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by Tara Carreon
Have you read Robert
Thurman’s new book, Inner Revolution – Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of
Real Happiness? From the subtitle, you'd expect to find a blend of
Jeffersonian democracy and Buddhist psychological independence. Sort of
the best of the West, and the best of the East. Good government from the
West, healthy spirit from the East. The subtitle, taken directly from the
United States Declaration of Independence, borrows a solemn ring of
credibility from that hallowed political document. Little would you
suspect that never once in the book's 322 pages would the Declaration of
Independence be mentioned. Yet that is the case. Because strangely enough,
Thurman has rejected democracy as the governmental system worthy to
sustain human happiness, reserving that signal honor for theocracy.
So what is this
"revolution" of which Thurman speaks? It is an event that never occurred,
called Buddha's Cool Revolution. This cool revolution, once imagined by
Thurman, echoes throughout history. The original "shot heard round the
world" was not fired from a cannon to announce the American Revolution,
but rather was Buddha's realization of enlightenment some 2,500 years
earlier. And while you may have thought that Michelangelo was the fire
behind the Renaissance, you'll be pleased to learn that the true stimulus
was the golden reign of dharma in Tibet under Je Tsong Khapa, a time so
transcendent that the rest of the world experienced a sympathetic cultural
flowering. These flights are not the excesses of Thurman's writing, but
its basic substance.
Rather than a cogent
discussion of what Buddhism can add to the development of fair government,
this book is a notebook filled with Thurman's piecemeal solutions for
diverse social ills. Displaying no consistent political philosophy,
Thurman encourages us, among other prescriptions, to provide generous
government benefits to the Buddhist clergy, in exchange for which society
will basically receive good vibes. This type of social calculus all works
out in a place Thurman calls the "Buddhaverse."
Thurman’s
Buddhaverse, a contraction of Buddha and Universe, is a familiar place in
the world of political philosophy. As far as I can tell, it fits the
definition of a Utopia. In Merriam-Webster, utopia is defined as “1: an
imaginary and indefinitely remote place, 2: a place of ideal perfection
especially in laws, government, and social conditions, 3: an impractical
scheme for social improvement.” Thurman’s Buddhaverse seems to qualify on
all three counts. Like Thurman's Buddhaverse, too, the term "utopia" was
invented -- Sir Thomas More joined the Greek words for “no” and “place,”
(“ou” and “topos”) to create the contraction “no-place.” Further, both
Thurman and More theorize morally coherent worlds that are intended to be
"perfect." But More's Utopia is this in some sense tongue-in-cheek, while
Thurman's Buddhaverse is dead serious.
Because Inner
Revolution is earnest political philosophy, Thurman tries hard to make his
Buddhaverse sound practical and achievable. Inner Revolution thus invokes
the language of commerce, describing Tibet’s monasteries as “enlightenment
factories” that churned out armies of wise men, and projects the image of
powerful take-charge Buddhas who “overpower obstacles” on their way to a
better tomorrow for all beings. Buddha is a “cool-war general” who “sent
out an army of monks and nuns to infiltrate all countries.” Thurman's
Buddha is the pivot of history, whose magical abilities can be invoked to
conquer any practical objection. Casting aside any suggestion that the
Buddha might've been made of ordinary human clay, Thurman's Buddha has
more outlandish characteristics than Paul Bunyan. According to Thurman,
Buddha arose from the boundary between infinity and form to take
reincarnation through magical apparition in the brilliant Tushita heaven.
He took rebirth as a male in the royal family of the Indian Shakya nation
on the planet earth in 563 BCE, in order to make an earthshaking
demonstration of the vanity of mundane ways by abandoning his kingdom,
wife, and child.
Arriving in our
earthly realm with the accumulated force of aeons of spiritual striving,
the Buddha’s enlightenment drove a spiritual shock wave around the world
that caused Zoroaster to revolutionize the Iranian religion, Deutero-Isaiah
to codify the five books of Moses, Socrates to teach young boys, Confucius
to write the I Ching, Lao Tzu to refute Confucius, and India to seethe
with creativity. This "cool revolution" gradually took over all existing
Asian governments.
If Thurman's Buddha
is a spiritual general, his monks are soldiers in a war to liberate
themselves from the obligation of working for a living. Buddha forced the
issue by forbidding his monks from performing any service to society
except for begging and sharing insights. The kings of Buddha's time,
Thurman says, were wisely persuaded to accept the intrusion of a “vast,
materially purposeless institution” in their country. Buddha thus used
India's “economic surplus” to integrate monks into society. This was the
beginning of what Thurman calls "an enlightenment movement."
The newly-empowered
monks flexed their muscle during the reign of King Ashoka, who "heated up
the cool revolution” in 262 BCE, imposing edicts to compel observance of
Buddhist rules. Completely inverting the meaning of the term "revolution,"
Thurman calls Ashoka's edicts a "top-down spiritual revolution." Such
torturing of language allows Thurman to argue that, because Ashoka built
monuments, made enlightenment a prominent ideal, and promoted
vegetarianism, he was a revolutionary. The one does not follow from the
other. Ashoka was a king, who enjoyed the kingly prerogative of oppressing
his subjects with his enthusiasms; this is far from a revolutionary
notion. Prior historical authors labeled Ashoka an opportunist who sought
alliances with the Buddhist clergy for secular purposes, but Thurman
assures the reader that Ashoka created a glorious civilization based on
the transcendent value of the individual, and "universal democracy."
History does not support these claims. Aside from "cool" rhetoric,
Thurman's enthusiasm for Ashoka's governmental style has little to
recommend it.
In Thurman's history
of Buddhism, we pass from Ashoka’s reign to 100 A.D. when “urgent adepts …
mad with compassion and excruciatingly aware of the priceless opportunity
of human life” demanded more from the Dharma – a quicker, more effective
path. Thurman thus imagines a new phase in his invented social chronology
of Buddhism. Having established the monastic class of non-workers to till
the fields of spiritual insight, the enlightenment movement demanded
“spiritual technology” to solve production problems that slowed the
process of manufacturing Buddhas. The Buddha responded to the demand by
releasing new methods, thus illustrating that essential spiritual
principle -- the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Not surprisingly,
this spiritual technology is in the form of magical ritual. The tantric
siddhas received initiation from Buddha, who annointed them with healing
elixirs of enlightened imagination, "propelling them out of the gross
world of the senses and into a dreamlike, magical, extremely subtle realm
where aeons are moments and universes are contained in atoms." Buddha also
transmitted visualizations of a "sacred architectural plan" that provides
the secret key to a mandalic reality so secure that adepts "perceive death
as a luminous foundation rather than a lurking doom." With these new
powers in their arsenal, Tibetan Buddhists were able to accelerate the
process of liberating beings to a rate previously unheard of.
In all fairness to
Thurman, this is the official Tibetan explanation for why their version of
Buddhism is best -- because it is packed with Vitamin "M" for Magic and
Mystery. Thurman simply retells the one-size-fits-all philosophy of his
monastic preceptors, and making use of the freedom of expression allowed
by monastic tradition, coins some new metaphors of his own. Thus does a
traditional scholar add to the fund of spiritual knowledge -- with
metaphor! And what metaphors!
Breaking out his
thesaurus of medical analogies, Thurman says the Buddha developed
“spiritual genetic engineering” to create “an immune system of the psyche
for swiftly conquering the demons of the unconscious.” Revealing further
medical discoveries, Thurman declares the existence of “a spiritual gene
of universal compassion that determines one's further evolution and marks
the biological continuum, making everyone a leader in the great effort
toward salvation of all.” This could win Bob the Nobel, but where is the
peer-review research, you want to know? Well that is difficult to produce,
because Buddha taught these genomic teachings “to gods and extraterrestial
bodhisattvas and leading students.”
In reliance on these
technologies, unheard of since the days of Lobsang Rampa, Tibet hosted a
spiritual industrial revolution that harnessed the Buddha's high tech
wisdom in the ultimate laboratory of the enlightenment movement. Equipped
with lamas capable of seeing through matter and discovering the nuclear
energy of the mind, Tibet became the secret dynamo of spiritual history,
turning the world toward Enlightenment.
Direct application
of lessons drawn from Tibet's political history is a little tricky,
however, because Tibet's history is a little different from our own. It
includes magical events. For example, Thurman tells the tale of
Padmasambhava's mighty struggle with the "ego of the national deity of
Tibet" that Thurman likens to the epic battle of “Godzilla vs. Mothra,
with cinematic special effects.” Appearing as a giant eagle, Padma
swallowed Tibet's “potent father deity” that had appeared as a ferocious
dragon. Just as things were about to wrap up, Padma’s partner in the
enlightenment project, King Trisong Deutsen, burst in on the epic battle
while the dragon's tail still thrashed from Padma’s mouth. Trisong
Deutsen's intrusion ruined the exorcism. Furious, Padma predicted that now
the deities of Tibet couldn't be relied upon to support the doctrine and a
terrible price would have to be paid. While interesting, this Tibetan
political anecdote is not exactly comparable to the Cuban missile crisis,
and Thurman's efforts to give current significance to this ancient tale
provide an example of how unproductive this process can be.
Then again, some
might wish to adopt the method whereby Tibet trimmed its military budget
by entrusting defense preparations to ancient mystical rites performed
long ago by mythical beings. Thanks to Padmasambhava, many generations of
Tibetans grew up inhabiting a “safe zone for Enlightenment,” generated by
Padma’s installation of “a high altitude mandala of radiant spiritual
energy that transformed the bloodthirsty savage deities of Tibet into
servants of dharma.” Padma still lives in a hidden paradise somewhere in
the jungles of Africa. Presumably, the lama/generals left in charge of the
supernatural shield were unable to contact Padma when the Chinese invaded.
Alas, another lesson to remember -- even the best technology is only as
good as its tech support.
On the other hand,
since the Vajra Strategic Defense Initiative did last for centuries, and
kept people feeling secure, it might be deemed a good deal. After all,
safe within that magic tent of invincibility, Tibet intensified its “inner
industrial revolution” by developing “industrial strength” monasteries
where individuals could transform their world into a Buddhaverse. The
entire people of Tibet felt protected while engaged in a sustained attempt
to create a society that provided everything individuals needed to achieve
inner enlightenment revolution.
And what were
Tibet's guiding political principles? What can we draw from their
experience to guide our own search for government that will foster human
enlightenment? Well, it certainly wasn't anything democratic. The Tibetan
lamas created a "buddhocratic political system administered by enlightened
heirarchs" born out of the “reincarnation institution.” In other words,
the monks ruled the country through the tulku system, whereby old monks
picked new monks from among the children of the realm, who in turn became
old monks who picked new monks, etc., ad infinitum.
For Thurman, this is
perfect! What could be better than appointing leaders vested with both
spiritual and temporal power to make all decisions? This is the apex of
both good government and true religion. Extending the logic, Thurman
cannot help but ordain that a fully functioning Buddhaverse must be ruled
by an enlightened tulku. Thurman pinpoints 1642 as the date when Tibet
achieved this goal, when a Mongol warlord designated the Fifth Dalai Lama
as a fit object of supreme reverence, and compelled his vassals to make
offerings to the new theocrat. Thurman reinterprets this act of military
compulsion as a showing of popular support for the Fifth Dalai Lama;
however, this belief that tyrants express the will of the people seems, by
this point, endemic to Thurman's thinking.
While the ascendancy
of a god-being completes the logic of Thurman's Buddhaverse, it seems to
have done little for Tibet. The subsequent histories of the Dalai Lamas
appear to be a mix of monastic intrigue and foreign manipulation,
concluding with the 13th Dalai Lama's frustration with his ministers and
effective suicide ("conscious decision to die early"). Thus, if Tibet was
Thurman's model Buddhaverse, it seems to have failed during testing.
More than the reign
of the Dalai Lamas, Thurman plays up the cultural era sponsored by Tsong
Khapa, the Gelugpa saint that Thurman declares was "completely
enlightened" and developed “a curriculum that anyone could follow to reach
enlightenment.” Tsong Khapa's enlightenment was a planetary phenomenon, a
“spiritual pulsar” emitting enlightenment waves that likely caused the
Western renaissance as a distant byproduct. During Tsong Khapa's heyday,
everyone perceived Buddhas in the sky above, day after day, over entire
regions and provinces. One-sixth of the Six Million Tibetans entered the
huge monastic cities springing up around the country. The Tibetans felt
they lived in a specially blessed and chosen land.
The greatest problem
with turning Tibet into a Lost Buddhaverse is the fact that it likely
never was one. In our longing to imagine a Utopian realm of perfection,
writers have often penned hymns to a removed, protected realm, guarded by
benevolent mystic powers, where the fortunate are able to learn timeless
truths in peace. By choosing the language of statecraft, commerce and
industry, Thurman cloaks his endeavor with a modern, can-do appearance.
But the substance of his philosophy owes more to the Lobsang Rampa school
of Tibetology than he would like to admit. Like Rampa's, Thurman's lamas
are thorough magicians, controllers of the elements, time, and the minds
of men. The question, with regard to such lamas, is not whether they can,
but whether they wish, to do magic.
While such adulatory
rambles once satisfied the need for any information about the lofty
Tibetans, those times are gone, and Thurman's book a relic of them. If he
has any coherent political thesis, it is that government should unite
church and state in the single embrace of Vajrayana Buddhism, with monks
and nuns charged with all-purpose duties of social betterment. To
seriously suggest that a welfare system run by pious bureacrats is the
next stage in government is mere naivete. And while the book might be a
useful source of politically correct quotes for politicians looking to
spiritualize the practice of statecraft, most would still get more from
the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence from which Thurman
lifted his subtitle:
"We hold these
Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these
Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers
from the Consent of the Governed...."
Unlike the
Constitutional framers, Thurman places his faith in the intuitions and
inspirations of the elite, the annointed, and the enlightened. He admires
Ashoka, who compelled allegiance to an ideal creed, and the Mongol lord
who made the Fifth Dalai Lama the ruler of Tibet. Thurman places no faith
in the value of government based on the "consent of the governed," and
thus his talk of democratic Buddhism is completely hollow. Inner
Revolution provides only a nostalgic prescription to return to faith in
special people and magical doctrines, and is marked by yearnings for
supernatural solutions to concrete problems. The book fails to provide the
up-to-date blending of spirit and politics promised by its title, and
instead succeeds best as another pep rally to preserve the fading cultural
heritage of Tibet.
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