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ACTIVISM
The Dharma of Politics: Adventures in Interdependence
“If we serve sentient beings by engaging in political activities with a spiritual orientation, we are actually following the bodhisattva’s way of life.” HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA
I met my lama at a demonstration. It’s hard to imagine a less spiritual place – a busy intersection beneath the drab utilitarian architecture of the Los Angeles Federal Building at rush hour. It was December 10t, 1991- International Human Rights Day. Less than one year later, I found myself half way around the world in the North Indian town of Dharamsala, filming a documentary about human rights abuses in Tibet. I remember my teacher telling me once, “Spirituality and politics aren’t different. People think they are, but they are the same”. He put out his two forefingers and rubbed them together side by side as he spoke.
I had never been interested in politics before I became a Buddhist, but the Tibetan cause seemed to be a special case because it represented something beyond the sphere of conventional political goals. This thought was echoed in something that His Holiness the Dalai Lama once said. “The political struggle for the restoration of Tibetan freedom should not be seen in the same light as we view ordinary politics.” He went on to explain that this is because Tibetan freedom is focused on a culture that “has the potential to bring happiness to all sentient beings”.
In Tibet, taking refuge is a political act. The Guru – the fourth Jewel – embodies the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The Dalai Lama, who China’s leaders have called “a monster with a human face,” is considered the guru of most Tibetans. Even possessing a photo of him can be cause for arrest. And because of the history of protest against its rule, the Communist Chinese government views Tibetan Buddhism itself as a seditious system. But even before the Chinese occupation, Tibetans happily merged Dharma and politics, with a system of government made up largely of monastics, and a domestic policy based on religious principles. The Tibetan freedom struggle is rooted in the Dharma. It’s no coincidence that monks and nuns are usually at the forefront of dissent.
In speaking with hundreds of Tibetan men and women – torture survivors and veterans of protests in Tibet from fifty years ago to the present – I’ve heard stories to both break your heart and mend it. Many of these people told me about doing tonglen for their torturers – mentally taking on their suffering and negative karma and giving them their happiness. A young nun told me how she prayed every night that tomorrow the prison guards would beat her instead of her cellmates. Ani Pachen described how, after being released from a nine-month sentence of solitary confinement, she asked the guards to close the door because she hadn’t finished her retreat. Every day, Mahayanists are taught to pray to take on the suffering of the world. These are people who really know how to live and die for others, I thought.
But in the pain and loss that went along with these experiences, it has been repeatedly brought home to me that the Dharma we now enjoy in the West spilled out of Tibet in rivers of blood and tears. To my confused and painfully self-conscious mind, the Buddha’s teachings seemed a miraculous elixir of sanity and happiness. Maybe it’s just the way I was raised, but I couldn’t imagine taking it without a proper thank you. I joined a local Tibet Support Group, organized campaigns, and stayed up late licking cheap envelopes. Later, I started a radio program about Tibet. I also attended Dharma teachings and tried to practice them as well as I could. It wasn’t always an easy balance, and I found myself thinking that if I could completely devote my life to my practice I would be a better practitioner. Or alternatively, if I just dedicated my life to activism it would make me a better activist. I don’t think that way any more.
Things shifted during March of this year. I had been ramping up my practice for about a month before the protests in Tibet began. Rather than racing through my commitments as if I were being chased by wolves, I slowed down and allowed the meaning some time and space to seep in. The harmony of emptiness and dependent arising, for so long an exquisite idea lying on some distant shore, for the first time seemed to hold the promise of true revolution right under my nose. I spent my days merrily experimenting with ways to actually enact this liberating reality, however imperfectly, rather than simply admiring it and chatting about it with my Dharma friends.
And then March 10 2008 arrived. Tibet erupted, and I was flung off my cushion and back out onto the street. But the shift felt completely natural, as if the work in the world was simply a continuum of the work in the mind. The tension I had sometimes felt between the two seemed to have disappeared. And strange as it may sound, there was a huge sense of joy among my activist friends, even with the emotionally difficult news coming out of Tibet. It felt like tsundue, enthusiastic effort. Simply, joy in doing good. The feeling of camaraderie among those who work for Tibet transcends all boundaries of age, race and culture. This isn’t just a Tibetan cause. It belongs to all of us.
Not everyone responded in the same way, of course…
To read the rest of this article, buy a copy of the August-September issue of Mandala now.
