I wrote this to friends on the day the Towers fell, the Pentagon was attacked, the fields of Pennsylvania left more death---and America began its own Mahabharata.
***
Brothers and sisters,
Surely these are trying times for all the people of our planet. Lives
we have not yet even imagined to be affected by recent events will be
unwittingly drawn more directly and deeply into the conflict, just as
so many have already been so deeply changed by events so far. Innocent
people are destined to die, just as innocent people have already seen
their lives end without the slightest moment's notice. What lies before
us is a conflagration that promises even more devastation of lives and
we will constantly be asking ourselves if we have the moral wherewithal
to lay claim to notions of justice, goodness, or the right.
These are important issues within the Mahabharata, one of the sources
from which we can gain a deeper understanding of what lies before us.
Scriptural resources of our tradition are as rich in solace and comfort as they are in wisdom and
reflection. Sometimes that reflection and wisdom is unresolved, it means
not to offer answers but to consider possibilities, realities, and
stubborn facts about nature and civilization.
The Mahabharata includes within it, as you know, the Bhagavadgita whose
Voice of Divinity is a call to action even as it demands a deeper
contemplation of life in every form of the everyday as well as in its
ultimacy. There is also a sober message that we might resist as
peace-loving and non-violent people and that is what I wish to bring out
here, not as an advocate of such views
but simply for reflection. There are teachings here we may find a
valuable resource not for their solace but for the wisdom that might
emerge from reflection upon them.
So allow me a moment to turn to events in the Epic as an instruction in
matters that we can usually resist taking seriously because we don't
have to. Now I think we need to take them to heart and choose for
ourselves what to do and what sorts of persons we are and wish to
become.
First, it is crucial to remember that the struggle that emerges in the
Epic is of one family with many branches. We are one humanity and yet
we have different mothers and fathers, different up-bringings, different
understandings from the experiences that have informed our lives. We
are one human family but with genuine differences. We must remember
that there is as much to lament, regret, forgive, forget, and remember
as to celebrate and affirm. There is no polly-anna-ish vision of
spiritual goodness in the Mahabharata: good people make serious mistakes
and are admonished to learn by acknowledging them and turning to a
deeper reality, one of Divine Goodness in the Self. We are born of God
and born to uncover that Divinity in our hearts. That, we are told time
and again, is our most noble purpose even in the face of other stubborn
facts.
As Mahabharata unfolds we learn that Dharma, manifesting as the heir to
the throne in the form of a man named Yudhisthira must assume the
responsibilities of leadership. Yudhisthira is a reluctant king, as all
those with such power must be. He would prefer transcendence and
retirement to worldliness and engagement. He seeks the noble purposes
and goals of human life. And yet as the Epic evolves he is drawn deeper
and deeper into his responsibility as King, as the leader of the Pandava
branch of the family, and the leader of civilization itself.
Civilization, we learn, is the only context in which we can uncover our
common humanity and reveal our essential and common divinity. Without
civilization we are as less than animals: surviving merely to eat and to
persist without higher or nobler aims.
Duryodana, his cousin and adversary, believes he and his side of the
human family have been disinherited unjustly and that their portion of
the kingdom cannot suffice to satisfy their claim on all of it. Despite
the entreaties of his father, Dhrtarastra, Duryodana ultimately rejects
Yudhisthira's final request for peace, just five villages in which to
live in obscurity. Duryodana will settle for nothing less than the
destruction of his cousins. He seeks to deny them life itself, the very
right to be.
We can wonder how people, such as Duryodana, come to such destructive,
dare I say, evil aspirations. For to deny others the right to live, to
be, is indeed at least some definition of evil, as is the hope to make
others' lives as miserable as possible to satisfy one's own interests.
Evil has more than one face, more than one form, just as does the
Divine. It is difficult to comprehend Duryodana's "irrationality" but he
seeks first to terrorize his cousins and then to destroy them finally,
unequivocally, without mercy or care for the destruction he may bring to
his own people. (The episode of the cattle raid during the Pandava
exile, in which Duryodana and his lot come to disturb even the withdrawn
lives of their cousins, is indeed "terror" made manifest, even if it
fails and backfires against them. The Pandava end up saving their
terrorist cousins and retreat again to the forest to serve their term in
hopes of peace.)
How can such devastating evil arise and sustain itself? Doesn't
Duryodana know that he will bring upon himself and those he loves even
more pain and devastation?
Mahabharata makes clear that desire, fear, anger, hatred, and delusion
can indeed infect a human heart and that as they grow and mutate, they
seek to perpetuate themselves at whatever cost to that heart. Evil is a
cancer, a virus, a reality defined as that which self-destructs even as
it seeks to foster its own presence in its host. Evil is a corruption
of the Goodness that is the Heart, a corruption that is permitted
because human spirits are free to choose and to manifest the conditions
that permit its growth because we are made Free. But it is plain as
well that Mahabharata does not always consider "redemption" possible in
this civilized world if the contagion of evil has reached a stage of
growth in which its course is sure
self-destruction. No, like cancer in advanced stages, unfortunately
not detected when less violent or drastic means might have prevented its
spread, the Mahabharata offers in Duryodana the example of an evil that
must be rooted out before it destroys that which gives civilization its
purpose.
And so we turn again to Yudhisthira who is responsible not only for
nurturing and protecting the good but facing those situations in which
there is no alternative but to face the reality that evil will not
contain itself. We admire Yudhisthira's constant hope for peace and
reconciliation, hi willingness to turn his cheek and to accept
responsibility for the injustices his own family has perpetrated against
their cousins. We wonder how far he will go in making amends, how
deeply his instincts for peace and non-violence will serve his family's
interests, how far he is willing to go to protect what is rightfully
theirs. Yudhisthira ponders and reflects; he often appears indecisive
for his patience. But he understands, certainly better than any of his
brothers and perhaps even his elders, that as soon as he acts to counter
the threat of genuine evil taken root, he runs the risk of becoming that
evil or, at least, succumbing to the moral bankruptcy that expends
whatever goodness motivated his actions. In short, Yudhisthira knows
that cutting out the cancer of this evil will cost him and his family
their dignity, their moral claims to goodness; he knows that he will
kill innocents even as he seeks to destroy only that which is bent upon
the destruction of his family. He knows that by "winning" he will lose
some part of himself. He knows that by "losing" he puts at risk the
very notion of civilization itself. He knows that it is possible to
co-exist, to live in difference and with difference, that we need not
agree to agree that we all have the right to live. He wonders why
others cannot share this conviction.
Mahabharata presents a reality that accepts the possibility that others
may insist their differences are irreconcilable, that some may reach the
point of conviction and action in which our very existence is beyond
their willingness to admit. Mahabharata presents to us the fact that
their position, their vision of uncompromising destruction violates the
deepest principles of civilization itself. And Mahabharata understands
that those who must defend civilization even as they contemplate the
meaning of justice itself are not just liable but assured of inflicting
upon themselves the curse of acting in uncivilized ways.
There are no "good guys" in the Epic, not in the sense of untainted
warriors whose principles remain uncompromised by their deeds. No,
everyone and especially Yudhisthira is morally compromised. And yet
Krishna ( a deity) insists that Yudhisthira act as he does, that he not
allow the evil that has arisen---even if he, Yudhisthira has helped
create it and is, at least in part, guilty of creating it---to sit by
idly and accept his own destruction. Krishna insists that the Pandava
have a right to life itself and that they not, in the contemplation of
their own creation of the evil of their cousins and their complicity in
their oppression, fail to understand their grim duty.
There is no glory in the Epic's war. It is war in the truest sense of
irreconcilable differences resolved by violent means and unremitting
will. It is painful, horrible, ugly: the longest book of the
Mahabharata, the sixth, is called ironically the "Shanti parva," the
book of "peace" because here begins the war and the nearly endless
descriptions of devastation and battlefields strewn with innocents as
well as warriors.
Throughout Mahabharata we need to take note of a few persistent points
of contemplation:
* Yudhisthira never takes delight in the destruction of his enemies,
even as he realizes that there can be such a thing as an enemy. Instead
he is sobered by the ways his own dignity and goodness are invariably
compromised. He constantly seeks peace even in the midst of war.
* It is wrong, plain wrong, to allow the contagion of evil to persist.
Even as we seek to foster the cures for such evil in ourselves and
others, we cannot allow it to wreak its havoc. The Mahabharata is not
passivist nor does it wholly reject violence as a "solution." Instead
it means to explore the implications of the moral compromises that
violence as a solution will bring to those who seek justice. It means to
point out how it is possible to discern the difference between
justice and vengeance or terror.
We as an American nation are on the brink of this last stage of moral
compromise in which we will certainly have no unequivocal or untainted
claim to being the just or the "good guys." That could not be plainer
to me. Let us pray that we retain some deeply rooted and serious
capacity to reflect upon our moral responsibilities. Surely the
American nation will act and respond to this horror with violence. I do
not mean either to exalt or condemn such a response but merely to
suggest that we have sources that enable us to reflect upon violence as
a course of action. Less clear to me is how we Americans will avoid
triumphalism and prevent our banners, our flags from becoming symbols of
vengeance and anger just as they represent "evil" to those who oppose us
or use them to represent their own pain and discontent. We have within
our military power such devastating means. What remains to be seen is
the character of our will.
I was deeply moved by the statement of the Dalai Lama who has, in the
traditions of Buddhism, made clear that violence begets violence. But
the sobering reality of a pernicious evil, be it cancer or human
intolerance, is in the view of the Mahabharata a fact that must lead us
to reflect more and more deeply on violence itself. We are born
violently, lovingly cut from the cord that gives us life as we are
pushed into the world from the womb of a mother who loves us
unconditionally. This is a fact of life itself and how Life seeks to
remind us that we exist only by Grace and Love.
But if we allow those who deny life itself to become the paradigm of
civilization then life will surely not be worth living at all. That is
surely one important teaching of the Mahabharata.
I am not advocating a view here and do not mean to propose solutions.
I've tried not to interpret the Epic in ways that reflect a particular
bias but merely to present to you its ancient understandings as I have
reflected upon them. We are warned not to become the evil we must
confront, but we are also reminded that the failure to confront that
evil consigns us to a death of ignominy and a future in which there is no possible co-existence of
differences. We must somehow seek to remind ourselves that justice is
the foundation upon which we create a context for civilization and that
civilization, however fragile it may be, is our collective, human
responsibility.
I hope you will forgive me the vanity this missive suggests.
I find no self-importance in all of this. Instead I mean
merely to reflect aloud in a reasoned voice with those whom I love and
respect and who I believe will love me for who I am even if we come to
differences of understanding or opinion. In my heart I seek to
experience the deeper unity in which the Self is One and in my life I
hope to live in ways that reflect how that Oneness assumes the infinite
forms of difference that make the universe so remarkably sublime.
with great love,
Douglas Brooks Professor of Religion University of Rochester Rochester,
NY
>>
***
Brothers and sisters,
Surely these are trying times for all the people of our planet. Lives
we have not yet even imagined to be affected by recent events will be
unwittingly drawn more directly and deeply into the conflict, just as
so many have already been so deeply changed by events so far. Innocent
people are destined to die, just as innocent people have already seen
their lives end without the slightest moment's notice. What lies before
us is a conflagration that promises even more devastation of lives and
we will constantly be asking ourselves if we have the moral wherewithal
to lay claim to notions of justice, goodness, or the right.
These are important issues within the Mahabharata, one of the sources
from which we can gain a deeper understanding of what lies before us.
Scriptural resources of our tradition are as rich in solace and comfort as they are in wisdom and
reflection. Sometimes that reflection and wisdom is unresolved, it means
not to offer answers but to consider possibilities, realities, and
stubborn facts about nature and civilization.
The Mahabharata includes within it, as you know, the Bhagavadgita whose
Voice of Divinity is a call to action even as it demands a deeper
contemplation of life in every form of the everyday as well as in its
ultimacy. There is also a sober message that we might resist as
peace-loving and non-violent people and that is what I wish to bring out
here, not as an advocate of such views
but simply for reflection. There are teachings here we may find a
valuable resource not for their solace but for the wisdom that might
emerge from reflection upon them.
So allow me a moment to turn to events in the Epic as an instruction in
matters that we can usually resist taking seriously because we don't
have to. Now I think we need to take them to heart and choose for
ourselves what to do and what sorts of persons we are and wish to
become.
First, it is crucial to remember that the struggle that emerges in the
Epic is of one family with many branches. We are one humanity and yet
we have different mothers and fathers, different up-bringings, different
understandings from the experiences that have informed our lives. We
are one human family but with genuine differences. We must remember
that there is as much to lament, regret, forgive, forget, and remember
as to celebrate and affirm. There is no polly-anna-ish vision of
spiritual goodness in the Mahabharata: good people make serious mistakes
and are admonished to learn by acknowledging them and turning to a
deeper reality, one of Divine Goodness in the Self. We are born of God
and born to uncover that Divinity in our hearts. That, we are told time
and again, is our most noble purpose even in the face of other stubborn
facts.
As Mahabharata unfolds we learn that Dharma, manifesting as the heir to
the throne in the form of a man named Yudhisthira must assume the
responsibilities of leadership. Yudhisthira is a reluctant king, as all
those with such power must be. He would prefer transcendence and
retirement to worldliness and engagement. He seeks the noble purposes
and goals of human life. And yet as the Epic evolves he is drawn deeper
and deeper into his responsibility as King, as the leader of the Pandava
branch of the family, and the leader of civilization itself.
Civilization, we learn, is the only context in which we can uncover our
common humanity and reveal our essential and common divinity. Without
civilization we are as less than animals: surviving merely to eat and to
persist without higher or nobler aims.
Duryodana, his cousin and adversary, believes he and his side of the
human family have been disinherited unjustly and that their portion of
the kingdom cannot suffice to satisfy their claim on all of it. Despite
the entreaties of his father, Dhrtarastra, Duryodana ultimately rejects
Yudhisthira's final request for peace, just five villages in which to
live in obscurity. Duryodana will settle for nothing less than the
destruction of his cousins. He seeks to deny them life itself, the very
right to be.
We can wonder how people, such as Duryodana, come to such destructive,
dare I say, evil aspirations. For to deny others the right to live, to
be, is indeed at least some definition of evil, as is the hope to make
others' lives as miserable as possible to satisfy one's own interests.
Evil has more than one face, more than one form, just as does the
Divine. It is difficult to comprehend Duryodana's "irrationality" but he
seeks first to terrorize his cousins and then to destroy them finally,
unequivocally, without mercy or care for the destruction he may bring to
his own people. (The episode of the cattle raid during the Pandava
exile, in which Duryodana and his lot come to disturb even the withdrawn
lives of their cousins, is indeed "terror" made manifest, even if it
fails and backfires against them. The Pandava end up saving their
terrorist cousins and retreat again to the forest to serve their term in
hopes of peace.)
How can such devastating evil arise and sustain itself? Doesn't
Duryodana know that he will bring upon himself and those he loves even
more pain and devastation?
Mahabharata makes clear that desire, fear, anger, hatred, and delusion
can indeed infect a human heart and that as they grow and mutate, they
seek to perpetuate themselves at whatever cost to that heart. Evil is a
cancer, a virus, a reality defined as that which self-destructs even as
it seeks to foster its own presence in its host. Evil is a corruption
of the Goodness that is the Heart, a corruption that is permitted
because human spirits are free to choose and to manifest the conditions
that permit its growth because we are made Free. But it is plain as
well that Mahabharata does not always consider "redemption" possible in
this civilized world if the contagion of evil has reached a stage of
growth in which its course is sure
self-destruction. No, like cancer in advanced stages, unfortunately
not detected when less violent or drastic means might have prevented its
spread, the Mahabharata offers in Duryodana the example of an evil that
must be rooted out before it destroys that which gives civilization its
purpose.
And so we turn again to Yudhisthira who is responsible not only for
nurturing and protecting the good but facing those situations in which
there is no alternative but to face the reality that evil will not
contain itself. We admire Yudhisthira's constant hope for peace and
reconciliation, hi willingness to turn his cheek and to accept
responsibility for the injustices his own family has perpetrated against
their cousins. We wonder how far he will go in making amends, how
deeply his instincts for peace and non-violence will serve his family's
interests, how far he is willing to go to protect what is rightfully
theirs. Yudhisthira ponders and reflects; he often appears indecisive
for his patience. But he understands, certainly better than any of his
brothers and perhaps even his elders, that as soon as he acts to counter
the threat of genuine evil taken root, he runs the risk of becoming that
evil or, at least, succumbing to the moral bankruptcy that expends
whatever goodness motivated his actions. In short, Yudhisthira knows
that cutting out the cancer of this evil will cost him and his family
their dignity, their moral claims to goodness; he knows that he will
kill innocents even as he seeks to destroy only that which is bent upon
the destruction of his family. He knows that by "winning" he will lose
some part of himself. He knows that by "losing" he puts at risk the
very notion of civilization itself. He knows that it is possible to
co-exist, to live in difference and with difference, that we need not
agree to agree that we all have the right to live. He wonders why
others cannot share this conviction.
Mahabharata presents a reality that accepts the possibility that others
may insist their differences are irreconcilable, that some may reach the
point of conviction and action in which our very existence is beyond
their willingness to admit. Mahabharata presents to us the fact that
their position, their vision of uncompromising destruction violates the
deepest principles of civilization itself. And Mahabharata understands
that those who must defend civilization even as they contemplate the
meaning of justice itself are not just liable but assured of inflicting
upon themselves the curse of acting in uncivilized ways.
There are no "good guys" in the Epic, not in the sense of untainted
warriors whose principles remain uncompromised by their deeds. No,
everyone and especially Yudhisthira is morally compromised. And yet
Krishna ( a deity) insists that Yudhisthira act as he does, that he not
allow the evil that has arisen---even if he, Yudhisthira has helped
create it and is, at least in part, guilty of creating it---to sit by
idly and accept his own destruction. Krishna insists that the Pandava
have a right to life itself and that they not, in the contemplation of
their own creation of the evil of their cousins and their complicity in
their oppression, fail to understand their grim duty.
There is no glory in the Epic's war. It is war in the truest sense of
irreconcilable differences resolved by violent means and unremitting
will. It is painful, horrible, ugly: the longest book of the
Mahabharata, the sixth, is called ironically the "Shanti parva," the
book of "peace" because here begins the war and the nearly endless
descriptions of devastation and battlefields strewn with innocents as
well as warriors.
Throughout Mahabharata we need to take note of a few persistent points
of contemplation:
* Yudhisthira never takes delight in the destruction of his enemies,
even as he realizes that there can be such a thing as an enemy. Instead
he is sobered by the ways his own dignity and goodness are invariably
compromised. He constantly seeks peace even in the midst of war.
* It is wrong, plain wrong, to allow the contagion of evil to persist.
Even as we seek to foster the cures for such evil in ourselves and
others, we cannot allow it to wreak its havoc. The Mahabharata is not
passivist nor does it wholly reject violence as a "solution." Instead
it means to explore the implications of the moral compromises that
violence as a solution will bring to those who seek justice. It means to
point out how it is possible to discern the difference between
justice and vengeance or terror.
We as an American nation are on the brink of this last stage of moral
compromise in which we will certainly have no unequivocal or untainted
claim to being the just or the "good guys." That could not be plainer
to me. Let us pray that we retain some deeply rooted and serious
capacity to reflect upon our moral responsibilities. Surely the
American nation will act and respond to this horror with violence. I do
not mean either to exalt or condemn such a response but merely to
suggest that we have sources that enable us to reflect upon violence as
a course of action. Less clear to me is how we Americans will avoid
triumphalism and prevent our banners, our flags from becoming symbols of
vengeance and anger just as they represent "evil" to those who oppose us
or use them to represent their own pain and discontent. We have within
our military power such devastating means. What remains to be seen is
the character of our will.
I was deeply moved by the statement of the Dalai Lama who has, in the
traditions of Buddhism, made clear that violence begets violence. But
the sobering reality of a pernicious evil, be it cancer or human
intolerance, is in the view of the Mahabharata a fact that must lead us
to reflect more and more deeply on violence itself. We are born
violently, lovingly cut from the cord that gives us life as we are
pushed into the world from the womb of a mother who loves us
unconditionally. This is a fact of life itself and how Life seeks to
remind us that we exist only by Grace and Love.
But if we allow those who deny life itself to become the paradigm of
civilization then life will surely not be worth living at all. That is
surely one important teaching of the Mahabharata.
I am not advocating a view here and do not mean to propose solutions.
I've tried not to interpret the Epic in ways that reflect a particular
bias but merely to present to you its ancient understandings as I have
reflected upon them. We are warned not to become the evil we must
confront, but we are also reminded that the failure to confront that
evil consigns us to a death of ignominy and a future in which there is no possible co-existence of
differences. We must somehow seek to remind ourselves that justice is
the foundation upon which we create a context for civilization and that
civilization, however fragile it may be, is our collective, human
responsibility.
I hope you will forgive me the vanity this missive suggests.
I find no self-importance in all of this. Instead I mean
merely to reflect aloud in a reasoned voice with those whom I love and
respect and who I believe will love me for who I am even if we come to
differences of understanding or opinion. In my heart I seek to
experience the deeper unity in which the Self is One and in my life I
hope to live in ways that reflect how that Oneness assumes the infinite
forms of difference that make the universe so remarkably sublime.
with great love,
Douglas Brooks Professor of Religion University of Rochester Rochester,
NY
>>
