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The Saffron Revolution Continues in Utica

| arun

The New York Times LENS blog is exploring the lives of U Pyinyar Zawta, U Gawsita and U Agga Nyana, three monks who were involved in Burma’s Saffron Revolution, and who now continue their struggle in New York. You can view the full video here.

In September 2007, thousands of Buddhist monks led the “saffron revolution,” a series of peaceful marches in response to military oppression and a dire economic situation in Myanmar, formerly Burma. Since then, three monks who escaped Myanmar and settled in Utica, N.Y., have continued campaigning across the United States for democracy and human rights for their country with the All Burma Monks’ Alliance.

As soon as I saw this link in my news feed, I had to call them up. (You’re famous!) The New York Times has plans to publish weekly pieces on Burma, they told me, with this one as their first. Stay tuned!

Dragging Buddhism into Political Fights

| arun

A post title on Danny Fisher’s blog caught my attention yesterday: “Buddhist Teacher Shot Dead in Southern Thailand.” What makes this Buddhist news? The teacher’s religion is of note only because she was killed by individuals who are Muslim, who are terrorizing southern Thailand for ethno-nationalist reasons: 

The predominantly ethnic Malay, Muslim region was an independent sultanate known as Patani before it was annexed by Buddhist Thailand in 1909 as part of a treaty with Britain.

More importantly, as Erick D. White has pointed out in comments that Danny Fisher has also posted:

The majority of those who have died in the South are Muslims at the hands of the insurgency. While there are inklings of the conflict taking on a Buddhist vs. Muslim character – and this is a meme that the insurgency would like to spread – it is mostly just a poor, easy hook that the international press employs. The insurgents attack all who are opposed to their project, Muslim or Buddhist. It remains, as far as we can tell, a very local affair (i.e. no international jihad) and primarily an ethno-nationalist insurgency.

The Buddhist vs. Muslim theme also plays well into the hands of Thai nationalists, who would like to tie these insurgents to global terrorist networks (i.e. Al-Qa‘ida). The story becomes “Muslim terrorists vs. peaceful Buddhists” thus legitimizing the government’s policies on the international stage. Thai authorities can accordingly marginalize Southerners’ complaints of discrimination and historical injustice, casting the struggle in terms of Buddhist and Muslim Thais. But the Muslims of Pattani are about as Thai as Tibetans are Chinese. So are we still talking about a Buddhist issue?

Russell Leong’s Phoenix Eyes

| arun

Russell Leong and I met eight years ago precisely because of his Buddhist writing, but I’d never read a word of his until last night, when I flipped through several stories in his book Phoenix Eyes. From the University of Washington Press:

In styles ranging from naturalism to high-camp parody, Leong goes beneath stereotypes of immigrant and American-born Chinese, hustlers and academics, Buddhist priests and street people. Displacement and marginalization – and the search for love and liberation – are persistent themes. Leong’s people are set apart, by sexuality, by war, by AIDS, by family dislocations. From this vantage point on the outskirts of conventional life, they often see clearly the accommodations we make with identity and with desire. A young teen-ager, sold into prostitution to finance her brothers’ education, saves her hair trimmings to burn once a year in a temple ritual, the one part of her body that is under her own control. A documentary film producer, raised in a noisy Hong Kong family, marvels at the popular image of Asian Americans as a silenced minority. Traditional Chinese families struggle to come to terms with gay children and AIDS.

Leong paints the community that I know, an Asian American community that’s too diverse for the mainstream media to handle. His Buddhist Americans are honest in their imperfection. These stories are so personal to me that I almost don’t want to share them.

Military ≠ Buddhism

| arun

In response to an article on two Washington educators who spent four days in San Diego as participants in the Marine Corps Educators Workshop, two commentators suggested a “Buddhist boot camp” would be more suitable for our educators.

Gregor Samsa: Wow. Rather than glorify a program probably intended to amp teachers up to be better recruiters in high schools for the military, to convince kids that their future interests are best served as being cannon fodder for the loathsome and evil Military-Industrial Complex, why don’t we send teachers to buddhist camps and meditation education programs where they can open their closed minds to a world without gun and grenade slinging hate bots, a world without the need to dominate others at the point of a gun. Sorry. Not impressed.

I often get torked by comparisons where the military and Buddhism are presented as two ends of some spectrum. That says a lot about how little people understand of both. Besides, I’d like to see Gregor Samsa go to boot camp and a 12 day meditation retreat, and tell me which one was tougher.

Why Buddhism Doesn’t Need the West

| arun

In the Spring 2009 issue of Tricycle, David Loy’s “Why Buddhism Needs the West” predictably whipped up the Angry Asian Buddhist in me (again). When I got down to reading the piece a second time, his words began to appear less provocative and more simple minded.

From a Buddhist perspective, it would be naive to expect social transformation to work without personal transformation. But the history of Buddhism shows us that the opposite is also true: although Buddha-dharma may focus on promoting individual awakening, it cannot avoid being affected by the social forces that work to keep us asleep and submissive. It is the mercy of the West that those social forces need no longer be mystified as natural and inevitable.

These words didn’t explain anything to me, and I had to track down his article “Religion and the Market,” which presents the same notion in a different framework.

The great sensitivity to social justice in the Semitic religions (for whom sin is a moral failure of will) needs to be supplemented by the emphasis that the Asian enlightenment traditions place upon seeing-through and dispelling delusion (ignorance as a failure to understand). Moreover, I suspect that the former without the latter is doomed to be ineffective in our cynical age.

David Loy is simply a philosopher who wants Buddhism to merge with Western social justice to transform society and the world for the better. But he has no empirical argument to show that this can actually happen. He’s a philosopher doing what philosophers do best: enjoying that armchair. Buddhism doesn’t need the West “to realize its own deepest promise,” rather this is Loy’s way of describing how he’d like to make society fit his worldview. That’s great, but I think I’ll pass.

Unmistaken Message

| arun

A single paragraph in an LA Times review of Unmistaken Child reminded me that, more than a simple arthouse favorite, this film has broader implications in the world of Tibetan sovereignty issues.

For how the situation plays out in human terms in a society that believes in reincarnation – the way Westerners believe in gravity – is fascinating. It is a subject that is poised to have serious political repercussions with the Chinese government and Tibetans in exile likely to clash over the identity of the next reincarnated Dalai Lama.

The documentary tows you through a Tibetan disciple’s search for the rebirth of his revered master. It’s a beautiful and compelling narrative, but it can also be viewed as a legitimization of the selection process. In the longstanding faceoff between the Chinese government and Tibetan religious authorities, this film has the potential to be a marketing/propaganda tool to win over broader public opinion. (Although I wonder if it’s had any effect on all the blogtalk over Lama Tenzin Osel.) I’m not much of a believer, but I wonder what sort of reaction you’d get from launching this film with Chinese subtitles.

Buddhism Meets Cultural Entitlement

| arun

I write quite a bit about Asians and Asian Americans being marginalized by self-styled Westerners, and today Dr. Scott Mitchell takes on the complaints by these Westerners vis-à-vis discrimination by Asian Buddhists.

First and foremost, when having the racism-in-white-American-Buddhism conversation, invariably someone steps in with the quip that so-and-so Asian Buddhist community routinely excludes white people, routinely keeps white people from ascending the spiritual and/or political power ladder, etc., etc. When I hear this argument, I also hear my mom’s voice in the back of my head: “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”

I’m not trying to say that self-styled Western Buddhists have no basis for complaint. The post’s discussion is set in a historical framework that I personally wouldn’t be all too sanguine to sign off on, but importantly he explores the interaction of Buddhist identity and personal/cultural entitlement. I wonder if this back-and-forth all boils down to just that.

More Buddhist Memoirs

| arun

The Christian Science Monitor reviews Turtle Feet: The Making and Unmaking of a Buddhist Monk.

For four years, Grozni studied Tibetan texts at the Institute of Buddhist Dialects, which is part of the Dalai Lama’s headquarters. There, he lived in chastity and squalor, memorizing texts, gazing from afar at the “prettiest Tibetan prostitute in town,” and taking classes with Buddhist masters. For a time, renouncing relations with the opposite sex and general participation in the material world seemed worth it.

But slowly, over time, Grozni began to question his decision. He wondered if “dropping out of school, giving up piano after 15 years of practice, ending friendships, destroying my parents’ hopes, changing my name and identity – to be humiliated by some belligerent old monk who hated Westerners and couldn’t talk to people unless he was debating” was really providing him with the spiritual answers he sought.

I don’t think I’ll be reading this memoir. I feel the emergence of a new school of Buddhist practice: quit your job, spend all your money, write a book, hit the circuit.

When a Western Monk Has Had Enough

| arun

Both here and on Dharma Folk, I’ve repeatedly railed against the marginalization and misrepresentation of Asian (American) Buddhists by self-styled “Western” Buddhists. For instances of Asians acting likewise towards non-Asian Buddhists, I hadn’t read a truly compelling story (sorry Al) until I read Bhante Noah Yuttadhammo’s post today. He describes a very similar loneliness and powerlessness.

Next on the list is the feeling of being much akin to a tropical bird in a gilded cage; all for show, living a life of interminable slavery to a group of well-meaning admirers. The abbot of Wat Thai summed this one up on the last day of the grueling three-month meditation course when, during the final ceremony and in front of a large crowd of people, he congratulated me by saying, “Phra Noah is a monk worthy of compliment. He is not even Thai, he is a foreign monk, and yet he was able to study and practice to the point that he can even speak Thai.” (Polly wanna rice cracker?) I have met nothing but resistance to any thought that I might ever be given a position of authority; the one time I was made head of a failing meditation center in Thailand, it almost cost me several bruises from a broomstick because, as was kindly pointed out to me, “this isn’t your home. Your father wasn’t born here. Why don’t you go back to your father’s home?” That piece of advice turned out to be terribly useful (the broomstick didn’t add much to his credibility, however), and that is what I came to seek out this time around in North America; a place where I can stand on my two feet and walk the Buddha’s path unhindered by monks who think “Thai way or the Highway.”

I certainly feel for Bhante Yuttadhammo (and sort of wonder what he has to say about Wat Metta and Abhayagiri monasteries). The takeaway message here shouldn’t be that each side is just as bad as the other. Rather, I’d like to think that we’re different groups of Buddhists who have yet to accept and respect that we’re all part of a common community. It’s a hard sell.

In the meantime, I hope he’ll find a good place to stay for the Rains Retreat.

Asian Tradition’s Got it Wrong Again

| arun

Tricycle Editors’ Blog today touted an article by David Loy in the current Tricycle issue. I’m happy to see that his view on karma is in many ways not much different from my own. But the author of “Why Buddhism Needs the West” seems to never miss the opportunity to point out how wrong we Asians are, as he does below.

THERE ARE AT LEAST two other major problems with the ways that karma has traditionally been understood. One of them is its unfortunate implications for many Asian Buddhist societies, where a self-defeating split has developed between the sangha and the laity. Although the Pali canon makes it quite clear that laypeople too can attain liberation, the main spiritual responsibility of lay Buddhists, as commonly understood, is not to follow the path themselves but to support the monastics. In this way, lay men and women gain punna, or “merit,” a concept that commodifies karma. By accumulating merit, they hope to attain a favorable rebirth or to gain material reward, which in turn redounds to the material benefit of the monastic community. This approach reduces Buddhism, quite literally, to a form of spiritual materialism.

The other problem is that karma has long been used to rationalize racism, caste, economic oppression, birth handicaps, and so forth. Taken literally, karma justifies both the authority of political elites, who therefore must deserve their wealth and power, and the subordination of those who have neither. It provides the perfect theodicy: if there is an infallible cause-and-effect relationship between one’s actions and one’s fate, there is no need to work toward social justice, because it’s already built into the moral fabric of the universe. In fact, if there is no undeserved suffering, there is really no evil that we need to struggle against. You were born crippled, or to a poor family? Well, who but you is responsible for that?

Time and again, David Loy’s words have so many things wrong with them that I find myself too stunned to say a thing. Am I wrong to read that he’s drawing a line connecting Asian Buddhism, spiritual materialism and social inequity? The saddest truth is that he could have written his entire article without racial and ethnic terms, and it would have had the same rhetorical force. He is implicitly saying this is an issue for Asians (not white folk). He is casting Asian Buddhism in an unfavorable light for no other purpose that to contrast with and promote his own “modern” views on karma. These are views which, by no coincidence, are shared by countless Asian Buddhists too.