Based on Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings of engaged Buddhism and the Plum Village tradition, this course offers practices to help ground ourselves amid the negativity and injustice that we face. From a peaceful center, you’ll discover how to skillfully respond to strong emotions that may arise while engaging in social causes.

Valerie Brown is a dharma teacher of Afro-Cuban descent in the Plum Village tradition founded by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh.

The post How to Fight Injustice Without Hating appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I am an older Black Buddhist practitioner. Throughout the three-week trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, I watched and experienced holding tension between the past and desire. During this time, I engaged in a practice I call “shock protection”—noticing that the fact our conditioning may not have prepared us to receive what is to come while trying to remain neutral as a way to lessen the pain of another unjust outcome.  

Buddhism is founded on shock protection if we take into consideration that the Buddha was conditioned to not see human frailty while he remained in his wealthy province preparing to inherit his father’s powerful position. Some of us have been conditioned in this way—we have been beneficiaries of the rule of law, but many others of us have not. Shock protection is another way of practicing equanimity, but an equanimity fueled with decades of disappointment for the hundreds of millions of black people killed in the US over 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, white supremacist-crafted criminal justice systems, and mass incarceration. It would have been foolish of me to cast this history aside while watching the trial, as the defense “retried” the case during closing arguments using the playbook other attorneys have used to defend white police officers who killed unarmed Black men. This playbook has included repeatedly reminding jurors of the deceased’s character imperfections, past criminal behaviors irrelevant to the case at hand, imperviousness to pain, underlying medical conditions and the police’s perceptions of the deceased as innately dangerous due to appearance (including inferences to the deceased being Black), along with a host of other strategies to dehumanize someone who is already dead. To counter this playbook, the prosecution needed to resort to reminding the jurors that George Floyd had parents who brought them into the world, using Floyd’s birth certificate as proof! Keeping this history in mind, I wasn’t angry, or in shock. I was reminded that this is how it has been, and it has worked in the past to convince jurors that they did not see what they saw. I’m very familiar with the cognitive impact of being invited to doubt my beliefs.

As a Buddhist practitioner, I’ve been taught and trained to question my perceptions. This is useful for lessening the suffering that comes from clinging to views that become narrower the more I cling. Some Buddhists refer to this as a wholesome form of doubt. But when the defense in the Chauvin case said in their closing arguments that jurors should doubt the evidence presented by the state about the causes of Floyd’s death, was that the same as training jurors in cultivating Buddha mind? I don’t think so, largely because so much was riding on their doubt—namely, the maintenance of and justification for the deadly use of police force remaining situated in police discretion alone. In Buddhism, our trainings and teachings in doubt are about expanding our awareness. On the other hand, the defense was arguing for the very same thing—broadening the jurors’ awareness.

Those of us who saw the viral videos saw Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for what we initially thought was 8 minutes and 46 seconds, but what turned out to actually be 9 minutes and 29 seconds. What does this mean? Collectively, we were wrong. There was nearly another minute of factual information from the police officers’ vantage points; it means that we missed facts by only having access to the viral videos taken by witnesses. This was part of the defense’s argument. The other part of their argument was that the jury had to make a decision about what a “reasonable police officer” in that particular situation would do. Contrary to what the Minneapolis police officers testified to regarding their practices not being consistent with Chauvin’s actions, the defense argued, with supporting evidence, that police have a multitude of decisions to make and each action of the arrestee is cause for a new set of decisions. The defense also said that the police officer is not required to believe anything the arrestee is saying about how they feel. In defense attorney Eric Nelson’s view, it didn’t matter that Floyd said he was claustrophobic. It didn’t matter that he said the handcuffs hurt (in fact Floyd’s wrists were bleeding), it didn’t matter that Floyd said he couldn’t breathe, it didn’t matter that Floyd was lying face down in the prone position (because he was able to talk), and it didn’t matter that Floyd became unconscious because each of these factors (according to the defense) were changeable. 

Buddhists have also been taught about changeability. We call it impermanence. The impermanence we are taught about has to do with not clinging to things that have no permanence—even ourselves—so that we do not become deluded and then distraught when we must inevitably part from everything we love as we are reminded in the five remembrances (through death and natural processes of loss that are part of any human life). The defense’s “impermanence” argument was different altogether. The defense argued that even when Floyd was not resisting, he could resist again, thereby justifying the length of time Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck. We may not agree with the defense, but we know from our own teachings in doubt and impermanence that if these teachings are not grounded in the ethics of non-harm, compassion, selflessness, and truth, they can be twisted toward supporting injustice. Many Buddhists have supported injustice with indifference by not coming together as one entity, focusing on anti-Black racism. It is a political choice. What is a Buddhist to do now that Chauvin has been found guilty and the three other arresting police officers are scheduled for trial in August?

Though cities across the US, including Minneapolis, prepared for a violent response if Chauvin was acquitted, Buddhists were not prepared to stem the energetic flow of possible violent responses because we haven’t been able to harness the power we have to effectuate structural change. Still, it is not too late to find our collective voice in areas of racial justice. As we contemplate this historic guilty verdict, we can also endeavor to engage police departments across this nation on this question: How can we support you to trust that those you arrest are in pain when they say they are? We say we are students of the Four Noble Truths, and we dedicate the merit to all sentient beings, but do we, as American Buddhists, take the time to understand the suffering that is caused by the school-to-prison pipeline that includes miseducation, policing, the court systems, and mass incarceration, and seek to collectively transform this situation? Do we take that understanding to those who cause suffering, and proclaim the third noble truth—that things can change? What within the noble eightfold path can we apply to the transformation of modern-day lynchings and slavery? Let’s examine what right action means in this context.

Maybe we’ve been too immersed in our doubt and teachings in impermanence to be moved off our proverbial cushions to be the agents of change we chant in our bodhisattva vows. I think we’re more prone to magical thinking than we want to admit. Meditation, learning, and chanting alone will not stem the tide of racism, murder, and imprisonment. Nor will they stem the tide of an ever-increasing militarized police force. I often hear Buddhist practitioners say, “I don’t know what to do.” Do our practices actually serve to disempower us? Do they cloud our perceptions when we say we are expanding our awareness? We need to take a deep look at what we’re learning and practicing, otherwise we unwittingly run the risk of solidifying being agents of white supremacy.

With the new reality that a white police officer can be found guilty of murdering an unarmed Black man, how will we interpret this reality for what our lives mean and can mean? How do predominantly white sanghas make room for Black and Brown people living with an existential situation that hasn’t changed just yet? By practicing deeply with racial and cultural humility. But that’s not all. Even if Chauvin had been acquitted, sanghas need to come together, harness our power, and deploy the positive power of our practices in compassion, directing that power to the policing of our neighbors and fellow citizens. We can begin with just one goal, restoring the humanity of arrestees who cry out that they are in pain, so that police officers will also care for those they are arresting.

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In Buddhist thought, the ultimate cause of death is life itself. All things are impermanent, and Buddhist practice involves extending compassion for the suffering that inevitably arises. The dharma also prohibits killing: to have clear minds and hearts, we must cultivate and encourage life. Yet in the name of public safety; for the sake of law and order; and to protect and enhance private property, Americans often justify the use of force and normalize the taking of human life. 

The trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has put complex and sophisticated cause-of-death arguments on display. The daily push and pull between the prosecution and the defense has made for a wrenching and riveting spectacle. It is tempting to look away and to tell ourselves that we are not part of this picture because we don’t think this way or that way about the situation. But Buddhist justice-making involves doing our best to stay in the present moment, to gaze without flinching, and to connect self and other. No matter which way this trial goes, we aspire to a deeper understanding of the causes of George Floyd’s death and how compassionate action can eventually lead to justice.

Five manners of death

Prone, handcuffed, and face down on the street in broad daylight. Nearly 100 pounds of pressure applied downward against his neck. For 9 minutes and 29 seconds. All of it witnessed first-hand and recorded by a group of bystanders, among them an expert martial artist who knows what unarmed combat techniques can do and a certified emergency medical technician who can tell when someone is medically dead.  Proving that Chauvin killed Floyd in the courtroom requires working with an intricate legal system that ultimately favors and rarely prosecutes the police. 

Medical examiners use five classifications when determining the manner of death, or how a person died: natural, accidental, suicide, homicide, or undetermined. The crux of the trial is on whether Chauvin committed homicide, which is defined as one person killing another person. Floyd did not die naturally of old age, and he did not kill himself. The charges—second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter—do not require the prosecution to prove whether or not Chauvin was trying to kill Floyd; to convict Chauvin, however, a unanimous jury must be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the former officer’s actions, regardless of intent, caused Floyd’s death. In addition, because Chauvin was an on-duty officer, the jurors must agree that the killing was not justified. 

Over and over again, the twelve jurors have been shown what happened that day at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. Collected from police body cameras, street surveillance cameras, and cell phones of concerned bystanders, the footage reveals: Floyd’s car and the drugs found inside it; his entrance into the Cup Foods corner store; his demeanor while inside the store; and his payment with a $20 bill. Suspecting the bill to be fake, a teenage store clerk considers replacing the fake with a real one from his own pocket. Thinking twice, he calls the police. 

Two core strategies have driven Chauvin’s defense. 

One: Encourage a doubtful mind with regard to homicide. Evidence of controlled substances and the COVID-19 virus in Floyd’s bloodstream, as shown in the autopsy report, may help sow the seeds of doubt. Since the decision of guilt or innocence must be agreed upon by all twelve jurors, if even one juror believes that Floyd died by any other manner than direct pressure from Chauvin’s knee, Judge Peter Cahill will call a mistrial. In other words: no murder or manslaughter conviction. 

Two: Argue that the use of force is justifiable under the law. To convince the jury, Chauvin’s team is painting the bystanders as an “angry and violent mob” and Floyd himself as a “large and dangerous” man so difficult to subdue that handcuffs and a single police officer were not sufficient. According to the defense, the situation escalated not because Chauvin used excessive or extreme measures but because as he applied the techniques he had been professionally trained to use, both Floyd and the crowd became increasingly more incensed and uncontrollable. From the defense’s point of view, Floyd died because the police officers themselves were at risk as they attempted to deal with a dangerous Black man and mounting threats of mob violence.

But lethal force should never be allowable on an unarmed person. The single use of a counterfeit bill is a misdemeanor that should have been ticketed, similar to a parking violation. Instead, Floyd was pinned to the ground with four armed officers using war zone killing tactics while desperate bystanders risked their own lives trying to stop them. But it’s too late to turn the clock back. The only way forward is through a justice system based on the motto “presumed innocent until proven guilty” in which even the most depraved criminal gets a fair trial.

Justifiable force as compassion and skillful means

Although the dharma prohibits killing, it is possible in extreme situations to interpret killing as an act of compassion and skillful means. A classic example in the Upayakausalya (“Skill in Means”) Sutra describes when the Buddha was a ship’s captain in a previous life, and out of wisdom and compassion—and with the rare insight of clairvoyance—he makes the difficult choice to kill a marauding pirate in order to save everyone else on the ship. While he violated the precepts, the Buddha’s mindset was clear and pure and he did not take a lower birth. 

Before May 2020, many more people would have probably accepted the story that despite the “bad optics” of Floyd’s murder, Chauvin did what police are entrusted to do: protect the public, viewed analogously to the actions of the Buddha as the ship’s captain. Is this narrative indicative of a pure and clear mindset? What would it take to foster a rare sense of clairvoyance in those who we entrust with the task of “public safety?” 

The fact is that on-duty police officers have shot and killed more than 5,000 people across the United States since 2015. A disproportionate number of those killed have been Black and Brown men. Over the past 15 years, only 35 officers have been convicted of murder or manslaughter. 

Here in the Twin Cities, it’s too soon to tell how things will turn out. The prosecution has offered meticulous evidence and precisely calibrated arguments. However, the defense has planted the seeds of a familiar morality tale in which Black people are natural criminals and police use justifiable violence to protect a mostly white public. What will State v. Chauvin reveal about America’s understanding of racism and social justice? In our next essay, we’ll discuss how we can engage our bodhisattva vows and push for justice through the courts, keeping in mind that the system is predicated on racism and wealth. 

The post Cause of Death: The Theories Behind State v. Chauvin appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

SAM MOWE

Originally an intern at Tricycle who went on to join the magazine’s editorial team as an associate editor, Sam Mowe returned to the organization in 2018 as Associate Publisher. For the several years in between, Sam served as Editor-in-Chief and Marketing and Communications Manager at the Garrison Institute, a retreats and events center in New York’s Hudson River Valley. He now lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and daughter. For this issue, Sam penned a personal reflection on awakening, lineage, and what we pass on from one generation to the next—all in the context of a family adventure to one of Japan’s sacred mountains.

RHONDA MAGEE

A full-time law professor at the University of San Francisco for more than twenty years, Rhonda Magee—mindfulness instructor, author, and social justice advocate—is a leader who wears many hats. As the former board president of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, an active participant in The Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics, and a Fellow at the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life Institute, Magee strives to incorporate mindfulness into higher education, law, and social justice. In this issue’s “Teachings” section, we feature a practice on working with our social biases from Magee’s new book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice.

BARRY BLITT

Best known for more than one hundred New Yorker covers, Barry Blitt is a cartoonist and illustrator based in Connecticut. His work has appeared in numerous other publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Time. On drawing portraits of Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer for Tricycle , Blitt said being able to draw “faces with character for a change” was the project’s greatest appeal.

MARIA DE LA GUARDIA

Maria de la Guardia is a freelance multimedia journalist who, after years in the Middle East and East Africa, is now based in Asia. Driven by the belief that storytelling has the power to create change, she will go just about anywhere for her work, which focuses on women’s rights, refugees, culture, and religion. For this issue, she traveled to Dharamsala, India, to photograph Tenzin Mariko, the first openly transgender person in the Tibetan community.

The post Featured Contributors appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A tangle within, a tangle without,
people are entangled
in a tangle.
Gotama, I ask you this:
who can untangle this tangle?
–Jata Sutta, SN 7.6

Over the last few days, there has been a storm of controversy over a video which seemingly shows teenage boys in red MAGA hats mocking a Native American elder. The incident and its interpretation are dominating news headlines, with the confrontation being called a Rorschach test whose different interpretations reveal the division and conflict in America today. To use the Buddha’s terminology, we are left with “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views (MN 72),” which is hard to untangle.

I am not going to reiterate the layers of details that have surfaced over the last few days. (Vox has a good summary here if you need to get caught up.)  Suffice it to say that the interpretation of the event falls into two camps: One argues that the evidence reveals a group of racist white Trump supporters mocking and disrespecting a Native American elder. The other points to the fact that the boys were responding to a hate group that had mocked them with slurs and insults, and argues that the students’ irreverent behavior was not intended as racist mockery.

How is it that even though we can all see the same videos, the truth is still unclear? Buddhist teachings suggest the reason is that we are looking for the wrong type of truth. The debate around this incident has focused primarily on the question “Who is to blame?” or “Who is the villain of this story?” The Buddha, however, was known to point out that the question we should be asking is “What are the conditions that led to this situation?”

Asking “Who is the villain?” is the prologue to asking who should be punished. But asking “What are the conditions that led to this?” leads us to consider how to change those conditions so that the situation is less likely to happen again.

Reframing things in this way is a type of analysis known as dependent origination. Though this term has far-reaching and often abstract implications in Buddhist thought, it simply means that everything arises on the basis of multiple factors, and if we want to discourage something from happening again we have to address the factors underlying it. If our goal is to judge and punish, we will need to determine guilt, which becomes more difficult as we consider more causes. But if our goal is to gain a better understanding, then the fact that there are many factors is not a problem.

This type of thinking can also prevent a short and ambiguous video clip from spreading across social media and being picked up by mainstream media outlets uncritically. If we were not looking for a villain in this story, would it have become a story at all? It seems unlikely. But as this incident has entered public awareness, it’s worth considering the case through the lens of dependent origination.

One of the main questions surrounding this story is whether Nick Sandmann, the 17-year-old who has become the face of this controversy, was smirking or just holding his ground. Ultimately, we have to admit that we don’t know. And chances are that he might not know, either. Unless we are watching our own minds with mature mindfulness, even our own theories about why we did what we did can be mere reconstructions. In asking this question, we are attempting to definitively judge Sandmann as a good or bad person, place him a particular category, or make him into a symbol of what we are fighting against. But we end up only obscuring the situation even more by trying to make it fit into a pre-existing category.

A more fruitful inquiry would be: Were there factors in play at Covington Catholic High School that led to this incident? What were the choices made by the chaperones and the boys that led to it, and what conditions underlay those choices? Why did the Black Hebrew Israelites hate group antagonize the students, and why did Nathan Phillips, the indigenous elder in the video, feel the need to intervene? What are the institutional mechanisms that perpetuate racism or ignorance? These questions might not tell us how to discipline anyone, but they will bring us much closer to finding some truth.

In addition to asking what conditions led to this situation, we should consider what actions could be taken to create better conditions for the future and thus would be beneficial to undertake now. Maybe those individuals who engaged in racist taunts can enter into a dialogue in the spirit of compassion and wisdom, especially the Black Hebrew Israelites, who as an organized group of adults should be held to higher standards than the teenagers involved. Maybe Phillips could come give a talk to the boys about intercultural understanding, something which is reportedly already in the works. (Sandmann has said that he would like to talk to Phillips, whom he says he “respects.”) Perhaps Americans in general need more effective education about Native Americans, who have been called the least visible minority in the US. Or maybe the staff at Covington Catholic needs to be better trained in how to chaperone groups of teenagers at protest marches.

Ironically, the Buddha’s teaching of dependent origination may align more with the restorative model of justice that is popular with many of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, including the Omaha tribe that Phillips comes from, than with the punitive model perpetuated by the media. The indigenous peoples of Canada, where I live, have much to teach us about how to approach situations of conflict and injury from the perspective of how to heal, not who to denounce. If a conversation between the Covington kids and Phillips does happen in earnest, it could do far more good than public condemnation, which runs the risk of leading people to double down on their beliefs.

In Buddhist thought, dependent origination is closely linked to the teachings on not clinging to views (ditthupadana). The Buddha taught that clinging to views made for suffering and harmed the clarity of the mind. The Buddha also explicitly puts forth dependent origination as a way to avoid extreme views (such as in his discussion of the four noble truths in MN 2).

Thinking this way has two benefits. The first is that it teaches us to identify the holistic set of conditions behind something, not just those we are biased toward identifying or which serve our cause. This avoids a myopic solution to the problem and instead provides a basis for a more nuanced, multi-factorial one.

The second benefit is that we can calm afflictive emotions like anger and hatred that are stirred up when we cast blame. When we see that there are multiple factors in the actions of someone who has caused other people suffering, our feelings of anger and hostility toward that person are softened.

So dependent origination can bring more external clarity and internal calm—or to put it another way, calm and insight, which are the two halves of meditative cultivation in Buddhist practice. Calm and insight are, from a Buddhist perspective, the conditions for both individual and collective freedom.

The Buddha’s teachings would suggest that arguing over who is the villain in the Covington controversy is the wrong approach. The complicated mosaic of interconnected factors may frustrate our desire for blame, but it is only by calmly identifying the various realities involved that we can begin to understand what we can actually do about them.

The post The Red Hat Rorschach Test appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Rebecca Solnit’s new collection of essays in Call Them by Their True Names does not overtly convey a Buddhist perspective. Along with one or two brief references, there is also the book’s title, which evokes the well-known poem by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh “Call Me by My True Names.” For the most part, however, the essays are thoroughly secular in nature—and yet, as I read them, I kept envisioning Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Although sometimes she or he is represented as wholly graceful and as mild as Mother Mary, at other times she appears as many-armed and many-headed, capable of looking in all directions and of summoning the widest possible range of responses to what she sees: from tender mercy to fierce rage.

It is this multifaceted version of the bodhisattva that these essays awakened for me. In their very subject matter, they encompass a range of issues, from recent political campaigns to climate change, gentrification, police shootings, and more. The range is so wide that the book is organized in four sections: “Electoral Catastrophes,” “American Emotions,” “American Edges,” and “Possibilities.” Yet one thread runs through the entire collection: differentials in power, and how these differentials shape human lives.

If you’re lucky enough to live toward the privileged end of the power spectrum, then you have the luxury of not paying much attention to the devastating weight of circumstance that crushes those at the other end. This is a luxury that Solnit, who is white and well-educated, rejects again and again. And for those who are committed to seeing the world around them clearly, it’s a luxury that must be rejected again and again. Why? Because as the essays, taken together, reveal, each situation requires a new head, a new pair of eyes.

And this is what’s most remarkable about these essays. Though their author is clearly motivated by certain unifying principles (the need for economic justice, environmental protection, preservation of diversity within communities), she doesn’t content herself with a one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, she takes us inside each situation and—with her swiveling perspective—helps us see through the eyes of people whose lives may be radically different from our own. For those looking on from the outside, it’s as though each situation comes with its own particular pair of blinkers. In each case she sets about identifying these blinkers as the first and crucial step in the process of dismantling them.

Sometimes this dismantling occurs via a flash of illumination that moves from the surface level of appearances to their deep cause and/or consequence. One such example occurs in “No Way In, No Way Out,” which explores the twinned yet inverse connection between homelessness and mass incarceration. Though the essay provides factual information to argue that both conditions are a direct consequence of certain political and economic decisions, it doesn’t stop at this level of investigative journalism. It goes deeper, articulating for those who have never been without shelter or locked in a cell what it’s like for people who can’t rely on the fundamental distinction between inside and outside. Solnit writes:

This is almost a definition of quality of life, the balance of public and private, the confidence that you have a place in the world—or a place and the world.
In the years since the Reagan Revolution, this basic condition of well-being has become unavailable to millions in the United States: the unhoused and the imprisoned. The former live in an outside without access to the inside that is shelter, home, and stability; the latter live in an inside without access to the outside that is liberty. Both suffer a chronic lack of privacy and agency.

And then, revealing the most tangible implications of such deprivation, Solnit observes that in San Francisco “local laws ban sitting or lying down on sidewalks and sleeping in public parks, as well as public urination or defecation—doing the things you do inside your house, the things biology requires that we all do.” Doubtless most of us would agree with the statement “I feel deeply disturbed by the suffering of the homeless on our city streets.” But how often, in the moment of rounding another urine-soaked corner, do we remember to direct our sense of revulsion to where it properly belongs: the public policies that have forced so many people to eke out a fragile and humiliating existence on the streets?

Similarly, in her essay on climate change, Solnit explores its relation to violence. Not surprisingly, when there is a scarcity of vital resources—as in certain drought-struck regions of Africa— already existing conflicts between neighboring peoples intensify. It’s easy to see the violence of these conflicts: the bombing raids, burned-out villages, rapes, throngs of refugees. But Solnit dives below the level of observable data to a deeper truth: that climate change itself is violence. It’s a form of violence that is impelled and sustained by decisions made by powerful and wealthy people who don’t have to see the bloodstains on their own hands. Though such decisions are usually made out of sight, Solnit’s gaze pierces through closed doors. Again and again, it’s as though having first dismantled our blinkers, Solnit then hands us a pair of 3-D glasses, so that we’re able to see directly through blighted surfaces and tragic circumstances to the deeper chain of cause and effect.

This is where Avalokiteshvara’s merciful head and wrathful head converge. Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem “Call Me by My True Names” is an act of identification with the widest possible range of living beings, from tiny bugs to violent thugs to people cowering in detention. But as her title “Call Them by Their True Names” conveys, Solnit does not shy away from making a distinction between “us” and “them.” As she writes in her foreword, “Naming what politicians and other powerful leaders have done in secret often leads to resignations and shifts in power.” For her these are two inseparable tasks: perceiving the suffering of the powerless and exposing those who are most directly responsible for their suffering. 

Among my favorite essays was “The Loneliness of Donald Trump.” Partly, I confess, there was the sheer pleasure of seeing someone with Solnit’s laser vision and lush precision of language take on the man whose chaotic and aggressive style of leadership leaves many of us dumbfounded. Yet even in her unflinching excoriation of Trump and his politics, her analysis transcends the level of ad hominem attack. At its core, the essay explores a particular mode of being: that of supreme self-centeredness and obliviousness to the needs of others. “It’s like going mad on a desert island,” she writes, “only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is wherever you want it to be.” In this passage, it seemed to me significant that the pronouns shifted from “he” to “you.” Even here, describing a man she regards as “a pustule of ego,” she makes the effort to get inside his state of mind, encouraging each of us to succumb, at least for a moment, to the terrible allure of a lying compass.

In another essay, the particularly powerful “Bird in a Cage: Visiting Jarvis Masters on Death Row,” Solnit uses the metaphor of rowing against the current to imagine what it’s like when, from the start, there are such powerful opposing forces in a man’s life that he can find himself in a dingy jail cell awaiting execution, based on the flimsiest evidence. “We are all rowing past one another, and it behooves us to know how the tides move and who’s being floated along and who’s being dragged down and who might not even be allowed in the water.”

Not all the pieces have the same degree of writerly complexity, the intricate interweaving of factual information with pragmatic analysis, philosophical reflection, and poetic vision. Some read more like editorials, designed to share insight and encouragement with fellow progressives. In this context, I found the essay “Preaching to the Choir” illuminating. The prevailing model, Solnit says, is that “political work should be primarily evangelical, even missionary; . . . that talking to those with whom we agree achieves nothing.” And yet, she continues, “much evidence suggests that political organizations benefit most from motivating those who already agree with them.”

If one unifying theme of this collection is the devastating impact of disparities of power, a second theme is the importance of waking up to our own potential power to influence the course of history. Here, too, Solnit’s ability to see through layers and look in multiple directions comes to the fore, and she reminds us that some forms of protest that once seemed futile or tentative have actually created momentum to bring about significant change at a later point. Evoking the title of her previous book, I can testify that this book gave me “hope in the dark.” Rousing me out of my most recent attack of political despair, it got me off my duff and ready to engage again, remembering that the most important thing is to keep working for the world we long for, even when the odds seem overwhelming. After all, isn’t this the essence of the bodhisattva’s vow that many of us have recited again and again? All beings are numberless, I vow to save them.

The post With Eyes in All Directions appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Several years ago a friend of mine, like me an ex-Buddhist monk, invited me to come hear Michael Stone speak at a yoga studio in Victoria, British Columbia. I knew of Michael, and while I disagreed with the way he interpreted some of the ancient texts of the Buddha, as well as Patanjali, an ancient Indian yogi, I appreciated his values of social and ecological justice, intimate engagement with the world, a psychologically sensitive approach to spirituality, and self-transformation.

I went to the talk and was impressed by him personally—he seemed calm, kind, centered. My friend introduced us afterward. One thing led to another, and before long I was working as his research assistant on a book about the Buddha’s teachings on social justice (it never materialized). During our work together we had repeated disagreements: he had some beliefs about the Buddha I thought were unfounded, and I sometimes wrote extensive critiques of his positions, which he accepted graciously, humbly, and warmly. I became even more impressed with him.

A friendship developed, and when he visited Vancouver we would grab coffee or a meal. I attended a hatha yoga daylong retreat with him and was blown away by his precision as a teacher of physical yoga as well as his black humor and ironic wit, something I hadn’t seen in his public teachings before. Over the years we drifted away from each other—he had his partner, Carina Stone, his children, and an extensive teaching and writing schedule, with books and an expanding presence in the worldwide Buddhist community.

Then, just three weeks after my own mother, who had struggled with alcoholism for decades, suddenly succumbed to a drinking binge after a year of self-control and wonderfully sane behavior, I opened my Facebook feed to see that Michael had been admitted to the hospital after collapsing in downtown Victoria under mysterious circumstances. The similarities to my mother’s story were striking: as she had attempted to withdraw from alcohol again, she had suffered a seizure, then cardiac arrest and brain damage. She never woke up, and after 10  days we removed her from life support. Michael, too, had brain damage. He was to be taken off life support that night. I shared the shocking story with my wife, Miriam, and thought of him throughout the night and into the next morning. But the biggest shock was to come.

Related: Buddhist Teacher Michael Stone’s Family Said He Likely Died from Opioid Overdose

On July 20, Carina released a statement written together with senior students Erin Robinsong and Rose Riccio detailing the “complex and heartbreaking” story of what had led to his death. It turns out that Michael had bipolar disorder, and had struggled for years to control his extreme mental states. He had tried a host of medicines and supports both mainstream and alternative. As Carina wrote, “As versed as Michael was with the silence around mental health issues in our culture, he feared the stigma of his diagnosis. He was on the cusp of revealing publicly how shaped he was by his disorder and how he was doing.”

“In the silencing he hid his desire for relief,” she continues. “This spring his mania began to cycle more rapidly.” Michael’s psychiatrist increased his medication, and he expressed privately a wish for a safe, nonaddictive prescribed natural form of opium. On the day of his collapse, on a routine trip into Victoria from the gulf island where he lived, Michael apparently tried to get a safe, controlled drug to self-medicate from a substance abuse and addictions pharmacy but didn’t qualify. After a haircut, exercise, and some errands, he bought an unknown street drug that contained opioids and Western Canada’s deadly scourge, fentanyl. He didn’t come home.

Michael’s death has left a sudden vacuum. Aside from leaving his partner and children, he had thousands of students on multiple continents and was the lynchpin for more than one dharma community. He was an admired, trusted guide for many, many people.

What are we to make of his tragic struggle and death, particularly in the light of his daily practice for many years of dharma disciplines believed to reduce suffering and stabilize the mind?

Michael is certainly not the first dharma practitioner to struggle with mental illness or the self-destructive use of a substance. Many before him have succumbed to alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, mental disintegration, and even suicide. When this happens, the usual takeaway is a call to clear away the stigma surrounding mental illness. That is important and needs to be said. But I want to focus on a different, if related, lesson: the myth of the heroic self.

Michael Stone, from a Buddhist perspective, was a flow of conditions, a dance of factors and facts that he didn’t choose or control. There was no “essential Michael” who could have resisted his impulses or heroically chosen differently. Dogen taught in the Genjokoan that just as the reflection of the moon does not break the drop of water it is reflected in, enlightenment does not erase the personality of the practitioner. Michael, like all of us, contained not only the whole moon of buddhanature but also the whole rain-filled sky. He was a manifestation of the universe—an expression of all that he met, which includes a world of contradictions, a world of beauty as well as suffering.

This was true for my mom as well, and thankfully I had a chance to tell her that before her death, while I held her in my arms as she trembled from alcohol withdrawal. It is true for all of us. This is one reason that our attempts to understand ourselves and others must always make room for complexity and come with a healthy dose of forgiveness. The Buddhist understanding of no-self always leads to compassion, because it reveals the truth that none of us is in control. None of us is a static person responsible for our lives, failures when we do not heroically master them.

Not that Michael didn’t master his life. In a significant way, he did. Here was someone who suffered from bipolar disorder for years and in the midst of that wrote books, loved people, brought children into the world and cared for them, and shared the riches of hatha yoga and the dharma with thousands of people. Michael eased the suffering of untold numbers of people and inspired spiritual activism throughout his communities.

Threaded through the dark tangle of our misery are strings of light. We are no more responsible for the light than for the dark, but surely it is wise to celebrate the beauty of the light that has manifested in and through us. Let’s remember and celebrate that in Michael, and in ourselves, and let’s put to rest the myth of the heroic self, of the one who finally gets it all right. Let’s let ourselves off the hook and then see what small bodhisattva activity we can get up to today in our crazy and imperfect lives where death waits behind an unknown door.  

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alternative facts

All things exist. All things do not exist. All things both exist and do not exist. All things neither exist nor do not exist.

confirmation hearing

“In the morning, hear the Way; in the evening, die content!”

deplorables

Greed, anger, delusion

huge

“The bodhisattva can pick up this billion-world-galactic universe and throw it beyond universes as numerous as the sands of the Ganges.”

identity politics

Me versus myself

one-state solution

Abiding continuously in awareness

post-truth

Deepening one’s practice after an experience of insight

preexisting condition

Original enlightenment

travel ban

The king’s order that his son, Siddhartha, was not to venture beyond the palace

undocumented

“A special transmission [of dharma] outside the sutras, not depending on words.”

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Pairoj Pichetmetakul doesn’t need a studio. The 33-year-old Thai painter and former monk finds his subjects on the streets of New York City; his muses are the people who sleep on cardboard boxes and in tents, brave the city’s shelters, and depend on spare change to survive.  “My studio is on the street, and I have a very big studio,” Pairoj said.

Pairoj has been painting homeless people on the streets of New York and San Francisco for the past three years. The inspiration for the project, which he calls “The Positivity Scrolls,” started when he saw a homeless man being beaten on a deserted street in San Francisco. He was new to the United States, his English wasn’t strong, and his cell phone had died, so he went home, returning to find the man—unsuccessfully—after a sleepless night.

Ever since then, in an act of penance that has become an artistic exercise, Pairoj gathers his supplies and walks the streets at least once a week. He loads his giant canvas scroll—which weighs more than 100 pounds—into a cart with his art supplies and boards a train to Manhattan from his home in Queens.

Unlike the rest of the city, Pairoj seeks out homeless people, crouching down, introducing himself, showing them photos on his phone of other portraits he’s done, and inviting them to be a part of the series.

Tiffany Thompson agrees to let Pairoj paint her on a cold January day as the sun is setting on a busy corner of 34th Street. After putting out a donation box with a sign that reads “hope for her donations,” Pairoj starts to paint, capturing her furrowed brow and the deep creases in her face with blues and purples.

Thompson says she has been on the streets a few weeks, unable to work because of her breast cancer treatment. She has worked since she was 14, but was recently cleaned out of her savings by one of her children. “If you told me two months ago I’d be here, I’d say, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” Thompson says.

Pairoj paints Thompson for more than an hour. Many people stop to watch. Some give money and leftovers and even help him paint; a few chide him for blocking half the sidewalk during rush hour in one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan. By the end, Thompson is helping Pairoj paint too, adding a flower and a bee as her signature. 

As they hug good-bye, Thompson digs in one of her bags and tosses Pairoj a pair of gloves. “They’re too big for me, and your hands must be freezing.” 

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