Buddhist history to consider on Inauguration Day
By Kurt Spellmeyer
The word inauguration reaches back to the Roman Republic. There the prophecies of augurs—state
oracles—guided decisions of great consequence. In our modern-day
republic, the word has come to mean nothing more than the swearing in of
another president. But this inauguration
takes us closer to the word’s archaic roots: like the ancient Romans
who watched birds in flight, straining to detect a signal from the gods,
millions of Americans are waiting for the future to reveal its shape.
What should we expect?
This world is burning, the Buddha declared in the Adittapariyaya Sutta: “Bhikkhus, all is burning. . . . Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”
The Buddha himself had seen the “fire” up close. Near the end of his
long career, the Shakya Republic, his native land, fell to the army of a
neighboring state, whose leader then deliberately set out to
exterminate the losers. Nine centuries later, in 403 CE, when the
Chinese pilgrim-monk Faxian arrived at the Shakyas’ capital, he found
only “desolation,” splendid neighborhoods reduced to dusty mounds,
wolves and lions prowling alleyways.
The Buddha’s kinsmen were the victims
of a genocide, yet he persisted in the work he’d taken on since the
time of his enlightenment, instructing anyone who asked for his help.
His message remained the same as well: “Hatred is never appeased by
hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a
law eternal.”
What the Buddha didn’t say, however,
might be as important as what he did. He never predicted the coming of a
day when hatred would disappear from human affairs. Instead, he assumed
the very opposite.
By contrast, we Americans have long
believed existence is perfectible—a straight line from savagery to
utopia. That’s one reason this election came as such a shock to so many
of us. When the Flower Ornament Sutra describes greed, anger, and delusion as “beginningless,” it also implies these will never end. Surely this is true.
Arriving in China in 838, the
Japanese monk Ennin expected to begin practicing with the leading
teachers. Instead, he found a country in advanced decay, unable to
recover from a civil war that had killed, according to some estimates,
two out of every three people. And now, the sangha was under siege,
thousands of monks and nuns defrocked, buildings aflame, statues melted
down or deliberately defaced.
The instigator of all this was
Emperor Wuzong, a fearful, power-hungry narcissist whose attacks on
foreigners and their ideas helped to end China’s brightest period. Urged
on by the Confucian elite and Daoist fanatics, Wuzong ransacked temple
treasuries to pay for costly wars at China’s borders.
And yet, if we flash forward just
half a century, everything looks different. The greatest masters of the
Tang dynasty—Zhaozhou, Dongshan, Yangshan, Linji—lived through the
terror and began to recreate the dharma in ways the world had never
seen. One of Zen’s most vibrant periods followed heartbreaking
destruction.
How was this achievement possible? Why didn’t these great masters fall into despair?
A clue can be found in the anthology of koans or Zen stories known as the Blue Cliff Record. Case 29 relates this exchange between Daizui and a monk:
[The] monk asked Daizui, “When the great kalpa fire arrives and the whole universe will be destroyed, will THIS also be destroyed or not?” Daizui said, “Destroyed!”
Zen teaching holds that when the
kalpa fire comes to incinerate the universe at the end of the present
world age, absolutely everything will be destroyed. Naturally, we’d like
to think that something will persist, but no—the teaching is that
everything must go.
There’s a caveat, however: everything comes back again in a different form. Nothing stays the same, but THIS returns, indestructibly. And THIS
is where we have to plant our feet, no matter how close the fire draws.
When we ask, “What should we do now?” the answer is always, “Start
again.”'
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