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Dr. Ken
Brashier, Associate Professor of Religion (Chinese) and
Humanities (Chinese), Reed College. Dr. Brashier has created
a website on Buddhist Hell Scrolls that is used by scholars,
students and an inquiring public. His knowledge and
scholarship is sought for lectures and conferences.
Presently, he is reworking and streamlining his websites. As
he says, “I will be putting the new scrolls on along with a
great deal of textual history, the stories from which the
hell descriptions came, etc.”
Thank you for inviting me to
contribute a few thoughts on the Buddhist idea of peace. To
be honest, I can’t give the proper ‘Buddhist perspective’ as
I am not a Buddhist, but I can give you the perspective of
someone who has studied and thought about Buddhist
philosophy and popular Buddhism. So if I were asked about
what a Buddhist might say about ‘peace,’ I might say
something like the following:
The ultimate Buddhist
premise of existence is “nothingness” but not the
nothingness of nihilism or some kind of ultimate void.
Rather, everything is transient, is in flux, is changing.
Thus there are no static “somethings” and hence only
nothing. (Buddhists then struggle with this idea both
because “nothing” can be treated like a “something” and
because it takes a something to define a nothing. But we
won’t go there for now.) Modern Buddhists like to point to
what we know of the physical world with everything in a
perpetual state of becoming. In terms of our physical
bodies, we are what we eat, shedding cells to replace them
with new ones; in terms of our mental selves, we are the
combination of previous ideas and influences from being a
lineage member, a culture member, a human, a primate and so
forth. There is no independent stasis of anything. While we
don’t think about it much, none of this is too
controversial, surprising or even interesting so far.
Yet if we truly buy
into the Buddhist message of ‘everything in flux,’ that
includes the self. There is no perpetual self but just a
temporary conglomeration of atoms and ideas riding the brief
waves of momentum. We falsely project an idea of self-ness,
and to Buddhists, that’s the first domino that, once it
topples, leads to a long row of mistakes we make. If I
project a self, I then define borders around that self,
separating it from other. I enhance those borders using the
tools of greed (“That is ‘mine’ and not ‘yours’.”) and
hatred (“Stay away from ‘mine’.”) in terms of material goods
and mental conceptions. And it goes downhill from there.
Thus we live in a projected false universe originating from
the false notion of self, and our goal should be to dissolve
the idea of stasis that leads to the idea of self and
selfishness.
To me, that’s Buddhism
as succinctly as I can make it. So what might a
philosophical Buddhist say about the idea of peace? I think
– and this is just Ken musing – a Buddhist might extend his
or her thinking about peace from this idea of false borders
forming around the self. The nation state is just a really
big self, and the more nationalistic (or ethnic or
religiously exclusive) we become, the more we enhance the
borders between self and other, the more we use the tools of
greed and hatred, and so forth. If Ken were king for a day,
he might recommend dissolving the idea of kingdom itself, at
least in terms of borders. Borders are in fact a relatively
new conception – the old idea being foci or centers rather
than borders – but borders have been around for so long now,
we are habituated to think they are natural and the only
option. If the United Nations were stronger (and if Ken were
king of the United Nations, and if Ken were a Buddhist, and
…), it might/would/should invest in a new kind of border
concept to interject into conflict regions. It
might/would/should come into a conflict region with a
ready-made idea system that said, “Okay, for fifty years, we
suspend the idea of border in this place, and there will be
no line drawn for a while. For a little while, we’ll leave
it as a region in limbo, in flux, in confusion and THAT’S
OKAY.” The Buddhist eraser to the world map could indeed
have a practical, site-specific application, but only if
both sides of a conflict are willing to accept just a little
bit of this diminishment of static ‘self.’
So much for theory.
Like any religion, Buddhism on the ground is not run on
theories and philosophies but on practices and habits. The
popular Buddhist extension of this idea generates ethics
such as not killing, not stealing and not even thinking harm
toward others. All that generates false ideas of self. So if
one passes through the Buddhist hells between lives, one
will meet with all the beings with whom one generated
friction between self and other. One will see the mirrors of
karma in which all those past encounters will be reviewed
for you and for the magistrates who will mete out justice
that takes the form of torture in the afterlife and type of
rebirth leading to the life to come. Only those who have
embraced peace of mind, who avoided contention entirely,
will be led off into the Western Paradise, transcending the
world of projected self v. other.
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Note: I’ve been looking
at your hand scroll on line, and there’s so much I could say
about it, but I’ve probably bored you to death already with
the above. First, I can translate the title of your Ming
Dynasty handscroll. It seems to say, “Qingshang anzhou
shanshui juan,” which could literally translate as “Purity
above and peacefulness all around’ landscape scroll” or “A
landscape scroll depicting purity above and peacefulness all
around.” “Purity” could also be “clarity”. “Landscape” is
literally “mountain/water” and is a standard term for
scrolls like this.
Hell Ten
(shown: Part Six-Peace Journey) is at:
http://www.reed.edu/~brashiek/scrolls/Hell10.html
<http://www.reed.edu/%7Ebrashiek/scrolls/Hell10.html>.
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