September, 2010

In her 1938 essay, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf cautioned women to think critically about joining the professions men have created. She writes, “Those opinions cause us to doubt and criticize and question the value of professional life – not its cash value; that is great; but its spiritual, its moral, its intellectual value. They make us of the opinion that if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion – the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. Moneymaking becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more than they can do themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.”

In his recent book, Happiness, Vietnamese Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh offers practices and teachings to regain this sense of proportion and to return us to our senses. The foundation of happiness, Nhất Hạnh suggests, is nothing other than the ancient Buddhist practice of mindfulness, adapted to the exigencies and opportunities of modern life.

In his classic book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Nhất Hạnh wrote about his youthful monastic days and how he was instructed by his teachers to use gathas, or mindfulness verses, to stay rooted in the present moment. In Happiness, he offers many gathas to enable us to live in the here and now.

For example, as you hear your cell phone ring, you can use this gatha in sync with breathing calmly in and out: “Words can travel thousands of miles. May my words create mutual understanding and love. May they be as beautiful as gems, as lovely as flowers.”

Or, when walking on a beautiful autumn day, you can remember to look up and recite this gatha: “Breathing in, I recognize the blue sky. Breathing out, I smile to the blue sky.”

And when someone ignores us or talks down to us, we can call to mind this gatha: “Breathing in, I see anger in me. Breathing out, I smile at my anger.” He also mentions this Vietnamese proverb, which emphasizes the need to let go of such negative states of mind: “Be angry, sad, or annoyed for five minutes.”

Gathas are indispensable but so is a Sangha, or community that offers support for this practice. Sometimes, we think in grandiose terms of all we want to accomplish—at work, in school, or in social change movements. Evoking the spirit of the Dao De Jing, about the journey of a thousand miles beginning with one simple step, Nhất Hạnh writes, “If even just two people create a Sangha and an atmosphere of mindfulness, the peace and harmony around you will grow and soon your Sangha will grow too.”

The Second Body System is a method he encourages people to use at home, work, school, and community groups: Your own body is your first Body, and someone in your class is your Second Body, that is you look after someone, and that someone looks after someone, and someone will stay in touch with you, too.

I’ve cited several specific practices here, but in the book there are scores of trainings and exercises developed over some sixty years of experience. One can experiment with a couple and gradually integreate these, and more, into daily life.

Like many of his works, Nhất Hạnh’sHappiness seems simple (some might say simplistic), but the emphasis throughout is on practice. Yesterday, Sandra sent me a challenge by a Palestinian, Jawad Siyan, who said, “[International solidarity activists are] very weak. These people who want change, they are weak. Palestine is not for them a subject that they take to the heart. It’s volunteer work. They do it when they have time. If you want to solve this problem, you have to take it on as a job, not as a hobby.”

Likewise, the practice of mindfulness is not something we do when we have time, or as a hobby we take up here and there. Like solidarity with people facing oppression, it is a subject we need to take to the depths of our hearts. And it begins with the breath and this moment.

City Lights Open Media Series has done the U.S. public a service in publishing historian Howard Zinn’s The Bomb, a two-part pamphlet that is a contribution to critical thinking about war, and about one of its modern manifestations, that of high-altitude bombing.

Part 1 is Zinn’s essay on the atomic bombings of Japan and part 2 is about his own wartime participation in and later retrieval of the history of the Allied napalm-bombing   of a French town, Royan. Both essays could be read in less than a couple of hours but it will take a lifetime to integrate their implications in our personal and collective lives.

In his first essay, Zinn reminds fellow citizens of the enormity of unnecessary damage and destruction done by the two U.S. atomic bombings of Japanese civilians.  Statistics point to some 200,000 killed immediately by the two bombs. But Zinn stresses that “we need personal testimonies, not statistics to free us from our numbness: Only with those scenes in our minds can we judge the distressingly cold arguments that go on now, sixty-five years later, about whether it was right to send those planes out those two mornings in August of 1945. That this is arguable is a devastating commentary on our moral culture” (26).

For example, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, a Japanese man said to a filmmaker:  “I ordered the driver to stop, with the funeral pyres still burning in the city, and turned to the American soldiers: ‘Look there. That blue light is women burning. It is babies burning. Is it wonderful to see the babies burning?’”  (52).

Zinn’s second essay is based on research he did in the mid-1960s about the French town of Royan, which he had helped bomb in the spring of 1945. The official line was that it was a military necessity to bomb the German soldiers garrisoned in the vicinity of Royan, even though the end of the war was clearly in sight.  The task for Zinn and his fellow pilots:  “…to bomb pockets of German troops remaining in and around Royan, and that in our bomb bays were thirty 100-pound bombs containing “jellied gasoline,” a new substance (now known as napalm)” (66).

After the town was bombed for three days, the German soldiers surrendered.   Practically all the buildings of the town had been destroyed.  Zinn notes that “[t]he evidence seems overwhelming that factors of pride, military ambition, glory,  and honor were powerful motives in producing an unnecessary military operation” (80).

After his participation in the European theater of the war, Zinn had a leave for some weeks before he was to join the effort in the Pacific.  Reunited with his wife, he noted that one day in August they read the headlines about Hiroshima:  “I remember our reaction: we were happy.  We didn’t know what an atom bomb was, but clearly it was huge and important and it foretold an end to the war against Japan and if so I wouldn’t be going to the Pacific, and might soon be coming home for good” (19). Thus, he was like countless Americans who were jubilant or relieved that the bombs ended the war.

About the bombing of Royan, Zinn recalls, “From our great height, I remember distinctly seeing the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches struck in fog. I was completely unaware of the human chaos below” (67).  Earlier in the book, he writes more specifically that being such a pilot means “seeing no human beings, hearing no screams, seeing no blood, totally unaware that down below there might be children dying, rendered blind, with arms or legs severed”(18).

Over the decades, Zinn went from being this thoughtless and just-war bombardier to a critical citizen and historian:  By the period of U.S. B-52 carpet bombing in Indochina in the 1960s-1970s, Zinn had become experienced in questioning authority, refusing obedience to the war machine, and facing the victims of U.S. violence.

Able to break through the nationalist propaganda that conditions us to avert our gaze from or minimize U.S. belligerence, Zinn offers us a simple, though demanding, task: “We can reject the belief that the lives of others are worth less than the lives of Americans, that a Japanese child, or an Iraqi child, or an Afghani child is worth less than an American child” (63).