repairing a broken piece with gold.
The beauty of anything is in its flaws.
This is the beginning of what I intend to be a series of posts that accurately represent events that threaten to turn us all into “Bad Buddhists” like me. Whether I will fulfill my intentions, and the schedule and frequency of my attempts, I won’t project at this point. As Dirty Harry said, “A man’s got to know his own limitations.”
Over the last few years, I have frequently been challenged
for the apparent disconnect between the anger in many of my writings and the
Buddhist teachings by which I strive to guide my life. The most frequent
assumption by readers most critical of that disconnect is that I’m simply not a
very good Buddhist, a claim with which I must in all honesty concur. I fail, on
a daily (hourly?) basis to live up to the aspirations of a practicing Buddhist,
and to a great extent, those failures are borne of my responding angrily to
events that shall admittedly pass in time.
I do trust that even the most destructive of those events
will indeed pass, regardless of my responses or behaviors. It could even be
said with some authority that angry responses such as mine only serve to
prolong and exacerbate the very destructive circumstances, events, and
behaviors that “good” Buddhists work diligently to nullify. I cannot honestly
refute such an accusation. I don’t judge myself as a “bad” Buddhist, but as I
stated above, I’m not a very good one, either.
That said, a study of history hints that I am apparently in reasonably good
company.
Back in 14th Century China, during the Tang
Dynasty, the Shaolin Temple – the birthplace of Kung Fu martial arts – housed
within its walls a group of over 1,000 monks whose primary responsibilities
involved the protection of the temple and the Tang government from assaults by
warlords. Known at the time as the Dragon of Retribution, these monks were
arguably the first “gathering of warrior monks,” or Tong. Member monks were as
brutal in their defense of their charges as their host monks were pacifists in
their devotion to the Eight-fold Path to enlightenment. In modern days, many of
the Tong's actions would fall under the definition of terrorism. Brutal assassinations
were not uncommon, and the Tong members were viewed by the public as either
mystical super-beings on a righteous quest, or as incarnate demons. The reality
lingered somewhere between the two extremes.
In later years, arguably beginning in the 17th
Century under the Ming Dynasty, many of the Tongs were corrupted, opened themselves to lay members of questionable agendas, and
ultimately formed the beginnings of organized crime syndicates that continue to
function and prosper to this day.
Lest anyone assert that I view myself as a warrior monk, I
can assure you that I am no such thing. I am, at best, a devoted but flawed student
of the Path, and I make no claim to exceptional powers of any kind. What I am
is a lifelong student who sees a burgeoning rise of a profound danger to the
way of life I cherish, as well as to the principles which I try but
frequently fail to demonstrate in my own life. Seeing that danger, I am driven
to combat the threats in a manner for which I am most qualified: sharing a
vision of the truth of those dangers, reminding others of the potential harm we
all face should the threats go unchallenged, and hoping to encourage others to join
in that fight without adding to the inevitable repercussions of a potentially
devastating descent into violence. To remind us all – myself included – that we’re
all in this together, for better or worse.
