In the books I loaned Ryan I had found much to consider. I was still intrigued by the Tibetan path that for thirty years my friend Billy had traveled. I had just read Dragon Thunder, the memoir by Diana Mukpo, Trungpa's widow. Trungpa's marital infidelity and sexual conduct are legend; but his widow writes that Trungpa remained indifferent to her own occasional casual affairs only until she fell in love.
"Rinpoche may have been a mahasiddha but he was also a man," she explains, "and like some men he seemed to have a double standard about extramarital affairs…[and he] sometimes worried that he was losing me."
Jealousy—
Fear—
Mukpo never completed the preliminary practices normally demanded by the Vajrayana path and on one occasion, "conflicted" by the master being "both husband and guru," she abandoned a yoga practice to which she objected that it required her to visualize him as her teacher.
"He screamed at me," she writes, "and started pounding his hand."
"Go back," he insisted.
She did.
I was familiar with Trungpa's infidelity, his use of illicit drugs, his alcoholism, his addiction to tobacco, his unpredictable behavior in general, but it felt important to me to learn from his wife also of his jealousy, his worry, his depression, his anger, his infatuation with celebrity, wealth, ceremony, excess, and pomp, and his neglect of his wife and children.
Mukpo:
I felt vulnerable and exhausted. I needed desperately to rest at night. With people coming in all night long and the baby waking up all the time, I finally freaked out completely and started screaming at Rinpoche. We had a huge fight. Rinpoche started screaming back at me and chased me around the bedroom until I finally barricaded myself in the bathroom with the baby.
Not long before his final illness and his death Mukpo told her husband that their situation was "terrible," "really awful," that he was getting "completely crazy," that he was getting "out of control," that he was a drunk, and that by his drinking he was killing himself.
"With that," she writes, "he tried to hit me but he missed."
Missed.
The intention to harm.
However—
Mukpo witnessed her husband kill a scorpion he discovered in his son's room. She says but for that single exception his commitment to nonviolence never wavered and she cites a talk her husband delivered on the subject of self-deception.
Trungpa:
You cannot by any means for any religious reasons or for any spiritual or metaphysical reasons step on an ant or kill your mosquitoes at all…. You cannot destroy life. We have to respect everybody. You cannot make a random judgment on that at all…. You can't act on your desires alone. You have to think, contemplate….
"That is Buddhism," says Trungpa. "That is the rule."
Yes.
Billy objected.
The first four passages I cited, he said, illustrated the honesty of Mukpo.
Yes.
I agreed.
"Like her teacher," Billy insisted, "she hides nothing."
So it seemed.
Billy emailed two statements by Mukpo in praise of Trungpa.
The first in part—
I now realize that the immediate chaos, though painful and excruciatingly real, was a passing confusion. I find that what endures is the big picture, the vast vision that Rinpoche communicated.
The second in part—
As the model of sanity and compassion in my life, he continues to guide me. Throughout my life, I continue to question myself as to how he would want me to handle one situation or another. He is no longer outside of me, so when I turn to him, I turn to my own wakefulness.
This made me nervous.
Had I been unfair to my friend's root guru?
It worried me.
I replied.
I explained that from the little I knew of Trungpa through his books and second- and third-hand reports it seemed the Rinpoche had astonished and energized just about everybody around him in creative and compassionate ways. An explosion of creativity seemed to occur in almost everyone who came in touch with him—in me, too, and I had only read his books. Trungpa did not lack for students and friends who bear witness to his inspiration, to his virtue, and to his enlightened activity. But I explained that in my book I thought it important to mention, too, the ordinary human and male qualities that he possessed. The way Mukpo remembered her husband and teacher in the two passages Billy cited, I told him, were the way I remembered my own family and friends. The chaos and confusion had passed, I had forgiven them all their faults, I had forgiven everybody everything, and I felt able to see the mystery, power, and beauty of the larger pattern and bigger picture.
Repentance.
"I hope that family and friends will be able to forgive me for all the stupid, cruel things I did."
Religion.
Billy thanked me for my clarification.
Language.
"My hope and aspiration is the same as yours," he added.
Understanding.
Peace.
Love.
In his Secret of the Vajra World Reginald Ray summarized the mind required of a disciple; and though Ray offered a number of qualifications it was difficult for me not to apply the five requirements listed by Ray to the long difficult struggle I endured with the master.
To wit:
1 One must respect one's teacher.
2 One must give up any attitude of criticism toward the teacher.
3 Any doubts must be regarded as one's own mistaken projections.
4 One must accept the master's version of reality.
5 Failure to regard the master in the right way will generate bad karma.
Touché!
The Four Reliances of the Buddha and Sosan Davis these were most definitely not.
1 Submit.
2 Submit.
3 Submit.
4 Submit.
5 Or else.
I could easily understand how the requirements listed by Ray would be onerous for a woman, like Mukpo, whose teacher was also her husband. It seemed her duties in the marriage would be little different from those demanded of wives whose husbands were Christian fundamentalists.
Love, honor, and—
Obey.
Yet I had over the years like many husbands significantly improved the fruit of my marital karma by adopting in my relationship with my wife Ruth the attitude recommended.
Yes.
Ruth was usually right.
Submit.
In his exposition of the Tibetan way Ray caused me to reconsider my objection to what I had long considered the master's neglect of the third truth, the cessation of suffering, and his seeming obsession with the first and second truths, suffering and its origin. Ray explains that in Tibetan practice the bodhisattva renounces individual liberation.
This liberation involves realizing that the game of ego is a battle that can never be won. The practitioner comes to see that no matter how hard he or she tries, the image of the self carried around in one's head will never be actualized. In short, one will never achieve samsaric happiness. [It] is an experience of certainty—one sees and one knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that suffering touches every moment of phenomenal experience and that no amount of struggle is going to change that fact. This realization is devastating…. [T]here is no way out.
Understood.
Yet, despite this impossibility of samsaric happiness and the inevitability of pain and suffering, for the mahayana bodhisattva nonviolence and pacification are enlightened activity.
Ray:
From an enlightened perspective, things as they operate in the world work in an inherently peaceful way. This means that there is room for everything to occur in its own manner, apart from judgments or evaluations. The karma of pacifying accommodates everything, understands its appropriateness, and acknowledges its right to be—as an expression of karma. The karma of pacifying reveals that there is actually no such thing as problems, obstacles, or enemies, and that the aggression of ego against such supposed negativities is entirely beside the point and unnecessary.
Yes.
But it was from the third and fourth books that I profited most.
The Rape of Nanking—Iris Chang.
Horror.
Zen at War—Brian Victoria.
Religion.
Denial.
In The Rape of Nanking historian Iris Chang employs intellect, inquiry, reason, "discriminative thinking," the faculty of mind which according to the master is "good only for building bridges" and is anathema to Zen Buddhists in general, to identify, document, and classify the monstrous varieties of torture and murder perpetrated in Nanking by the Japanese army in the year immediately preceding WW II—live burial, mutilation, death by fire, death by ice, death by dog.
Chang:
The Japanese not only disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture. Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts, carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet practice. At least one hundred men reportedly had their eyes gouged out and their noses and ears hacked off before being set on fire. Another group of two hundred Chinese soldiers and civilians were stripped naked, tied to columns and doors of a school, and then stabbed by zhuizi—special needles with handles on them—in hundreds of points along their bodies, including their mouths, throats, and eyes.
At Nanking, in "the forgotten holocaust of the second world war," at least 260000 and perhaps as many as 350000 Chinese noncombatants were murdered, thousands only after first suffering unimaginable horror.
Chang:
[A] pregnant woman began to fight for her life, clawing desperately at a soldier who tried to drag her away from the group to rape her. Nobody helped her, and in the end the soldier killed her, ripping open her belly with his bayonet and jerking out not only her intestines but a squirming fetus.
Chang documents worse—
Much worse.
Chang argues that for Asians the Second World War began not in 1939 but in 1931 when Japan occupied Manchuria as the first step toward military domination of East Asia. Its method was a ruthless and sophisticated "military machine" in the service of a "master race mentality."
Did Zen Buddhists in general oppose and resist it?
No.
To the contrary most supported and defended it.
Indeed—
Encouraged it.
The fine work of academic discourse Zen at War by ordained Soto Zen priest Brian Daizen Victoria is a deconstruction of institutional Buddhism in Japan and a scathing indictment of its complicity in centuries of militarism, nationalism, racism, imperialism, atrocity, and war which culminate in the Rape of Nanking and in WW2. In his book Victoria names the Buddhist scholars, monks, and "fully realized" and "enlightened" masters who reconciled Zen with Japanese imperialism, many of whom, following defeat in 1945, then recanted almost overnight yet resisted full disclosure. Their failure is not simply that they were unable to deter Japan from conquest, murder, and war.
It is that they were enthusiasts.
Zealots.
Had I not already experienced an overwhelming personal and subjective encounter with the dharma and the buddha I do not believe that my practice would have survived this book.
Victoria suggests that Zen's almost categorical repudiation of language, thinking, inquiry, reason, logic, analysis, and criticism and its emphasis upon authority, harmony, loyalty, submission, silence, obedience, and discipline contributed to its accommodation to nationalism, patriotism, and militarism.
Victoria:
[T]he development of an irresistible attack spirit became paramount. A critical part of this spirit was absolute and unquestioning obedience to one's superiors, who acted on behalf of the emperor. Through training, this spirit of obedience had to transcend mere habit and become instinctive, unthinking.
[W]ho better to do the [training] than Confucian-influenced Zen monks with their ethical system that emphasized unquestioning, selfless loyalty to one's superiors?
Victoria documents how Japanese Buddhists interpreted terms and concepts central to Buddhism and to Zen—"sutra," "precept," "virtue," "emptiness," "no self," "no soul," "no birth," "no death," "renunciation," "nonthinking," "relativity," "subjectivity," "no right," "no wrong," "intention," "karma," "compassion," "concentration," "skillful means," "peace," "harmony," "bodhisattva"—and the practice of Buddhism itself in ways that excused, encouraged, condoned, justified, and glorified the killing of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.
War.
"Did Buddhism really offer doctrinal justification for war?" Victoria asks.
"Yes," he answers.
Thus "skillful means" meant that depending upon the specific circumstances the bodhisattva could violate a precept in the short term in order to save another being in the long term.
Thus "just war."
The first step was to identify inferiors; and the Lotus Sutra, to cite just one of the texts used to do so, provided a description of the human beings who had earned the fruit of karma.
[A]nyone slandering this scripture or those who uphold it will be stricken with blindness, leprosy, missing teeth, ugly lips, flat noses, crooked limbs, tuberculosis, evil tumors, stinking and dirty bodies, and more, for life after life.
Karma.
People get just what they deserve.
Justice.
They earn it.
Therefore it is permissible to ignore and to neglect them.
To let them suffer.
Die.
Besides, the victims really have "no self," "no soul," they are little more than phantoms, "empty," "nothing," and life itself is but a dream; ultimately there is really "no birth," "no death," no moral absolute, "no right," really "no wrong"; so from this point it is a relatively simple matter to understand that even killing such hinin, "nonhumans," is an act of "pity" and "compassion" performed by the "bodhisattva" soldier in a state of samadhi, "concentration," a being equally "selfless," "soulless," "empty," with the holy "intention" to spare these victims further "suffering," to afford them the opportunity of a better life in their next "reincarnation," and to bring "peace," "harmony," and "love" to the world.
It is a rationalization endemic to all nations and to all religions.
Killing for peace—
Killing for truth—
Killing for humanity—
Killing for god—
Killing ad nauseam.
Victoria believes that the Chan and Zen tradition fostered an atmosphere which condoned violence and he cites the legends involving the amputation of a disciple's arm, the severing of a boy's finger, the physical blows by fist and staff, the same stories of abuse that had troubled me. Victoria acknowledges that the instructional purpose of such a method is to awaken the disciple from delusion and to free him from dependence upon anyone.
"Nevertheless"—
It provided the link that facilitated the connection made between Zen and the sword in feudal Japan and in turn between Zen and total war in modern Japan.
The fact is that Zen leaders who supported Japanese militarism did so on the grounds that Japanese aggression expressed the very essence of the Buddha Dharma and even enlightenment itself.
Victoria believes that these assumptions must be "closely examined and challenged" and he cites the conclusions of D.T. Suzuki who before the war had supported the Buddhist argument for it but after the war acknowledged, at least in part, his error.
Suzuki:
With satori [enlightenment] alone, it is impossible [for Zen priests] to shoulder their responsibilities as leaders of society. Not only is it impossible, but it is conceited of them to imagine they could do so…. With regard to disputes in the ordinary world, it is necessary to employ intellectual discrimination.
Thinking.
Victoria cites similar conclusions by Soto Zen scholar Hakamaya Noriaki, who argues that in Zen the idea of "harmony" is often employed as a means to "stifle internal dissent."
Hakamaya:
One must never allow oneself to be reduced to a mere physical entity. Instead, the intellect must be used to its utmost to clearly distinguish what is right, and words used to their utmost to criticize what is wrong. I believe this is the way in which faith becomes an activity opposed to war.
Thinking.
Zen priests and Zen practitioners were sometimes able in Japan to overcome resistance to military service by teaching the idea that there is something more precious than life.
Is there something more precious than life?
In his book Victoria also documents the fact that there were Buddhists in Japan who did oppose the forces of racism, nationalism, imperialism, and war and remained committed to the more universal understanding of the principles of nonviolence and compassion.
I conclude my discussion of Zen at War with the words of just one.
Kondo Genko:
War is an activity in which people kill each other. Whether it be friend or foe, the killing of people is monstrous. There is nothing more sinful in this world than the killing of people.
Thinking.
Thinking.
Yes.
These four books and the three reviews of my own book by my wife and my friends Billy and Ryan still occupied many of my thoughts when on Thursday I received more bad news of the master.
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