Tag: American History

What’s Done Is Done

ゆく河の流れは絶えずして、しかももとの水にあらず
Yuku kawa no nagare wa taezu shite, shikamo moto no mizu ni arazu.

“The river flows without end, but it is never the same waters.”

Hojoki, 12th c. Japan

I’ve been sitting on this post for a little while, trying to decide how best to put things into words. I don’t like delving into contemporary issues, or politics. But it’s hard to ignore the many problems going on right now.

In particular, I keep thinking about the above quote, and the related Ship of Theseus for us Westerners. Even in peaceful times, it’s hard not to look back and see how things have changed, and won’t go back to the way things were before. Even more so in dramatic times.

But this year, I feel we’ve definitely crossed some kind of threshold, not just in a nostalgic sense.

Portrait of Sulla on a denarius minted in 54 BC, photo by Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Even after the Roman general Sulla retired in 78 BCE as dictator, the Roman Republic didn’t carry on as it did before. Instead, rapid decline continued as other men such as Cicero, Pompey, Caesar, and Augustus seized on the precedent to push their own vision of rulership. If one powerful man can break precedent, then what’s to stop others from doing the same?

Of course, this decline of the Republic1 had other precedents too. Bit by bit, across generations, things changed and the effects weren’t always clear until too late. Sulla opposed the populist, reformist Gracchi brothers, and the Gracchi Brothers in turn were opposed to increased centralization of land-wealth, which in turn had been caused by Rome’s increasing power and influence across the Italian Peninsula, etc, etc. Where one issue begins and another ends is hard to fathom. Instead, bit by bit, like the wooden planks on the Ship of Theseus, small changes gradually add up until something is no longer recognizable.

If we look at other societies, such as the fall of Heian Period aristocracy in 12th century Japan, it is the same thing: small changes built up, followed by a dramatic shift in power, and then the aristocracy was then permanently diminished in power, replaced by military governments. Once the threshold was crossed, it was never the same, and that’s why the author of the Hojoki wrote what he did.

“How did you go bankrupt?” 
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Thus, here I sit, an armchair philosopher watching everything I took for granted in my youth change around me, often abruptly, until it’s no longer recognizable. I don’t know how things will resolve, though somehow they will. Yet, countless changes that will only make sense in hindsight have led to this moment in history that I am forced to live in, and I have to accept that in a sense it’s already over.

1 Technically speaking, the Republic (a.k.a. res publica in Latin, or politeia in Greek) never ended until 1453 with the fall of Constantinople. The way that modern historians define a republic is different than how Romans thought of it. The imperial era from Augustus onward was still seen as the res publica/politeia, it just gradually changed and evolved … like the Ship of Theseus … from one system of administration or another. But Romans never really viewed a “break” between the senatorial style of government and the later imperial one as a change in historical period.

Juneteenth and What It Means For All Of Us

In Charles B Jones’s overview of the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, he talks about a sect called the Yuzu Nembutsu sect (which I explored here), but in particular, he delves into the Buddhist concept of interdepedence, which the sect relies upon:1

Suppose you lay a row of ten coins on a table, and then move the tenth coin in front of the first, shifting the rest over one position. You probably assume that changing the order does not affet what they are in any way. However, from the Huayan point of view, they are not independent of one another; the first is coin one of ten, the second is two of ten, the third is three of ten, and so on. Their relationship with the other coins in the row is part of their identity and figure into the way we conceptualize them. When you take the last coin and move it to the first position, it changes from ten of ten to one of ten. At the same time, since the relation of the other coins to the one you moved has changed, they are no longer the same coins as before either, even though you did not move them.

Charles B Jones, “Pure Land: History, Tradition, and Practice“, page 120

It’s not enough to simply exist, things exist in relation to one another, and what affects one thing affects others. Taken in total, this is the Buddhist-Sanskrit concept of shunyata.

So, what does this have to do with Juneteenth?

The enslavement of Africans, generation after generation didn’t just traumatize and dehumanize black Americans, it dragged all of society down with it. Everyone was adversely impacted by it in one way or another, even those who profited from it. American society was poorer for it, directly contradicting its own high ideals of human rights, and forcing some to use mental gymnastics to justify such a barbaric enterprise, even resorting to organized violence to deflect their own festering guilt and paranoia. This spilled over into such conflicts as the infamous Bleeding Kansas, and then again later in the Civil War, to say nothing of the tragic deaths of countless Black Americans.

Thus, while Juneteenth wasn’t a holiday that I grew up with as a white kid of the 80’s and 90’s, I am glad to see we celebrate it now. Or rather, I am glad we have more awareness now and the holiday has the widespread acceptance it deserves. The emancipation of Black Americans wasn’t the end of discrimination, especially since the Jim Crow laws persisted even as late as the 1960’s, but as soon as slavery ended, America as a whole was that much better for it.

When we see the entire struggle for freedom and equal rights through the lens of Buddhism, it’s not just a problem for Black Americans, it poisons the well for us all. Where one suffers, we all suffer in some way. Where one person is treated with goodwill and dignity, we all benefit. When one black man in this country is unfairly persecuted by the law, or killed by police violence, it wounds us all. Where Americans of different backgrounds come together in a spirit of community, family and so on, we all benefit.

The struggle of Black America, as is struggle of Native Americans, LBGTQ people and so on is everyone’s struggle too. The little things we do on a daily basis to listen to these struggles,2 or to be an ally for others, or even just be kind on a person-by-person basis do affect others, including those we never see. This is a fundamental Buddhist truth, whether we see it or not.

Let us each leave this world a little better than the one we entered.

Namu Amida Butsu

1 The example above was originally composed by Fa-zang (法藏; 643–712), a proponent of the Chinese Huayan school centered around shunyata.

2 Sometimes this can be as simple as letting other people speak about their experiences, and not sucking all the oxygen out of the room with your own thoughts and opinions.