True Love: The Third Mindfulness Training and Radical Inclusiveness

The third of the Five Mindfulness Trainings shows Thich Nhat Hanh placing the four divine abodes, the in-dwelling places of the Buddha, into our very human lives and interpreting equanimity as inclusiveness. It's odd, because on the face of it, these are very different concepts.

                      "... I will cultivate loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and inclusiveness [equanimity],
                       which are the four basic elements of true love, for my greater happiness and the
                        happiness of others. Practicing true love, we know that we will continue beautifully
                        into the future."

This training addresses that one of the Five Precepts which deals with responsible and loving sexual conduct. As a result, dharma discussions on it are often hesitant and not very personal. And with Thay's usual optimism and hope in its tone, I find as I write this (to present to my sangha) that I am not quite in harmony with its tone. Right now in my own life, it is hard for me to think about, or believe, that I, my family, or even my country will really "continue beautifully into the future." After COVID-19, with its personal and economic tragedies unfolding but not yet fully known, the future does not look beautiful.

I am unable to retire and I need to remove myself from a very difficult marriage to someone who has already been financially irresponsible and still wedded only to his original family, it seems.  And my woes are very small compared to the millions all over the world who are out of work, homeless, ever deeper in poverty, with loss of loved ones or of their own health, I am merely looking for the luxury of retiring into a new life and a less lucrative, but more interesting, career combining some forms of teaching and spiritual direction.

Finally, this precept/training forces me to ask, as I face the failure of a relationship, what is the essence of a good one?

Well, recently, as I was browsing through The Guardian newspaper, I saw a book review that included a recent interview with the book's author, Jan Morris. I have always enjoyed Morris's work over the years, consisting of serious journalism, travel writing, and "popular" history that was praised for being scholarly and comprehensive (The Pax Britannica Trilogy, 1968-1978).  I also remember the news of her gender transition from the male James to the female Jan as a pioneering medical and psychological journey in the early 1970s (!). She is now 93, and with the publication of the memoire being reviewed, Thinking Again (2020), she looked back at the book she wrote about her transgender experience, Conundrum (1974). 

In this interview she spoke about her wife, Elizabeth, and their children. After her treatments and surgery, she returned to their house in a small town in Wales. She noted that the villagers just accepted her, at least publicly. She attributed it to something very simple: essential kindness.

And Elizabeth? At the time they had to divorce, but it turns out they have been together always. "I made marriage vows 59 years ago," she says. They reaffirmed their love in 2008 in a ceremony of civil union (the UK allowed same sex marriage later in 2014). The children always were supportive of them.

This is an example of a kind of radical inclusiveness and love of the essential person- not in contradiction of the Buddhist notion of non-self, but of the manifesting, in fact ever growing person. This helps us understand that sexual identity and sexual love exist alongside the mystery of personality and compassion. We do not become an Other nor do we have an unchanging Essence. Gender can and should be fluid when it needs to be, to express to each other who each of us really is.

True Love is transcendent of each moment yet present in each moment. It goes beautifully into a future that a 93-year-old helped me to see as having more possibility. It gives to me a new meaning to "the more things change, the more they stay the same." That cliche can have a positive meaning, In a Buddhist context, this phrase might mean that the ocean water is the same that makes every different wave, to use one of Thay's favorite metaphors. The water is still there in the waves that keep crashing onto the shore; they sometimes scare us, sometimes delight us, then always retreat to let us experience them in new ways. Include them all, and it looks like variety can create, and even enhance, equanimity.

May we be at peace in this time of pandemic.

True Happiness: The Second Mindfulness Training and the Heart Sutra

Three key passages speak to me from the Second Mindfulness Training of Thich Nhat Hanh, and all suggest the deeper truth of inter-existence:

True Happiness

I will practice looking deeply to see that the happiness and suffering of others are not separate from my own happiness and suffering...


...true happiness is not possible without understanding and compassion.


...I am committed to practicing Right Livelihood so that I can help reduce the suffering of living beings on Earth and stop contributing to climate change.


These passages are taken from one of the versions of the mindfulness trainings that appears at the Plum Village website of the Thich Nhat Hanh community, the Order of Interbeing. It sets forth for me three aspects of our interconnectedness, in order: interbeing itself, inter-feeling or deep empathy, and cooperative action. As we commit to the precept in its simplest form of "not stealing," we find we are already in deeper consideration of our vastly interconnected planet and its fate. What will life and property, all that we cling to, be worth in a warmed and less habitable world, where scarcity may create more prevalence of disease, homelessness, and tribal/geographic conflict, that is, outright war?


As I contemplated this training, I was immersed in and fascinated by the work of a Japanese artist and science teacher who had woven the 260 Chinese characters of the Heart Sutra into beautiful paintings. The gold characters were woven into images of the galaxy, the double helix of DNA, and other elements of paintings set in nature or Buddhist iconography expressing this most abstract yet image-focused sutra: the Heart Sutra. Thich Nhat Hanh has translated the sutra in a most subtle and inspiring way to show that its abstract premise- emptiness is form; form is emptiness- is not an equation of emptiness with non-being. Instead, it is simply another way of stating the truth of interbeing: that here are no separate self-entities; rather, everything inter-is.


Despite this truth of our world as one of linked biological systems, where has climate change been in our political debates? What are we stealing from future generations? Because we are in fact stealing something, namely, our sustaining earth's well-being, and it cannot be replaced by us because we cannot re-form it as it has first appeared. We can only create the conditions for its re-appearance. This hope can move us from fear and nihilism to deep understanding of interbeing, empathy, and positive action. And we must act now.






Thich Nhat Hanh, The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries. Berkeley, CA: Palm Leaves Press imprint of Parallax Press, 2017.


Paula Arai, Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra, the Buddhist Art of Iwasaki Tsuneo. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2019.

Reading and Post-War Trauma: Imagination, Healing, and Identity

A wonderful Christmas gift this year, and this past year's centennial of the First World War, have brought my attention to a new facet of my current research on the relationship between textual media and human identity. I received Jorn Leonhard's major study: Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War (Cambridge MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2018). As part of my interest in the eventual emergence of human rights, its normative and literary contexts, I coincidentally found in my Feedly a post about bibliotherapy and the "healing book" at The Conversation (from the Open University) and it made me take a second look at this concept.
I am skeptical of the notion that reading can induce empathy in all cases, and I'm looking into the implications of a 2018 New Yorker article- one of many in recent years on the topic- that got me thinking about it for my research, but healing is a bit different. This interesting area of inquiry involved the history of "literary caregiving" as established by one Helen Mary Gaskell and her "war library" as the effects of trauma were being make overwhelmingly evident by 1918. There is much to read on this aspect of bibliotherapy and I will be looking into limited definitions and applications of it; I am reading one of the linked articles now (Hasam, Reading, Trauma, 2018).
As Leonhard points out, the British office class was faced with the embarrassment of the "shell shock" phenomenon and some terrible, even torture-based "treatments" were applied to soldiers.
(Leonhard, Pandora's Box at 510). He does not seem to detail this development of the war library and its healing intent, but as I am discovering this subtopic as yet another outgrowth of Robert Darnton's scholarship on reading, I am adding it to the mix in my exploration of self and text and the relationship between book and body, information and the manifestation of human consciousness, and the contributions of both to the rise of human rights.

Democracy is Dying and other Book Reviews

After reading James Traub's article/review in Foreign Policy of several* of the more pessimistic run of books on the global Trump Era ("Democracy is Dying by Natural Causes," March 1, 2018 posted at 12:15pm), I was forced to contemplate the end of democracy, when it started, and where it is going, I posted the following comment (as" zendo4"):

Back in what is now the ancient history of 1970s legal philosophy and the dialogue between Ronald Dworkin and his critics, one distinction he made that always seemed clear to me (though fuzzy to many, so my view may itself be overly simplistic) is that between policies (expressed in majoritarian legislation) and principles (individual or minority rights guaranteed in our Bill of Rights, primarily, and defended in litigation). In both categories, the Constitution serves as the repository of basic norms (in the sense put forward by Hans Kelsen). Policies/legislation is tested but only after a hurdle of presumed deference is overcome. Principles such as non-discriminatory treatment of citizens and others within our borders should provide a check on populism when it becomes illiberal, that is, when a majority sees its welfare threatened by a minority and the latter is threatened in turn by the majority's intolerance.

That is why the most troubling norm violations, whether by FDR or by the Republicans with or without Trump, are threats to "pack" or deeply politicize the SCOTUS beyond the limits of what any realist would say has been present in the very process of Presidential nomination and Senate confirmation.  In other countries, too, a fatal weakness or brutal assault seems to focus on the independent judiciary. It seems a linchpin on which the continued rule of law in democracies depends.

We do not need a mercantile plutocracy or an aristocratic oligarchy or even the late Victorian versions of these to maintain control by technocratic elites. It may be true that such elites may serve a nation better than the incompetent elites of the Trump Era, with Trump himself the foremost of these as authoritarian leader of know-nothings.

What we DO need is some sort of movement that could project a serious moral authority within a democracy, something like a new civil rights movement, or Ghandi meets the Quakers, something like that, which is not religious- we have too much of that supporting our current intolerant re-tribalized world, in a deeply hypocritical way- but still able to connect to people who want both money and meaning in their lives. Don't we all, one might say. But can this movement perhaps be promoted by an effective body of people living the truths cited here of tolerance and forbearance?

This movement might start with education and the fervor of  students like those currently against the NRA. Just being optimistic.

* How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt; How Democracy Ends, by David Runciman; The People vs. Democracy, by Yascha Mounk; and On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder. 

Suddenly Preoccupied with War

Over the summer and into early fall this year, I have read two books on war and law as well as a novel about the lawlessness of Haiti. I have reflections on all of them; novels and dystopia are the province of Codex and Hypertext, however. Then, just within days, I watched all of Ken Burns's The Vietnam War and endured the ignorant statements of President Trump about North Korea in our current crisis of nuclear threat. After the racism of his comments about a destroyed Puerto Rico following hurricanes and collapse that he will not address (and for which he blames them!) finishing today with the horror of a mass shooting with automatic weaponry in Las Vegas, everything seems like war.
This phrase echoes the first of the two books I reflect upon here:
Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (Penguin, 2017).

How DID everything become war? Rosa, whom I know slightly as a librarian working with the Graduate Programs at Georgetown and who was chair of a committee I attended, has a good answer for this:

We don’t trust Congress, and the budgets of civilian foreign policy agencies have taken a beating, along with their capabilities. Faced with problems, we send in the troops—who else can we send? Unlike any other part of the government, the U.S. military can be relied on to go where it’s told and do what it’s asked—or die trying. As a result, Americans increasingly treat the military as an all-purpose tool for fixing anything that happens to be broken.

Haass, who is more the foreign policy wonk and less the lawyer in comparing his book with Rosa Brooks's work, concludes by suggesting that we need sovereign responsibility and acceptance of obligations and not just rights and self-determination. That is all well and good, but the United States has been struggling with being responsible for everyone and everything, and even with our military, we cannot do it. We cannot rescue the "failed states" that Rosa Brooks points out were never really states. Civil wars have erupted in response to various experiences of conquest and colonialism over the history of the world. This is certainly the case of Vietnam.

Rosa Brooks approaches world disorder differently and less abstractly than Haass; after reviewing issues in international law around piracy, drones, and the Responsibility to Protect, she looks at something interesting- the warrior identity that has been set off from daily life even in earlier pre-industrial tribal societies. And  we are still tribal- that is our central truth in my view-and in fact she is understated about that aspect. But she raises a fascinating point about war paint and ritual- we used to enter "war time" deliberately, not just drift into it.

Drift is exactly what Ken Burns shows happened in Vietnam. We just kept on pointlessly overlooking a people who needed help and mixed real blood with an abstracted  strategy that our competitors in global domination exploited. An ideology, a Communist and authoritarian reality drawn down from Kant's noumenal world and made phenomenal, became the enemy. And it was real, no question about it, when manifested in a liberation movement that was ignored and not assisted by the U.S. for fear of offending the French. (Odd that we should care so much for a country that was not strong in resisting fascism, but which did help us out in our revolution). In any case, the manifestation that took root when next the north turned to China and Russia was brutal indeed, and we could not stop the unlimited energy, local knowledge, and the support against us of two ambitious powers, each alone not our equal. But together...they encircled us with mayhem.

In the end, we did not learn and the Republican party in particular keeps scratching the itch of war, as it did twice in Iraq even after our defeat. Far from needing a weaker government, we need more democracy coupled with the rule of law, ruling over hyper-capitalism and restraining it in favor of the vulnerable. Rosa echoes what I've talked about with other often- an ideal of national service. I'll close with her recommendation:

War, for all its horrors, has long been one of the best and only means of harnessing collective human talent and energy to serve the group as a whole, and the military has long been the institution we use to bring talent together. If the military is becoming everything, why not use this as an opportunity to engage everyone—to include millions more Americans in the project of makingon the idea of universal service—an America in which every young man and woman spends a year or two engaged in work that fosters national and global security. the nation stronger, and the world a little less cruel? ...Imagine a revamped public sector premised on the idea of universal service—an America in which every young man and woman spends a year or two engaged in work that fosters national and global security.  Reimagining the military and combining it with a broad program of universal national service would be complicated and, in the short run, expensive—but in the long run, how else can we harness the creativity, energy, and talent we will need, in this uncertain and dangerous world?

Amen to this, and if we can overcome greed and egotism to achieve it, it would be the birth of an engaged social justice, much like the School of Youth for Social Service that Thich Nhat Hahn founded in 1966 in the midst of war-torn Vietnam. Thoughtfulness and compassionate action are as great a challenge as the excitement of war might seem to provide and profoundly more conducive to human flourishing.

At War with Ourselves -The Sympathizer

I am old enough that the Vietnam war was intellectually defining for me, yet privileged enough that it did not touch my life and my family even to the extent that it did many Americans. My brother was older and because of the after-effects of an earlier tragic car accident, not fit to serve. But he likely could have been deferred or excused in some other way.

Not so the energetic and skillful writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. His novel is deeply plotted through the perspective of the divided self, a hero/anti-hero, American/refugee, apparent supporter of the corrupt and autocratic South Vietnamese regime to which the U.S. clung as anti-communist, but a double agent as well for a communist regime that shared all the ruthlessness necessary to be conventionally revolutionary.

The comic satire of the book, especially around the racism of Hollywood and its hypocrisy about a war that for us was a "cause" but that for a whole people was utter destruction- well, it's brilliant.
The unnamed narrator, the General, the Auteur, are all like masked archetypes yet all too real.

The center of the book spiral down into the fateful duality of loyalty/betrayal, friend and enemy together going back to the ravaged country, and so the torture of "re-education" resonates deeply and cuts away the arrogance and cynicism that the narrator has used to escape from his own idealism and refusal to feel the sadness of loss. The narrator finds he had to continue to kill, not only in the U.S. to keep his cover and pretend to fight communism, but also to protect a friend. His confession- this book- is thus in the end about human rights and the right to be human, a right that neither capitalist nor communist flavors of authoritarianism can tolerate. The ability to kill and to suffer: this is what the narrator's divided self is left with. At the end he understands, too late perhaps, the value of life and knows at last why he must say "we will live."

Among the many literary echoes and allusions included by this English professor, what I found most frequently coming into mind was Herman Melville's The Confidence Man.  This neglected work, overshadowed by the writer's famous Moby -Dick and Billy Budd,  is about the divided America that the narrator of The Sympathizer embodies. The spook-narrator of the latter is very different from the American con-artist or huckster in that he emerges in tragedy and has few choices about how to confront a ruthless materialism. We are now living in another age of the "con," and governed by fraud. Our destruction of Vietnam ended up as a weird "con" as well- raising up hopes and patriotism even while going down in humiliating defeat.

What we arrive at in The Sympathizer is a recognition of the sanctity of living free, and here is where I find there is an outcome Nguyen alludes to but could not develop: healing. Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn has begun a spiritual and environmental movement that tries to be a powerful voice for such healing and wholeness and an antidote to racism (he was a peace colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr.), destruction, political hypocrisy, and torture: simple compassion. Viet Thanh Nguyen showed the need for this healing in his talk at Georgetown when he described the experience of his parents having to give up their store in L.A. to eminent domain- this outrage coming after surviving burnt villages and a horrific escape. Nguyen choked up at the podium, nearly crying publicly at the thought that his parents had to suffer more even after they achieved some peace and success.

Simple compassion. Even democracies don't cherish it. We have to hope that this can change. It was good to hear that Viet Thanh Nguyen now has a little boy. 

Newspeak, Agitprop, and Fake News: 1984 in the Age of Trump

In coming back to Orwell's 1984 after reading it in high school and noting a lifetime of references that have put it at the center of our literary culture ("Orwellian",) I am most struck by two things: the real beauty of so much of Orwell's writing and the deep darkness of the book. I am almost ashamed of having taken the work for granted, relegated it to a staple of what high school students read and discuss, and also of having found it much less interesting than I do now. I believe I can account for the change. Two things are different now: Many of us feel we are experiencing aspects of the threat Orwell portrays, and in addition, I think I am appreciating more acutely the degree to which this novel is about the nature of language and its connection to human dignity and flourishing. Now I get it: there is a deep and important relationship between words and deeds (as Chaucer observed in describing moral integrity in General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales: "the word must be cousin to the deed" ). There can be a path from text to torture.

Orwell feared Stalinism and yet fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He apparently came to regret this and after his sequence of careers- as an Imperial Civil Servant, teacher and writer. He became anti-Communist but against bureaucracy and managerial conformity as well. His seeming "all purpose" dystopia may be part of why his novel appeals to the planners of high school curricula. However, his ideas were more complicated than "balanced." He did specifically have Stalinism most in mind and was in fact worried about Ingsoc as centralizing and using efficiency in a way that would cause loss of basic freedoms.

Fortunately, in 2013 The Daily Beast published a piece that presents the text of a 1944 letter Orwell wrote explaining quite openly why he wrote 1984. He says

       Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers° of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler,Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means.

This is a very helpful statement, even if only a snapshot of his conscious reasons for writing as he did. He goes on to mention the attempted rewriting of history by Hitler to say the Jews started the war, and so on. Why this is now so very disturbing is obvious. Despite Orwell's own distrust of many around him who seemed less worried about socialism, and with the irony of his own use of a pseudonym (being born Eris Arthur Blair), he perfectly isolates the most chilling and persistent abuses of state power: 1) perversion of the meaning of words in the context of proclaiming that an obvious falsehood is true, and 2) endless war. The wars further nationalism and a reason for unity and distract from questioning Big Brother's version of events. Sadly, we are right now seeing how this is possible; Orwell had to have Winston Smith burn up news accounts. With the internet, there is no need. The pixels just come and go, might be erased or not but it is all very confusing isn't it? Who is to say one thing is more true than another?

If we do not resist what is happening here under Donald Trump and Steven Bannon, and if we do not see the admiration for dictator oligarchs like Putin for what it is, we run a risk that many commentators believe is unique in our history. Our own government certainly has misled us many times and maintained secrets. However, if this was done to achieve ends that leaders knew or suspected might be democratically rejected, it remains within a universe of discourse and human dignity that we know. It arises from some sense of shame and realization that some norms and rules are being broken. Vietnam and even the pretext of the second Iraq war can fit into this model.

Not so our current situation. Some "Anglo-American millionaires," to quote Orwell again as above, are seeing that Newspeak serves very well to undermine human decency. Ban enemies and name them and see if a terror attack or a war starts. That will be a useful distraction. Lie boldly and simply say that a former President personally "wiretapped" you, the videos showing you saying what war you supported or that you said many things and then the opposite- all of it can be accepted by those who are just so confused, aren't they? Don't all politicians lie?

Orwell writes beautifully. "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make the thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one work, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." It is not just that "war = peace" but that it does not matter to those who are not curious.

     Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

I think Orwell means here that when  true loyalty has been destroyed, the body can be treated as an object by the State- no one will come to save, or rescue you. And this will be not only out of fear, but also out of having forgotten who you are. "When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness."

We cannot let this happen to a leading democracy, and certainly not to human culture, but since thanks to Orwell and Trump we know it CAN happen, we have to make sure that we do not let a nationalist, white supremacist, ignorant, lying, misogynist, con artist, the savior of  "I alone can fix it," become our destroyer. We have to use the Constitution's rule of law and our democratic institutions to put a legitimate stop to what is going on right now.