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John Lewis and Persevering with Non-harming

One of the really important qualities for life, for Dharma practice, is perseverance and the idea of a long-term vision of practice. We have in the Vipassana^[1] community, Insight practice, a great emphasis on attention to the present moment, here and now. But if that's done too exclusively, it shortchanges us, because a very important part of human life is also the vision of what's possible in the future, what we work towards. We enter the present moment as fully as we can to support our ability to fulfill that vision of freedom, of personal development, of making a difference, and making the world better.

That perseverance to continue with practice is a very important quality because, with all things, there are ups and downs and challenges. By just persevering and continuing over time, amazing things begin happening in practice just with regularity and continuity.

A Long-Term Vision of Practice

About thirty years ago, some friends of mine went to hear the Dalai Lama, and they came back and told the story of being there. It was a big amphitheater in Arizona—a big stadium, I guess—and many thousands of people were there. The Dalai Lama was giving weekend teachings, and periodically he would take questions from the audience. A man stood up to ask a question and asked, "What's the fastest way to enlightenment?"

The Dalai Lama, as the report goes, stood there quietly for a long time and didn't say anything. At some point, he started crying a little bit, tears going down his cheeks. Then he spoke. He spoke about how—I wasn't there, so I can't express his words exactly, but how I remember them is that he was quite sad about this idea of the quickest way to enlightenment. There's a certain kind of greed, and maybe it's even arrogant sometimes, that we have to get there the fastest, the quickest, and that the only point of practice is to get enlightened.

For the Dalai Lama, there is a long-term vision—a long-term vision for his people in Tibet, the long-term vision of practice—to steadily persevere, practice, grow, and develop. Too often, when people are pushing their practice too quickly for enlightenment, they have some significant experiences that are very meaningful. But if there's too much of an emphasis on that, the long-term growth and development of all of who we are, the fullness of who we are, and all aspects of ourselves get shortchanged. The full maturation of a person in Buddhism takes time. It's something we have to persevere with through life challenges and involvement, and just keep going.

There are stories told of olive farmers in the Mediterranean who, when they get old, maybe in their seventies and eighties, will still be planting olive trees. Even though it will take twenty years for those olive trees to start bearing fruit, and the chances are those trees will not bear fruit in their lifetime. They're not planting the trees for themselves. They have a vision of what's possible in the future, and so they're planting seeds for what's going to come in the future.

Maha Ghosananda and Planting for the Future

I had the good fortune of meeting a wonderful Buddhist monk named Maha Ghosananda^[2]. He was considered the Gandhi of Cambodia. When Pol Pot^[3] enacted the genocide and slaughtered millions of Cambodians, in 1976 there were 60,000 Buddhist monks in Cambodia. By the time the genocide finished three years later, there were only 3,000 left still alive.

Maha Ghosananda was one of them, and he survived because he was living in Thailand at that time. Jack Kornfield^[4] knew him in Thailand; they were in the same monastery for a while, practicing with Ajahn Chah^[5]. Maha Ghosananda went to the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border to support and minister to the Cambodian refugees. He was warned not to go there. The Thai government didn't want him there, and apparently, the Pol Pot regime also didn't want him there. He was threatened with his life, but he would go anyway. Some of these refugees hadn't seen a Buddhist monk for a long time, and having a Buddhist monk come was quite impactful for them.

The story goes of him standing up on a stage with thousands of people in the refugee camp all around him. He started chanting some of the familiar chants that they knew but hadn't heard for a long time. Imagine this huge trauma—Maha Ghosananda himself lost his entire family, his friends, and his communities that were left in Cambodia; they were killed. So here Maha Ghosananda comes up on this stage in an open area with thousands of refugees around, and he starts chanting. They start crying hearing it. One of the chants he chanted, which apparently they knew and would recite back to him or with him, was the simple chant:

Hate is never overcome by hate. By love alone is hate overcome. This is the ancient truth.

What a phenomenal message to bring into refugee camps, where probably many of those refugees had seen horrendous things happen to their people, had lost their country, and so much else. He came with that message of hope.

When I met him, he had already gone back to Cambodia. He had been there for maybe about ten years, helping with the reconstruction of the country and bringing peace to the country. I met him for breakfast one day, and I had the good fortune of sitting together. So I asked him a question—maybe it was a little bit rude, but I sincerely wanted to find out what he would say. I had learned that he had spent time dedicating himself to tree planting in Cambodia, among the many things that he did. I asked him, "Why do you, as a Buddhist monk, spend time planting trees? You could be teaching, training new monks, all kinds of things. Why planting trees?"

This old man—he was probably around eighty years old when I talked to him—looked at me very kindly and said, "The Buddha was born under a tree, was enlightened under a tree, taught under a tree, and died under trees." That's all he said in reply.

But I heard him. I heard that he thought trees were really important—a place for the Dharma, a place of practice, a place where people can connect to something really important. Here he was planting trees that probably would never come to maturity in his lifetime, but he was planting for the future. He had this longer vision of what was possible. This idea of persevering with the longer vision, not losing track of this bigger span of time that we live in, how things come and go and change, how the past is really close by, and the future is not far away. What we do now can have a huge impact on the future. What we do now is connected to what's happening in society, which is connected to the past.

The Long Arc of History

I was struck by this last week when I read a story in the Washington Post of an 88-year-old man named Daniel Smith. His father had him late in life; his father was 70 when he was born. So he is 88, and it's 157 years since his father was born. That's a phenomenal length of time. It turns out that it was in 1863. His father was born a slave in Alabama in the American South.

And here we have today, living in Virginia, a man whose father was born a slave. I read about American history in school, and it just seemed like that was far away, ancient times. But I can imagine that for Daniel Smith, that isn't so ancient. His father and he witnessed some of the cycles of Jim Crow laws, racial segregation, and all the rules and laws preventing African Americans from voting. He was part of the Civil Rights Movement and saw the coming and going of all this stuff.

He said that for much of his life, the 157 years since his father's birth had once seemed like a huge gap, like empty space. But now, the time strikes him as distressingly brief. He said that time feels like an accordion, with the time just folding back, folding down, coming back together.

The impact of the past 157 years still lives in so many different ways in this country. And what happens today, what happens now in these years, can live 157 years into the future. To have this long-term vision: What is the world that we're contributing to? What are the olive trees that we're planting? Are we interested in the world of the future, and do we want to live in such a way that we are caring for future generations of people?

John Lewis and Non-violent Civil Disobedience

One of the remarkable people we've been reading about this last week is John Lewis^[6]. I am very inspired by him and his colleagues, who in the 1960s were dedicated to the movement of non-violent civil disobedience. Disciples of Gandhi and the American tradition of Henry David Thoreau, there was a very strong dedication to non-violence and training in non-violence.

That takes perseverance. That takes dedication, the ability, the strength to persevere against tremendous odds, and the willingness, in a certain way, to be physically harmed for the sake of freedom and for the sake of justice. It's a remarkable thing. It's counter-intuitive for some people, but it creates greater good. I think John Lewis created greater good than if he had picked up a rifle and a gun, hated, shot, and been violent with people. His example of non-violence, and other people like him, was a turning point of American history with the Civil Rights Movement.

In this remarkable story, by the time he was 23 or 24, he had been arrested 24 times. He'd been beaten up many times. He was one of the first of the Freedom Riders who took buses and insisted they could sit on the buses when desegregation happened, but in the South, people weren't allowing it yet. One of the tactics he and his colleagues had was to go into waiting rooms in bus stops that were segregated "whites only" waiting rooms. They would be attacked with bats and crates and all kinds of things. And they would keep doing it, and keep doing it.

I'll tell you one story of someone who came to me at a retreat. She had been a civil rights worker—a white person who had gone down to the South during the 1960s. She had stood on a street corner with friends doing a non-violent, silent protest against racism down there. At some point, a pickup truck came up with a bunch of white men who were opposed to them standing there. These men jumped out of the pickup truck and started to beat them up with their fists.

The next day, she and her friends went back to the same place to protest again. The same pickup truck came with the same men; they jumped out and beat them up. The third day, she said to me, they were there again, and the same men came. A man came and was standing over her, and he had his fist poised to strike her again. He looked down into her eyes, they looked at each other, and he stopped. He said, "What in the world are you doing?" That day, there was no more beating up. That day was the beginning of a dialogue, starting to have a conversation with these men. I don't know what the follow-up was, but the idea of being able to change someone who is violent and hateful through our willingness to be present for it and to protest takes perseverance. It takes dedication.

I think Buddhist practice, with its tremendous dedication to non-harming, is also very aligned with the idea of civil disobedience: to stay present, to not succumb to hate. That's where the perseverance is most powerful—to not succumb to hate, to stay there, and not succumb to violence. This is the power that this practice we do can bring us, and can be an expression of it in our lives.

There's this wonderful story of John Lewis going to the South, going into these all-white waiting rooms. In Montgomery, he did it, and sure enough, immediately this bunch of white people attacked him and his friends. Apparently, he was hit over the head with a crate and ended up unconscious, and maybe ended up in the hospital. He had a lifelong scar on his head from this particular event, and this happened over and over again.

When Barack Obama became president, there was a man in the South who had been there in Montgomery in that waiting room. He had lots and lots of hate towards Black people, and no shortage of expressing it to others. It turns out when Barack Obama was elected as president, he liked what he saw in Barack Obama, and he started to have remorse for how he'd been in the 1960s. He went to find people to apologize for how he had been a racist back then. Remarkably, he went and found John Lewis because he was the person who had used a crate to knock him out. He was the most vicious of the people attacking John Lewis. He went and found John Lewis and he apologized, and John Lewis accepted it and forgave him.

The perseverance—forty years later or something like that—it took that long for John Lewis's non-violent civil disobedience, and his willingness to stand there and be hurt in that tremendous fight for justice, for this man, Elwin Wilson^[7], to have his heart changed.

Restraint and Overcoming Hostility

Are we living for the present only, or are we living also for the future? This is very important when it comes to things like hate. Hate, which I think maybe should be better expressed as hostility, causes tremendous harm down through the generations. Hostility is a way of harming oneself; the person who is hostile hurts themselves.

I think of hostility as really coming from the surface of the heart. It comes from a lack of confidence in the depths and strengths of the heart. It comes from a reaction to pain, anger, frustration, and a certain kind of misconfidence—the confidence that violence or hostility is effective. It's only effective, at best, for temporary relief if it's successful to get something to go away. But hostility always harms the hostile.

This is what becomes clear when we sit and meditate. When we start awakening the inner life and the heart becomes more and more clear about what's going on, then we start feeling the impact that things like hostility have. We start feeling it's not worth it, we shouldn't do this, that there are better places to come from.

A simple thing to say is that we might have anger towards people of a different political persuasion, and some of them upset us quite a bit. Recently someone asked me, "How can I have compassion for these people who I'm so opposed to?" And my reply was: First, overcome your hostility. First, have no hate, then we'll talk about compassion. To leapfrog over the inner work to resolve and free ourselves from hostility and hate—to leapfrog over that into compassion because it's a great ideal—I don't believe really is very effective.

So we need to really work through what's going on with us. Hostility is always a surface phenomenon. We're not really deeply connected and rooted in ourselves when we're acting from hostility. We need to discover that, explore it, and be with it. Remember that the first ethical principle in Buddhism is non-harming. There is no question about that; it's the first principle.

We have this teaching in Buddhism of not-self, but if there's a self that we should be—as a minimum—if we have hostility, we should be the one who refrains. We are the person who refrains from causing harm. To have confidence in that person, that's where strength resides. That's where personal power resides. All kinds of good things are inside of us in that restraint. When there's no longer a need for restraint because there's no more hostility, then maybe we drop the idea that that's who we are; we don't need to be that anymore. But this idea of not causing harm is so important.

So, restraint, training ourselves, and being willing to look for an alternative way to take care of and deal with difficulties and challenges—an alternative to hostility—and to see that as something that's going to last for way beyond your lifetime. We live in this vast scope of time, and things come and go. The challenges of human life come and go, and we are in our own challenging times. It's not an exception to the pattern of humanity to be in these kinds of times when there's lots of hostility and hate, unfortunately.

But we can be the people who don't hate. Not to be passive, but no matter what side of political persuasion you might be on, to be dedicated to not being hostile, to not hating—that's where strength can be. And then perhaps we can meet each other and find our way. Maybe there is a third way, a different way that no one knows yet, that doesn't have to be in this grip of oppositional politics. Maybe there's a way in which non-harming and a real dedication to civil disobedience—opposing what we feel is wrong in a non-harmful way—can help all of us find a third way, a new way, that can create the conditions for all kinds of trees to grow in twenty, thirty, or forty years. All kinds of things to change in the slow way that sometimes they change.

May all of us have the perseverance, dedication, and restraint of John Lewis. May all of us have the fortitude and dedication of Maha Ghosananda. May all of us plant trees that will last long beyond our lifetime, so that we are planting seeds of peace, seeds of goodness, seeds of welfare, and mutual respect for all people. May all people live at peace. Thank you.