Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [153]
I have friends who are Buddhists. They, too, are trained away from their bodies, away from the real, away from the primary, away from the material, away from their experience, away from what they call samsara (literally passing through in Sanskrit: what my dictionary calls “the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma,”280 and what one Zen Buddhist calls “the hellish world of time and space and the shifting shapes which energy assumes, the fluctuating world which is apprehended by the senses and presided over by the judgmental ego,”281 all of which sounds like an awful drag, and really, to be honest, does not sound in the slightest like life as I experience it), away from what they call illusion, and toward what they tellingly and pathetically call “liberation” from this earth. As Richard Hooker puts it on his “World Civilizations” web pages, “If the changing world is but an illusion and we are condemned [sic] to remain in it through birth after birth, what purpose is there in atmansiddhi? The goal became not an eternity in a blissful afterlife, but moksha, or ‘liberation’ from samsara. This quest for liberation is the hallmark of the Upanishads and forms the fundamental doctrine of both Buddhism and Jainism.”282
In short, Buddhism and Christianity both do what all religions of civilization must do, which is to naturalize the oppressiveness of the culture—get people (victims) to believe that their enslavement is not simply cultural but a necessary part of the existence to which they’ve been “condemned” (what does it say about them and the lives they lead that they perceive life not as a beautiful gift from the world, something for them to cherish and be grateful for, but as something to which they’ve been condemned?)—and then to point these people away from their awful (civilized) existence and toward “liberation” in some illusory better place (or even more abstractly, no place at all!). How very convenient for those in power. How very convenient for those who enslave human and nonhuman alike. These are religions for the powerless. These are religions to keep people powerless.
There are many Buddhist stories I love (as there are many Christian stories I love). In one of them, set during Japan’s feudal period, an army sacked a neighboring shogun’s village. Most of the villagers had already fled, but when the general of the attacking troops entered a Zen monastery, he found the master meditating. The general raised his sword. The master did not respond. The general sputtered, “Don’t you realize I’m the man who could cut off your head without blinking an eye?”
The Zen master responded, “Don’t you realize I’m the man who could have my head cut off without blinking an eye?”283
Since hearing this story I’ve admired the Zen master’s equanimity in the face of certain death, and when the time comes I pray I manifest the same serenity. But the more I’ve thought about this story the more I’ve realized that the Buddha not only is always killed on the road, as Tom Robbins wrote (“Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road”284) but, and I’m sort of inverting his language here to emphasize a similar point a different way, the Buddha must be killed on the road, by each and every one of us, each and every day.
It all has to do with something I’ve been hammering on throughout this book: that all morality is dependent on a particular context, as is effective action. What may be appropriate and moral in one circumstance may be inappropriate or immoral in another. This means that while it’s often useful to look to others for models on how we might behave under certain circumstances, it’s foolish