Comparing the Three Men (Revision Again)

All of the men agree on the following ideas that resonate in Buddhism:

1) Non-violence begins with self-awareness of the potential for and truth of the violence within. So self-discipline leads to self-acceptance which leads to other-acceptance. This attitude does not require any overt practice of a religion;

2) More simplicity and less clinging (including to ideas) are important. The first precept of the Order for Interbeing rules devised by Nhat Hanh calls such clinging idolatry. In this connection the Buddhist story of the raft is relevant. In it Buddhism is a raft in a river (samsara). We don’t need the raft where we’re going and may not even require it as we approach shallower waters so we needn’t always cling to it. The Jainist idea of anekavada also means roughly the same thing – no doctrine is final. There is also an old Indian story of the three blind men feeling the elephant (in it we are the blind men and the elephant is something like existence). The man who felt the tail might describe it as soft (his doctrine concerning the universe) but the man feeling the toes might call it hard. The question raised is which is the correct view? Both and neither is the answer. As blind men (and women) none of us are in a position to hold anything with certainly about our elephant as we grope around in existence;

3) Dismantling oppositionism is necessary. You are me and I am you. The idea of “other” is a distortion based on the false ideas of “self” and thus “self-interest”. Compare this with the ideas of evil propounded by both the Bush-Cheney administration and Usama bin Laden. Their ideas of otherness suggest a need to correct or be rid of the other as a problem solution. The Americans tried this in Afghanistan. The evil USSR ‘took charge’ there so the US funded Taliban-like groups to get rid of the Soviet army. Now the ‘evil’ Taliban are there and as far as the Taliban are concerned so are the evil Americans (and Australians). Ridding oneself of ‘evil others’ is patently not generally a permanent solution;

4) Genuine peace is more than the mere absence of violent conflict; and

5) There are karmic consequences (in the non-technical sense of causes and effects). For example 9/11 was arguably a cause of the War in Afghanistan but it was certainly also an effect and specifically probably of global Western colonialism, arrogance and violence among other things. Thus nobody is necessarily blameless in this. We all bear some responsibility for what happens to us. Karma had spoken.

These men are more than hopeless idealists, then (as they may be portrayed). They are accurately taking the social and political pulses of the world, diagnosing the condition and prescribing a cure.