The Kōan that an entire generation has failed.

Taixu and 21st Century Buddhism

I’d like to take a look at the Buddhist monk, Taixu 太虛大師(1890–1947). He was part of the generation in China that was born during the final years of the Qing dynasty and came of age during a time of instability and revolution, when the old forms of Buddhist practice weren’t meeting the needs of such tumultuous, chaotic, and transitional times. I’m calling Taixu to mind because I feel we are in the same kind of dynamic in American Buddhism. The first wave of Asian teachers has been gone for 40-50 years and the Baby Boomer generation has enjoyed a reign of fame and prosperity since then, becoming Buddhist celebrities, some opening multi-million-dollar retreat centers, and riding the wave of the commercially successful mindfulness wave. But every generation has a challenge that will put their practice to the ultimate test, and to me, the Genocide in Gaza was the Zen Kōan that they all failed. When we study the “Case Records” of the ancient Chan Masters of China, we see the teachers challenging their students with a question that puts them into a dilemma. There are no intellectual answers that will be accepted, but to pass the Kōan, the student must embody directly the non-dual understanding of interconnectedness with all of life. If you respond from your separate, ego-based mind, the arrow misses the target, and the master rings the bell and you are dismissed from the dokusan room with not another opportunity or even another syllable to be spoken.

In this case, the Master asks, “There is a live streamed genocide happening of unarmed civilians, 2/3rds of whom are women and children, now more than 50,000 people have been killed, nearly 30,000 children dead and another 25,000 amputated, both of their limbs and of their families. 100,000 people wounded, and all of the hospitals have been intentionally bombed. All of the food, water, and medical supplies have been purposefully blockaded. After 85,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on an area the size of Philadelphia,and 2 million people are now being intentionally starved to death, and shot when they were desperately trying to receive the most meager food rations imaginable… What is your response, keeping in mind that our government is financing, arming, and giving an extra $7.9 Billion to help this slaughter? Answer now, especially those who identify in-any-way with the perpetrator group.”  The reply, a deafening silence, not of profound interrelationship, but of silent complicity, at best they utter a weak spiritual bypass statement like, “I’m on the side of peace,” which address none of the Causality, or they retreat back into sly, “I’m just Bearing Witness,” “We can’t take sides,” “We must stay in Not Knowing,” and “We must not cling to views,” all of which only benefit the oppressors. An easy out, allowing them to avoid dealing with any real morally grounded stance or any moral obligation to use their voice, platform, influence, or power to stop it, Then-You-Have-Failed-The Kōan. If, “I don’t want to upset all of my Genocide-supporting students,” or “This conversation is making me uncomfortable,” or “I’m maintaining my neutrality,” are your responses, Then-You-Have-Also-Failed-The-Kōan. This week marks the 20th month of continuous bombardment by a world military superpower, Amerisreal, raining down upon an unarm population with no ability to defend themselves, or even to survive. In some ways, I see these teacher’s silence based in the fear of their own deaths, anicca/anitya, they are clinging to ego, clinging to their own power and position, to their own celebrity, so much so that they give up their own ability to plead for the remaining children who haven’t already been slaughtered. This is attachment to self; this is fear of the death of the ego. Drop off the branch (of self-clinging) and fall into the mouth of the tiger (disobey power and speak out to save lives, even if it costs you all of these superficial entrapments of ego and the world).

We are being besieged with neo-fascism, environmental crisis, global economic instability, and international crimes against humanity, and we cannot respond with the old standards of mindful breathing and Not Knowing from the last generationthat is based in privileged self-help and individualism. We need to adjust so to address these more intensified causes and conditions as they are impinging on our very survival. Taixu was in the same transitional context, the old ways were broken andChinese Buddhism has a long history of getting entangled with power and whole lineages died out from not licking the boots of feudal lords. Some monks and small sanghas escaped into the mountains and received the true Dharma from the smell of the rain and the sound of the wind through the pine trees, while prosperous lineages augmented their teachings and kept their mouths shut on critiquing power. But I am a Zen practitioner, and the thread of our narrative is based on the outlaw-rebel-spirit, from Bodhidharma, through Hui Nêng, to Ikkyū, and on and on. Defiant and irreverent, they stood before the most powerful of their times without flinching and dared to expose their shams.

How cut-off from your own heart and the suffering of the One Body not to respond to the crying out that is coming from Gaza? I recall Charlotte Joko Beck saying that, “We practice so when a crisis arises, we know how to respond.” Well, we didn’t, so we need to change the model. Something is broken, and as my friend, Khin Mai Aung wrote in an article, “We must address religious nationalism to prevent Buddhism from being perverted into a force of evil,” and I think that being complicit in Genocide qualifies as a force of evil. We can see the history of when Buddhism got tangled up with power in the book, “Buddhist Warfare” edited by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer, and Brian Victoria’s “Zen at War.” We can also juxtapose these failures of upholding the Dharma with, “Engaged Buddhism, Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia,” edited by Christopher Queen and Sally King.

We can look at B.R. Ambedkar for the way he retooled Buddhism to address the needs and the liberation of his own people. We have contemporary Buddhist thinkers like Rita Gross, author of, “Buddhism After Patriarchy, A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism,” and we have the work of Joanna Macy, “Mutual Causality in Buddhism and Systems Theory” and her “Work that Reconnects,” as our guides. We can go back and look at Thích Nhât Hanh, and remember that he and Sister Chân Không and their sangha were practicing in times of great violence and destruction, and not in the context of privilege and security, and know that they were fearless. We need to address the way Buddhism in the West is infused with individualism, consumerism, privilege, self-help, narcissism, and power. We need to work in new ways that would allow and nurture the awareness of the greater body, the collective liberation, that would give insight into the interconnectedness of all things, with critical analysis, fierce debate, education into systemic problems, and a deep dive into causality, both in mind, and in action.

All of these ideas lead back to Taixu and why he is important at this moment. I will be selective because I know there are some problematic aspects of his perspectives, but in service to this post, I will focus on his revolutionary spirit and his attempt to reform the Buddhist practice of his time. As a result of reading the political thinkers like, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong, and Zhang Taiyan, Taixu was inspired to reshape Buddhism in a similar way. This was around 1911, and these political revolutionaries were looking to shake some things up.Perhaps more than anything else, he is known as the founder of a form of Buddhism called “Buddhism for Human Life” (rensheng fojiao) and “Buddhism for the Human Realm” (renjian fojiao), terms often translated into English both as “Engaged Buddhism” and “Humanistic Buddhism.” Only recently have scholars begun to acknowledge that Taixu kept much of the Buddhist tradition intact even as he tried to reorient it toward engagement with contemporary social and political problems. However, his successors have moved even further away from “escapist” goals in order to focus Buddhist attention on this-worldly issues such as environmental degradation, women’s issues, and human rights. This to me is a true awareness of Dependent Origination, and its expression of Collective Liberation. How privileged it is to be able to separate your spirituality from civil and human rights. So to keep Buddhism from becoming in service of power, we must activate it into the form and function of dismantling these oppressive forces and looking deeply into how our own minds have been hypnotized and pre-programed into passive support and decolonize our mental paradigms.      

It is also important to note that Taixu had a big influence on Thích Nhât Hanh and the way ‘Socially Engaged Buddhism’ was introduced into Vietnam. From the 1920s, Vietnamese Buddhist reformers revitalized their practice, inspired by Taixu's blueprint to modernize and systematize sangha education and temple administration, and by his idea of renjian fojiao, "Buddhism for this world," emphasizing the centrality of education, modern publishing, social work, and Buddhist lay groups to Buddhism's future in the modern world. The Chinese Buddhist revival had a direct influence on the activities of Buddhist reformers in Vietnam in the 1920s–60s and how renjian fojiao was interpreted and realized there. This would include Thích Nhât Hanh’s “School of Youth for Social Services,” that went into rural areas to establish schools, build healthcare clinics, and help rebuild villages after they were destroyed by both American and Vietcong soldiers, they also created orphanages to help take care of the children who lost their parents in the war. We also see Thích Nhât Hânh walk into the halls of power to directly address the U.S. Congress in 1966 to plead with them to stop the bombing, to stop the killing. Where is the delegation of Buddhist leaders to do this today? This is why we must move on; mom and dad are gone and they aren’t coming back, it’s up to us now.