Why the world needs Bodhisattva activity

Postwar German philosopher Victor Frankl, observing the rise of the United States as the world’s dominant center of economic and political power, famously proposed the construction of a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast of the country, to complement the Statue of Liberty already standing in New York harbor. He saw a profound danger in the lack of a balanced appraisal of the importance of these two complementary principles.

In Mahayana Buddhism, there are four Bodhisattva Vows:

• Beings are numberless; I vow to save them
• Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to dispel them
• Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them
• The Buddha Way is unsurpassed; I vow to attain it.

A Bodhisattva is one who selflessly takes these vows, and pledges to renounce all pursuit of personal Nirvana until all beings can join him or her in that same state of salvation.

Anthropologist, author, and filmmaker Helena Norberg Hodge, in the documentary, “Learning from Ladakh”, interviews the most eminent Buddhist scholar of that remote Himalayan country. He tells her, “We in Ladakh have a problem with our education system. It has become Westernized, and the problem with the Western educational model is that it is hyperspecialized. All educated persons must be specialists of some kind within it, whether they are elecricians, or plumbers, or civil engineers, or statisticians, and so on. And the problem with all these specialists is that they are highly irresponsible people.”

She illustrates his point with an anecdote she tells about her experiences as a field anthropologist living in remote villages in the country for months at a time. One day, as she was washing her dress in a stream (or what appeared as such to her), a little eight year old girl came up to her. “Madam”, the little girl said gravely, “you cannot wash your dress there!” “Why?” asked Hodge. “Because, we have special places set aside for that activity, but you cannot do it here, as the people downstream have to drink that water!”, indicating an adjacent settlement with her finger.

What possessed a little village girl to accost a grown woman, and a foreigner at that, in such a way? Had she received a certificate in Waste Water Management at the university? No, it was because she was responsible. She took responsibility as a matter of course for everything around her, as she learned from her elders and fellow villagers. To do otherwise was unthinkable in her culture.

We all could certainly profit from such a sense of responsibility. It would help us out of a lot of our present difficulties, even very mundane ones.

Take, for example, one of the most banal activities of urban life in this country, driving a car to work or elsewhere. The vehicle we are driving is the end product of a well nigh miraculous chain of production activities, coordinating the skills and genius of countless people in its design and fabrication. It can attain stupendous speeds and develop unimaginable power outputs, the equivalent of a train of literally hundreds of horses, something inconceivable even a hundred fifty years ago, and formerly unavailable to even the richest and most powerful monarchs of the world.

We ought to be both awed and humbled by the power suddenly placed at our command, and treat it with considerable caution and respect. And yet, it is in the nature of daily activities that we soon become accustomed and take them for granted. So we can hardly blame the common man and woman behind the wheel of their car on their morning commute if they do not experience such feelings or think such thoughts. How could they?

And yet, the power – and danger – remains undiminished. We, however, are all specialists nowadays, but while we do have automotive specialists, traffic engineers, and so on, most of us behind the wheel of a car are no such things. We merely use the products of the ingenuity of those other specialists. Not for us is it to ponder how to engineer a safe vehicle, plan out a safe roadway, or devise vehicle codes and laws. All those activities are already taken care of by the designated specialists in charge of them. It is only for us to passively consume the fruits of their prodigious labors. “Stay in your lane!” we may even be warned, if we dream of trying to do more than that.

What if, however, the person behind the wheel of the car made a point of renewing their Bodhisattva Vows on a regular basis, and was able to bring themselves back, now and then, to awareness of the prodigious power and responsibility entrusted to them during their fleeting periods on the roadway? “Beings are numberless; I vow to save them” suddenly takes on immediate relevance! What’s more, the work of carrying out such a responsibility is now no longer a mere burdensome obligation. It is imbued with heroic flavor, as part of a vast spiritual enterprise. Who can seriously doubt that large numbers of drivers endowed with such attitudes would dramatically decrease the toll of death and injuries on our roadways?

Liberatory politics vs reactionary violence: "what is to be done?"

Nineteenth century financial robber baron Jay Gould was infamous for once saying, “I can hire one half of the working class to hang the other”.

Likewise, economic and social elites have always had a variety of means at their disposal, both legal and extralegal, for subverting and destroying any challenges to their power.

The book, “Whiteout”, by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, is a veritable smorgasbord of stories from the skeleton closets of US military and intelligence circles, detailing their close (and no doubt ongoing) “amicable arrangements” with underworld actors around the world, on affairs of mutual interest and benefit.

This should not surprise us. Naturally, the US is in no way unique in such regards, albeit sometimes more fastidious about maintaining “plausible deniability” about them.

Other countries have had their “Freikorps” (Germany), “Porros” and “Zetas” (Mexico), Corsican Mafia, etc. These kinds of armed gangs have always been “freelancers“ to some extent, acting on their own initiative, but also aligned with existing economic and political elites who share mutual interests. Often their membership comes from a hodgepodge of backgrounds, including cashiered ex-military, petty criminals, adventurers, and assorted misfits in search of a mixture of unconventional economic opportunities and thrill seeking.

During General Suharto’s 1965 coup d'état and ensuing genocidal campaign of annihilation against leftist or perceived leftist elements throughout Indonesia, such unconventional formations played an instrumental role in carrying out the bloodiest carnage against regime opponents or suspected opponents. The film by Joshua Oppenheimer, “The Act of Killing” (2012), goes into bloodchilling detail about the motivations and modus operandi of these groups (including numerous interviews with the perpetrators, who have enjoyed total impunity over the past five decades since the coup in that country). These groups called themselves “Vrijemannen” (Dutch for “Free-men”), and were basically street hoodlums who usually, under normal conditions, had busied themselves with more pedestrian criminal enterprises, like garden variety racketeering (eg, extorting protection money from small shopkeepers) but who, immediately after Suharto’s coup, found themselves anointed as quasi-official irregular forces deployed in an all-out war to “save the country” from the clutches of supposedly nefarious “Communists” plotting its destruction. Most such “Communists” were simply peasants who may have at one point or another joined left-leaning mutual aid organizations to defend themselves from brutal and corrupt landlords, extortionate tax collectors, etc.

In light of this history, we should not be surprised to see similarly inspired and motivated groups in the USA itself. During periods of economic and political upheaval, opportunists are bound to smell such opportunities, even without the explicit initiative of a Jay Gould or a General Suharto to cheerlead them on. Even in the USA, we too soon forget the history of internal “dirty wars” against the Wobblies, for example (eg, the Everett Massacre, or the numerous radical labor organizers who were kidnapped and hauled out on cattlecars into the middle of Arizona’s Sonoran desert to die of exposure). For minority groups, this kind of treatment is nothing new. One need only recall Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s summary execution in his bed by Chicago police, or the numerous cases of “informants” on the official FBI payroll who turned out to be active duty KKK militants.

Yet, as frightening as such events no doubt are, most often the damage done by reactionary agents and opportunists probably pales in comparison to the harm we do ourselves by ascribing to them a power they lack on their own. Most of the harm done by COINTELPRO, for example, was indirect, via setting different individuals and radical groups against each other, spreading paranoia, fomenting rivalries and splits, false accusations, etc. Such things can happen even without the help of a nefarious government or underworld agency, of course. So one should never make their jobs any easier. While common sense and discretion are always welcome, we have to always remember that social movements cannot accomplish anything major by primarily clandestine adventures, or staying “on the downlow”, or “sneaking one past the Man”.

Also, a liberatory social movement cannot “beat the capitalists at their own game”. In his prophetic essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, Oscar Wilde gravely warned of the dangers of a “barracks socialism”, noting what he already considered in 1890s London to be the excessive seriousness of East End radicals who preached the Communist Manifesto as a quasi-religio-military crusade, requiring something akin to monastic austerity for success. A century later, we can review a 20th century littered with the wreckage of just such “barracks socialisms” against which Wilde warned. The Soviet Union was the epitome of this baleful phenomenon. Despite promising beginnings and some truly ambitious and innovative efforts in many fields, particularly education, the Soviet system, ironically, became the world’s leading preserve of industrial Taylorism, the ultimate attempt to “beat the capitalists at their own game”. Such tragically misguided efforts completely discounted the wisdom of humble grassroots radical agitators, often women, who understood that “the workers of the world must have bread, but they must have roses, too”. Or as Emma Goldman famously said, “If I cannot dance, I want no part of your revolution!”

Furthermore, it’s a basic truth that political violence inherently favors reactionary forces. A liberatory social vision calls for democracy, equality, and horizontal structures instead of authoritarian and excessively hierarchical ones. But organized violence and war always require top-down, authoritarian structures to be effective. In the end, this is a fairly decent point in favor of a principled social democracy that stops short of embracing any ideas of all out, literal class war and a decisive “final victory”. As a purely practical matter, milenarian visions, and the actions and conflicts necessary to realize them, usually lead to unpredictable and often unpleasant results and outcomes.