This is my first Blog in about a month. I am sorry if you are one of my few regular readers. The events in Paris last Friday have been stimulating a lot of thought and emotion. As much as I am stimulated directly by the events in Paris I am equally stimulated by the reactions of others to those events. I am wary that these events may evolve into a much larger tragedy. I see that people around us are reacting out of the depth of their emotions but these emotions are ignorant and delusional. The question for us practicing Buddhists is how do we react to tragedies such as the Paris attacks? Is there a way that a Buddhist should react? We might think that we should react with compassion. But, as a human we might be reacting with fear and anger. I am not going to say that there is any one way a Buddhist should react to this or any other events except to say we should be clear eyed.
What does it mean to be clear eyed? Maybe a better place is to start with the question what does it mean to not be clear eyed. This goes right back to the fundamentals of Buddhism, we suffer because we are ignorant. What are we ignorant of, we are ignorant of? We are ignorant of our true nature and the true nature of the world around us. Because of our ignorance we react to the world through our karma. Our karma is our past, not just the past of our single present life but the past that goes back right to the beginning of life and beyond. One might think of this as reincarnation but I am not talking about reincarnation in the usual understanding of this word. I prefer to think of karma in terms of evolution which I think is a more accurate understanding. Either way we should realize that we humans are filled with emotions and ideas which are the result of our long past. And so we react out of our anger and fear and arrogance and compassion and national identity and religious identity and political identity and on and on, all the accoutrements of our ego This is all karma and it is all ignorant because it is not cleared eye and it is devoid of a true understanding of who we are and the way things work.
We practice meditation so that we can quiet our thoughts and quiet our passions and become more and more clear eyed and thus not react through our karma. And, the clear eyed see the world differently than most of us. They see the world without division as an interdependent whole. But then there is also what in Zen is sometimes called the principle of identity, that is to see the world as an interdependent whole and that this interdependence is our true nature and that in this understanding we identify with the other.
Where is this taking me? We might react with anger to the terrorism in Paris, and that is OK but realize the events in Paris did not happen in a vacuum and that the terrorists are also reacting to circumstances. We might think the terrorists are different from us but they are not. They have come to act out these horrific events through the same delusions and emotions we all fall pray to. And so we all need to sit back and look at the situation from all the the different sides before we act so that we don't compound the tragedy.
What does it mean to be clear eyed? Maybe a better place is to start with the question what does it mean to not be clear eyed. This goes right back to the fundamentals of Buddhism, we suffer because we are ignorant. What are we ignorant of, we are ignorant of? We are ignorant of our true nature and the true nature of the world around us. Because of our ignorance we react to the world through our karma. Our karma is our past, not just the past of our single present life but the past that goes back right to the beginning of life and beyond. One might think of this as reincarnation but I am not talking about reincarnation in the usual understanding of this word. I prefer to think of karma in terms of evolution which I think is a more accurate understanding. Either way we should realize that we humans are filled with emotions and ideas which are the result of our long past. And so we react out of our anger and fear and arrogance and compassion and national identity and religious identity and political identity and on and on, all the accoutrements of our ego This is all karma and it is all ignorant because it is not cleared eye and it is devoid of a true understanding of who we are and the way things work.
We practice meditation so that we can quiet our thoughts and quiet our passions and become more and more clear eyed and thus not react through our karma. And, the clear eyed see the world differently than most of us. They see the world without division as an interdependent whole. But then there is also what in Zen is sometimes called the principle of identity, that is to see the world as an interdependent whole and that this interdependence is our true nature and that in this understanding we identify with the other.
Where is this taking me? We might react with anger to the terrorism in Paris, and that is OK but realize the events in Paris did not happen in a vacuum and that the terrorists are also reacting to circumstances. We might think the terrorists are different from us but they are not. They have come to act out these horrific events through the same delusions and emotions we all fall pray to. And so we all need to sit back and look at the situation from all the the different sides before we act so that we don't compound the tragedy.
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