Bin there, dun that

In the raucous din of the glowing and crowing about the thrilling John Wayne commandos killing Osama Bin Laden, I keep hearing my teacher softly speaking the Buddha's advice: killing a body solves nothing if you haven't killed the hatred and aggression in your own mind. In fact it only makes matters worse. Rinpoche likes to point out if you have an enemy and you harm or destroy that enemy, you automatically multiply enemies: that enemy's friends and family, people who also think they're right. So you still live with the cold fear of vengeance and retaliation. Nothing changes. It's like punching down Bozo the clown: Bozo springs back up again. It's just another episode in a shaggy dog story going on and on. And thus it was, true to his teachings, that news of the assassination was instantly followed by alerts to be extra careful this week on trains and airplanes and in US compounds around the world. For sure somebody will be out to get us.

The sad truth is we've already been had. Bin Laden was a heat seeking missile who achieved his devastating goal to destroy America. We are no longer the shining cohesive country we were before he blew up our buildings, Navy ships and moral high ground. We let him do that to us as his enablers. Our childish, panicky reaction to him was to drop everything we stand for and go native, to give ourselves up and shamelessly adopt his paranoid mindset. It's not just that assassination--which we resorted to-- is an Arabic word, meaning an Arabic concept. We blew ourselves away by truncating our democratic freedoms, subjecting each other to criminal like pat downs, destroying our economy with war profiteering, wrecking the lives of half our citizens while pouring billions of their tax dollars into the pockets of Pakistanis and Afghanis insidiously joyful at the prospect of turning our funding against us for their gain, degrading our standing in the world, creating more enemies and enmity, attracting more aggressive attacks and sacrificing our moral worth.

Having no firewall against his hatred, we absorbed it as our own. Instead of looking at what caused him to be our enemy-- what aroused all that violence and vindictiveness-- and dealing forthrightly with it, we merely decided to erase him, as though hating somebody back that much could stop the terror straphanging in our psyche and let us live happily ever after. By screaming our hatred is bigger than yours, we could move on without bothering to change our lives or behavior, without caring that not changing anything would inevitably cause more of the same problems that produced Bin Laden and thus merely create more like him. Our stuck mind, our warped perspective, our refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of our own actions made us our own worse enemy. Compared to the profound destruction we heaped on ourselves, Bin Laden taking down two towers was a piker.

My teacher has on several occasions told us his story of fleeing the horrors of the mad Chinese communist legions wiping out Tibet in 1959. He, his family and devoted monks were fleeing for their lives on foot and on horseback as the Chinese fired from behind. Rinpoche says at some point a Chinese soldier got out in front, near to him, and Rinpoche had a perfect moment to shoot him out of the way. But the teachings rose in his mind: to kill was to create a mountain of bad karma that would devour any merit gained for lifetimes. And it would achieve absolutely nothing in the end. There would only be more people to kill, more aggression, more hatred, more bang bang you're dead. So Rinpoche goaded his horse and flew as fast as he could. A bullet came at him, right at him and should have smashed through his head or chest. But before his eyes, he saw it deflected into the ground behind the horse, and a shimmering chimera like image of his protector deity in front of him.

"I didn't kill anyone," he says. "I didn't create any bad karma or more hate. I rode on to safety. I had absolutely nothing but it all worked out rather well." Yes indeed. By virtue of his virtue, he has magnetized thousands of devoted followers in Chinese lands and ours. He oversees six enormous monasteries filled with monks and nuns, and a boarding school for about 400 penniless children. In person he has spread the Buddha's teachings beyond Asia to four other continents and published more than a dozen books. Six charities are in his name.

So now Bin Laden is dead at the bottom of the sea. Did this ancient equation of an eye for 3,000 eyes really change anything? Did abandoning the high ground make us high and mighty? Are we safer now? Freer? More united? As we ponder the terrifying duplicity of the Pakistani government and the horrifying depravity of the one in Afghanistan-- whom we have enabled with our treasury, is today the start of happily ever after that turns out well for us? Or did, as Buddhists like to say, nothing really happen?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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