Formed From Within

I've moved and renamed my blog. Look for future posts at Formed From Within.

Revolutionary Love: On Hooking Up, Waiting, and the Buddha's Middle Way

To avoid all evil, to cultivate good,
and to cleanse one's mind—
this is the teaching of the Buddhas.

—Buddha, Dhammapada 14:183

Last March, The New York Times Magazine published an article about Harvard's abstinence group—True Love Revolution—showing two extremes of sexuality at Harvard. On one end was Janie Fredell, former president of True Love Revolution and a vocal advocate for abstinence. On the other was Lena Chen, author of the infamous Sex and the Ivy blog and an equally vocal advocate for—well, certainly not abstinence. The two faced off on October 25, 2007, in a debate The Harvard Crimson Magazine called, in a rather sexist and immature article, “chock-full of mutual respect” and “BORING!”

“To say that I have to care about every person I have sex with is an unreasonable expectation,” Chen explained to the Times Magazine, “It feels good!” While opposite in content, Fredell was strikingly similar in tone: “Why bond yourself so intensely when you’re not sure you’re going to spend the rest of your life with this person?” She went on to explain that there is nothing “unbalanced or irrational” about her relationships.

Before I go any further, I should say that I do not mean to critique Chen or Fredell, their lifestyles, or even their ideas; but rather, the radical poles that they have come to represent—fairly or not. And what is most striking about those poles is not their extremity or immodesty—as the Times Magazine suggested—but rather their self-absorption.

Chen is taken aback at the notion that it might be good to care about the people we sleep with—as if there is anyone, anywhere it would be bad for us to care about. What she really seems to be saying is, “It feels good...for me.” She ignores the simple fact that pursuing instant gratification alone often makes us—let alone other people—miserable. As for Fredell, she totally ignores the destructive consequences of her abstinence ethic for those of us who either wish not to or simply cannot marry. Hers is an ethic designed exclusively for straight, white, upper-class Christians. What's more, there is something cold in her arguments. “Why bond yourself so intensely,” she asks, as if another person might not be worth the risk, as if a balanced and rational love were possible—or even desirable. For Chen, emotional intimacy is unreasonable; and for Fridell, physical intimacy is. What both women fail to really consider is the other person.

These extreme views of sexuality aren't just a problem at Harvard, either. I went to college at the University of West Georgia—a relatively small, rural, public university. Like at Harvard, there were certainly people who fell into the middle; but, the campus culture was strongly divided between socially conservative, evangelical Christians and promiscuous, alcohol-driven fraternities and sororities. Things were stuck between physical distance and emotional distance. I always felt like a complete misfit. On one hand, I was vice-president of the campus LGBTQ group, wasn't Christian, wasn't saving myself for marriage, and certainly had no objections to orgasming. On the other, I was a virgin, a teetotaler, and an utterly hopeless romantic. Neither extreme fit; and frankly, they both bored me to tears.

Of course, there aren't many other options available to people my age and younger. The culture wars have polarized America—either Girls Gone Wild and Brittney Spears, or abstinence only education and True Love Waits. Chen and Fredell represent extreme views of sexuality not just within the Harvard community, but within broader American culture. Wherever one looks there is hardly any middle ground to stand on. Instead there is just this thicket of extremes. How do we see our way out of it?

Two summers ago I knelt on the floor of my Buddhist teachers' house at their retreat center in upstate New York with two other students, trying to mumble after them as they chanted phrases in Tibetan. Though we did not understand the words, their meaning was clear. We were taking the Five Lay Precepts, the basic ethical guidelines for non-ordained Buddhists: to refrain from taking life, to refrain from taking what is not freely given, to refrain from sexual misconduct, to refrain from incorrect or harmful speech, and to refrain from intoxicants.

After we repeated the vows three times, my teachers chanted some prayers and snapped their fingers to indicate the precise instant at which we received the precepts. We responded with the Tibetan phrase lexo—how wonderful! I was now an upasaka, or “householder,” a lay follower of the Buddha. My teachers then gave us a brief teaching on each precept, one by one, until they got to the third: “Sexual misconduct means...sexual misconduct.” Then quickly on to the fourth. Wait...what?

I don't know what I expected from two Tibetan Buddhist teachers in their seventies who have both been monks since before puberty. I was curious to know what exactly that meant, “sexual misconduct.” Still, I was too afraid to ask. These are, after all, my spiritual mentors. I'm not certain I could even say the word sex to them without blushing a little—call it latent Catholic guilt or southern gentility. It didn't really matter, anyway. At the time I was both a virgin and in a committed relationship, but now that neither of those is an issue I've found myself revisiting the question of sexual misconduct.

First I did what any healthy young man would do when faced with a question about sexuality—I reviewed the literature. The closest I could find to a definition of sexual misconduct from the Buddha himself is in the Cunda Kammaraputta Sutta, where he warns against pursuing “those who are protected by their mothers, their fathers, their brothers, their sisters, their relatives, or their Dhamma [religion]; those with husbands, those who entail punishments, or even those crowned with flowers by another [engaged].” The general idea seems to be not to take advantage of the vulnerable, the under aged, or those with prior commitments—all of which seems perfectly reasonable. Still, even Buddhism isn't immune from Chen and Fredell's extreme views on sexuality.

Later Indian commentators expanded the Buddha's original definition of sexual misconduct to include activities like masturbation, anal and oral sex, sex during menstruation, same-sex activity, and even sex on the day of the full moon. These lists make Fredell look like Dr. Ruth. Even His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama—who's locked in a mortal struggle to save traditional Tibetan culture and religion in the face of China's incessant cultural genocide—has signaled his willingness to re-examine them as outdated.

The savviest contemporary Buddhist teachers seem to agree that abandoning sexual misconduct simply means not harming oneself or others—physically or emotionally—through sexuality. What is most important, they say, is the attitude and motivation that we bring to our actions. Still, when it comes to sex it's easy to delude ourselves. Something that's obviously harmful might not seem like such a bad idea to me when a beautiful woman is unzipping my pants. Thankfully, beautiful women don't try to unzip my pants often; but, the question remains. How do we avoid slipping from “do no harm” into “it feels good (to me, for now),” especially in the heat of passion?

In Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, three travelers—a priest and a woodcutter who've just come from testifying in a court case, and a commoner—take shelter from a storm in a ruined gatehouse. As they talk about the case, the movie flashes back through four mutually exclusive, eye-witness accounts of the rape and apparent murder—including that of the dead victim himself, given through a court medium. Suddenly, the priest and woodcutter's stories are interrupted by the sound of a crying baby who's been abandoned at the gatehouse.

By this point the priest's faith in humanity has been almost entirely shaken by the deception and selfishness he's witnessed. Resolution comes not in hearing what “really happened,” however, but in a selfless act of compassion. The woodcutter picks up the crying baby and takes it home to raise as his own.

Before attaining enlightenment the Buddha was a prince. He lived in a palace surrounded by wonderful food, expensive objects, and beautiful courtesans, until suddenly he had a deep existential crises and decided to renounce his wealth to go looking for an end to suffering. For six years he practiced extreme self-denial. Finally, he realized that neither hedonism nor asceticism would bring him to contentment. Ever since his teachings have been known as the Middle Way; but, this isn't an Aristotelean mean. It is much more like the conclusion of Rashomon. What the Buddha discovered is not equal measures of hedonism and asceticism, but a third way transcending both—something sharp and quick, like a lightning bolt that pierces were ideology alone cannot.

So, how do we live our lives? Contemplating it, I often feel like the priest at the end of Rashomon. Chen and Fridell, sloppy liberalism and uptight conservatism—in the end, it's enough to make someone want to throw up their hands in frustration. This is why I think the Buddha was so compassionate about the precept against sexual misconduct. He'd already been to both extremes, so he knew what a thicket both idealism and nihilism were. He gave us the precept—don't commit sexual misconduct; but, instead of a list of do's and do not's he gave us practices to cultivate our courage, compassion, joy, and humility.

These are the very qualities that brought clarity to Rashomon's despairing priest, and they are the very ones lacking in Chen and Fredell's opposite, but equally self-absorbed, ideologies. As Lama Bruce Newman, a contemporary Buddhist teacher, says, “Anything done with a loving heart is virtuous. If you love your partner and give pleasure to him or her as an expression of your care, that is a virtuous act.” May there be virtue.

Note: This article was originally published as Upasaka Joshua Eaton, "Revolutionary Love: On Hooking Up, Waiting, and the Buddha's Middle Way," HBomb Magazine 4 (2009).

The Responsibility of Intellectuals in an Economic Crises

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

—Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"

In February of 1967, Noam Chomsky published “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” in The New York Review of Books. It was a rallying cry for intellectuals to take a good, hard look at themselves and their unquestioned assumptions with respect to pressing social problems—especially the war in Vietnam. Twenty-five years later, in October of 1992, Eugene Rivers published “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in an Age of Crack” in Boston Review. Like Chomsky before him, Rivers was calling on intellectuals to squarely face the great moral crisis of their day—black poverty and nihilism. “As intellectuals, as humanists, are we not morally obligated to provide more than lecture circuit radicalism,” he asked.

Here at Harvard, there seems to be a certain unspoken courtesy we all provide to one another—especially within the humanities—not to bring skepticism to bear on the morality of our academic pursuits in the midst of largely preventable human suffering. Still, such ghostly silence only serves to underscore the urgency of the question, and the existential despair with which it so often fills us—a plural pronoun in which I very much include myself. The question hangs constantly, the elephant in the room: Are we not morally obligated to provide more than lecture circuit radicalism?

Estimates vary—from 22 percent, to 30 percent, to as high as 50 percent—but, the current economic crises has taken a toll on Harvard's endowment. The term layoff has not yet been uttered—another little courtesy we provide to one another—but, it has certainly been alluded to. In her letter to the Harvard community on the economic crises dated February 18, 2009, Harvard University's President Drew Faust pointed out that “compensation” accounts for nearly half of the University's operating budget. The times call, she said, for “discipline and sacrifice.” Harvard Divinity School's Dean William Graham was more forthright in his January 28, 2009 financial update: “As we reexamine priorities, ...it has become clear that this will inevitably involve a review of staffing configurations.” Later he acknowledged that “the shifting of priorities” might “lead to staff reductions.” Note the passive voice. Meanwhile, Graham assured us, “events, travel, and catering budgets...will be cut in ways we can all live with.”

Let's be clear: Harvard University is still obscenely wealthy and obscenely powerful. Still, times are, relatively, hard. The University has already resorted to layoffs to meet its tightening budget—most recently among subcontracted custodians at the medical school, as detailed in the April 7, 2009 Harvard Crimson; and, while the economy appears to be showing tentative signs of recovery, unemployment always lags behind other economic indicators. There is the possibility that the worst is still before us. Layoffs could touch the Divinity School yet.

So, are we morally obligated to provide more than lecture circuit radicalism? In Buddhacharita 4:60, the Buddha says

But when a man happens to see
someone who is old, sick, or dead,
And remains at ease, unperturbed,
He's the same as a dead man.

Elsewhere, in the Sigalovada Sutta, the Buddha says that masters should share delicacies with their servants and care for them when they're sick. Of course, old age, sickness, and death are more than just bodily realities. Job insecurity is old age, sickness, and death. Unemployment is old age, sickness, and death. Poverty is old age, sickness, and death. What Chomsky wrote 42 years ago and what Rivers wrote 17 years ago still matters for us today. It may, in fact, be more pertinent now than then. If we “remain at ease, unperturbed” in the midst of this, then we are truly the same as dead.

The Buddha did not content himself with simply cursing the darkness. Once he saw the old age, sickness, and death swirling around him he gave up his kingdom, with all it privileges, in order to find a solution. I am writing this on Easter Sunday; and, like Christ, the Buddha understood that the success of the Bodhi Tree required the sacrifice of the Great Renunciation. Today we feast; but Friday, we fasted. In the face of possible staff layoffs, how few events, and how little travel and catering, can we all live with? We all go on endlessly about equality and rights and justice. We have a responsibility—not just to others, but to ourselves—to put our money where our collective mouth is. If worse comes to worse, we ought to say to the administration, as students, that we would rather lose all of our community teas and catered lectures, all of our organizational budgets and finals week green rooms, all of our Billings Prize money and orientation luncheons, than lose a single employee. President Faust called for “discipline and sacrifice.” It is up to us to ensure that such sacrifice never comes at the expense of people's livelihoods—even if it means voluntarily taking it on ourselves. That is our responsibility as intellectuals; and, it is no lecture circuit radicalism.

Note: This article first appeared as Joshua Eaton, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals in an Economic Crises: An Open Letter to the Harvard Divinity School Community," The Wick (spring 2009): 66-68.

White On White Racism

Since moving to Boston I've been asked when the south is going to "get over" the Civil War; told how wonderful it is that I'm going to Harvard after growing up somewhere with such a poor education system; ask to defend my love of where I grew up; and called upon to answer for racist southerners interviewed about then-candidate Obama in a Walmart parking lot by The New York Times.

To begin with, a white liberal Cambridgite would never dream of asking a Britain when England will get over the War of 1812; or, of congratulating an Indian student on making it to Harvard out of the subcontinent's obviously inferior school system; or, of asking an Iraqi why she loves her homeland despite its ills; or, especially, of making a black person answer for the views of people interviewed in front of a liquor store in Oakland, California. Things are different when it comes to the south only because, as John Waters has pointed out, white trash is the last acceptable racist term—or, in this case, sentiment. No one ought to have to defend loving where they are from, and no group of people deserves to be judged by it's most ignorant.

"That's true," someone might argue, "but why does the south have so many more ignorant people to be judged by than other parts of the country?" And if they did, that would merely prove that they have never been to upstate New York or rural Arizona—two of the most conservative and desolate place that I have ever lived.

Tracing the Threads: Asvaghosa and Santideva

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a paper using Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative to interpret Santideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicaryavatara) 3:18-22, which was written in the seventh century AD. This weekend I'm in the middle of a paper on Asvaghosa's Life of the Buddha (Buddhacarita), written in the first or second century AD. While re-reading it, I noticed that the verses I worked with from The Way of the Bodhisattva actually borrow heavily from Life of the Buddha.

First, here's Life of the Buddha 12:13, as translated from the Sanskrit by Patrick Olivelle. It's a eulogy spoken by the Buddha-to-be to his first pre-enlightenment teacher, Aradah:

As a light for a man longing to see,
as a guide for a man longing to trek,
As a boat for a man longing to cross,
so do I regard your philosophy.

And, Life of the Buddha 13:62-64, spoken by a god to the demon Mara as the later was unleashing his armies on the Buddha-to-be to frighten him away from attaining enlightenment:

When the world is swept along crooked paths,
he toils in search of the right path.
So it's no more right to harass that guide
than to harass a skilled navigator
while the caravan is lost.

When creatures are lost in the great darkness;
this man is being made a lamp of wisdom.
It's no more right for you, a gentleman,
to extinguish it than to extinguish
a lamp set up to shine in the darkness.

Seeing the world plunged in the great flood of samsara
and unable to find the farther shore,
This man is working to ferry that world across;
what gentleman would entertain
wicked thoughts against him?

Now, here's The Way of the Bodhisattva 3:18-19, as translated from the Tibetan by the Padmakara Translation Group:

May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,
A guide for those who journey on the road.
For those who wish to cross the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

May I be an isle for those who yearn for land,
A lamp for those who long for light;
For all who need a resting place, a bed;
For those who need a servant, may I be their slave.

I don't have it handy, but according to Vesna A. and B. Alan Wallace's critical translation of The Way of the Bodhisattva (titled A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life), the original Sanskrit verson of verse 19, above, doesn't actually contain the line, "May I be an isle for thos who yearn for land." Apparently, that bit was just added in the Tibetan translation. So, the Sanskrit verson of The Way of the Bodhisattva is even more strikingly close to the metaphors in Life of the Buddha.

In Life of the Buddha, the Buddha-to-be compares Aradah's philosophy to a light, a guide, and a boat; similarly, in The Way of the Bodhisattva Santideva wishes to become a guide, a boat, and a light. In Life of the Buddha, a god compares the Buddha-to-be to a guide, a light, and a ferryman; similarly, in The Way of the Bodhisattva Santideva wished to become a guide, a ferry, and a light.

I wonder if these were common Sanskrit poetic convenventions that both were drawing on, or if Santideva was drawing specifically from Life of the Buddha. I also wonder how each section would match up in the original Sanskrit, as opposed to their respective English translations.

Alas, both questions are beyond my abilities to answer. It is a neat discovery, though, and I think it says something about Santideva's intent. He wasn't aspiring for just any damn thing or simply pulling aspirations out of thin air. He was aspiring to be like the Buddha and the philosophies that helped him along his path to enlightenment.

Overheard in Crema Cafe

"The world is run by people between the ages of 25 and 30."

I'm no certain whether that idea fills me with despair or hope. It reminds me of verse six from "Masters of War," off of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan:

How much do I know
To talk out of turn?
You might say that I'm young,
You might say I'm unlearned;
But there's one thing I know,
Though I'm younger than you—
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

It's hard to say which is preferable—youthful freshness, idealism, and ingenuity or the wisdom, maturity, and steadiness that often comes with age. Anyway, like most of my peers at Harvard I have a genuine desire to make the world a better place than I entered it, somehow; and, also like most of my Harvard peers, I'm immodest enough to believe that possible. So, this does make me more than a little hopeful. A man can dream, at least.

"My adviser told me, 'Get over your existential crises and get back to work.'"

Your existential crises is a big part of your work. Maybe the biggest part. Maybe the only part.

On Love and Now

Tonight Keith Olbermann's #1 story was a bit on the finale of The Bachelor. In one of the clips he played, contestant (victim? protagonist?) Molly Malaney says, "I'm so in love with Jason [Mesnick] right now."

You're so in love with him right now? It's hard to imagine a mother, for example, saying that she loves her child right now; or, a husband saying that he loves his wife of thirty years right now; or, the Buddha saying that he loves sentient beings right now. Anytime those words follow the word love, that might be a problem. I'm just saying.