Buddhadasa Bhikkhu:
The Middle Way Life in a World of Polarity
By Santikaro
We
human beings have long acquired the habit of creating dichotomies and
opposition, and our understandings of scriptural texts and traditions
have not avoided this tendency. We frequently find polarity imposed as a
device of convenience: tradition versus reform, meditator versus
scholar, etc. Some Buddhist teachers may fall into such dichotomies.
Ajahn Buddhadasa is one who does not. For him, the middle way is about
finding the right course between extremes.
Ajahn
Buddhadasa grew up during a time of great change in Thai society, as
aggressive western “civilization” and imperialism made deep inroads.
This change brought about many benefits such as roads, schools, and
advances in health care, but much destruction resulted as well. The
forests of Thailand diminished from over 90% to just 10%, prostitution
became rampant, and traditional modes of life have disappeared. Many in
Thailand responded to the pressure to westernize by embracing and
profiting from it. Others took the opposite approach, resisting and
refusing what the West had to offer. Ajahn Buddhadasa sought the middle
way between these opposing alternatives.
The
organizing element in Ajahn Buddhadasa’s response to Western
imperialism and modernization was the Dhamma. This may seem
self-evident, but it wasn’t true of the political-economic elite or even
the majority of Thai monks, especially the senior monks who were often
much more interested in maintaining tradition and privilege than in
living from Dhammic principles. One of Ajahn Buddhadasa’s most notable
qualities was his ability to hold the Dhamma at the center—not a
bookish, memorized Dhamma, but a living, creative expression of it. He
and others, such as Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn,
represent some of the healthiest Asian responses to the tremendous
economic, political, and military pressure emanating from the violent
capitalist-driven ideology of the West.
Faced
with the dichotomy of slavishly following or stubbornly refusing the
progress of Westernization, Ajahn Buddhadasa felt that there were many
things to learn from the West. Like the Dalai Lama, he was fascinated
by science. When he was a young monk, he cherished the typewriter given
to him by an early benefactor. He experimented with radios and early
recording equipment, and was an excellent photographer. He read Freud
and other psychologists, and philosophers like Hegel and Marx. He
believed there was a way to use some Western developments
constructively. Instead of blindly refusing them, he thought that one
should learn how to adapt them - understanding them while being mindful
of their potential dangers.
He
thought that Asian peoples could learn from what those in the West
were thinking and doing, without surrendering their own wisdom. Many
Thai students in Europe and in Western-style educational systems were
being told by their European teachers that they came from an “inferior
civilization.” There were some who believed what they were told.
Fortunately, others did not. Ajahn Buddhadasa emerged as the main Thai
voice pointing out that Europe had created nothing comparable to
Buddhism, while acknowledging the economic and military advancement of
the West. He presented the view that Asian Buddhism had an attitude
much more fitting with science than Christianity, and a kind of wisdom
largely missing in the West.
Ajahn
Buddhadasa taught that in order to wisely absorb what is coming from
the West, and to filter what is unhealthy, we need to stay grounded in
an understanding of Buddha-Dhamma. This had a great influence on Thai
society, especially among the progressive elite. Though the meaning is a
bit different for those of us born in the West, the dilemma remains:
we live in a culture that is very powerful and has some healthy,
creative aspects, but also a tremendous amount of violence and
destruction. How are we going to sort through this? In which
principles can we ground ourselves?
Another
dichotomy occurs between conservative and radical. The Thai activist
and scholar Sulak Sivaraksa coined the term “radical conservatism” to
describe Ajahn Buddhadasa. In some ways Ajahn Buddhadasa was
conservative. He thought that Southern Thai culture was healthy,
balanced, and wise, and he wanted to help conserve it. He was also
conservative, in certain respects, regarding Buddhism, believing that
Buddhism needed to stay grounded in its past without being stuck
there.
At
the same time he was radical. Ajahn Buddhadasa honored the Buddhist
tradition that had developed over 2500 years, but he also recognized
that the many changes it had been through were not in keeping with its
core. In trying to understand and preserve the tradition, he endeavored
to find the original and essential aspects of Buddhism through
carefully reading and studying the Pali suttas. He insisted on reviving
core threads of Buddha-Dhamma—teachings such as suññata (emptiness) and tathata
(thusness) —that were in danger of being obliterated by certain
elements of traditional Theravada Buddhism. Although this could be
considered a conservative activity, it seemed very radical to the
monastic hierarchy. Rather than end up on one side or the other of this
conservative-progressive dichotomy, he was able to be progressively
conservative and conservatively progressive, avoiding a common
ideological lock-down.
Another key dichotomy he addressed is that of lay versus monastic. Senior monks discouraged him from teaching anatta (not-self) and paticcasamuppada
(dependent co-origination) to lay people on grounds that it would
“confuse them.” But in good conscience Ajahn Buddhadhasa could not stop.
He argued that these dhammas are core to Buddhism, and all people who
want to end suffering have a right to learn them. For him, ending
suffering is not a monastic issue, or even a Buddhist issue, but a human
issue. He took on the work of making the Dhamma available to anyone
who might be interested, whether they were lay or ordained, Buddhist,
Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Sikh (and he had students from all of these
traditions).
Ajahn
Buddhadasa also challenged the meditation versus daily-life practice
dichotomy. The term ‘Dhamma practice’ is often used as a euphemism for
meditation both in the West and in Asia . When people
say ‘practice’ they are referring to the practice of sitting on a
cushion or doing walking meditation, and sometimes specifically on
retreat or in a formal setting. This has raised questions and created
confusion about how to practice in daily-life, and how to respond to
the demands, complexities, and needs of the world we live in.
Central
to Ajahn Buddhadasa’s approach is the idea that “Dhamma is duty; duty
is Dhamma.” Dhamma practice comes down to doing our duty, which
inspires a further investigation into the nature of that duty. For some
of us our duty is something dictated to us by our family. The
government tells us about our patriotic duty. Capitalism tells us about
our duty to consume to keep the economy strong. Ajahn Buddhadasa
believed that duty must be discovered by and for ourselves. We should be
mindful of messages from our family, government, culture, and economic
system, but in the end it is our own responsibility to identify.
Sometimes it’s about taking care of the body, sometimes it’s about one’s
profession, and sometimes it’s about social action. Ultimately the
core duty is to let go of self and to be free of suffering.
Finally,
there is the spiritual versus worldly dichotomy. There are teachers of
Theravada who believe in a clear duality between samsara and Nibbana,
the worldly and transcendent. And there is much in the West that
dichotomizes these as well, including leftist political traditions that
want to abolish religion and be simply materialistic. There are others
with the opposite bias: “Forget politics and forget social issues, all
you have to do is practice, practice, practice and escape to Nibbana.”
While Ajahn Buddhadasa didn’t believe that samsara (worldly) and Nibbana
(transcendent) are one and the same, he did insist that Nibbana is
found only in the midst of the world. For him the way to end suffering
could only be found through suffering. He described Nibbana as “the coolest point in the furnace.”
The Dhamma perspective that made all this bridging possible is an understanding, both intellectual and experiential, of idappaccayata—the
universal natural law that all things happen because of causes and
conditions. Nothing is static, absolute, or fixed. Seeing this, we avoid
becoming trapped in ideology, positions, and dichotomies. Ajahn
Buddhadasa believed that an approach which may have worked for a while
may also finally reach its limit. The more we understand that everything
depends on causes and conditions, that nothing is fixed, the easier it
will be to navigate the intellectual and ideological dichotomies of
our world, and to follow the middle way of non-suffering in this
lifetime.
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