I’ve never been quite
sure why I started this blog several years ago, and it I have addressed
personal issues and issues relating to the history and practice of Buddhism in
Zen. I have no idea how long a blog like this will last I have no idea how long
it will float through the Internet some of my posts have been read by thousands
of people and some of my posts have been read by almost no one. I suppose this
has a lot to do with the title of the post and the search engine that picks up
that title. But what I have rarely done
is addressed current events things that are happening right now in our society.
Buddhism is thousands of years old and as scholars do more and more research
they find that its teachings reach far back in time the truth is no one knows
how far back.
Most of
the issues that I address have to do with the practice of Zen as it exists
today in the teachings of the Buddha as they have been passed down to us over
those thousands of years. One of the
really amazing things about Buddhism and the teachings of Buddha is that they
are so fundamental to human nature that they never seem to lose their power
because of their truth and I think it is
that truth that has kept it alive and spread it from one end of the planet to
the other over those thousands of years.
I’ve written on Buddhist websites and I have
taught in Zendo’s I’ve even given lectures in Christian churches on the
teachings of Buddha but I have never seen myself as a priest I have seen myself
more as a scholar and a student of the teachings of Buddha and the history of
Zen and Buddhism. My last couple of blog posts have been very personal and they
were posted in what may be a vain attempt to help other people that have gone
through some of the sufferings that I have. After all if Buddha ever made one
promise about his teachings it was that they would mitigate our sufferings as
we dealt with this life.
The subject of
this post is the Zen mind, a commentary on the mass shooting of nine black
people at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston South
Carolina on the evening of June 17, 2015. And it is
being written shortly after that event. Anyone reading this post today will be
very aware of the facts and the news media are flooding television and radio
newspapers with the facts of this horrible event. But 10 years from now the
world flooded by horrible events the people who are reading this post if it
still exists might not remember that on the evening of June 17 a 21-year-old
white man entered a historic church in Charleston
South Carolina and sat down at a
Bible study group. After about an hour of participating in the group he pulled
a gun out of his pocket and shot nine people to death in cold blood, he left at
least one witness alive so they could relate the twisted reasoning that drove
him to do this. It was a statement of pure irrational racist hate made by a man
whose mind was consumed with hate. At this particular time no one is aware of
any particular harm that any of these people had ever done to him personally or
to anyone he knew. It was an action driven by a mental state that we in the United States
have observed on numerous occasions, simply put , unreasoning racial bigotry,
irrational hate and fear.
Any
historical observer or psychologist or for that matter any person familiar with
human history will recognize this state of mind, I will call it here the “us
versus them” state of mind. This state of mind is characterized by the
individual separating himself out into one group and convincing himself or
herself that a particular other group is intent on his destruction. While we
see this quite often in racism it is certainly not been limited to that over a
period of the last 10,000 years. As I write this in the Middle
East and Africa Islam's ancient schism Sunnis and Shia Muslims
have been slaughtering each other for thousands of years based upon this “us
versus them” irrational separatist hate. Christians and Moslems and Jews have
been slaughtering each other for generations deeply ingrained in this mindset
of “us versus them”. When the Europeans landed on the North American continent
one of the traits of their society was to see the Native Americans as subhuman,
within 20 years 97% of the population of Native Americans on the North American
continent were dead. These Europeans then started importing black slaves to North America and treating them pretty much in the same
manner as subhuman creatures that they
could own, for all intent and purposes
animals that they could own as property and do with as they will. Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Ireland have
killed each other in the same irrational mindset for decades if not for
hundreds of years.
Now I’d
like to step back into the present were journalists civil rights activist
politicians and religious figures all are at this very moment pretending that
they have some kind of cure for what happened in that church. I have read a
blog by a civil rights leader proclaiming that open dialogue is the only
answer. I’ve heard statements by religious figures stating that only God’s love
can save us from this unreasoning hate.
One very well-known pundit named John Stuart on the Daily Show bemoaned
the fact that he was convinced that in the end American society would do
nothing about the conditions or the mindset that led to this tragedy. And
perhaps the truth is we as a species just don’t know how to cure this disease
of the mind. Beneath all the great
compassion being expressed across the world at this senseless act one can sense
a deeper feeling of futility and hopelessness.
Religious leaders from almost every religion have expressed a
willingness to try virtually anything that will eliminate this kind of behavior
in the future, they offer prayer and preaching
and tears. But history has shown us that prayer and preaching and tears have in
the end not stopped this plague upon our species. On this same day Christian preachers claiming to represent the
Prince of Peace stand in their pulpits and demand the arrest and execution of
Gay and homosexual people who want to get married. The Confederate flag the
battle flag of the South that represents a nation that fought and bled to
maintain slavery flies over the capital of the state in which this occurred. It
seems no one who supports this flag is willing to admit that it stands for hate
and that state of mind that led to that
shooting of those nine innocent people. It is an icon around which races haters
gather and at the same time in the year 2015 they still refuse to acknowledge
what it represents.
But in our
country there is a growing number of people have begun to practice an ancient
philosophy and way of life. Some people call Buddhism, some call it a religion other peoples call it a lifestyle
but virtually every type of Buddhist acknowledges the basic teachings of
Buddha. And one of the things that separates Buddhism from all the other world
religions is its requirement to deal with your own mind, using what Buddhists
call skillful means primarily through the practice of meditation the Buddhist
is taught to observe his own mind. This can be called minding mind and it is a
powerful tool when applied sincerely by the individual practicing it.
Buddha was
perhaps one of the most insightful psychologist who ever lived. One of his first revelations was that we are
the victims of our own mind and that we have little control over it as we
stumble through life. Well over 2500 years ago he was teaching people about
their minds and providing them with advice and direction on how to observe
their minds. Buddha wasn’t a God and Buddha wasn’t a Savior he was just a man
but he is what we would call an enlightened a man who had seen things about the
human condition and took up the selfish life of trying to show us what he saw.
One of his
teachings that is accepted by almost every school of Buddhism
is the teaching on the monkey mind. It might even be better described as monkey
minds, minds intoxicated with fear and irrational thoughts, our self awareness filled with what we call
our mind is filled with a chattering screeching and howling of what amounts to
a pride of monkeys rattling around in our head. Buddha observed that it is
almost pointless to try to vanquish these monkeys to make them disappear
because the paradoxes is that the harder we try to resist the more they seem to
persist. And that is perhaps one of the reasons why for thousands of years
different religions have tried to vanquish these monkeys called hate and racism
with very little success and have in fact often ended up under their control.
They can not be killed only tamed.
Buddha
showed his students how to meditate in order to quiet those dozens of monkey
minds hiding in our skulls. He showed us that the pratice of meditation could
calm them down and that with a great deal of practice and observation many of
these monkey minds could be tamed. In fact if one practices meditation and
observes your own mind there comes a time when you can have a talk with these
minds, you may not be able to reason them into changing their nature but
through these conversations you can silence their voices sometimes almost
putting them to sleep or under a kind of self control. The monkey mind of fear cannot be dissolved or
totally vanquished but it can be reasoned with an calmed down and put in its
place.
But perhaps
the hardest mind to reach, the hardest mind to calm down the hardest mind to
unbind its power upon you is that lizard mind. And it’s in that lizard mind
that the key to our future continued existence on this planet resides. The simple truth is Buddha knew that the only
way to actually change the world was to change ourselves. This is not quite as
hard a task as it may seem. If we teach our children to take the time to
meditate a few minutes a day. If we teach ourselves that we are in fact
responsible for ourselves and our future and our children’s future then perhaps
there will be some hope that this lizard mind can be tamed.
But if I have observed anything in the last 60
years it is that no state governments or churches or political leaders have any
real power over this lizard mind that
drives young men to walk into a church and coldly murder nine people simply
because of the color of their skin. If in the end we destroy ourselves I think
it will be because we are simply too stubborn and childish to grow up and take on the responsibility of
our own minds. The tools are there, just
waiting to be picked up.