If you are a leftist, you might be a Buddhist

On a miserable day in 1966, I was being shot at from several directions and jumped into a ditch for cover. In seconds the field in front of me was riddled with bullets, as American soldiers returned fire on Vietnamese rebels determined to eliminate their sworn enemies, foreign invaders bent on returning colonialism under a new guise.

Then a Buddhist monk dressed in a bright saffron robe walked between the two warring groups, calmly and determined to ignore the mayhem. I was awestruck, watching him hold the hem of his robe above the tall, wet grasses, a look of disgust on his face. The gunfire slowed as he walked the entire length of the field and disappeared on the horizon.

The monk may have been a follower of Thich Nhat Hahn, or simply Thay (teacher, as he is called) who had devised a Buddhist order of what he calls “interbeing,” or the relationship of all things. Thay’s followers do not have enemies and refuse to take sides, so Thay was not welcome in his own country, by either the People’s Republic side, or by the American puppet government in Saigon.

It was my first exposure to Buddhism, and little did I know that I would be confronted by it again and again throughout my lifetime.

My next Buddhist experience was on a street where someone threw a hand grenade attempting to kill Vietnamese who were American supporters, resulting in the death of about 4 people and the wounding of perhaps fifteen, including me—the only American on the street. One piece of shrapnel crossed the street and hit my wrist, which gushed blood several feet into the air.

Stunned and in shock, I was frozen, staring at the squirting blood and thinking I was going to die. I’d never seen blood gush from a human body like that. Time stopped, and I stood there like an idiot watching the blood spurt until an elderly woman appeared, putting her hand on the wound to stop the bleeding with pressure, and guiding my free hand over to do same so that she could prepare further treatment.

She had a very wrinkled face, I remember writing a poem about her years later. Her look was one of hatred—as a Buddhist she despised the war and the foreigners who had come to oppress her people. But her response was one of “right action” as the Buddhists say—she had no choice but to heal me.

She presented what looked like a shoe polish tin, into which she spat, and wiped a salve with her spit into my wound. For a moment I thought she might be trying to poison me, but I felt I had no choice other than to accept her merciful act. She then wrapped a dirty white cloth around my wrist and fastened it somehow. I exhausted my Vietnamese language skills in thanking her, while she returned only the unremitting look of abomination.

For a month, I was afraid to unwrap the bandage, worrying that I might have gangrene and would wind up losing my hand. When I finally took the bandage off, I was shocked to see it was completely healed, with a very tiny scar. The piece of shrapnel must have been very tiny, but hit an artery to cause the massive bleeding which I’d thought was a major wound.

My next Buddhist experience came in Nha Trang, a beautiful city I’d visited more than once because the Fifth Special Forces were based there and it was my job to travel to all of the combat units (infantry, cavalry and the like, including variations like ranger units, air cavalry, armored cavalry etc., gathering information for Military Assistance Command). Since I was under fire so much everywhere I went, I loved to visit Nha Trang because it was a peaceful place, having been a French resort before the war, in colonial Vietnam.

That beautiful day I walked through downtown Nha Trang to a point where the street was blocked by a crowd of people in front of me, so I had no recourse but to stop to see what was happening.

A Buddhist monk sat on the ground, an assistant pouring liquid over him. I thought it might be a ceremony and I wondered why it didn’t take place in a temple. I noticed the seriousness on the faces of the people in the crowd break into shock as the assistant lit a match and set fire to his master. The flames shot up fifty feet into the sky as I realized the liquid was gasoline. The burning Buddhist looked into my eyes as if to give me a message, but I was an ignorant Westerner who deciphered nothing from it. Decades later his twisted face came back to me, and I realized what he was doing to slip into my consciousness forever, together with the memories of others in the crowd.

More than a decade later I was working in an office in Alexandria, Virginia, supervising computer analysts when one of the workers named Curt challenged me to a game of tennis. He was a big man, very big, so I assumed he would be clumsy and I would be able to easily win the game. If I won, he would buy tickets to a basketball game, and if he won, I was to go to Buddhist meetings for two months.

To make a long story short, Curt beat me so badly that I had to prepare for the Buddhist meetings. After the game he confided that he once had a scholarship to Harvard to play on their tennis team. I’d been suckered.

Curt belonged to a Buddhist group that practiced a Japanese form of Buddhism called Nichiren Shoshu. At the meetings we chanted “Nam myoho renge kyo,” a verse with different meanings to different Buddhists, but I once saw a translation by the magnificent singer, Tina Turner, “The lotus grows in mud. The deeper the mud, the more beautiful the flower.” I think the Vietnamese Master Thay would like that relationship of mud to a flower that eventually rots to mud and provides sustenance for new flowers—an obvious way of expressing his interbeing philosophy.

In the Buddhist philosophy (I don’t consider it to be a religion as practiced by most Westerners or most Northern Asians) all things are related to all other things–Thay’s concept of interbeing. Therefore, if I cause harm to come to you, I harm myself, because we are related. If I cause good to come to you, I bring good to myself.

There are said to be a hundred-thousand sects within Buddhism, so to understand it is not easy for one determined to be absolutely correct. Thay’s Buddhism is made up of Theravadan, or Southern School Buddhism, mixed with Mahayana, or Northern School Buddhism.

People interested in knowing how the philosophy works, rather than deciphering long, wordy treatises difficult to follow, should read Thay’s little book Peace is Every Step, the most powerful book I’ve ever read. Most of the stories in the book are only one or two pages long and I would recommend “Doing Dishes,” as a good place to start.

As a leftist I am in awe of a Buddhist called Bodhidharma, who lived in the fifth century and brought Buddhism to China in a form the Chinese call Ch-an. Ch-an later traveled to Korea where it is known as Sen, and from there to Japan where is is called Zen. This is roughly the form of Buddhism most Western Buddhists embrace.

It was from the teachings of Bodhidharma that I learned to appreciate the principle of the “three poisons,” in which all of the evils of the world are broken down into hatred, greed and delusion. I was amazed by the simplicity of describing everything that’s wrong with three words. I have since reversed the three poisons into their opposite for words to make a better world, and a simple leftist philosophy, encouraging compassion, sharing and understanding—the antidote to the three poisons.

Zen is a Mahayana form of Buddhism in which there are no supernatural creatures, no gods, angels, devils or the like. Zen practitioners often joke that when the historical Buddha was asked by a follower, “Are you a god, are you a prophet come to teach us?,” the Buddha laughed and replied simply “I am awake” (Theravadans don’t agree with this)

So these followers, including most American Buddhists I’ve known, do not believe the Buddha was a god, as do some Theravadans, but instead, simply an enlightened man.

What the Buddha found was that if one meditated deeply enough and long enough, one would discover knowledge from one’s own mind, innate knowledge we all have at birth that connects us to everything else in the universe.

After such learning, the Buddha said, we know that time and space exist only in our imaginations, as do wealth, power and fame, which are only illusions we create.

And so it was that when the Buddha prepared to die and his followers sobbed and asked that he remain with them, he asked that they please let him go, because he was tired of pretending that there is a past and future, and all of the other illusions that made life into continual suffering for him.

In the early 1980s, the burning Buddhist monk from Nha Trang often came back to me in my dreams and I could hear him seemingly shouting “What does one have to do to convince people to oppose war?” He has persecuted me with this, just as he’d intended, for most of my life. So I joined the local peace center and eventually became a board member, marching in every antiwar march and realizing that not just Vietnam, but all wars are wrong.

In many Buddhist sects one’s only purpose is to perfect oneself, ignoring all that happens in the world, but that is not true for the followers of Bodhidharma and the modern engaged Buddhism. To be engaged is to attempt to make the world better before one dies, and in my Zen it is to promote compassion, sharing and understanding.

If everyone promoted compassion, sharing and understanding, we would have a heaven on earth, with no wars, poverty or hunger. It seems to me that it is the ultimate in being leftist.

I do love the opportunity within Buddhism to choose one’s beliefs—that is why there are a hundred thousand sects. Religious people who are Christian or Jewish, and people who are atheist practice Zen, again suggesting it is not a religion itself but a philosophy.

I don’t guess there is another person on the planet with my exact beliefs, which are largely the promotion of the three antidotes, as I call them—compassion, sharing and understanding—and I can’t imagine why anyone would wish to oppose that.

I would be happy if others thought it was a good idea, but I think everyone should continue to believe whatever they think is right for them. Then again, if you’re a leftist who believes in pushing compassion, sharing and understanding, you might just be a Buddhist.

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.