Women and Buddhism in China (Not Necessarily at the Same Time)

I’m briefly finishing this ‘ancient China’ series now with a note on what happened to women in all of this and the issue of Buddhism. As it happens, the two issues can be combined somewhat. The collections of early Zhou songs and odes that Confucius is said to have collected mentioned women but even up until after the Three Kingdoms period they seem to then have disappeared from Chinese history (as women per se – they may be parents who die leading to filial grieving but not really women qua women). What happened to them? It appears to be another case of history.

Virtually the next time they appear in primary sources is as pious Buddhist children and nuns.

Buddhism itself is now seen as at least as Chinese as it is Indian (as Christianity is now seen as at least as Western as it is Middle Eastern). There are three proposed and feasible routes for such successful infiltration of Buddhism into China: pretending to be a version of Daoism, compromising with Confucianism and being itself.

Buddhism began in China as a showy religion of merchants. We first hear of it in Central China and find that it early on came to the attention of princes and at least one Emperor. In the 3^rd Century CE, China still had only a few Buddhist scriptures but the ones that had arrived readily entered into the debates within the neo-Daoism of the Three Kingdoms period because they discussed similar issues. Non-being was the message of most of them and the alleged glory of non-being (無 - Wu) was already a central issue in this era in neo-Daoism in North China (along with the mysteriousness of being – You (有)). So in a sense they pretended to be Daoist because technical Buddhist terms had to be translated using words that would be understood in China and only Daoism in the North had the words in anything like the technical sense intended by Buddhism.

Buddhists readily attracted Confucian adherents with the proposal that it ought to be a filial duty to protect one’s parents from going to Buddhist hells and rebirths by becoming Buddhists. Even today filial sons are supposed to drink red wine to symbolically stop the bleeding of their parents in hell. This was more a threat but it could be called coming to terms with Confucianism.

Being itself was what attracted well-educated people in China – it encouraged transcendence in a way that Daoism and Confucianism hadn’t managed to do and transcendence seemed like something fun to aim for that the earlier religions had somehow missed out on. Wu could be strived for and achieved and wasn’t a mere Daoist ideal state of nature.

Finally, what do the last forty odd posts add up to?

Here's what I think the life and legacy of Siddhartha Gautama is all about (bear with me as I summarise forty odd earlier posts):

There were forms of theism in India around 500 BCE that Siddhartha had a critical dialogue with during his lifetime of around 80 years. He was a persuasive and wise fellow and his message as it was understood also resonated and was appreciated by many for political and social reasons as well as for purely religious ones (ultimately even beyond India).

The actual message was really down to: everything is suffering but at least it's not permanent so enjoy each moment without clinging to anything and appreciate your lives and develop your communal connectedness and compassion.

That was expressed as four "noble truths" and a "Buddhist path" that had both moral-teaching and self-learning elements was instituted.

After Siddhartha's death this was all finally written down in various forms and argued about at length for centuries. Buddhism (in the various forms that thus emerged) became and remains the religion of around a billion people (essentially throughout much of East and South East Asia (though no longer India) and its peoples' diasporas).

Some forms have inspired the West recently (significantly, for Western and modern (or postmodern) reasons) via people like Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama.

The problem with all of the above is that this inspiring religion for the West that began to be written about more than two millenia ago may not be what Siddhartha actually taught and this idea is brought out in a fascinating book called "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" written by a former monk. The ex-monk (in both Tibetan and Korean Zen traditions) was born as and now goes again by the name Stephen Batchelor.

I highly recommend the book. It brings out the real story of Siddhartha based on the earliest Pali canon and reveals how this earliest extant evidence shows that he didn't actually believe in either reincarnation or gods (key beliefs of most forms of Buddhism today).

So what then does the extensive development of Buddhism discussed in my posts amount to if it is apparently so clearly contradicted by the clearest of evidence. Simply, it produced a culture valued by almost as many people today as Christianity or Islam so it deserves to be understood. I hope the earlier posts and this post give an understanding of the Buddhism we know today and also how it may develop in the future to become an even more valuable and truly atheist and scientific worldview.

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.

The 14th Dalai Lama

Today I’m focused on the early non-violence philosophies of the latest Dalai Lama.

What was once called Lamaism, was viewed as a separate religion from Buddhism and we now know as Tibetan Buddhism exhibits some of the features of a Buddhist theocracy. Recently the Dalai has been willing to reform this and arrogate to himself a more-or-less mere figurehead role but the development of a form of theocracy in the first place is an interesting pre-modern historical example of a very active and engaged Mahayana Buddhism.

He had already received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 (Aung San Suu Kyi did in 1991). Here she is (from Wikipedia):

The Dalai led around 80,000 Tibetans into a more-or-less forced exile in India when Communist China asserted control of Tibet in the late 1950s. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s later changed the face of religion and culture dramatically in all of China including Tibet, the brutal so-called “Four Olds” campaign being one of the driving anti-religious forces at that time. In addition to the general violence, nearly all of the thousands upon thousands of Tibetan Buddhist Temples were completely destroyed along with many of their invaluable and irreplaceable contents. The Dalai was able to save a lot of this material in India, however.

His philosophy of non-violence was supported by his enunciation of three important principles in the context of his pluralist and ecumenical sensibilities and ideas (similar to the ideas of Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh):

1) Compassion – we all share human values;

2) Equality – of everyone; and

“Universal Responsibility” – Why? Because we are all interdependent. This is an ethical duty in a world of dependent arising.

Thich Nhat Hanh

He was born in 1926 and became a monk at the age of 16. He later received a tertiary education in the West and taught at Columbia before returning to Vietnam. His tradition was a Vietnamese form of Zen that had adopted several Theravada meditation approaches.

During the Vietnam War between a Communist North and a Capitalist Christian South Vietnamese regime (allied with Western forces – note not West Vietnamese but Western in the global sense) he advocated Buddhism as a third way. He was again at Columbia in this period where he met Martin Luther King, Jr. He influenced King’s attitude to the war and King nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. He was also involved in non-violence movements in the US, generally.

He argued in these so-called ‘non-violence’ movements (that were often havens at the time for angry people) that peace was gotten at moment by moment by means of awareness and that angry actions lead to angry results. Therefore, he taught the angry people that they should always seek the place of compassion in their hearts if they truly sought peace. “Being peace” was the consistent somewhat mystical focus of his message and plans for the movements more so than “aiming for peace” without any internal thought for how that can come from an angry place. He talked of his philosophy of “Interbeing”. The basic idea was that the interconnectedness of all of us stressed in the Buddhist idea of dependent arising meant that we had (and were) a joint-being. So he advocated peace and compassion and said “to be is to interbe”. Non-violence naturally followed from interbeing. The link with Gandhi’s (and Buddhism’s) views of wisdom and compassion is also fairly clear.

The question arises whether the self-immolation practiced by several monks taught by Nhat Hanh as a result of the situation in Vietnam during the war is truly non-violent and/or righteous. Books of Buddhist Ethics usually provide extensive discussions of the issue of Buddhism’s approach to suicide in comparable circumstances. The monks were, of course, meditating and seated in the Lotus position. The Buddhist view of such things is not necessarily like the Western view, as I hope has become clear in the course of these posts. This is however at the extreme end of “Engaged Buddhism”.

There is a Mahayana tradition of self-immolation. See, for example, part 23 of the Lotus Sutra and there is also in some traditions a routine burning of parts of the body as an initiation rite for postulants to the vows of the religious life. The rationale for this latter rite at least is to signify the sincerity of the vow. Thich Nhat Hanh suggested that the self-immolation, too, was a sign of the sincerity of the monks who committed to it as a form of non-violent protest against the war and so was (and is) not comparable to either violence to other beings or mere suicide. The motive was regarded as the issue and the motivation here was the purest of compassion for the people of Vietnam. The monks had also first attempted other forms of action to address the issue including meditation and a letter-writing campaign so they further argued that the suicides and their publicisation were last resorts.

Many Buddhists do have a problem with it (as many Muslims and Christians reject suicide bombings and ‘abortion doctor’ killings for their own reasons). Part of the issue is the violence per se and part is that idea rejected so firmly by Gandhi that religion simply does not belong in politics or social policy to such a potentially revolutionary extent, Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama notwithstanding. One may ask: did the ‘tactic’ of self-immolation achieve peace? It certainly produced an effect and that is perhaps more to the point for “Engaged Buddhism” as it was sincerely entered into. The issue may still remain: was that effect positive?

The next issue for Nhat Hanh may have been: is “Engaged Buddhism” what Siddhartha wanted his monks to do? The man himself spent 75 years as an enlightened being speaking mainly with Buddhist religious though, of course, we know he also gave advice to kings in that time. By comparing Buddhism with other religions, we may notice similar changes that may be attributable to modernity but also to the way of Siddhartha.

So any 'changes' may be doctrinally valid as well as modern but there is probably at least an element of modernity? The common theme of ‘modern’ religious observance (since the Christian Reformation at least) is that the rules of observance are to be understood personally rather than merely ‘handed down’ by scholars. So if a scholar says I can’t be a suicide bomber, ‘abortion doctor’ killer or self-immolator, my modern education tells me that I may also have an opinion on how I may observe my religion. I can read the religious texts for myself and in my own way. The Theravada tradition remains the most conservative tradition within Buddhism in this regard though even here this situation is not static. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu is a noted Theravadan activist, for example. Also, within India around the time of partition, quite apart from what Gandhi was doing, Buddhism achieved a large number of new converts as a protest by former Hindus at both the Hindu caste system and Islamic and Christian systems led by a leading ‘untouchable’ politician of the time. Other still earlier examples of modern “Engaged Buddhism” though they didn’t yet have that name were the 19^th Century Japanese lay movement and a 19^th Century movement inspired by a European convert. Not all of these movements are necessarily either right or wrong, however, from a 'true Buddhist' perspective.

So the locus of religious authority is the subject of a fraught debate within Buddhism just as it is in most religions today. Al Qaeda (much of the leadership is Western tertiary-educated) and “Engaged Buddhism” are perhaps the Calvinists and Lutherans of today in their religions dealing with an unprecedentedly educated mass audience. It can further be argued that, in the harsh environment which modernity can provide, it is virtually inevitable that a wide variety of solutions to problems might well urgently and sincerely be preached and earnestly and wholeheartedly be adopted by adherents to a wide variety of the consequent and inevitable sectarian divisions.

Nhat Hanh also met Thomas Merton, the Catholic writer, who apparently took an interest in the war (Merton, though sworn to silence as a Trappist monk, is a well-respected writer on spirituality and may have asked to meet Nhat Hanh - he was given permission from his superiors to meet him). He apparently greatly influenced Merton, who later wrote that monasticism may be a common ground and meeting point between religions. Incidentally, the Dalai Lama also met Merton and later planted a tree near his grave.

Today Thich Nhat Hanh lives in France where he runs an order and community that he founded called “the Order of Interbeing”. He was once expelled by the Communist government of Vietnam but was allowed to return to attend a conference recently to be a keynote speaker and has apparently returned since.

Gandhi

The essence of all of the policies of all of the men I mentioned in the last post is aiming for non-violent solutions for political and social problems but Gandhi seems to have inspired all of the others so I’ll start with him (even if he was Hindu).

He was born and raised in the Indian region of Gujarat in the late 19^th Century where at the time the very non-violent religion Jainism that I mentioned in one of my earliest Buddhism posts was quite common. Jainism most likely influenced the young Gandhi. Incidentally, the founder of Jainism and Siddhartha may have been actual contemporaries and known of each other’s work. Gandhi thought at length about the concept noted as the main special focus of Jainism of doing no harm (expressed in Sanskrit as ahimsa). There is much written about Gandhi (and all of these men) but ahimsa is the central feature of his ideas (along with engagement with problems) that they all took on.

Another feature of his early ideas is that he recognised and regretted (as did others of my list of wise men) that, between Globalisation and the modern era population explosion, the environment was no longer conducive to the retreat into the wilderness of the wise person, which was so often the inspiration for religious regeneration in earlier eras. The wilderness had gone. Buddhism, too, could be mined (and was) in order to find the inspiration for the environmental movement that arose in the last century or so in the West. On a deeper level, he saw the environmental challenge as a destruction of habitat that would inevitably lead to conflict. Retreat was no longer possible. The question for our three thinkers was ‘how to be’ with the conflict.

The conflict Gandhi faced was between ‘Indian’ British Indians and their colonisers, the British Indians among the British Indians and Britain. His way to be was ‘peaceful’ yet ‘struggling’. A Muslim woman in a documentary recently compared this approach to her interpretation of jihad and indeed there was always significant Muslim support for Gandhi’s approach (and even for Gandhi himself). Thich Nhat Hanh’s problem was the colonialist Vietnam War (he led a Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks). The Dalai Lama’s problem was an alleged invasion and suppression of Tibet and its culture and politics by the Chinese pouvoirs-en-place-ont-été. MLK’s bug-bear was the colonisation of the poor of the US by the US ruling class (and globally) and of US ex-slaves. These men (and Aung San Suu Kyi – a Theravada Buddhist) have also contributed their non-violent ahimsa ideals directly to environmentalism.

Gandhi studied law in England and was then fortuitously invited to practise in South Africa in a practice that helped many Indians there. In England he had been especially influenced by learning of Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” and Christianity more generally and the social ideas of people like Tolstoy.

In South Africa he became committed to the welfare of Indians and he tells of having been asked to leave a first class carriage despite holding a valid ticket. He cites what then happened as his first approach to non-violent protest. He at first refused and upon being manhandled out of the carriage attempted to resume it whereupon he was further ‘roughed up’ and later arrested.

In Hindu terms, he was a karma yogi, meaning an active practitioner, and is known to have said something to the effect of “whoever thinks religion has nothing to do with politics knows nothing about religion and nothing about politics”. He repeated the name of the god, Ram, as a general spiritual practice and was reportedly repeating it as he died at the hands of an assassin.

Returning to an India during the First World War that knew him well as a defender of the Indians of South Africa, he set up a “Tolstoy” ashram (commune). He apparently also had some correspondence with Tolstoy. He was immediately asked to join the independence movement and, with the Indian National Congress Party, set to work on organising non-violent civil disobedience. His belief was that a few hundred Brits could hardly resist the civil disobedience of (at that time) a population of 600 million British Indians for very long and that violence could thus easily be avoided. He also tried to establish ecumenism among Indian British Indians (the ‘Indians’ of ‘British India’ - now Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis but probably not so focused on the Burmese or the natives of the Aden Settlement which were also considered British Indians until 1937) especially working on the fraught relationship between Hindus and Muslims. He also worked to end discrimination against the ‘lower’ castes in Hinduism.

Some of his philosophising can be easily seen to compare to Mahayana Buddhism. He argued for non-violence based on the truth (satya) and compassion. The truth is known as a result of turning away from the exterior world in order to gain wisdom but compassion turns the wise person back to resolve the problems of the exterior world. He differs from it to the extent that he saw non-violence as a means inextricably causally linked to truth as an end whereas a Buddhist would tend to not make such a clear causal link between the two.

He saw non-violence not as a mere non-action but as a positive force. He encouraged ‘holding on to truth (Satyagraha)’ meaning in the case of struggles with others actually believing in the truth of the best nature of your ‘opponent’. As a theist, he saw this best nature as deriving in some way from the Ultimate Truth. So his model wasn’t adversarial; it wasn’t about “us” and “them”. Being ‘friends’ with the better nature of an adversary meant that one couldn’t contemplate violence against her or him and also that only these peaceful means could lead to peaceful ends. Here are three rough paraphrases of quotes that illustrate his philosophy:

There are no roads to peace; peace is the only road.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Befriending one who believes you to be an enemy is the quintessence of religion.

After a life of preaching non-violence as a Hindu (though he never regarded Jainist ahimsa as an absolute requirement in conflict) he was emphatically rejected by a member of his own faith when he was assassinated by a Hindu militant in 1947 who apparently thought he was too soft on Muslims.