No
Consolation
Ven.
Anzan Hoshin Roshi on “September 11th”
Introduced
by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho
One
of the questions that frequently comes up for students concerns the vast
suffering experienced by people world wide due to war and other causes.
A student brought this up recently in an email exchange, asking why there
is so much contraction and how to practise with it. I asked Roshi if I
could cut and paste some quotes from his own writing into my reply. Following
that, he very kindly gave his permission for these quotes to be included
in a text to be posted on our Website.
The first quote is copied from the issue of the eMirror that was
sent out immediately following September 11th:
“At
Wednesday morning's formal sitting, Anzan roshi dedicated chanting the
Komyo Shingon to “being mindful of the deaths of so many and this Great
Matter of birth and death.” He has also said, “Birth and death are happening
in each moment. This is always the case. Being mindful of this Great Matter
of Birth and Death is not a matter of telling ourselves stories about
it, but of being sensitive to the sheer vulnerability of ourselves and
of all beings.
“The
events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 are deeply shocking and truly terrible.
But events of greater and lesser scale are always occurring every day.
This is the world as it is. The states of aggression that have led to
this violence occur to people in a greater or lesser scale every day.
This is the world as it is. Passion, aggression, and stupidity are the
three klesas, the three poisons that arise from the contraction of dividing
our lives into self and other.
“Our
practice is to see through the contraction of self-image and release the
gestures of attention that arise from it. We do this through the practice
of whole-bodily mindfulness moment to moment.”
The text that follows is an excerpt from an email exchange between
Roshi and a student on the same subject.
Student:
Since I heard that the US started air strikes on Afghanistan , a deep
feeling of sadness keeps surging in bursts and waves of tears that swell
up in the eyes.
Roshi:
I have already wept for the millions that will die over the coming years
on September 11. I wept again this afternoon. We have done the Komyo Shingon.
Now I am writing to you.
Student:
I don't have the tendency to be an overly emotional person and I don't
have a tendency to indulge in these feelings in order to secure some solid
states of feeling sad. There are just these surge of images of people
scared, hiding, being bombed, kids, women, men, animals wounded, dying,
screaming in distress. There are surges of tears and tightness in the
stomach, in the chest, in the forehead region and behind the eyes. There
is a general tension and kind of anxiousness felt throughout the bodymind.
Although I know that this kind of suffering occurs every day any week
in many more than just one place in the world but this is the first time
that I feel very closely involved in this.
Roshi:
Then you have only really known that this kind of suffering occurs at
all now. It is good that you have. There have been many peace protests,
peace letters and petitions going around and as usual they have hardly
any effect on our democratically elected leaders. This situation is sadly
inevitable. It would not be enough for the West to withdraw from its long
entanglement in affairs in Middle Eastern cultures that they do not understand
and have no sympathy with.
The
terrorists represent the implacable hatred for the enemies of God that
saints and other fanatics feel. And they are saints, they are devoted
to what they feel is good, and right, and true. They are also the extreme
form of the dislocation that people brought up in basically a 15th Century
worldview feel as their economies continue to decline, being outstripped
by almost all other developing nations. Many people of Middle Eastern
nations feel as strong a hatred of the West as do the terrorists but have
not dedicated their lives to acting upon it.
Here
is an absurd example of how bad it really is from a news item I sent out
some time ago:
“Digitally
composed pictures of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) are flying through
Pakistan's mobile phone network via SMS (short message sending) to become
the most sought-after accessory in the country. “Already an icon among
certain Muslim groups, bin Laden has now become a digital icon as well.
“ ‘It was sent to me by a friend,' said Asif Azziz as he showed the grinning
picture of the man blamed for the devastating September 11 bomb attacks
on New York and Washington . ‘It is cool, no?'
“The
picture remains on the display of a mobile phone in a similar way to a
screensaver on a desktop computer. Bin Laden's face can be manipulated
to waggle his eyebrows, move his mouth and, in one particularly graphic
rendition, explode dramatically.”
In
order for this “war” not to happen, everything about how everyone does
every thing must change. And it will not. For a decade or so I have said
that one of the best things that peoples of the West (and the East, although
their histories are not so twined nor bitter) could do is to show an interest
in the Middle East . I meant by this very, very simple things: hear their
music, look at the beautiful traceries of their calligraphies, import
their films. We have never really taken the Middle East seriously. (Except
perhaps to buy a falafel or make hummus and feel virtuous because it wasn't
meat and besides we're trying to lose weight). Any interest the West has
shown at all until very recently was, for example, to translate the Qu'ran
and other texts in order to inform Christian missionaries how to counter
the culture of the people they were converting. Or to make possible a
play in the Great Game played by Britain, Germany, and Russia even through
the First World War. And since then there has been eighty years of manipulation
of economies, states, and peoples (and collusion with such activities
by this or that Middle Eastern state) by Western nations through the lack
of knowledge and disinterest of their own people and short-sightedness
of various officials.
The
peoples of the Middle East are already deeply isolated. Being interested,
being willing to listen to their voices, even in such simple ways, is
still important and will still be important through these months and years.
There will be reprisals, there will be subterfuge, there will be an ongoing
war that seems to have no point at which any one can say that they have
“won”.
And this is still true:
Dhammapada
verses 3 - 5:
“He
abused me, hit me, beat me, robbed me”; for those who brood on this, hostility
isn't stilled.
“He
abused me, hit me, beat me, robbed me”; for those who do not brood on
this, hostility is stilled.
Hostilities
aren't stilled through hostility no matter what. Hostilities are stilled
through non-hostility alone. This is an old truth. Sadly, even peace protests
tend to become angry events unless we let go of our stances. War is such
a sad and awful process, the mass suffering of people is so unbearable
and it is such a common occurrence in this world. It is unbearable. And
it is this world as it is.
Student:
Please shed some light and wisdom for me. I have very rarely felt so torn
and sad.
Roshi:
You might not like it. But it is true. As the Buddha pointed out over
and over again: This is samsara, this is the closed cycle of conditioned
experience. At best it will inevitably kill you and everyone you love.
There is no other possibility. But there are much worse things possible.
People not only harm each other and the world around them but kill. Deliberately.
There is war, pestilence, and famine. This has always been so. As well
as the millions of human lives that will be lost in these events over
the coming months and years, as you have said, there are also the birds
and cattle and goats and horses and dogs and cats and insects that will
be killed by explosions and the famine and other hardships that will follow
devastation. As well as this, it gets worse. People who make money by
buying and selling money move their money here and there and industries
and nations and people lose money because of it; people can no longer
buy rice to make gruel for their babies. This too is very real. There
is also every likelihood that no matter what anyone does now, unless everyone
everywhere changes everything that they do about everything (and most
of us also just vanish magically from the earth without leaving the plagues
and pollution that would result from so many human bodies), all wildlife
on the planet will be extinct within twenty years or so except what can
live in cities and between the ploughed rows of fields such as raccoons,
crows, and so on. This too is very real. And it gets worse because the
list goes on.
None
of this can be remedied, no matter the depths of rage and anguish and
horror and sadness we might feel. You cannot fix it. I cannot fix it.
We can try not to break it further. But in any case, life will go on,
as it does, doing what it does: birth, eating, shitting, death. This is
a very beautiful world, but it is not a safe place. It is not fair. It
is not nice. And yet the nature of all beings and of each being is, and
always has been, and always will be limitless luminosity, beyond birth
and death and all conditions.
Realizing
this freedom, embodying this, and making it available to others in every
way that we can is the only thing worth doing at all. This has nothing
to do with trying to make the world safe or wishing it was nice. It has
to do with the continuous practice of radical questioning and the dynamic
activity of releasing. So I cannot help you with your sadness except to
say: Feel sad, if sadness is present. A broken heart is a reasonable thing
in this world. But do not become the sadness but do not avoid it. Feel
the hands, feel the feet, keep the peripheral vision open. Don't talk
to yourself. Don't vent to others and encourage them to vent. If you are
watching the news on TV, practise. If you are speaking, practise. If you
are listening, practise. And follow the instructions you have been given.
Sit when you can, as often as you can.
From
everything that I know and what all of the Buddhas and Awakened Ancestors
have known, this is the most and in fact the only important or useful
thing you can ever really do: practise the Way. This is the only light
and wisdom I have to offer. It is not consoling but I think you do not
really want merely to be consoled.
 
©
2004 White Wind Zen Community. All rights reserved.
|