The War of Self and Other
In 1968, I was eight years old. It was startling to me to see how quickly we went from the Summer of Love to hate. There were the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King along with many violent Vietnam War protests, both for and against. I found this all very frightening. I assumed that there was something wrong with our leaders or our culture until I saw this bumper sticker below. There is even a vintage one for sale on eBay, priced at $34.99.
It is hard to determine the provenance of this quotation. It is attributed to Carl Sandburg. But in 1970, there was also a movie titled Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came starring Brian Keith, Ernest Borgnine, Susanne Pleshette and Tony Curtis. In this case, “the title is derived from an American antiwar slogan from the hippie subculture during the Vietnam War era, popularized by Charlotte E. Keyes in her 1966 article for McCall’s magazine titled Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came.”
This slogan really challenged my way of thinking about war. It personalized it for me. Perhaps the problem was not with our governments but with ourselves. As an individual I can choose to be peaceful or not. This experience has stayed with me my entire life and has really helped me see violence as a personal problem, not one that I can blame on others.
The Buddha also took this very same individualistic approach.
“The Buddha addressed himself as an individual to individuals. Even when he spoke to large groups, as he frequently did, he focused on individual responsibility. He understood every group ... as resting upon the insight, conscience and actions of each of its participants. He had no theory of, nor belief in, supervening collective structures of society or government that could amend or replace the bedrock of individual choice.”
Paul Fleischman, The Buddha Taught Nonviolence, Not Pacifism (2002)
But this can be confusing to many. We expect our religious institutions to define an overriding moral and ethical structure for society. But the Buddha did not do that.
“Modern discussions of violence commonly pursue rules of conduct rooted in universal norms ...’A great deal of effort in modern liberal society is invested in defining and applying codes of conduct.’ [There is] a widespread assumption that such codes ‘can be generated from a single source or principle’ ... Religious traditions are often understood to have served in the past to provide such foundational principles. In most Buddhist traditions, an ethicized notion of karma and the various formulations of virtues and precepts for monastics and lay practitioners may be seen to have offered such support. Recent efforts by Buddhists to reinterpret such guidelines for practice as the six paramitas or the five precepts in terms of contemporary social life reflect the modern demand for codes of conduct ...”
Dennis Hirota, Violence and Nonviolence in Shinran (2018)
We often get questions like these as Buddhist ministers. People want to know what is Buddhist justice and what is the Buddhist position on war. But this approach deals with these issues in the abstract, often focusing on one group verses another, often further separating us rather than bringing us together. This is called Othering and it often creates more distance between us rather than less.
Shinran Shonin also takes this approach, to focus on the individual rather than on the groups. When we approach issues in this way it helps us to not blame others for our conflict. The problem is inside not outside. This also helps us to become much less self-righteous.
“Dennis Hirota wrote in his essay, ‘Violence and Nonviolence in Shinran,’ that violence and other aggressive acts surface ‘from afflicting passions (bonno) of ego-attachment and deepens one’s entanglement in samsaric existence ...’[Aggressive actions] are rooted in forms of violence directed toward self-magnification and division from others.’ He also writes, ‘Consequently, for Shinran, mental acts are the primary form of violence.’ The slogan of [Dostoyevsky’s] heroes is ‘we are all to blame’; the recognition that we are all complicit in sin is the gateway to grace, and hence the transformation which can take us out of the structures of evil. We are at the [antithesis] of self-righteous anger.”
Ken Yamata, War and Jodo Shinshu (2022)
By seeing ourselves clearly we can then begin to appreciate the teachings and start to recognize and change our deluded ways of thinking. We are able to reorient ourselves and begin to look for solutions within rather than without. This transformation can feel negative in the beginning but it is also the initial steps towards insight into ourselves and acceptance of others.
“In this way, Shinran traces the contours of realization born from the evil of violence, the encounter with the teaching, and the birth of self-awareness.”
Dennis Hirota (2018)
Namoamidabutsu, Rev Jon Turner
