political order that could accommodate such autonomous individuals and their desires. He wished to establish what Rousseau called ‘the reign of virtue’. But he did not see it coming about through an abstract political organization. Although he stressed that the ruler be righteous, he balked at making a faceless entity such as the state the supposed arbiter between allegedly solitary and fearful individuals, who preyed upon each other and so were in need of a remote master. The same delusion that made men suppose themselves to be solid and independent individual selves could also make them see such changing, insubstantial entities as state and society as real and enduring, and subordinate themselves to them.
Given his experience, the Buddha would not have disagreed with Rousseau’s diagnosis: life was indeed simpler when men had little to work with and lived in small groups, preoccupied almost entirely with the tasks of survival. He would have agreed that th
e idea of private property set men against each other and created a state of inequality. But he would also have accepted the change as inevitable in the light of technological innovations and the growing human need for comfort and space. Although, in practice, the sangha held property in common, the Buddha did not preach against private property.
His preference was for small political communities where the power of decision-making was distributed among all the members. Even as large states emerged in North India, he hoped to preserve the small bonds and solidarities that protect the individual and prevent him from being ground down by vast impersonal forces. By establishing the sangha, he wished to reintegrate uprooted people in a mode of life, a tradition and a form of spiritual practice.
He did not detach even so apparently private a sphere as the spiritual from the larger human world; the bhikshus didn’t live in forests but in retreats close to urban centres, and were bound to laymen by an ethic of social responsibility. He is unlikely to have had much time for the modern idea that freedom was something the individual enjoyed in private after discharging his obligations to his society and state.
Like Rousseau, the Buddha disliked selfishness, and upheld the value of compassion. But his compassion was different from that which the revolutionaries of France and Russia claimed to be driven by, based on solidarity with an abstract mass of lonely and angry individuals who had not been allowed to pursue their self-interest. The Buddha’s compassion presupposed no gulf of class or caste between persons; it sprang from his concern with the mind and body of the active, suffering individual. It sought to redirect individuals from the pursuit of political utopias to attentiveness and acts of compassion in everyday life.
As he saw it, without the belief in a self with an identity, a person will no longer be obsessed with regrets about the past and plans for the future. Ceasing to live in the limbo of what ought to be but is not here yet, he will be fully alive in the present.
The Buddha’s insistence on inhabiting the here and now prevented most Buddhists from lapsing into the utilitarianism of those who sought to build better worlds and ruthlessly sacrificed the present for the sake of a hypothetical future. But it didn’t save Buddhists from the consequences of the search for political utopias that blighted the twentieth century.
The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who was born in 1926, grew up to see his country divided among and ravaged by Marx-inspired nationalists and their pro-American opponents. Amid a civil war that killed millions of Vietnamese and thousands of Americans he upheld non-violent methods of negotiation and dialogue, and eventually was forced to leave Vietnam for America in 1966.
Buddhists often became the victims of the degraded forms of Marxism that spread across large parts of Asia. Tibet, a mainly Buddhist country in which about 20 per cent of the population consisted of ordained monks and nuns, had already shown its vulnerability to the organized forces of the modern world in 1904, when British-led invaders massacred hundreds of poorly equipped Tibetan defenders and forced the Dalai Lama to flee to Mongolia. In 1951, the Chinese Communists invaded Tibet and began a still ongoing process of brutalization: hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have been killed, and thousands of monasteries destroyed, in the course of what the Chinese describe as an attempt to end medieval feudalism in and bring modernity to Tibet.
Buddhists also suffered greatly in Cambodia, where out of the chaos created by heavy American bombing in the early 1970s emerged the Khmer Rouge, the most radical Communists yet. The leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, dreamed of a Rousseauian utopia where each person would have his own little farm. In a perverse parody of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, his cadres destroyed hospitals and schools, and forced anyone who looked like a doctor, teacher or engineer into menial work in the villages. In just five to six years, up to three million Cambodians died from starvation, overwork, torture and execution. Before their overthrow by the Vietnamese army in 1979, the Khmer Rouge destroyed more than three thousand Buddhist temples, and only three thousand out of fifty thousand monks survived their murderous fury.21
The Buddhist response to such unprecedented modern atrocities may at first seem unrealistic. The Buddhist monk Maha Ghosananda, who lost his entire family in the Cambodian killing fields and who became a major figure in the reconstruction of his country, insisted on including the Khmer Rouge at UN-sponsored talks on the future of Cambodia. He claimed to want an end to antagonism, not to antagonists. He said, ‘We must condemn the act but we cannot hate the actor. The unwholesomeminded must be included in our loving-kindness because they are the ones who need loving-kindness the most.’
Over more than four decades of exile, the Dalai Lama continued to insist on non-violent opposition to the brutal Chinese rule over Tibet. He threatened to resign his leadership of the Tibetan community in exile if Tibetans ever resorted to a violent insurrection against the Chinese. Similarly, the Buddhist democrat, Aung San Suu Kyi, refuses to lead an armed struggle against the military rulers of Myanmar who have kept her under house arrest on and off for more than a decade.
These modern-day Buddhists derived their scruples from the Buddha. But they claimed to draw their immediate inspiration, and courage and optimism, from a man who, though not a Buddhist himself, appears to have consistently applied Buddhist principles to the murky world of politics.
Mourning his death, Albert Einstein asserted that ‘generations to come will not believe that such a man walked the face of the earth’. But Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi provoked such incredulity in his own lifetime. A confidential government report in South Africa, where he organized a small and frequently trampled-upon Indian minority against racial discrimination, said that ‘the workings of his conscience…his ethical and intellectual attitude, based as it appears to be on a curious compound of mysticism and astuteness, baffles the ordinary processes of thought’.
Rabindranath Tagore called him Mahatma – great-souled. The word implied that Gandhi was a sage, part of a long Indian tradition of spirituality. So he was in many ways; but he was also an activist. As Gandhi himself put it, ‘the quest for truth cannot be prosecuted in a cave’ – a sentiment the Buddha would have approved. His lifelong attempt, as the leader of the Indian anti-colonial movement, was to infuse morality into the realm of politics where falsehood and violence had become widely accepted norms.
Born in 1869, half a century after the British consolidation in India, Gandhi grew up in an India where the traditional forms of community, though under assault from British colonialism, still existed in various tribes, sects, castes and clans. He died in 1948, when India was free and on the brink of rapid modernization; and, as with the Buddha, his life and insights emerged out of an intimate experience of a fast-changing world.
Many of his contemporaries were much more optimistic about the healing power of political independence. Many of his more westernized followers, such as Nehru, despaired at his seemingly quixotic rejection of the industrial revolution and other aspects of western modernity. But for Gandhi, liberation from British rule meant nothing if it wasn’t preceded by self-appraisal and introspection by individual Indians. This often made him withdraw altogether from the freedom movement and for years immerse himself in social work with peasants, women and untouchable Hindus.
Like the Buddha, he was partial to the small-scale self-governing political unit. He was wary of nationalism; and he distrusted the over-centralized state of the kind the British had created in India and which Indians were to inherit in 1947. This was not just personal whimsy. Gandhi was among the first western-educated Indians to realize how thoroughly the imposition of alien ways had bewildered and demeaned Indians. He spoke less of administrative and legal reforms than of the need for spinning wheels, cow protection and village democracy, all the things that he thought Indians needed to achieve true self-government. He would have agreed with the Russian Christian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev, who asserted that ‘the concept of man as a citizen obscured the concept of man as a free spirit belongi
ng to another order of being and also obstructed the vision of man as labourer and producer’.22
He felt it important for a conquered people to look for fresh identity and dignity in their own traditions. India, he felt, must find its own way instead of imitating western models of the nation state, military and economy. To attempt to beat the West at its own game, as Japan was then doing, was already to admit defeat.
For the enemy were not the British, or the West, but the immemorial forces of human greed and violence that had received an unprecedented moral sanction in the political, scientific and economic systems of the modern world.
Appropriately, his political method, satyagraha (non-violent persuasion), which went on to inspire Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, attempted to change the rules of the game. Spiritual awareness and self-control are of the utmost importance. The activist has the option of retaliation when faced with violence. But he actively chooses to forgo it. He works to purify his mind, ridding it of anger and hostility right in the midst of conflict – as with the Buddha, what was in the mind was as important as the specific action in which it resulted, if not more so. By doing so, the activist tries to win the respect of his oppressor, and to turn him into an equal interlocutor, a partner in the political process.
As Gandhi saw it, a political movement against the British could not be, as national liberation struggles usually were, a zero-sum contest, with clearly defined winners and losers. He exhorted Indians not only not to demonize their British rulers but to make them participate in a process of self-questioning and self-purification. He hoped for satyagraha to bring about an inner transformation within the British, to the point where they themselves would share with their victims an awareness of the profound evil of colonialism: how the suffering created by organized exploitation touched both exploiter and victim. Such awareness, reached individually, could alone create the possibility of reconciliation between peoples and nations who would otherwise remain locked in mutual distrust and hostility – a method tried most recently in South Africa by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which followed the end of the apartheid regime.
An End to Suffering Page 29