The magnitude of what happened in the United States on Tuesday, September 11, is beyond imagination. Thousands of people are still missing, more than ten thousand were injured and hundreds of thousands were directly affected. We do not yet know the exact number of victims.

Because of this horrible act of terrorism, there are children returning home to no parents, parents going to bed knowing their children are probably dead, wives and husbands returning home to no spouse, friends dead, friends missing, friends in grief.
 

The dead are not only Americans but people of more than 30 countries. All of us are related to these people in a variety ways. Some of us will discover in coming weeks that people who have been close to us died in this tragic incident.
 

Our response was predictable—disbelief, shock, grief, fear, sadness, anger, even hatred. All are forms of suffering.
 

Most Americans, at least, now feel more vulnerable, no longer safe, feel as though their home is no long a place of safety. Although Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese in 1941, it is in Hawaii, a long way from North America.  The United States mainland has not been attacked for nearly two centuries.
 

Deep in human, or Western, nature there seems to be a need for revenge, retaliation, striking back, inflicting pain and punishment on those who have offended or wronged us. This is usually called "justice." In America, the "criminal justice system" is for the purpose of punishing criminals, as a way of getting even.
 

It is likely, however, that Tuesday's terrorists believed deeply that they were working for justice, giving their own lives for what they believed to be justice. One of the saddest things to see on television news was of some people in Palestine cheering the attacks on the World Trade Center buildings and Pentagon. What was in their experience that led them to such a reaction to the killing of thousands of innocent people?

Now, others want to punish Arabs, or even Muslims, everywhere as potential "terrorists," and bomb the extremely poor country and people of Afghanistan into oblivion. Too often this is the nature of "justice." An eye for an eye, says the Bible. Justice looks back to correct wrongs or get even by inflicting punishment. These days, religious people all over the world are being encouraged to subscribe to Western notions of the "justice."
 

This is not, however, the Buddhist way. Buddhists are asked, even in the midst of enormous suffering, to look back in order better to understand the causes and conditions giving rise to suffering. They have to ask not only who, but why?
 

But Buddhists are also asked to try to look forward—asking for, seeking for, a way ahead, a better world, a world of peace. Not to right the wrong, but to create the good.
 

This creates both a challenge and a problem for Buddhists. The problem is how there can be peace in a world in which so many seek justice through punishment and retaliation, people who have no interest in causes or reasons, only in striking back. It is clear that Buddhists have an enormous healing ministry to perform.
 

The terrible attacks on America and the cries for violent retaliation remind me of the story of Devadatta.  Devadatta, the cousin of Shakyamuni and older brother of Ananda, was known throughout the Buddhist world as the embodiment of evil, almost as a kind of devil. He told lies about Shakyamuni and tried to kill the Buddha several times, once by arranging for hired assassins, once by releasing a mad or drunken elephant to charge at the Buddha, another time by trying to poison him, once by shooting at him with an arrow, and later by pushing a rock off a mountain down toward the Buddha, where a fragment cut the Buddha's foot. When the Buddha refused to make him the head of the sangha, Devadatta tried to split the community of monks by starting his own movement. Perhaps his most infamous act was to inspire Ajatashatru to imprison and kill his father, King Bimbisara of Magadha, and usurp the throne. Old texts say that Devadatta was so evil that he was reborn in complete suffering in the deepest hell. Many Buddhists at least could not imagine anyone being more evil than Devadatta.
 

The Lotus Sutra, however, says nothing at all about the wickedness of Devadatta. Instead, he is thanked for teaching Shakyamuni. The beginning of the chapter Buddha is a story about a former life of Shakyamuni in which he was a king who learned the dharma from a wise man, a wise man who was Devadatta in a former life. Because of Devadatta, the king could become enlightened and became the Buddha. Thanking him, Shakyamuni announced that in a future age Devadatta too would become a Buddha.In a sense, the Buddha says to Devadatta, "Thanks a lot; despite everything, I've learned a lot from you; and you too are a bodhisattva on the way to becoming a Buddha."
 

It is impossible now for us to be thankful for Tuesday's devastation.  The tragedy and loss is too great, but we can learn from it.
 

We might learn that violence produces more violence. Retaliation does not cut the chain of violent retribution. We might learn that we should look into the causes and conditions creating the attitudes that enable someone to kill thousands of innocent people, along with oneself. The terrorists obviously were not pursuing their own selfish interests or desires. They apparently thought they were doing justice. If we are to work to create a better future we need to understand their motivation.
 

We Americans might learn that great profits from arms sales to Israel and others may not be so profitable after all. Selling weapons has been a big business for the United States.
 

However optimistic we may have been, we should have learned that the way to peace is a long and difficult one. Maybe Wonderful Voice Bodhisattva in Chapter 24 of the Lotus Sutra was correct when he asked Shakyamuni Buddha about people of this world:
 

"Are your ailments and troubles few? Is your daily life and practice going smoothly? ... Are the affairs of the world tolerable? Are the living beings easy to save? Are they not excessively greedy, angry, foolish, jealous and arrogant? .... Don't they have wrong views and inadequate goodness? Are they not unrestrained in their five emotions?"
 

I want to conclude by suggesting four things Buddhists can do now in response to this tragedy.
 

First of all, we can express sympathy through prayers, meditation, chanting, and dialogue—sympathy for the victims, their friends and loved ones; sympathy for those who have worked so hard to rescue or treat or comfort victims; and sympathy, too, for those who are now and will suffer from acts of vengeful retaliation.
 

Second, we can reflect on what contributed to Tuesday's tragedy. We might ask ourselves, for example, whether American policies on the Middle East contributed to Tuesday's tragedy.
 

Third, we need to work to spread the Dharma. Too few Buddhist voices are being heard in America today. Buddhism is becoming more and more popular in the West, but since the attacks I haven't heard a single Buddhist voice on American television or radio.
 

Finally, we might cooperate with those who seek peace. Many Christians, Muslims, and Jews are, in a sense, practicing Buddha-dharma without knowing it. Through a variety of international agencies we can try to support them, encourage them in many ways. The same Bible that says "an eye for an eye" also says "turn the other cheek." We need to join the peacemakers of every religious tradition, promoting interfaith cooperation and encouraging them to work together to build a more peaceful world.

"Bodhisattva" means one who seeks to be enlightened by working for others. But another meaning of  "bodhisattva" is one from whom we can learn, just as Shakyamuni learned from Devadatta. May Tuesday's tragedy be Tuesday's bodhisattva for all of us?
 
 
 

Gene Reeves, a UU minister and former head of the UU-related Meadville/Lombard Theological School at the University of Chicago, is the International Advisor and regular dharma preacher for Rissho Kosei-kai's International Buddhist Congregation (IBC) in Tokyo, Japan. The IBC is a new and unique organization, recently created to
serve the needs of people in the Tokyo area who would like to study and practice Buddhism in English. It holds weekly services and classes based largely on the Lotus Sutra.
 

Happy Halloween to our readers!  As the air turns chill and shadows lengthen, UU Sangha turns to an exploration of the dark side of life.  Buddhism abounds with tales of monsters, serial killers, ravenous ghosts, and visions of the infernal regions.  While modern Unitarian-Universalists aren’t likely to take a literal approach to such things, there are still lessons to be learned from these old stories and metaphors for the evil that we find in the world.

 We begin with a look at real life evil in all its horror, as Gene Reeves reacts to the terrible events of 9/11.  In the weeks following the attacks we have all been struggling with a new immediacy to dukkha and impermanence.  Drawing on the wisdom of the Lotus Sutra, which proclaims the Buddha-nature of even the worst criminals of our world, we are offered some thoughts on how we might process these events from a Buddhist approach and respond appropriately.  Holding to the UU affirmation of the inherent dignity and worth of all people, how might we grapple with the murder of thousands of innocent civilians?

 This issue also contains a couple of traditional Buddhist stories dealing with cannibalism and the supernatural, retold by modern commentators.  While such motifs provide a frisson of fear that can be fun in the October season, such stories in Buddhism usually act as bearers of imbedded messages, as these two examples demonstrate.

 Finally, we’ll be accepting submissions for the next issue, due in January, until New Year’s Day.  In honor of the end of what looks now to be a very bleak year and hope for a better one to come, the next issue’s theme will revolve around the concept of rebirth.  If you have any thoughts on rebirth, or any poetry, artwork, or other contribution, you’re encouraged to submit them.  What is a UU perspective on this ancient—and for some people obsolete—pillar of Buddhism?  Off-topic submissions are also entirely welcome.  Please send all submissions to jwilson403@hotmail.com.
 
 

“I consider no power, brethren, so hard to subdue as the power of Mara.”

Confronting the existence of evil is a basic concern for all religions, and yet there is a widespread misperception in the West that because Buddhism does not set up rigid categories of ultimate good and evil, but instead focuses on context and intention, that it is fairly silent on the issue of evil.  This perception is further strengthened by the Buddha’s heavier focus on discovering the mysteries of the inner world of the mind, rather than the regulation of specific external human behaviors.

Mythology and drama are devices frequently used in Buddhism to communicate key concepts.  This skillful means finds its expression in the stories surrounding the Buddhist personification of evil, known as Mara (literally, “Death” or “Murder”), and the infernal regions into which evildoers may fall.  Many Westerners are largely ignorant of the existence and significance of the hell regions in traditional orthodox Buddhist thought.  Beyond the usual difficulties of translating a foreign tradition into a new cultural consciousness, this may be due to the fact that many people come to Buddhism out of relinquished faiths which emphasize the judging, damning aspects of a literal place called Hell.  This is probably especially true of UU Buddhists.  Scarred by early negative experiences, such people may be reluctant to look into the Buddhist idea of Hell or even to acknowledge its existence.  But this understandable hesitation nonetheless robs Western Buddhists of an important element of the Buddha’s religion, cutting them off from a set of useful teachings that are psychologically and spiritually insightful, as well as a rich store of folklore.  When placed in their proper position amongst the myriad Buddhist teachings of wisdom, compassion, relativity, and rationality, the Buddhist teachings on the nature of evil and its punishments buttress the other, more familiar, Buddhist doctrines.

Evil is seen in Buddhist thought as a secondary effect of ignorance, rather than something self-existent and eternal.  According to the doctrine of the twelve interdependent links of causation, ignorance gives rise to attachment, and attachment brings about the poisons of greed and hatred; attachment is the cause of birth and therefore death.  Death is personified in Buddhist mythology as Mara, the Evil One, who is best known as the antagonist in the drama of the Buddha’s Enlightenment.

As the Bodhisattva Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, sat in meditation beneath the Bodhi Tree, the god Mara looked down from his place in the heavens and became alarmed.  Unlike Satan, the evil tempter of Christianity and Islam, Mara does not reside in the hell regions, but in the divine realms, where he is the lord of the sixth heaven of the realm of desire.  There he rules over all beings that are caught in ignorance and disregard the truths of impermanence, non-self, and suffering.  He is a jealous overlord, and when he saw that a new Buddha was about to be born to preach the way of escape from the cycle of Samsara, he gathered his army of demons and angry gods and charged forth to do battle against the future Buddha.

First Mara called upon the Bodhisattva to abandon his meditation because it was an unfit activity for members of the warrior caste, into which Siddhartha was born.  Thus Mara revealed himself as an apologist for the ancient Brahman orthodoxy of India, which sought to mollify death by offering sacrifices and which kept beings within his realm of power by promising them rebirth in the realm of the gods.  As anything that Mara proposes is sure to be of an evil nature, this suggests the immorality of both the caste system and any artificial separation of humanity into higher and lower categories and classes.

Having defeated Mara—that is, having dispelled ignorance and overcome the last traces of evil—Siddhartha proceeded deeper into his meditation and soon became the Buddha.

Mara is a being unique to Buddhism—he has no true equivalent in the Hindu system.  He is described as having four aspects.  The first is Aggregate Mara.  The aggregates are the five constituents of personality- form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.  In the Samyutta Nikaya, the Buddha proclaims, “What is this Mara?  Form is Mara. . . Feeling is Mara. . . Perception is Mara. . . Mental Formations are Mara. . . Consciousness is Mara. . . With regard to this Mara, you should overcome your longing.”  The aggregates have Mara-nature because they are impermanent, and thus subject to death (Mara).  Attachment to them prevents enlightenment.

Mara’s second aspect is as Defilement Mara.  The defilements are essentially the same as Mara’s army—they are the powers by which Mara influences sentient beings to remain within his realm of endless suffering and desire.  They act upon the aggregates, ensuring ignorant beings’ rebirth, and thus eventually bringing about Mara’s third aspect as Death Mara.

Mara’s ultimate aspect is God Mara, who contains the other three aspects within him.  Mara is the lord of illusion—he is often pictured as having a hundred or a thousand arms and can assume any shape he wishes in order to lead people away from the path to enlightenment.  He is really only perceptible as the deity Mara to those with deep insight—those without it are fooled by his myriad disguises.   At first beings fail to see Mara because he hides behind the veil of illusion, which they are caught in due to their greed, anger, and delusion.  Then as practitioners progress away from him, he begins to emerge and demonstrate his power in an effort to dissuade them.  But when they see through him, they defeat him and escape him, and he melts back into nothingness.  Psychologically, this is true as well.  If Mara is the mind and its components, then beings exist in a hell-state of ignorance, until they hear the Dharma and begin to work on themselves.  Then their true state is thrown into dramatic relief, and they must work diligently against it.  So Mara’s forces are religiously symbolized as a host of demons, but psychologically revealed as disturbed mental states.  When those hosts are defeated by Buddhist practice Mara loses once more.

After his enlightenment the Buddha encountered Mara many times, and was able to defeat him immediately by proclaiming that he recognized Mara and thus couldn’t be fooled by his tricks.  It should be pointed out that Mara does not create the world of illusion, he merely mistakes it for the best possible existence.  Also, Mara is a sort of celestial position or occupation, not a specific, eternal entity.  In the Maratajjaniya Sutta, Moggallana, one of the Buddha’s most advanced disciples, is possessed by Mara.  After calling out that he recognizes Mara, and thus dispelling the Evil One’s power over him, Moggallana goes on to relate how he himself was once the Mara in a previous lifetime.  This reveals two important aspects of Mara— like all sentient beings, he is temporary and must die, and furthermore, after paying for the evil karma he has accumulated, he can eventually become a saint and even attain Nirvana.  Even Mara, the lord of evil himself, is not fundamentally evil at root.  Acting on his own (short-sighted) self-interest, he seeks to keep people trapped in his realm where he can rule over them and receive offerings.  He does not realize that all he has is impermanent and he will die one day, to be reborn in a hell for many eons, tortured for his sins.  And another ignorant being will take his place, believing himself to be the world-ruler, unaware of the countless other Maras who came before him and the evil karma he is creating for himself.

This possibility of redemption for the personification of evil is an important Buddhist teaching.  Evil is evil, but it is not self-existent.  Furthermore, though they manifest evil thoughts and actions at times, the fundamental base of sentient beings is goodness.  The Buddha said, “This mind is pure and self-luminous in its nature, but it is stained by adventitious defilements.”  Evil results from ignorance, and all unenlightened beings have this ignorance to some extent, from the most heinous criminals to the most revered human saints.  As such, we can see the potential roots of evil in ourselves and feel some compassion for those compelled to do evil by their karma.  Furthermore, the other two poisons, greed and hatred, spring from ignorance, and they are the primary motivations for evil behavior.  Thus evil is an effect, not a cause—it is a response born from ignorance and cleansed by the twin lights of wisdom and compassion.  And just as the evil symbolically represented as Mara passes away and can eventually be turned into goodness, so too the evil mental states we find in ourselves can be worked on and transformed into wisdom, compassion, and bliss.  Evil is thus a challenge and a learning experience which can help the practitioner on the path to enlightenment.

Jeff Wilson is the Editor of UU Sangha  and a columnist for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review  He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

A Buddhist Halloween Story

“This is my dinner, you go find your own!” the smaller ghost commanded.

“Give me that morsel right now, this is my territory and I’m hungry!” roared the larger ghost.

Revata thought about trying to get away before they noticed him, but he was shaking so hard his teeth started chattering together.  The ghosts looked over and saw him sitting there alone.  “Hey, let’s get that human to decide who should eat it,” the ghosts said.

“No matter which ghosts I decide should be able to eat the corpse, the other will surely harm me,” Revata thought as the ghastly things crept closer.  “Therefore I'll just tell the truth and accept my fate.”

“So, human, who should be allowed to eat this tasty treat?” the larger ghost demanded.

Revata looked at the two frightening ghouls and sighed.  “Since you are carrying the corpse,” he said to the smaller ghost, “I think it must be yours and that you should be allowed to eat it.”

“What?!” the larger ghost shrieked.  “Why, I’ll show you!”  The big ghost ripped off Revata’s arms and ate them, crunching the bones loudly and smacking his lips.  The smaller ghost felt sorry for Revata and replaced his missing arms with those of the corpse. Then the big ghost pulled off Revata'’ legs and devoured them.  So the little ghost replaced them with the corpse’s legs.  The Big ghost bit off Revata’s head and swallowed it.  The little ghost replaced it with the head of the corpse.  This went on until the big ghost was full.  Then he let out a tremendous burp and crawled away, picking at his teeth with his sharp yellow claws.  Seeing that his meal was now ruined, the smaller ghost took off to find something to eat.

Revata was understandably in a state of panic!  “Whose body do I have now?” he wondered.  “This isn’t my original body, and yet it isn’t anyone else’s body either.  It responds to my commands.  Who am I?”

In a daze, he picked himself up and wandered down the road.  As day broke he came to a village.  Revata wandered from person to person, asking “Who am I?  Is this really my body?”  Everyone looked at him in bewilderment.  Finally Revata encountered another monk, much older and wiser.  Hearing Revata’s plaintive questions, he decided that Revata needed to seek the Buddha’s wisdom.  He took the frightened monk by the hand and led him to the Buddha.

Revata approached the Buddha, bowed, and blurted out, “What is this body?  Who does it belong to?”

The Buddha replied, “This body is the remains of another person.  It is not really yours.”  When Revata heard that straightforward answer, he achieved enlightenment.

“What is it that you have now realized?” the Buddha asked him.

Revata said, “I see that in this world, the bodies of people are really the remains of their parents, the remains of all things, not our own possessions.”

“Indeed you are enlightened,” the Buddha said.  “Therefore I give you a new name: Empirical Body.”

Alavaka the Demon

At the recent Tricycle Magazine-hosted Conference: “Buddhism In America: Does It Make a Difference?” I attended Tara Brach’s workshop on “Self-Aversion and Radical Self Acceptance.” She has us do an exercise with a partner, where we got into a meditative state and then one person would repeatedly ask the question: “What is wrong with accepting yourself just as you are?” and the other person had to repeatedly answer it.

This started out as a negative experience for me because I was the only person who could not find a partner, and I felt hurt and rejected. Fortunately however, a woman came in late and turned out to be the perfect partner for me. To make a long story short, as I meditated on accepting myself, I experienced a great deal of anxiety (even an actual physical tension in my stomach and throat). Then I remembered Jan Willis’s (a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and Professor at Wesleyan University) story from the Keynote address earlier that day about how when anger had overcome her, her teacher Lama Yeshe had told her that sometimes she just had to say to herself: “Buddha’s mind is angry today.” So I said to myself “Buddha’s mind is anxious today.” And in that moment, my heart opened up a little bit, and I felt a little bit of self-acceptance and some hope that this teaching really could help me accept myself.

The Buddhist teaching is that we all have “Buddha-nature” (“a spark of the divine” in other eastern religious traditions). So, if my mind is anxious, then, the Buddha's mind is, in fact, anxious today. It seems that the concepts of low self-esteem and self-hatred may be unique to Western culture. According to Ms. Brach and Ms. Willis, in one of his first dialogues with Westerners, His Holiness the Dalai Lama was confused by these concepts and evidently his translators could find no parallel terms in Tibetan! Personally, I find Lama Yeshe’s idea of identifying one’s own mind with the Buddha’s, or with the divine, quite liberating.

Patrick Bruckart is a member of the UU Community Church of Glen Allen, Virginia. He is a newcomer to Buddhism, has been studying it for several years, and currently practices in the Tibetan tradition with the Kagyu Shenpen Tharchin group at Ekoji Buddhist Sangha in Richmond, Virginia.

My son and I have a game.

is the loser.

In kids’ eyes,

Looking long

we once again

submerged.

Maria Shine Stewart is a member of UU Church of the Larger Fellowship and a co-manager of the CLF-L electronic list.