Big
Buddhas in the Big Apple
Gerry Kopelow
Recently the New Yorker magazine asked several American artists
to come up with some concepts for a memorial on the site of the
destroyed World Trade Centre buildings. In the July 10, 2002 issue,
J. Otto Seibold, a multimedia artist and children's book author,
suggested replacing the vanished Twin Towers with replicas of the
two colossal Buddhas that had been destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan
exactly six months before the WTC, on March 11, 2001. At the same
time, replicas of the WTC buildings would be rebuilt on the site
formerly occupied by the statues; these would house Afghani refugees.
Of course, all this reciprocal reconstruction will not happen, but
there is a certain elegance and gentle symmetry to the idea......the
big Buddhas and the big buildings were both outsized symbols of
all-encompassing world views, and both were brutally blown to bits
by hatred.
Nearing the first anniversary of the New York tragedy, though, it
is startling to note the dramatically different reactions to these
two horrific assaults. The attack on the World Trade Centre was
motivated by religious fanaticism, and the response was/is war.
The attack on the Buddhas was motivated by the very same religious
fanaticism, yet the response was/is not war.
There are lots of Buddhists in the world, nearly 400,000,000 in
fact, and there are some heavily militarized Buddhist countries
run by severe dictatorships. Yet there have been no violent reactions
to speak of, nor any talk of armed reprisals. Why is this so?
No one was killed when the 1000-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan came
down (up until the Taliban, they had withstood innumerable natural
and unnatural threats, including Ghengis Khan) but that fact does
not adequately explain the seemingly passive response from the millions
of people that regarded them with deep veneration and respect. Naturally,
the Buddhist community is not a homogeneous group, in fact there
exist many strongly held views that separate passionately different
ethnic and doctrinal
factions. Underlying this rainbow of intellectual/cultural discord,
however, are three fundamental and universally acknowledged principals,
all elucidated for the first time two
and a half millennia ago by the historical Buddha, Gautama Sakyamuni:
First, Buddhist practitioners remind themselves constantly that
all phenomena are interconnected. There are no independent arisings
because everything we recognize as real, both mentally and physically,
springs from earlier causes. Horrible events - however morally grotesque
and profoundly tragic they might be - are not unexpected, since
a multitude of horrible causes, like poverty, ignorance, greed,
hatred, and delusion are vigorously active in the world.
Second is the fact that all material forms, like minds, bodies,
stars, and even massive religious icons and very tall buildings,
are by nature impermanent: The acts of destruction in New York and
at Bamiyan were indisputably brutal and despicable on every level,
but nothing lasts forever.
And finally, as a logical corollary of the first two principals,
Buddhists think that identity itself is also impermanent. We work
to view the idea of `self' as a temporary construct. Our beliefs
and our behaviours are largely conditioned reactions to the myriad
of causes that unrelentingly impact on the brain, the mind, and
the body from the moment of conception. What terrorists and tycoons
- and all the rest of us - take to be absolute truth, is in fact,
only relative truth.
In response to all of this the Buddha declared - as did Christ,
Mohammed, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King in their unique ways -
that the development of wisdom and compassion is the highest goal
in life. Compassion is active empathy for the suffering of
all beings. Wisdom allows effective compassionate action in any
circumstance. Since both greed and poverty are causes of anger and
despair, why not act to alleviate both greed and poverty? Since
ignorance and fear are causes of delusion and inter-cultural hatred
and brutality, why not try to bring security to the fearful and
reliable knowledge to the ignorant? Such efforts would eventually
bear wholesome fruit, both in downtown Manhattan and in the caves
of northern Afghanistan.
