While I’ve posted an entry once per week since beginning this blog over a year ago, I am taking some time away for Beltane. I’ll return next week.
Month: April 2022
The Art of War arose from the Daoist reflection on warfare, strategy, and tactics. Daoist analytical methods emphasize the power of holistic frameworks. Placement of soldiers cannot influence the outcome if the soldiers starve due to broken supply lines. Sun Tzu and the classical commentators who expanded The Art of War brought together logistics, psychology, and martial experience to provide a holistic analysis of warfare. While not a Buddhist tradition, Daoist philosophy harmonizes with Buddhist philosophy as evidenced by influence on the Zen Tradition.
Later Zen-influenced reflection on the martial arts echoes both death imagery in Zen and the holistic analysis characteristic of Daoism. Like The Art of War before it, The Book of Five Rings holistically reflects on warfare and dueling. It describes a warrior philosophy of detachment from both life and death, liberated from fear to enter battle but forsaking glory found in murder. While Buddhist ethics discourages combat, its analytic methods have been successfully applied to the practice of violence.
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition contains a panoply of demonic images that project anger and force. Wrathful Buddhas sit wreathed in flame, indifferent to the changing conditions of the world. Beings with tusks and other bestial traits reject attachment to beauty. In the Tantric framing the awakened mind has been freed from the distractions of attachment and desire. When focused the awakened mind focuses completely, embraces emotions indiscriminately, and channels force precisely. Wreathes of flame represent ever-changing phenomena and the awakened mind’s detachment from it while remaining within it.
Meditation focused on mandalas and other intricate images feature in all Tibetan Buddhist lineages. Vivid images invite close inspection and the long gaze required to cultivate mindfulness. Demonic images may be jarring at first but found soothing or comforting after long exposure and a different perspective. Working with the images and the Buddhist concepts they represent serve as powerful teaching tools.
Despite rhetoric that glorifies the free market as the guarantor of ownership rights, late stage capitalism is marked by a concentration of ownership. As wealth flows toward the owner class, the working class becomes less able to acquire ownership rights in property and durable goods. Where a professional class family might have owned their home in a prior generation, their late stage descendents find themselves doomed to tenancy. Possessions of significant value become inaccessible outside of lease or subscription. Ownership narrows in the late stage because capitalism chiefly invents means to extract further capital from resources and transactions. As processes are fragmented and outsourced, opportunities for rents appear at points of transaction, expanding the set of facilitators obstruct what might otherwise be a frictionless process in order to extract rents from both sides. In the tenant society, consumers pay for the privilege of use but remain empty handed.
Zen literature references not only death but the act of killing in describing the path to liberation. Koans from the Blue Cliff Record advise that a disciple must be ready to take life to grasp the dharma fully. Seeing life and death as no different is said to be the attitude of the ancient sages.
These statements reflect confrontational interpretations of Buddhist philosophy. All of them can be interpreted charitably and aligned with the framework set down in even the most ancient lineages of the tradition. Yet, the Zen tradition reaches for provocative inferences within that framework. The vivid images and incongruous claims require the student to address deeply held attachments such as identifying with the body or illusions of permanence. Violence is not given prominence, highlighting that we bring assumptions of violence into thinking about death. Zen practice directs students to examine, question, and abandon assumptions because they often obscure attachments that should be let go.