Isms
Jim Matson
”Even if your mouth were big enough to swallow heaven and earth, Buddhism could not be expressed in words. Those who speak about Buddhism, for the most part, are only blinding people’s eyes.”
[Zen Master Bankei 17th century]
People, sometimes ask me if I am a Buddhist. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I find it interesting. I find it interesting because I don’t know. I certainly practice zazen. But there is a problem I find in the question. Am I a Buddhist as opposed to what? A Christian? A Moslem? A Jew? A Hindu?
Human beings have the ability to divide things up. The word divide being derived from Latin meaning to see apart. We have the tendency to see things as being separate. Saying I am a Buddhist can be thought of as classifying myself, in setting my self apart from all of those non-Buddhists out there. Then we can play the game further by dividing Mahayana and Theravada – Pure Land and Tibetan. Our ability to divide seems endless.
There is another word; distinction, meaning to mark apart. We can certainly mark things apart without conflict – thermometers, rulers and such. As human beings, making distinctions in this world is necessary. In this sense then OK, I’m a Buddhist. But that doesn’t divide me from a Christian or make me “better” than a Moslem. Marking things as distinct and seeing things as divided are vastly different. One can be useful and helpful in the day to day life we lead; the other can be destructive and leads to conflict and misery.
It was brought out recently that Buddhism is indeed an “ism”. As such it can fall into this dividing game just the same as any other religion. In Zen, being the sect of Buddhism that does not rely on words and letters, this presents a danger. The central tenet of Zen is “non-grasping” - that Truth [the capital “T” stuff / not stuff] cannot be clutched, cannot be captured and boxed up and held up as a series of ideas or beliefs that must be accepted. It isn’t that Truth doesn’t exist – indeed it is ever present, but it is like trying to seize the wind.
The English philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked if he would be willing to die for his beliefs. He replied “No.” They asked him why not and he said “Because I might be wrong.” I really like this answer. Zen does not require faith in anything that does not rest on direct experience. I do not believe in gravity. I don’t have to remember Einstein’s or Newton’s equations to keep my feet on the ground. The beliefs that I do hold are held pretty lightly. I am not willing to die for my thoughts about evolution. I do not find conflict in believing that man evolved from more primitive life forms, I find these thoughts very coherent, but if you want to believe that you were created out of whole cloth 15 minutes ago, I am not going to strike out at you. I may try to have a dialogue with you about it, but I am not threatened or angered by your ideas or by the fact that you are not willing to listen to my thoughts. And I hope to live in a culture that permits us both to hold them.
My sense is that Zen is about being a human being. That once you start dividing Buddhism up as Buddhism for women, or Buddhism for Republicans, or Buddhism for straight folks, or Buddhism for gay folks, Buddhism for cat lovers, Buddhism for dog lovers, you begin to invite conflict and mistrust and exclusivity. Please understand that I am not ignoring the fact human beings sometimes do horrendous things to each other, but the perception is that a great deal of the violence and conflict stems from this dividing activity.
So what is right action in relation to this? If one sees someone acting out of this sense of division, someone seeing the world in terms of categories, of stuff in boxes, of Good and Evil, Black and White, how can one help that person see what they are doing – or rather to get them to call into question what they see as Absolute. Because questioning things that you do not view as open to question is almost impossible or rather unthinkable [having conversations about God, or abortion, or gay marriage are examples]. If you have a great deal of social or political power, you can probably force others to behave the way you want them to, but once that power shifts, they will have their revenge. It seems to call for a different sort of action. This action must involve truly listening to where the other person is coming from, it must involve not coming from the stance that I know and you’re an idiot. It also involves the understanding that the other person may not be willing to listen and that the demand that the other person agree with my thoughts is perhaps a fruitless endeavor. It is probably most important to understand that you do not have hold of Truth either and at the same time you are never separate from it [like gravity].
