Show Me Your Original Face

Deconstructing the Self in times of Genocide

Show Me Your Original Face

We are witnessing an unfathomable amount of suffering in Gaza. When Siddhartha left the palace, he witnessed death and suffering on many levels as well. He didn’t turn and run back into the palace and instruct his attendants to shield him from the pain of these truths, he gave up everything to delve deeply into the source of this suffering which started his years of ascetic practices. If the Zionist-clinging Buddhist students, and teachers, are turning away from looking at the daily feeds of death and destruction, then they are violating the essential narrative of the Buddha’s awakening. If they further refuse to respond to it, then they are discarding the teachings for the comforts of the palace.

I’m watching a friend be harassed by a small but persistent couple of Zionist supporters on the internet after she and I wrote an article expressing a critical analysis of Zionist Buddhist perspectives. Three of them have started their attacks by citing that my co-author has a fundamental misunderstanding of Anattā/Anātman because she wrote “no-self” and they claim that it is “not-self.” This being an attempt to discredit her scholarship and understanding of Buddhism, even though she is a lay ordained Zen practitioner with a Masters in Buddhist studies and the commenters don’t seem to have any experience or knowledge of Buddhism outside of ChatGPT. The fixation on correcting “no-self” with “not-self” is uninformed on the most basic level, since the “a” in anattā is just a negating prefix in Sanskrit and Pali, which can be translated as “no” or “not” or “without” or any other negating verb. But Anattā is really more accurately described as, no-fixed, separate, unchanging, solid-self which is not subject to Dependent Arising and Karma. For those new to Buddhism, it all stems from the Buddha’s discovery of Śūnyatā, the emptiness of all conditions, which also therefore applies to the self, Anātman in Sanskrit, Anattā in Pali. Without understanding this, it is impossible to understand the functioning of Pratītyasumutpāda, often translated into Dependent Arising or Dependent Origination. According to Nāgārjuna, the whole system wouldn’t function if anything had a fixed and permanent identity, and so everything breaks open into a dance of radical relativity, interconnectedness, and interdependence.

This is where no-separate-self-from-all-of-life comes into play, when viewed through this lens, the destructive actions of Israel in the world seem psychopathic. There seems to be no sense of interconnected-self other than a very narrow fixation on tribalism, otherwise they could see the greed and the fear that is producing this violence is ultimately violence that is being inflicted upon the interconnected body of true self, and that the negative and destructive Karma that is generated from these destructive actions will put the very things that they think they are defending in even further danger.

What’s interesting to me is that, in watching the on-line attacks on my friend, especially on the subject of Anattā, is that their attacks are rooted in attachment to the false, ego-based self, and that this is at the heart of the destruction and unbridled violence of this Genocide and the fanatic level of aggressiveness in both denial and justification of it. But what I started to notice is that the persistent critic was acting quite similarly to the ego-mind, once you start to examine it. He was, if you will, an embodiment of the ego-mind at play.

The essential, “Why me?” question arises. He asked, “Why are you only asking Jews to deconstruct their identities?” We are not, and neither did the Buddha. The Buddha asked all people to “Leave the burning House,” but in cases like the current Genocide, it’s especially important that perpetrator nations, and those who identify with them, break the cycle of extreme violence because they are inflicting the most egreious crimes and creating the most negative Karma, Karma that will eventually be very damaging to every aspect of that perpetrator culture and extended group. This is also true for Americans who need to address the false premise of Manifest Destiny and for Western European countries address The Doctrine of Discovery. All of which are aspects of delusional understandings of self and the world.

As co-conspirators of the Genocide of Palestinians, their ethnic cleansing, and the illegal land grabs, America and Americans need to urgently address the Hungry Ghost aspects of their own endless greed, hatred and delusion as well. There has been a manipulative demand that Judaism be inseparable with Zionism and with the state of Israel. It has never been the case, from its inception, there have always been Jews who were against Zionism, those who thought it violated the very core principles of Judaism, those who thought that the displacement, dispossession, murder, and the oppressive and humiliating occupation of the Palestinians was also against the core principles of Judaism.

With the parts of Gabor Maté/Tara Brach’s interview in my mind regarding the excuses of American Dharma teachers’ silence, I’m again thinking about Anātman/Anattā in reference to Zionism, Israeli nationalism, and Jewish identity in regard to deconstructing the false, ego-based self, and how for so many American Buddhists, this is what’s behind their demand that silence and repression of others in addressing the crimes against humanity by Israel are not only tolerated, but quietly condoned in so many sanghas. In meditation we begin to see how the process opens into an awareness of conditioned perceptions, often based on fear and greed, both give rise to aggression, racism, and territorialism. We can see how deconstructing the self leads to an ability to separate ourselves from these toxic constructs of mind so as to give us the ability to see the destructive Karma that flows from Wrong Understanding, which leads to violent speech and destructive actions.

To me, seeing the lack of response from American Dharma teachers, is to witness the clinging to false self, and the soft holding of their students who are clinging to Zionism with almost zero work done on separation of mental constructs being done. This leaves them with only self-help practices to keep their nervous systems regulated which only affirms the false self, instead of using the uncomfortable feelings that arise as a catalyst to push them into deeply examining where these feelings are arising from, just as the Buddha did

Another interesting aspect of Buddhist practice and deconstructing the self, is to observe the way the ego-mind behaves when you are on the path to discovering what it truly is. In meditation we start to quiet our minds and do not grab the mental hooks that arise. All of the thoughts, the emotions arising that are pushing our emotional buttons or creating infinite distractions, start to become noticed. These are the tools of the ego, and we begin to identify these as aspects of the ego-mind and we let them circle around but don’t engage with them. If we sit quietly further still, we start to become aware of how false narratives have conditioned our entire lives and how we’ve come to understand ourselves as-those-narratives. Then we begin to see the Karma that has flowed from these narratives. It can be very painful to let go of all the things that we thought we were, that we created our whole self-identity on, and also seeing the harmfulness that was caused in the past because of it. We start to see that the causality was often systemic and conditioned flowing back for generations, not excusing one’s own personal responsibility, but seeing how many responses were based on Wrong Understanding long before you were born, and how that leads to detrimental speech and actions in the world, and that through more intense practice we could start to work toward a less damaging life.

As we get closer to discovering the source of the ego-mind it starts to panic, it starts to throw a lot of distractions in your way, you know the ones, sexual fantasies, shopping lists, reliving past arguments and winning this time, and as we continue to let go of these things and keep pursuing the source, it starts to shout in your ear, “If I die, you die!” “You can’t survive without me!” “You are your traumas, do not let them take this away from you or you will disappear!” “They are after you, I am here to protect you!” and the ego has a lot of degrading personal insults toward you along the way, just like internet trolls. Once you use your practice to observe these with detached curiosity, and ask, “Is that really true?” and “What is driving these thoughts?” “Where are these thoughts arising from?” You get closer and closer. Years ago, I remember watching a video of a well known Tibetan teacher who leaned into the microphone and said forcefully, “The Ego is a Lie!” This diggs at the essential question of, “Who am I?” Once this is discovered, we break open into a field of joy and liberation that is unbounded. For Hindus who followed this practice, they broke through the delusion of self and saw Brahman. The Buddha did not find any outside architect, but only further and further emptiness and the interplay of Dependent Origination, but both experiences were filled with light and joy.

Through conversations in chat groups around the Genocide in Gaza, I started to directly notice, or hear stories of reactions in multiple sangha interaction, a similar reaction from students who are aggressively unwilling to address nor critically analyze what is at play in their denial of the Genocide of the Palestinian people and these student’s, (and teacher’s btw) inability to separate their identities from the political ideology of Zionism and the enthno-religious Apartheid state of Israel. In some ways, I see their actions to be similar to the way the ego is resistant to critical analysis, screaming that we need to take care-of-the-ego first, prioritizing self-care over any difficult identity issues that may send them into crisis. Searching for distractions like, “What about the other tragedies in the world, why not look over there instead?” The screams that, “If we talk about this it will put my family in danger,” instead of delving into the causality that Israel’s violent and destructive policies are what’s actually creating any insecurity for them. I’ve watched my own ego-mind get so desperate that it has even taken mental hostages, just like the Zionist students have figuratively taken sanghas hostage by threatening to withdraw in protest which would create financial collapse of those sanghas. They demand that the students who are asking that we talk about the Genocide get sequestered into private rooms, so that the ‘general community’ dosen’t need to be exposed to it. Since many teachers, Board members, and funders are Zionists, they don’t need to be coerced by the students to maintain an official policy of silence on this topic.

But the tighter we cling to the false-self, the more we suffer, and as the months go by and more and more people are deconstructing and refuting the narratives of Zionism and are looking deeply into the causes and conditions within the history of the creation of Israel, the more the foundations of a constructed-self start to crumble. This leads to more insecurity which leads to more extreme reactivity, more withdrawal from the reality of the situation, and more violent denialism. As the crimes continue and get more and more obscene, it’s hard to stay affixed to this identity without closing-off your heart to the interconnectedness of all of life, even to the degree of calling the imposed starvation campaign ‘a hoax.’ No, deep practice isn’t about getting any percentage happier, well, yes, it is, but only after the really difficult work of letting go of everything that we had previously built our entire identities on is dismantled, and that is heartbreaking work. What we are doing here is not Spa Zen in order to coddle the ego, it’s about letting the fire of critical analysis burn away all notions of false-self. I learned some years ago that the traditional monastic robes of saffron and yellow were to reference the flames of critical discernment and the hair on their heads and even the eyebrows get burned away.

But the ego is a slippery snake and some teachers get lulled into addiction to their own celebrity and adulation from their students. American commercial Buddhism seems to be rooted far too deeply in individualism, but what we need to feel from sincere practice is our collective liberation as a product of Śūnyatā, Anattā, and Paratītyasumutpāda, and that is what arises when we take the controls away from the separate-ego-self. To me, the members of Jewish Voice for Peace have done this hard work of separating their identities from the toxic elements of Zionism and they are taking responsibility for the Karma of what is being done under the guise of false narratives far better than any American Buddhist teacher out there. As Ruth King wrote in her book, Mindful of Race, “Your liberation is tied to my liberation, my liberation is tied to your liberation.” The safety of my children is dependent on the safety of your children, and there is no escaping from Karma, no matter how much McCarthyism, PR, and Authoritarianism is imposed upon it.

My disappointment with the American Buddhist communities is that I thought that this practice of untangling the Karma of one’s life directly addresses these false narratives of self and helps us pull-apart our identities and therefore I thought that American Jewish practitioners would be at the forefront of the pro-Palestine movement, not hunkering down in bunkers of the false-self driven by greed, anger, and delusion and affixed to entho-religious-apartheid-nationalism. I thought the practice itself would help ease the grip on those false identities and to also see, as we are students of causality, the Karmic effects that flowed from these false narratives, these Wrong Views that lead to such harmful actions, such actions that had no real feeling of the truth of interconnectedness and mutual dependence.

In the Zen Kōan, “Show me your Original Face, the one before your parents were born,” your Original Face is that primal consciousness that we can access once the ego is quieted, it is not dependent on the conditions of birth, it is not the local, individual-self that will grow old, get sick, and die. It is not attached to race, gender, nationality, age, sexuality, or political ideology. It is, what Japanese Zen Master, Bankei called, “The Unborn Buddha Mind,” the “Dropping off body and mind” as Dōgen put it. This is liberation and bliss consciousness free from all of the sources of destruction and hate that spring forth from the ego-mind of separation.

Once we are released from its domination, we return to our Relative selves, but we understand this self not as solid and unchanging, it is radically interrelated and interdependent with everything and everyone around us. A self that, as Thích Nhât Hanh put it, “We see the flower is comprised of non-flower elements.” We understand that words, actions, and even thoughts have waves of effects in the world. We see Causality and how Karma flows, both harmful to self and the world, or beneficial to the world, one that sustains all of life as a holistic organism. We see that breaking the death-grip of the ego, deconstructing the self, and the political ideologies of separation, the entho-religious supremacy and domination, whether they be Zionism or Manifest Destiny, or concepts like, the Master Race or the Chosen People, need to be exposed as false selves in order to stop the violence in the world, and stopping this Genocide.

(Image: Buddha statue that survived Hiroshima.)