Buddhism.. Shaivism.. touching the mystery

I’ve recently discovered I’m living near to a Buddhist temple that seems to have its main links going towards the Burmese Buddhist tradition, with an enormous golden Buddha statue at its heart. It has a beautiful smaller shrine around the back with a marble Buddha surrounded by a small collection of interesting statues in different styles, and fresh flowers. This is where I like to sit, burning incense and candles, enjoying the rare peace which inhabits that space. Over the last few weeks the spot seems to have become a haunt of a mother cat and her kittens, who wander about the place knocking over things.

In his essay on shooting an elephant Orwell said that when in Burma he’d half like to stick a bayonet into the guts of the Buddhist monks who made his life hell there as a agent of British tyranny. I wonder how his experience of being the agent of authoritarian rule in Burma ultimately informed his politics, and I don’t know if he held onto his feelings towards the monks in later years. But the tradition of Buddhist monks sticking it to authority continues today in Burma, and one prominent dissident U Gambira apparently has now found asylum in Australia.

It makes me wonder how the Buddhist injunction to ahimsa (non violence) plays out in a revolutionary context. In the case of ancient India, and perhaps Tibet you could say that ahimsa might have led to Buddhism being wiped away.. or not because after all it is still as popular as ever. I am not sure if the original conception of ahimsa was adopted as an attitude towards the ritual sacrifices which were so common in ancient times. Vegetarianism is perhaps a more recent adoption of Buddhism, early Buddhism was ok with meat eating in some circumstances such as when it was offered while begging. I am reading a book that argues for the impact of Buddhism on Greek thought particularly on Pyrrho, ‘father of scepticism’, but the writer claims that the teaching of the actual Buddha is virtually impossible to reconstruct as it is buried under so many layers of practise and texts from later centuries. Another book about Buddhism I was reading recently portrayed Buddha as a kind of rationalist who merely wanted to develop a practical set of guidelines to living a good life free from suffering.  All quite different to modern Buddhism in all its many forms which have embedded beliefs such as rebirth and karma and added on stories of hungry ghosts and bodhisattvas as well as all the various monastic codes.

I’m thinking about all this because I’m writing songs with a revolutionary sort of vibe and trying to decide what my stance is on all this. I am essentially a pacifist through and through but I also believe there is an order to things and you can easily find yourself in an impossible situation where a pacifist stance is absurd. Essentially my belief is that if you are acting as if you aren’t the actor – that events are merely playing out through you according to their nature and you are like a puppet on a string – then there is no activity which you might not do. I also think that anything you do with an iota of agency will return to you – the consequences of every act will drag you on through the spiny clover palace of life whether you like it or not. That sort of karmic event also requires a kind of passivity to endure it and maybe then you might emerge the other side with your spirituality intact. After all that’s just what’s happening now. That’s how I feel about my life, it’s playing out according to the big plan, or perhaps it’s just a little plan. Shiva Ahamasmi. All my desires are like ash, burned up in the flames of the fire that is Arunachala.

The interplay of Buddhism and Shaivism and Advaita are interesting to me. I like Advaita because it seems philosophically sound and similar to Buddhism but without the monastic baggage. Shaivism I connect to because it is everywhere in the parts of India I visited in the south, and I felt the touch of a living deity or power on a level that I can appreciate somehow. It also had a fertile interplay with Buddhism in places like Kashmir in medieval times. When I was in temples in India I saw all the deities as being the manifestations of the one thing—that indescribable thing that lies at the centre of it all. This magic mysterious thing that keeps it interesting for me, in a way that isn’t captured by any rational thought. For me the Buddha is present right now, like an indestructible something which humans have been grappling to understand for two and a half millennia. I don’t think any words or systems can ever really get there for more than a few moments. Even my own attempt at a ‘Pλosm‘ system based on the number five and with deities such as Gaia and Truth and the Muses and the Unknown feels pretty underdeveloped now. My songs might be another way of trying to point at it or capture it. Or maybe my silence will point at it/