The first chapter of our 5 part series: Zenpolitik, in which Van Acker explores taoist practices and political pandemonium. Regardless of where one sit on the political spectrum, this read aims to push readers off their laurels by taking a grim look at contemporary America.
As he gazed into the fiery plume of the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenhimer, sequestered in the McDonald Ranch House laboratory in White Sands, New Mexico, was to recall a line from the Bhagavad Gita in which Vishnu, revealing his universal, multi-armed form, declares: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
“We knew the world would not be the same,” Oppenheimer later said of that moment, “a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.”
Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, was an atheist and never adhered to Hinduism in a religious sense. Hindu scripture and other aspects of Eastern thought served a utilitarian purpose for him: a method of structuring his outlook on life and on his own sense of duty. Indeed Visnhu, at the point of the “I am become Death” line shows his cosmic form to convince Arjana, the conflicted prince, to take up his worldly responsibilities. Here Hindu philosophy and the horrifying reality of Vishu’s world-destroying avatar is not an imputice to withdraw from the world and its illusions, but to discover the reservoirs of truth latent within our apparently grubby material circumstances.
This piece is about Zen, a distant inheritor of Hindu philosophy. I mention Oppenhimer in large part to dispel any misled assumptions about the primacy of Eastern thought for conceptualizing and addressing the gravest of political issues. Oppenhimer more than likely had at least a passing familiarity with Zen and whether by this knowledge or by his studies in Hinduism, he nonetheless came to an apt reflection that demonstrates what I expect will be the most difficult part of my argument to stomach:
“It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell….The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.”
This sort of claim is characteristic of Zen and characteristic of the kind of ideas I will put forward that, to many readers, may seem counterintuitive, impractical, and irresponsible in light of our current political circumstances. But I propose that if you investigate the inherent architecture of our current political conflicts you will begin to see the ways our assumptions about reality have embedded us deeper in issues we can only escape by re-orienting our priorities as citizens. One aspect of Zen thought that this Oppenhimer quote suggests is that much of the political strife in the world we provoke ourselves by our neurotic attempts to control and classify reality for our own interests. What are our interests? And how do we really know that they are good?
On January 6th 2021, following a rally held by the former President of the United States, a hodge-podge confederation of alt-right activists, extremists, Proud Boy chapter leaders, self-proclaimed Neo-Nazis, a viking, and an impassioned delegation of Grandmothers for Trump stormed and occupied the seat of American democracy. This farcical insurrection was a lot of things: embarrassing, degrading, horrifying, and depressing. But it was also a stark indication of just how much the political broiler of the past decade has warped the American identity. Of all the things you can say about it, I don’t think you can say that it represented a coherent political orthodoxy. Other than the miniscule amount of undercover alt-left agitators the crowd seemed to be composed of people swept up in a deranged kind of hero worship of Donald Trump. While their general goal was to “prevent” the confirmation of Joe Biden as president-elect, the range of people convinced of this course of action—from Nazis to Grandmothers—suggests that the forces that spurred them on were far from a conventional kind of political dissatisfaction. You’ll notice that as they occupied the interior of the Capitol and trampled over one another in the wings outside, almost everyone in the crowd had their phones poised. I can’t help but draw the connection between the desire to document their assault and their beloved reality TV president, who perceptively tapped into the immiserated mindset that reality TV depends upon: the promise that with a stroke of luck, a little talent, or some shameless display of sex or self-debasment the reigns of your destiny will be handed back to your along with the attention and admiration of millions. Our egos and, in extension, our desire for absolute and undivided control over our own destinies, which at its upper limits involves the desire to control the destinies of others, have dropped us into a bramble of polarizations between right and left, good and evil, black and white, at a time when the illusory nature of these dualisms have never been more explicit and obvious to all. Engaging in this “this team” “that team” politics has made us insane, whether in this recent manifestation of the alt-right mindset or in the form of its alt-left shadow-self. Our involvement in such a bad faith game is degrading all of us and it's high time that we find a way of deprogramming ourselves from it.
Zen Buddhism or the Great Doctrine is an invaluable resource for understanding and acting in matters of practical politics and not the kind of misty, new-agey, do-your-own-thing religion that western mischaracterizations have made it out to be. It is hardly a religion–at least not in the Western sense of the word. In fact many translations refer to Zen rather as a “method” or “way.” For the purposes of this piece I’ll defer to Alan Watts to give this working sense of what Zen “is:”
“If I allow you to leave here this evening under the impression that you understand something about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely. Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever. So that any concept, any idea, any words that I shall put across to you this evening will have as their object [the point of] showing you the limitations of words and of thinking….Zen in its essence is not a doctrine–there’s nothing you’re supposed to believe in– and it’s not a philosophy in our sense, that is to say a set of ideas, an intellectual net in which one tries to catch the fish of Reality.”
For my own part I’ll tentatively add that Zen seems to be a kind of context generated by discipline and meditation for understanding that which we don’t know. In writing a piece like this I am bound by the unique irony that Zen by its very nature is something practiced and, as Alan Watts suggests in this quote, something that fundmandaly eludes words. But I do think that there are a few ways into Zen that will help contextualize our current political problems.
As a matter of course, Zen suggests that the ego, your personal identity, the “I” that you answer to, is an illusion. Zen instead teaches that we are all one dance of energy in and out of the material world. This moment, as you read this sentence, is the current state of the big bang. And it follows that you are not an atomized being separate from that happening, you’ve only been led to identify with a certain interior monologue sustained by a complex set of symbiotic relationships. Relationships that, logically speaking, have no rigid points of separation. After all, there is an independent ecosystem of autonomous bacteria in your gut that allows you to digest your food. The line therefore between “you” and the “ecosystem” of which you are a part is not cut and dry.
In accordance with its roots in early Buddhism, Zen teaches that we suffer because we desire; because we try to cling to the remotest flowing tendrils of the big bang in the form of wealth, pleasure, or power—all means of arresting bits of reality for the sake of over-compensating for the one illusory “I” that we perceive as the center of the universe. Zen seeks to help us recover from this delusion through mediation and the disciplined practice of specific concrete arts like fencing, archery, and painting. The aim in these practices is to give yourself so totally to the routine and unconscious mastery of these arts that your ego and you own self-consciousness towards the craft dissolves such that each release of the bow string or flick of the ink brush becomes a way of transparently interfacing with reality purified from our human concepts, expectations, and prejudices. The hand reflecting the form of the bow, the bow reflecting the form of the hand.
But it is also true of Zen that to utter these teachings in this way is most certainly a kind of profane mischaracterization or at least an unsatisfactory attempt to embody what it means. This is because Zen asserts the limitations around language and human understanding as tools for grappling needlessly with necessarily unresolveable mysteries about reality. It makes a point to stress that the words “the sound of a bell” are not the sound of a bell. Meditation and Zen craft is therefore how you experience its teachings directly as opposed to attempting to apprehend them with concepts. The following sections are a few thoughts on how these ideas—our oneness, the limits of language and concepts, and applied mediation—can serve as a way of reevaluating our political circumstances and how we can comport ourselves more productively in manifesting a more harmonious society.