Category: Zen

Compassion and conflict

This is a longer blog than I would wish. But the subject doesn’t allow of anything else.

I’ve been reading the early pages of Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the brutal skirmishes between British and Vichy France troops in 1941, with Palmyra and Tripoli both figuring in the conflict. It brings home again how key down the centuries Syria has been, as a pivotal territory in the battles between countries and empires. And how, until recently, Aleppo and Palmyra had survived.

The Australian troops who came out of Syria alive then found themselves Japanese POWs after the fall of Singapore, suffering a different and sadistic brutality – the main theme of course of the novel.

On another tack …back in the 1960s Thich Nhat Hanh founded the School of Youth for Social Service in South Vietnam. It ‘drew young people deeply committed to acting in a spirit of compassion’.  They refused to support either side in the Vietnamese conflict and ‘believed that… the true enemies were not people but ideology, hatred and ignorance’. Several were kidnapped and murdered. (Quotes from Mobi Ho’s introduction to Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness.)

The juxtaposition of these two conflicts in not intended to draw out any comparisons. In Vietnam the School was at least able to function, at a sometimes terrible cost. Syria in 1941 and today is a different and terrible kind of all-out conflict.

But compassion – is there any room for compassion in conflict? The battle in Syria is a battle for a way of life, against a perverted ideology. The practice of compassion is such circumstances is a mighty challenge. But compassion, and specifically the saving of life, must come before any desire or insistence on retribution or punishment. If in this case there is scope for working with the Assad regime – not an easy case to argue – and by extension with Iran, and also with Russia, then we should do so.

The PM in the House of Commons today spoke of Assad ‘butchering his own people’. Even so, treating with the Assad regime, and bringing to an end one conflict, may be the only way in which we can focus on IS and Al-Qaeda, with whom we can never treat. I’m sure this is already being discussed behind the scenes: it will take extraordinary diplomacy to achieve.

We should not delay. I read today that an Al-Qaeda-related group has seized a strategic airfield in Syria near Idlib. The momentum is still moving in the wrong direction.

Watching and listening

Saturday evening gave us a beautiful sunset and we sat outside and watched the bands of red build and fall away. Our last, almost our only supper in the garden this summer?

Retreating indoors there was that marvellous final sprint from Mo Farah in the World Cup 5000 metres. Would I could have seen it live. Then, by way of total contrast, listening on the iPlayer to Andras Schiff playing the Goldberg Variations at the BBC Prom. A lightness of touch and an intensity, and a profound hush across the RAH.

A few seconds and a full hour – both will stay with me.

And that sunset wasn’t half bad.

Blackberry breakfast

Walking on a summer’s morning in Bushy Park, by a river (no name!), between the river and a stream, where no-one else goes. I can run, walk slowly, meditate as I walk, stop and linger, hear the slightest of sounds, watch fish swimming upstream, catch burdock burrs on my shorts, break a hemlock stem, pick early blackberries.

I see but don’t read articles on secret places in newspapers. They tell you where they are. Any special place that depends on quiet. Where? They tell you. There is space to fill in newspapers.

I will not divulge the whereabouts of my secret corner.

I’d not had breakfast that morning, and the two blackberries which melted in my mouth at maybe about 9.30 were my first food, and first of the year. And that was the high point of a beautiful day. Silence and sweetness and all things simple focused down to a single moment.

Miracles of life: 2]

I blogged last year on Democracy, under the heading ‘Miracles of life’.

No. 2 is love, love beyond even altruism, love that’s simply an attitude of mind. Read on to see what I mean.

I don’t have in mind as yet a third, though …  what about dance, which took over science and art in my last blog?

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Love beyond altruism, beyond the love of partner, family or friends, though they are all miracles in themselves.

Love that’s simply an attitude of mind. In Buddhism there are the four brahmaviharas – lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. Sympathetic joy – joy in the good fortune of another simply for their sake and not your own. Compassion – experienced as taking the part of another, not as an outsider, offering good works.

If love is woven into your life, then joy is its natural concomitant. Not a short-term ecstatic joy, but one which ties into peace of mind, and which blends into equanimity. Equanimity – it can sound too bland a word, but in the sense of balance and harmony it lies at the core of any fulfilled, contented and compassionate life.

Love in this sense is our ‘Buddha nature’, our original self.

It’s all to easy to make anything you write on love sound like a mini-lecture, or just a little bit, or a whole lot, pompous!

But for 2500 years that link between love, joy and equanimity has been tried and tested, and it works.

There lies the miracle.

A smile at the last

‘Lao Tzu cultivated the way of virtue, and his teachings aimed at self-effacement. He lived in Chou for a long time, but seeing its decline he departed; when he reached the pass, the Keeper there…said to him: “As you are about to leave the world behind, could you write a book for my sake?” As a result Lao Tzu wrote two books, setting out the meaning of the way and virtue in some 5000 characters, and then departed. None knew where he went in the end.’ (My italics.)

(Quoted in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the Tao Te Ching, 1963)

I remember as a schoolboy being intrigued by the Emperor Charles V departing imperial glory and retreating for his last years to a monastery. Why would he do that?

And later, in my 20s, by the music master with a smile of his faith at the end of his years, in Herman Hesse’s The Glass-Bead Game.

I’ve always imagined my last days as being a time of calm when, within and without the world, I would have a smile of my lips.

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We make so much noise in the world but when our time for making noise is over, it’s wise to recognise the fact and seek the silence that lies before, behind and after the noise. At that point we no longer want to know the world, as once we did, and the world loses interest in us. Our power to influence the world long gone, we may smile at the consequence and inconsequence of all we’ve done, and rest gently in the silence.

The rhythm of the dance

Taking my inspiration from an article in the current Tate Gallery magazine, by headteacher Kevin Jones.

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STEM – science technology engineering and maths should be STEAM, adding the arts – I like that.

A child is twirling around while circling a tree. “I’m orbiting,” he calls back when asked. Kevin Jones writes: “In a child science may well be a dance. There is wisdom in the dancing child who doesn’t know that art and science are different – who uses them equally to express his creativity.”

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“Butterflies are very interesting. Here these things are little grubs for a while. And then they go into a little coffin. There they are in a sarcophagus, and then they come out and dance with the angels.” (Roger Tory Peterson)

“Dancers are the messengers of the gods.” (Martha Graham)

It may or may not be the case that everything in the universe dances, but the child, the butterfly and the dancer all pick up on rhythms that lie in the very nature of things. If we’re carried along by the dance, if we are the dance (“how can we know the dancer from the dance,” to quote WB Yeats), then the world just might reveal a few of its secrets. If we walk, and each next step is predictable, then we might as well not move at all.

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Somewhere I read a quote about Royal Academicians being grumpy old men. Really, I thought? Then I remembered the academicians as portrayed in Mike Leigh‘s Mr Turner movie.  I don’t believe in all this grumpiness. But maybe they should take up dancing.

Turner came over in the movie as an old curmudgeon before his time. The dance for Turner lay in the way he handled colour. Could it be we all only have so much dance in us? Could that explain the grumpiness…?

From another mountain top

Looking out from the mountain top – another person’s, not your own. What’s the view like from there?

I call this blog zenpolitics. That has a certain ring to it. But I’m drawing on other Buddhist traditions. Compassion, which is there in all traditions, has a special place within the Mahayana, where it’s wisdom and compassion that chart the path to enlightenment.

Non-self is a key tenet, in all traditions, and it ties in closely with compassion. It’s easy to treat it as theory, separate from daily life, but it has a direct and eye-opening implication. If you downplay the notion of self, then it’s easier to put yourself in the place of others. You’re less obsessed with self, more aware that there are other points of view, as valid as your own. This is not to deny the importance of making  judgements, criticising, campaigning, often being personal. It’s a pretty hostile world out there and you won’t get anywhere by letting it walk all over you.

But don’t overlook the other point of view. What you say or write will be that much more valid if you’ve taken the time to understand the other’s position first.

Screamingly obvious you say. But also, it doesn’t make for good journalism, and party politics isn’t about understanding the other side’s arguments.

I’ll go along with that, but there are too many egregious examples, where it does matter.

In blogs that follow I mention the Middle East, Russia and that appalling false polarity between strivers and scroungers which seems to have infected popular discourse.

 

 

The Alligator’s Mouth

We missed the Lion and the Uniforn bookshop in Richmond (Surrey, that is) when it closed two years ago. Now a new bookshop, The Alligator’s Mouth, is about to open. In the window of the soon-to-open shop is the following:

“Our mission is to reach all readers; the confident, the beginner, and the reading-resistant….

We are here for any child who wants to enter Wonderland, or who still believes in fairies and that animals can talk, or who wants to be a pirate or a magician or fly with the dragons…”

The alligator’s mouth is a risky place, but it opens wide, and there’s a kind of smile there. Or maybe that was Mr Crocodile. And you don’t smile….never ever.

I’ve lived several childhoods, and I still want to enter Wonderland, and fly with dragons. And put my head in that wide-open alligator mouth.

Some days I’ll sit quietly, and instead of meditating I’ll fly with dragons. Maybe they’ll get me to the same place!

Be mindful, whatever you do. And if what you’re doing is being a dragon….

 

January – battening down – maybe not

Zenpolitics it seems has taken January off, almost unwittingly. It’s a month for battening down the hatches, keeping out the winter chill and all that sort of stuff, but unless you’re a determined recluse in acres of snowy countryside with a icy wind blowing so you hardly dare venture out, and ideally there are one or two wolves a-roaming and howling just to drill home the message… unless you’re all that and a bit more you’ll be on the train to work, driving round the M25, all the usual headaches but just a bit more in the dark than at other times of year.

And with almost February comes the snow and the ice, but no wolves yet.

Now the serious stuff. January has been the month of Charlie Hebdo, and much talk, wise and foolish, on the subject of free speech. And inequality in the wider world, with wealth ever more concentrated, has had a local reflection in the impact of the spending cuts on social welfare in the UK.

Two quotes have penetrated through to me in my eyrie above west London –

‘Like most religions, Christianity contains a faintly left-wing, anti-wealth message,’ said Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph. ‘Naively utopian, anti-growth.’ Christianity, Jeremy, was around long before left and right-wing came into common speech, and we trust that the message from the archbishops, wiser men than you, that economic growth alone won’t solve the country’s economic problems, and that the effect of recent spending cuts has been seriously damaging, will resonate with many, including most Telegraph readers. Rarely has a journalist looked so egregiously foolish.

Just to even things out, there’s Polly Toynbee, in the Guardian, claiming that in linking his mother and his faith, and suggesting (playfully) he might punch someone who insulted his mother, the Pope is using, in her words, ‘the wife-beater’s defence’. Quite how she got there only she knows, but it’s cheap and anyone who listened to the Pope’s actual remarks will know that it entirely misses the subtlety of the point he was conveying. To misrepresent wilfully (and I assume it is wilfully) is … let’s just say poor journalism.

Faith let it be remembered is deeply personal to countless millions and they will take insults against their faith seriously. If discrimination, bigotry or cruelty attaches to a faith it should be criticised, I’d almost say hammered, but for the attachments it carries, not for the faith that lies at its heart.

Free speech is priceless and an absolute, but so too are compassion and understanding. And of their nature, or rather human nature (everyone having their own point of view, as many shades of opinion as there are individuals on the planet),  they will conflict, and we all must strike a balance as best we can.

But, please, avoid barmy remarks, and cheap swipes. We can all do better than that.

Ming exhibition – a few final quotes

More captions/quotes from the BM Ming exhibition:

‘When I grow sober from the wine and the tea and the incense are finished I bid farewell to the setting sun and welcome the clear moon.’ Alcohol sets the mind up for contemplation, a world I assume of pure wine and no hangovers.

Birds depicted in paintings or scrolls: they were it seems ‘symbols of the complex social interactions at court’. They might flutter but ultimately all had their own perches in the bureaucracy.

Guanshiyin, bodhisattva of compassion, appears as a statue, and we’re told the name means ‘observing the sounds of the earth’. Yes, listening is a pure art – but it seems it more literally means ‘sounds of lamentation’, the cruel and not the gentle sounds of earth.

Warrior Yang Hong is quoted as displaying ‘intestinal fortitude of iron and stone’. As will I from henceforth in adversity.

A red lacquer dish has ‘The Imperial Household Department of Sweetmeats and Delicacies’ on its base – something out of fairyland but scratch below the sugar coating it was a pretty brutal place to be.

And there’s more… visit while you can!