An End to Suffering

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An End to Suffering Page 32

by Pankaj Mishra


  Tocqueville’s admiration for the achievements of the American Revolution was deep. It was also, as events in the next century and a half were to prove, remarkably prescient. America, which was to accommodate multitudes of persecuted peoples from across the world, and lead decisive battles against the totalitarian political systems of fascism and communism in Europe, could persuasively claim a high moral purpose as a nation at the end of the twentieth century. After two world wars and a cold war which had undermined the European imperial powers of the previous century, Germany, Britain and Russia, America seemed not only the most capable defender but also the greatest representative of western civilization.

  Nowhere else was the human intellect harnessed more exhaustively for practical use in industry, commerce and politics. Progress was nowhere else more visible than in America where scientists first split the atom, sent man to the moon, won important victories over disease and began to unravel, through the discoveries of DNA, the secret of life itself. And happiness and freedom – the special promises made by the West in the previous two centuries – nowhere seemed easier to pursue than via the endless highways, the cheap gasoline, the big cars and houses, the music and the slick films of America.

  Buddhism in America might have surprised the Buddha only because he hadn’t expected the dharma to survive this long. He thought it impermanent, like all mental events and physical states, with no unchanging essence, and had, in fact, predicted its disappearance. But he would have agreed that his ideas, too, were subject to specific causes and conditions, and so could assume a very different form in America from the one they had in China and Japan. After all, they had first gained resonance partly because they emerged at a mature phase in the civilization of North India. They had then travelled variously and found different forms everywhere else they went.

  The Buddha himself, while travelling across the different societies and cultures of North India, was inclined to modulate his teachings for the sake of his audience. He gave one of the most famous of his discourses to the Kalamans, a people living apparently on the margins of the Indo-Gangetic civilization. The Kalamans were part of an independent republic not unlike the one the Buddha was born in. Like all other republics, they were being drawn into the larger world of kingdoms through conquest, commerce and better communications. Their simple, close-knit society with its clearly defined code of morality was slowly disintegrating. This explains their vulnerability to the new forms of wisdom preached by the sramanas who passed through their territory, and explains why a group of Kalamans approached the Buddha while he was resting in a village during one of his regular tours.

  They told him about the various wandering ascetics and Brahmins who had visited them recently, presenting their views and attacking others. There were many of these itinerant teachers, each with his own form of knowledge. But the Kalamans did not know whom to believe.

  The Buddha, who had described the overheated intellectual atmosphere of his time as the ‘jungle of opinions’, told the Kalamans that they should not rely

  on hearsay, on tradition, on legends, on learning, nor on mere inference or extrapolation or cogitation, nor on consideration and approval of some theory or other, nor because it seems fitting, nor out of respect for some ascetic.

  The Buddha then recommended individual judgement to the Kalamans. But he wasn’t upholding only pure reason as the best means of knowledge. Reason could emerge only out of a moral regimen. The individual had to reflect thoroughly on the consequences for both himself and others of his deeds and the intentions behind them. Here, the Buddha’s favourite notion of kusala, or skilfulness, was crucial; it applied to both skill in meditation and to moral discipline. To be morally skilful was to know that what was good and bad was good and bad for both oneself and for others. Only then could the choices confronting the individual be narrowed down:

  When you know for yourselves that this is unskilful and that skilful, this blameworthy and that blameless, this deprecated by the wise because it conduces to suffering and ill, and that praised because it conduces to well-being and happiness…when you know this for yourselves, Kalamans, you will reject the one and make a practice of the other.

  There was nothing startlingly original about the conclusions the Buddha hoped that the Kalamans would reach through moral reasoning; they were akin to the prescriptions he gave to lay people: do not kill, do not take what is not given, or incite others to their harm. But the Buddha realized that since moral rules could no longer derive their sanction from tradition and custom they had to be inferred from actual individual experience. In the larger world, which increasingly absorbed small groups like the Kalamans and where tradition and custom had lost force, the individual had to rely upon his newly discovered rational faculty. Normally deployed in the pursuit of self-interest, it could also be used to cultivate the mental skills and attitudes necessary to a moral life in society.2

  The self-governing individual with moral self-discipline was what had struck Tocqueville on his tour of New England townships, and it was what he wished would appear in France where he thought religious faith had been too hastily undermined. ‘How is it possible,’ he asked, ‘that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?’ Tocqueville claimed that although the early Americans were unselfconscious followers of Descartes who had exhorted individuals to rely on their own judgement, they had managed to combine the spirits of religion and freedom. He saw religion as a necessary ethical and spiritual influence upon individuals in a mass society devoted to individualism and materialism. Buddhism in modern America often seemed to have, still in an extremely limited way, the same role Tocqueville thought religion had once played in early American civil society.

  The peculiarly modern vision of the Buddha, which presupposed the individual, and his capacity for reason and reflection, had proved extremely portable from the very beginning. Free of dogma, it could travel across political and cultural boundaries, just as the Buddha himself had, and adapt itself to local needs. When in the first centuries after Christ, traders and merchants took the Buddha’s teachings to Central Asia and then to China, they blended with the powerful pre-existing religion of Taoism.

  Monks and scholars began to make the Buddha available to a Chinese elite in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Mahayana Buddhism became the pre-eminent religion of China under the T’ang dynasty in the seventh and eighth centuries, when rich Chinese built Buddhist temples and retreats in extravagant styles in an attempt to gain good karma. From China, a version of the Ch’an lineage went to Japan, where it came to be called Zen. A Japanese teacher called Dogen returned from China in the thirteenth century and revived Zen in Japan. And now, more than a thousand years after their first major efflorescence, the Buddha’s ideas had moved beyond their old Asian frontiers and into the vast areas of the New World where members of another elite, by far the most powerful and wealthy in history, seemed to use it to re-enchant the modern world.

  Even as early as the 1830s, Tocqueville had diagnosed – in almost the Buddhistic sense of trishna – the peculiar restlessness of people living in a democratic and materially abundant society:

  The inhabitant of the United States attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he were assured of not dying, and he rushes so precipitately to grasp those that pass within his reach that one would say he fears at each instant he will cease to live before he has enjoyed them. He grasps them all but without clutching them, and he soon allows them to escape from his hands so as to run after new enjoyments.3

  De Tocqueville spoke, too, of how the pursuit of equality leads people into envy and resentment. It explained to him the ‘disgust with life that sometimes seizes them in the midst of an easy and tranquil existence’. He claimed that in democratic societies people enjoyed life more keenly and in greater numbers. By the same token, ‘hopes and desires are more often disappointed, souls are more aroused and more restive, and cares more burning’. />
  Such restlessness led many middle-class people in the 1960s to experiment with drugs, sexuality and the Eastern religions and philosophies found in such unexpectedly popular books as the I Ching, Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Artists and intellectuals were instinctively drawn to Buddhism, particularly to Zen, which was linked with psychotherapy by the books of D. T. Suzuki, a Japanese scholar, as well as those of Alan Watts, an English writer on Asian religions. Buddhism, which had first arrived in America with the trappings of Protestant rationalism, was now seen as emphasizing spontaneity and creative self-expression and exhorting the rejection of authority and convention.

  As Jack Kerouac wrote in 1954:

  Self be your lantern/self be your guide –

  Thus spake Tathagata

  Warning of radios

  That would come

  Some day

  And make people

  Listen to automatic

  Words of others.4

  Ginsberg and Kerouac had met Suzuki in New York, where the latter lectured for six years in the 1950s at Columbia University before audiences that included the composer John Cage and the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. In 1956, Anchor Books published Suzuki’s book Zen Buddhism, with an introduction by William Barrett, author of books on existentialism, who suggested Zen as a way out of the trap of modern existence in which neither science nor western metaphysics had provided certainty or meaning.

  In 1958, Kerouac published his novel, The Dharma Bums, which spoke of a ‘great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans…all of ’em Zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason’. His novel introduced young Americans to quasi-Buddhist ideas of a spiritual liberation. The same year Time magazine announced in an article on Alan Watts that ‘Zen Buddhism is growing more chic by the minute’.

  Much of the early American interest in Buddhism came through a highly idiosyncratic form of Zen, in which Buddhism could be personalized, embraced without responsibilities, mixed with drugs and psychotherapy, and pursued without self-discipline or institutions. Some of these accretions survived, but as the 1960s ended, Americans came to know many more kinds of Buddhism – brought to America by a fresh wave of immigrants from Thailand, Korea, Japan and Vietnam after the changes in immigration law in 1965.

  The idea of an ‘engaged Buddhism’ took deeper root as Tibetan refugees fleeing the Chinese Communist takeover of Tibet began to arrive in the West in large numbers in the 1960s and 70s. Among these refugees were young masters, such as Allen Ginsberg’s controversial later mentor, Chogyam Trungpa, who went on to have a large western following as teachers of Buddhism. But it was the Dalai Lama who, as the head of the Tibetan diaspora, helped give Buddhism a political edge in the West.

  Buddhism assumed another form in America as the Tibetan presence expanded. On the whole, Buddhism in the 1960s, particularly Zen, still addressed itself to the individual, responding to his need for a purely personal and particular escape from the oppressiveness of the hyper-rational world. The Buddhism that entered mainstream culture through a profusion of sects, and the mass media, in the 1980s and 90s was still orientated towards lay persons. But rebirth and karma ceased to have the central role they had in Asia. For many American converts, Buddhism came, as one influential book put it, ‘without beliefs’ it was an ‘existential, therapeutic, and liberating agnosticism’.5

  In his discourse to the Kalamans, the Buddha envisioned the individual who though forced to live in a confused world whose vagaries he little understood was still able to monitor his own habits and motivation. Americans attempting to design a suitable Buddhism for themselves found this particularly useful. As Gary Snyder wrote in an essay published in 1969, ‘Meditation is going into the mind to see this (Buddhist wisdom) for yourself – over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of all beings.’

  Meditation, particularly Vipasyana, became the central practice of Buddhism in America. The Buddha’s emphasis on meditation may not have been the only reason for this. Meditation was one of the few viable forms of practice still available to modern man. As an ancient form of mystical experience, it offered him release from the nervous, irritable, disciplined and information-heavy consciousness he was required to possess in his everyday world of work and responsibility. At the same time, it did not sunder him from the sources of his livelihood – a lesson learned by the New Age gurus who offered it as a substitute for psychotherapy and by the corporate managers who introduced meditation to their employees.

  Overcoming Nihilism

  BUDDHISM IN AMERICA COULD be seen to meet every local need. It had begun as a rational religion which found few takers in America before being transformed again, during the heady days of the 1960s, through the mysticism of Zen, into a popular substitute for, or accessory to, psychotherapy and drugs.

  Towards the end of the twentieth century, it had begun to appear, tentatively, in the mainstream of American life. It attracted not just white or Asian Americans but also, increasingly, African-Americans and Hispanics. It had been infused with political protest and ethical responsibility. At the same time, it had been commercialized and commodified.

  It often appeared a refined form of self-help, with meditation as its most widely available and practised technique. Few people explored its metaphysics and epistemology, partly because the key Buddhist ideas of karma and reincarnation were fraught subjects for people brought up to believe that all human beings are born, or at least should be considered, equal in all respects.

  Buddhism in America ran up not only against deeply internalized political ideologies but also against many obdurate psychological and emotional habits. On one of his first visits to America, the Dalai Lama was bewildered to hear some students at Harvard confess that they suffered from ‘self-hatred’. The Dalai Lama, who was brought up in a tradition much less keen on individualism, did not know what the word meant and had to consult the more westernized men in his entourage.

  It wasn’t clear what form if any Buddhism would settle into in America, where much of the discontentment with secular modernity was channelled into conservative politics and fundamentalist Christianity. But its quietly paradoxical and growing presence in a culture which exalted individual energy and optimism and action already seemed one of the most interesting events in its two and a half millennia-long history.

  It was Nietzsche who, towards the end of the nineteenth century, had seen most clearly how Buddhism would attract the peoples of the West precisely in the wake of their great success, after science and progress had abolished their belief in a transcendent world, in God and God-enforced values.

  Nietzsche also had the clearest foreboding of the cost of this success: the destruction of old moral and religious certainties, the rise of mass societies along with new forms of control and domination through the state and technology, and the beginning of an ‘era of monstrous wars, upheavals, explosions’.

  He called the end of religion ‘the most terrible news’, and predicted that ‘rather than cope with the unbearable loneliness of their condition, men will seek out their shattered God, and for his sake they will love the very serpents that dwell amid his ruins…’

  Nietzsche claimed to have identified these serpents that gave Europeans the consolations of belief: progress, history, reason, science. He denounced progress as a ‘false idea’ he dismissed Hegel’s vision of history as charlatanry. He doubted if increased theoretical knowledge about the world could heal the ‘wound of existence’. He saw modern science – an article of faith for secularized Europeans – as an aspect of the nihilism that he feared was blighting the world – a view that became commonplace after the First World War, which proved that science was unrestrained by ethics and could be put to the most destructive uses.

  Nietzsche also saw the o
bsession with economic growth, which had greatly increased in his lifetime, as concealing the futility of life and the diminishment of human beings. Utilitarianism to him was one of the empty substitute religions of the nineteenth century:

  What I attack is the economic optimism which behaves as though, with increasing expenditure of all, the welfare of all would also necessarily increase. To me the opposite seems to be the case: the sum total of the expenditure of all amounts to a total loss: man is diminished – indeed one no longer knows what purpose this immense process has served in the first place.1

  For Nietzsche, life and the world had no value in themselves; human beings adorned them with meaning by using such concepts as god, history, progress. Nothing was given as real to us except our ‘world of desires and passions’ and that ‘we can rise or sink to no other reality than the reality of our drives’. As he saw it, men needed to destroy their self-invented values before beginning the strenuous task of embracing their fate in a world which is without evident meaning but which, in the absence of beliefs in god, history, science, etc, ‘might be far more valuable than we used to believe’.

  Contemptuous of all modern faiths, Nietzsche concerned himself with finding out how Europeans could recover this valuable world that he thought two thousand years of Christianity and its secular replacements – the ideals of progress and science – had obscured. But he suspected that their despair and weariness would make Europeans vulnerable to religions and philosophies that preached ‘passive nihilism’ and helped people reach a private reconciliation with the general malaise.

 

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