Via Lionsroar: How should Buddhists respond to the gun violence epidemic?

After December, 2015’s mass-shooting in San Bernadino, Zen teacher Lewis Richmond had to wonder: What is an appropriate or effective response as a Buddhist?

 

Since such events evoke strong visceral emotions, including fear, I thought it might be helpful to report some facts about gun violence in America I have gleaned from my recent readings. Some of these are rather counterintuitive. 

For example, in the last 30 years the overall incidence of gun violence has dropped rather dramatically. Yes, it’s true. In fact, serious crime of all types dropped in that period too, perhaps due to the decline in drug related violence. Another fact: since 9/11, there have been about 100 deaths in America from terrorist violence; during that same period, overall deaths from guns (which include many incidents of suicides and domestic violence) exceeds deaths from the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars combined. Every day, every week, large numbers of Americans are killed by guns, a situation that is unique in the developed world.

Since the subject of gun control has been much in the air and in the news, here is another counterintuitive fact: the ratio of gun-owning households has declined significantly in the last 20 years, while the overall number of guns in America (around 300 million now) has gone up markedly in the same period. This means that people who own guns do not own just one; they own 5, 10, 20, 100—or in one recent case, 5000. There are also differences of geography and ethnicity. Per capita household ownership of guns is highest in the South, lowest in the Pacific seaboard and the Northeast.  Whites own substantially more guns per capita than people of color such as Latinos, Asians and African-Americans. Even if strict gun control laws were passed tomorrow, unless we were actually willing to confiscate most guns (as Australia did after a mass shooting there), those 300 million guns would still be out there. This near-infinite supply of firearms is like a dangerous horse who left the barn a long time ago.  Good luck trying to get the horse back in the barn.

I don’t think this means we should just meditate, say the loving-kindness prayer, and so on. I think our response needs to be more muscular and practical than that. When someone is firing randomly into a crowd with a semi-automatic rifle, the loving-kindness prayer is not going to help.

I regret that I cannot offer citations for all these facts; I did not realize I was going to be writing a piece like this at the time I read them. I know my sources were all reputable news sites, and that their data came largely from the FBI database of crime statistics. I report all of this because, among other things, Buddhism is based on the observation of how things actually are.

So I feel our response as Buddhists should also be based on facts rather than emotion. The first and foremost precept of Buddhism is ahimsa—non-violence, non-harm, no unnecessary harm. This is true of all sects and traditions of Buddhism past and present. I feel strongly that as Buddhists we should represent our non-harm precept in any way we can, and be prepared to stand up for it. I don’t think this means we should just meditate, say the loving-kindness prayer, and so on. I think our response needs to be more muscular and practical than that. When someone is firing randomly into a crowd with a semi-automatic rifle, the loving-kindness prayer is not going to help. We should also remember the first noble truth of Buddhism,  that human existence is marked by suffering. This doesn’t just mean that people suffer now and then, it means that because of our human tendency to yield to the three “poisons” of greed, anger, and confusion, human beings are constantly creating wars, injustice, exploitation, cruelty, and many forms of unimaginable suffering. We always have and to some extent always will. Wars are so terrible that we easily arrange to forget them. But they are horrible—always.  

My teacher Suzuki Roshi lived through the worst of World War II in Japan (he was not drafted into the Army and lived out the war in his home temple, probably performing a lot of funerals for young men). When asked about the war, he just said, “My whole country went crazy.”

It may seem as though we are living in a particularly violent historical time, but the psychologist and best-selling author Steven Pinker has researched this point exhaustively, and his conclusion is that the incidence of war, violence, and cruelty has been steadily decreasing over the last 1000 years.  Yes, from his point of view we are actually making progress, snail-like though it may seem. That seems to me to be a useful and little-remarked-upon perspective.

Mak the jump here to read the full article or more

Via Daily Dharma: Self-Care Helps You Help Others

Thinking of yourself first, when your goal is to help others, might seem counterintuitive, but in fact it is the only way it can work. In the end, the notion of putting oneself last is really an inside-out form of self-cherishing. That’s why during pre-flight instructions the flight attendant says to put on your own oxygen mask first.

—Cyndi Lee, “May I Be Happy”

Via Daily Dharma: Mindfully Open Your Heart

With regular mindfulness practice… we witness how we close our hearts to other human beings. Once we see this clearly, we can practice opening our hearts to everyone, including ourselves.

—Ronya Fakhoury Banks, “How Buddhism Helped Me Embrace My Palestinian Heritage”

Via Kick the Ick / FB

"Some words of wisdom for those of us that may be looking at the moment, or even those who have 'given up', 'giving up' doesn't make much sense, the universe is love, go find it rather than hoping it finds you!"

Via Daily Dharma: Permission to Move Forward

May we know we’ve been abandoned by the past, that the past has left us and moved on. So too have previous versions of our bodies left us, so too have previous iterations of the earth and its ecology left us.

—Leora Fridman, “Notes on Abandon”

Laurie Anderson, Tenzin Choegyal, Jesse Paris Smith - "Lotus Born, No Need to Fear"

Laurie Anderson, Tenzin Choegyal, Jesse Paris Smith perform "Lotus Born, No Need to Fear" off 'Songs from the Bardo', available 9/27/2019 and available for pre-order: https://orcd.co/songsfromthebardo

Via LGBTQ Nation: Anti-gay pastor quits Christianity, leaves wife & marches in Pride parade as atonement

Anti-gay pastor quits Christianity, leaves wife & marches in Pride parade as atonement

"I regret standing against marriage equality, for not affirming you and your place in the church. I hope you can forgive me."

Make the jump here to read the original and more

Via ACLU / FB:

Via Via / Words of Wisdom - August 7, 2019 💌

Wisdom and knowledge are two entirely different matters. Knowledge is very finite. The collection of objective knowledge is like a drop in the bucket compared to what it is to be wise.

Being wise is when you get out of the time-space locus that says, ‘I am me who knows.’ And then you merge with that which is around you. You become wisdom.

When you become wisdom, you don’t know you know. You gave that one up. But you are wise. Then whatever response comes out of you is the optimum response. At the same time nothing is happening inside you at all.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Benefits of the Unfamiliar

A sense of defamiliarization is a recurring feature of spiritual life, and it can come to us in many ways—in art, in travel, in practice. However it comes, it offers an opportunity for openness and intimacy, both, if one can allow oneself to fall into them.

—Henry Shukman, “Far from Home”

Via Daily Dharma: The Circle of Attention

What gets our attention in the present is colored by our impulses and innate disposition—our habits of thought developed in the past.

—Sandra Weinberg, “Eating and the Wheel of Life”

Via Daily Dharma: When Transformation Comes

Transformation is not something you do but something that happens when the conditions are right.

—Ken McLeod, “Anger”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - August 4, 2019 💌

The technique of the witness is to merely sit with the fear and be aware of it before it becomes so consuming that there’s no space left. The image I usually use is that of a picture frame and a painting of a gray cloud against a blue sky. But the picture frame is a little too small. So you bend the canvas around to frame it. But in doing so you lost all the blue sky. So you end up with just a framed gray cloud. It fills the entire frame.
So when you say, 'I’m afraid,' or, 'I’m depressed,' if you enlarged the frame so that just a little blue space shows, you would say, ‘ah, a cloud.’ That is what the witness is. The witness is that tiny little blue over in the corner that leads you to say, ‘ah, fear.’

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Expanding Your Net of Compassion

Not favoring any one thing over another allows you to center yourself within a boundless net of interconnection and to expand your circle of caring.

—Wendy Egyoku Nakao Roshi, “Hold to the Center!”

Via tricycle // Anger How to recognize it, work with it, and even find wisdom in it.

Anger is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion.” This is how Charles Duhigg sums up a conversation he had with James Averill, professor emeritus of psychology at UMass, Amherst. Averill also noted that a bit of anger can quickly clear up unspoken resentments, unacknowledged boundary violations, and unaddressed imbalances. On the other hand, in Buddhism anger is often regarded as taboo, an emotional reaction to be avoided as much as possible. The 8th-century monk-scholar Shantideva, in The Way of the Bodhisattva, writes that a single moment of anger destroys the good karma built up over a thousand eons. These are two very different views, but both agree that anger is very powerful.

Is there a way to direct the energy, clarity, and power of anger to spiritual or mystical ends? Is it possible to find the peace and clarity of awareness in the experience of anger? Is it possible to use anger to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and so undermine the tendency to treat ourselves as special? Is it possible to step out of the world of conflict and opposition that anger projects? And is it possible to discover the groundlessness of experience in an emotional reaction as intense and potentially destructive as anger? Although I cannot speak for other Buddhist traditions, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the answer to all these questions is an unambiguous “yes.”

For instance, Jan Willis, professor emeritus at Wesleyan, described an occasion when she was furiously angry while at Lama Yeshe’s center in Nepal. She remembers standing outside the temple fuming at something or other. Lama Yeshe crept up beside her and whispered in her ear, “Buddha mind very angry today.” Her mind stopped. The mind that is angry is the same as the mind of buddha? She had never considered that possibility. It changed everything. 

Anger was no longer a force or demon that took you over. It became, instead, a movement in mind, a mind as clear and empty as the sky.

Make the jump here to read the full article and more

Via Daily Dharma: Detaching from Attachment

Emptiness doesn’t mean that the mind is annihilated. All that’s annihilated is clinging and attachment. What you have to do is to see what emptiness is like as it actually appears and then not latch onto it.

—Upasika Kee Nanayon, “A Glob of Tar”

Via a FB chat: Bahais talk about inclusion, even though they tend to practise varying levels of exclusion...

Back in 1985, Joseph Campbell said:

"Now brotherhood, in most of the myths I know of, is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. For example, the ten commandments say, “Thou shalt not kill.” Then the next chapter says, “Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it.” That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other."

https://www.academia.edu/8513271/The_power_of_myth_-_joseph_campbell

In following up the concept of bounded communities, I discovered a journal article that looks at the extent to which  Bahais are a bounded community, and how that plays out -- given the challenge to boundedness that the Internet poses.

"...there are some aspects that the American Bahá’ís must reject withregard to blogging, as outlined by the Bahá’í Internet Agency. One of the aspects discouraged for practising Bahá’ís is the use of confrontational and negative discussion threads on the Internet. This includes any blog post that is seen to undermine or challenge Bahá’í policies or beliefs, which is to be ignored/deleted. If the blogger who makes negative claims happens to be a practising Bahá’í, he/she can be labelled as a covenant-breaker and shunned by the community."

http://bahai-library.com/campbell_fulton_bahai_internet

Via Daily Dharma: How to Be Your Brightest Self

What is the light? You are the light, with your ability to be conscious and mindful, and to act with wisdom and foresight. To serve the light means to show up—by which I mean, to be present—for yourself, as your best and highest self, and to show up for others in your life as well.

—Dawa Tarchin Phillips, “What to Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next”

Via Daily Dharma: Plant Yourself in Your Surroundings

Taking refuge is not some kind of evasion or escape, but is the planting of our “selves” deeply in the nature of what surrounds us. We lodge ourselves in the deep waves and in the shallow pools, in the crests and depressions of our lives. Sometimes, even wreckage can make a temporary resting place.

—Gary Thorp, “Shelter from the Storm”