Practicing Peace in Times of War

Practicing Peace in Times of War

PEMA CHÖDRÖN

BASED ON TALKS EDITED BY

Sandy Boucher

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2010

SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

© 2006 by Pema Chödrön

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUES THE PREVIOUS EDITION OF THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS:

Chödrön, Pema.

Practicing peace in times of war/

Pema Chödrön; based on talks edited by

Sandy Boucher.—1st ed.

p.    cm.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2118-7

ISBN 978-1-59030-401-3

ISBN 978-1-59030-500-3

1. Peace—Religious aspects—Buddhism. 2.Religious life—

Buddhism. 3. Buddhism—Doctrines.

I. Boucher, Sandy. II. Title.

BQ4570.P4.C56 2006

294.3′37273—dc22

2006013417

To my grandchildren Alexandria, Pete, and James

If somebody doesn’t begin to provide some kind of harmony, we will not be able to develop sanity in this world at all.

Somebody has to plant the seed so that sanity can happen on this earth.

—C
HÖGYAM
T
RUNGPA
R
INPOCHE

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Practicing Peace in Times of War

2. The Courage to Wait

3. Not Biting the Hook

4. Changing Our Attitude Toward Pain

5. Compassionate Abiding

6. Positive Insecurity

Resources

About the Author

Acknowledgments

T
HE WRITINGS
in this book are inspired by my teachers Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. In particular I want to thank Kongtrul Rinpoche for the teachings on
shenpa
that I discuss in chapter 3.

I would like to thank my editors, Sandy Boucher and Eden Steinberg, as well as Hilda Ryūmon Gutiérrez Baldoquín, who typed the changes to the manuscript and offered many valuable suggestions. Thanks also to Emily Hilburn Sell for first editing my talk on
shenpa,
which is the basis for chapter 3. I also gratefully acknowledge my friend Acharya Dale Asrael for the term “compassionate abiding,” which I use in chapter 5.

My appreciation goes also to Gigi Sims, who transcribed the talks, and again to Eden Steinberg, who conceived of this book and patiently guided it to completion.

Practicing Peace in Times of War

W
AR AND PEACE
start in the hearts of individuals. Strangely enough, even though all beings would like to live in peace, our method for obtaining peace over the generations seems not to be very effective: we seek peace and happiness by going to war. This can occur at the level of our domestic situation, in our relationships with those close to us. Maybe we come home from work and we’re tired and we just want some peace; but at home all hell is breaking loose for one reason or another, and so we start yelling at people. What is our motivation? We want some happiness and ease and peace, but what we do is get even more worked up and we get everyone else worked up too. This is a familiar scenario in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities, even when we’re just driving our cars. We’re just driving along and someone cuts in front of us and then what? Well, we don’t like it, so we roll down the window and scream at them.

War begins when we harden our hearts, and we harden them easily—in minor ways and then in quite serious, major ways, such as hatred and prejudice—whenever we feel uncomfortable. It’s so sad, really, because our motivation in hardening our hearts is to find some kind of ease, some kind of freedom from the distress that we’re feeling.

Someone once gave me a poem with a line in it that offers a good definition of peace: “Softening what is rigid in our hearts.” We can talk about ending war and we can march for ending war, we can do everything in our power, but war is never going to end as long as our hearts are hardened against each other.

What happens is a chain reaction, and I’d be surprised if you didn’t know what I’m talking about. Something occurs—it can be as small as a mosquito buzzing—and you tighten. If it’s more than a mosquito—or maybe a mosquito is enough for you—something starts to shut down in you, and the next thing you know, imperceptibly the chain reaction of misery begins: we begin to fan the grievance with our thoughts. These thoughts become the fuel that ignites war. War could be that you smash that little teensy-weensy mosquito. But I’m also talking about war within the family war at the office, war on the streets, and also war between nations, war in the world.

We often complain about other people’s fundamentalism. But whenever we harden our hearts, what is going on with us? There’s an uneasiness and then a tightening, a shutting down, and then the next thing we know, the chain reaction begins and we become very righteous about our right to kill the mosquito or yell at the person in the car or whatever it might be. We ourselves become fundamentalists, which is to say we become very self-righteous about our personal point of view.

Jarvis Masters, who is a prisoner on death row, has written one of my favorite spiritual books, called
Finding Freedom.
In a chapter called “Angry Faces,” Jarvis has his TV on in his cell but he doesn’t have the sound on because he’s using the light of the TV to read. And every once in a while, he looks up at the screen, then yells to people down the cell block to ask what’s happening.

The first time, someone yells back, “It’s the Ku Klux Klan, Jarvis, and they’re all yelling and complaining about how it’s the blacks and the Jews who are responsible for all these problems.” About half an hour later, he yells again, “Hey, what’s happening now?” And a voice calls back, “That’s the Greenpeace folks. They’re demonstrating about the fact that the rivers are being polluted and the trees are being cut down and the animals are being hurt and our Earth is being destroyed.” Some time later, he calls out again, “Now what’s going on?” And someone says, “Oh, Jarvis, that’s the U.S. Senate and that guy who’s up there now talking, he’s blaming the other guys, the other side, the other political party, for all the financial difficulty this country’s in.”

Jarvis starts laughing and he calls down, “I’ve learned something here tonight. Sometimes they’re wearing Klan outfits, sometimes they’re wearing Greenpeace outfits, sometimes they’re wearing suits and ties, but they all have the same angry faces.”

I remember reading once about a peace march. When one group was coming back from the march, some pro-war people started cutting them off and blocking them; everyone started screaming and hitting each other. I thought, “Wait a minute, is there something wrong with this picture? Clobbering people with your peace sign?” The next time you get angry check out your righteous indignation, check out your fundamentalism that supports your hatred of this person, because this one really is bad—this politician, that leader, those heads of big companies. Or maybe it’s rage at an individual who has harmed you personally or harmed your loved ones. A fundamentalist mind is a mind that has become rigid. First the heart closes, then the mind becomes hardened into a view, then you can justify your hatred of another human being because of what they represent and what they say and do.

If you look back at history or you look at any place in the world where religious groups or ethnic groups or racial groups or political groups are killing each other, or families have been feuding for years and years, you can see—because you’re not particularly invested in that particular argument—that there will never be peace until somebody softens what is rigid in their heart. So it’s necessary to take a big perspective on your own righteousness and your own fundamentalism when it begins to kick in and you think your own aggression and prejudice are reasonable.

I try to practice what I preach; I’m not always that good at it but I really do try. The other night, I was getting hard-hearted, closed-minded, and fundamentalist about somebody else, and I remembered this expression that you can never hate somebody if you stand in their shoes. I was angry at him because he was holding such a rigid view. In that instant I was able to put myself in his shoes and I realized, “I’m just as riled up, and self-righteous and closed-minded about this as he is. We’re in exactly the same place!” And I saw that the more I held on to my view, the more polarized we would become, and the more we’d be just mirror images of one another—two people with closed minds and hard hearts who both think they’re right, screaming at each other. It changed for me when I saw it from his side, and I was able to see my own aggression and ridiculousness.

If you could have a bird’s-eye perspective on the Earth and could look down at all the conflicts that are happening, all you’d see are two sides of a story where both sides think they’re right. So the solutions have to come from a change of heart, from softening what is rigid in our hearts and minds.

One of the most inspiring modern examples we have of this is the civil rights movement. I was recently rereading the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., and I understood once again that the whole movement was based on love—love that doesn’t exclude anybody. This is also the Buddhist idea of love. In this view, you want everybody to be healed.

Now, some political activists might say, “OK, but nothing will ever change just by holding that all-inclusive, loving view.” But the truth is, when you take that view and you begin to live by it, at the level of your own heart in your own everyday life, something begins to shift very dramatically and you begin to see things in a different way. You begin to have the clarity to see injustice happening, but you can also see that injustice, by its very definition, is harming everybody involved. It’s harming the people who are being oppressed or abused, and it’s harming those who are oppressing and abusing.

And from a Buddhist point of view, those who are being oppressed have a chance—just as people did in the civil rights movement—to be purified by what is happening to them. They have the opportunity to let hatred be replaced by love and compassion and to try to bring about change by nonviolence and nonaggression. Instead of sinking into self-absorption they have a chance to let their suffering link them with the suffering of all beings—those harming, those helping, and those feeling neutral. In other words, they have a chance to soften what is rigid in their hearts and still hold the view that injustice is being done and work toward unwinding that injustice or that cruelty.