Practicing Peace in Times of War (2 page)

But those who are oppressing may be so prejudiced and rigid in their minds that there’s very little opportunity for them to grow and learn. So they’re the ones who ultimately suffer the most, because their own hatred and anger and prejudice continue to grow. There is nothing that causes more pain and suffering than to be consumed by bigotry to be consumed by cruelty and anger.

So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.

Recently I was teaching from a Buddhist text called
The Way of the Bodhisattva,
which offers guidance to those who wish to dedicate their lives to alleviating suffering and to bringing benefit to all sentient beings. This was composed in the eighth century in India by a Buddhist master named Shantideva. In it he has an interesting point to make about peace. He says something along the lines of, “If these long-lived, ancient, aggressive patterns of mine that are the wellspring only of unceasing woe, that lead to my own suffering as well as the suffering of others, if these patterns still find their lodging safe within my heart, how can joy and peace in this world ever be found?”

Shantideva is saying that as long as we justify our own hard-heartedness and our own self-righteousness, joy and peace will always elude us. We point our fingers at the wrongdoers, but we ourselves are mirror images; everyone is outraged at everyone else’s wrongness.

And then Shantideva makes another thought-provoking point. He says that the people who we get so upset at, they eventually move away or they die. And likewise, with nations that fight each other, time passes and either the nations no longer exist or they shift alliances and enemies become allies. He reminds us how everything changes with time. But the negative seeds that are left in our mindstream, the impact of our hatred and our prejudice, is very long-lived. Why so? Because as long as we keep strengthening our anger and self-righteousness with our thoughts and our words and our actions, they will never go away. Instead, we become expert at perfecting our habits of hard-heartedness, our own particular brand of rigid heart and closed mind.

So what I’m advocating here is something that requires courage—the courage to have a change of heart. The reason this requires courage is because when we don’t do the habitual thing, hardening our heart and holding tightly to certain views, then we’re left with the underlying uneasiness that we were trying to get away from. Whenever there’s a sense of threat, we harden. And so if we don’t harden, what happens? We’re left with that uneasiness, that feeling of threat. That’s when the real journey of courage begins. This is the real work of the peacemaker, to find the soft spot and the tenderness in that very uneasy place and stay with it. If we can stay with the soft spot and stay with the tender heart, then we are cultivating the seeds of peace.

I think to do this kind of work it’s very helpful to take some kind of personal vow. You make it clear in your own mind what you wish for and then you make a vow. For instance, let’s say you hit your children and it’s habitual, but then you make a vow to yourself: “Whatever happens, I’m not going to hit them.” You seek help and you look everywhere for ways to help you not hit them when that uneasiness arises and everything in you wants to close your heart and mind and go on automatic pilot and do the thing that you always hate yourself for doing. You vow that to the best of your ability—knowing that sometimes there’s going to be backsliding, but nevertheless, to the best of your ability—you vow not to cause harm to yourself or to anybody else, and to actually help yourself and your children.

This kind of vow should be put in words that are meaningful and true to you so they aren’t somebody else’s good thoughts but actually your own highest, heartfelt wish for yourself. Your motivation behind the vow is that you equate it with the ultimate kindness for yourself, not the ultimate punishment or the ultimate shaping up, like “I’m bad, I need to shape up.” No, the basic view is that there’s nothing wrong with you or me or anybody else.

It’s like what the Zen Master Suzuki Roshi once said. He looked out at his students and said, “All of you are perfect just as you are
and
you could use a little improvement.” That’s how it is. You don’t start from the view of “I’m fundamentally messed up and I’m bad and therefore I have to get myself into shape.” Rather the basic situation is good, it’s sound and healthy and noble,
and
there’s work that we need to do because we have ancient habits, which we’ve been strengthening for a long time and it’s going to take a while to unwind them.

Living by a vow is very helpful, and actually it’s Jarvis Masters who caused me to think about this. His Tibetan teacher, Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, went to San Quentin Prison and, through the glass, talking through a telephone, did an empowerment ceremony in which Jarvis took the vow to never cause harm and to the best of his ability to try to help. He has lived by these vows so earnestly and when I read his book sometimes I laugh out loud at the extremes to which he has to go not to cause harm in a place like San Quentin.

To prevent some hostile, disrespectful guards from being killed, for instance, he had to talk some angry inmates into flooding their cells because they needed a way to express their rage. He knew that if he didn’t come up with something, they were planning to retaliate by stabbing the guards. So instead he said, “Listen, the whole thing is, you don’t need to kill them. These guys are wanting to get out of here to go to a party so you just need to ruin their day by making them work late cleaning up the mess we’ll make.” And everyone bought it, so they just flooded the tier.

One of my favorite stories about Jarvis was when he unintentionally helped some other inmates connect with the absolute, vast quality of their own minds. There is a teaching that says that behind all hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there’s always fear. But if you touch fear, behind fear there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is ineffable, ungraspable, and unbiased, that which can support and awaken us at any time. And somehow Jarvis, in this story of trying to avert harm, conveyed this fundamental openness to the other inmates.

One day there was a seagull out on the yard in San Quentin. It had been raining and the seagull was there paddling around in a puddle. One of the inmates picked up something in the yard and was about to throw it at the bird. Jarvis didn’t even think about it—he automatically put out his hand to stop the man. Of course this escalated the man’s aggression and he started yelling. Who the hell did Jarvis think he was? And why did Jarvis care so much about some blankety-blank bird?

Everyone started circling around, just waiting for the fight. The other inmate was screaming at Jarvis, “Why’d you do that?” And out of Jarvis’s mouth came the words,
“I
did that because that bird’s got my wings.”

Everyone got it. It simply stopped their minds, softened their hearts, and then there was silence. Then they all started laughing and joking with him. Even years later, they still tease him, “What did you mean, Jarvis, ‘That bird’s got my wings’?” But at that moment, everyone understood.

If we begin to take responsibility for our own self-righteousness, it leads to empathy. Here’s one more Jarvis story to illustrate this. Many of the prison guards in San Quentin are very kind and helpful, but some of them get mean and unreasonable and take their frustrations out on the prisoners. That day there had been plenty of that happening and tempers were short. An inmate came up to Jarvis in the yard and asked, “Is it your Buddhism that keeps you so calm, Jarvis? How can you stand it when these guards are giving you such shit?”

And Jarvis said, “Oh, it has nothing to do with Buddhism. I just think that if I retaliate, they’ll go home and beat their kids. I don’t want that to happen to any of those little kids.” The other man got it completely. Our empathy and wisdom begin to come forward when we’re not clouded by our rigid views or our closed heart. It’s common sense. “If I retaliate, then they’ll go home and beat their kids, and I don’t want that happening.”

There are many stories, but the basic message I’m trying to convey is that to the degree that each of us is dedicated to wanting there to be peace in the world, then we have to take responsibility when our own hearts and minds harden and close. We have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That’s true spiritual warriorship. That’s the true practice of peace.

The Courage to Wait

I
F THE JUSTIFIED
aggression of men and women just like us is the cause of war, then how do we ordinary folks go about finding peace? When we feel aggression in any of its many forms—resentment, discrimination, jealousy, complaining, and so forth—it’s hard to know what to do. We can apply all the good advice we’ve heard and given to other people. But often all that doesn’t seem to help us.

Traditionally, it’s taught that patience is the antidote to aggression. When I heard this the first time, it immediately caught my interest. I thought, if patience is really the antidote to aggression, maybe I’ll just give it a wholehearted try. In the process I learned about what patience is and about what it isn’t. I would like to share with you what I’ve understood and to encourage you to find out for yourself how patience can dissolve the mean-heartedness that results in us harming one another.

Most importantly I learned about patience and the cessation of suffering—I learned how patience is a way to de-escalate aggression and its accompanying pain. This is to say that when we’re feeling aggressive—and I think this would go for any strong emotion—there’s a seductive quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. We feel restless, agitated, ill at ease. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved. Right then we could change the way we look at this discomfort and practice patience. But what do we usually do? We do exactly what is going to escalate the aggression and the suffering. We strike out, we hit back. Someone insults us and, initially, there is some softness there—if you can practice patience, you can catch it—but usually you don’t even realize there was any softness. You find yourself in the middle of a hot, noisy, pulsating, wanting-to-get-even state of mind. It has a very unforgiving quality to it. With your words or your actions, in order to escape the pain of aggression, you create more aggression and pain.

I recently read a letter from a U.S. soldier in Iraq. He wrote about the so-called enemy fighters, the unknown people who are so filled with pain and hate that they sit in the dark waiting to kill foreign soldiers like him. When they succeed, and his friends’ bodies are blown into unrecognizable pieces, he just wants revenge. He said that each day he and his fellow U.S. soldiers were also becoming men who wait in the darkness hoping to kill another human being. As he put it, “We think that by striking back we’ll release our anger and feel better, but it isn’t working. Our pain gets stronger day by day.” Amid the chaos and horror of war, this soldier has discovered a profound truth: if we want suffering to lessen, the first step is learning that keeping the cycle of aggression going doesn’t help. It doesn’t bring the relief we seek, and it doesn’t bring happiness to anyone else either. We may not be able to change the outer circumstances, but we can always shift our perspective and dissolve the hatred in our minds.

So when you’re like a keg of dynamite just about to go off, patience means just slowing down at that point—just pausing—instead of immediately acting on your usual, habitual response. You refrain from acting, you stop talking to yourself, and then you connect with the soft spot. But at the same time you are completely and totally honest with yourself about what you are feeling. You’re not suppressing anything; patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself. If you wait and don’t fuel the rage with your thoughts, you can be very honest about the fact that you long for revenge; nevertheless you keep interrupting the torturous story line and stay with the underlying vulnerability. That frustration, that uneasiness and vulnerability is nothing solid. And yet it is painful to experience. Still, just wait and be patient with your anguish and with the discomfort of it. This means relaxing with that restless, hot energy—knowing that it’s the only way to find peace for ourselves or the world.

Patience has a quality of honesty and it also has the quality of holding our seat. We don’t automatically react, even though inside we
are
reacting. We let all the words go and are just there with the rawness of our experience.

Fearlessness is another ingredient of patience. If you want to practice patience that leads to the cessation of suffering, to the de-escalation of aggression, it means cultivating a fearlessness that is both compassionate and brave. Because at this point you’re getting to know anger and how it easily breeds violent words and actions, and this can be decidedly unnerving. You can see where your anger will lead before you do anything. You’re not repressing it, you’re just sitting there with the pulsating energy—going cold turkey with the aggression—and you get to know the naked energy of anger and the pain it can cause if you react. You’ve followed the tug so many times, you already know. It feels like an undertow, that desire to say something mean, to seek revenge or slander, that desire to complain, to just somehow spill out that aggression. But you slowly realize that those actions don’t get rid of aggression, they increase it. Instead you’re patient—patient with yourself—and this requires the gentleness and courage of fearlessness.