I'm partway through reading The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors by Lama Rod Owens. It's a guide to taking a socially-engaged approach to Buddhist practice, based on the concept of the bodhisattva. Owens writes "Bodhisattva is roughly translated as 'spiritual warrior' and is one who is motivated by the energy of bodhicitta, or a profound altruistic wish to free all beings from suffering" (18-19). So far there's a lot in the book that appeals to me, for example the distinction Owen draws between "reactivity" and "responsiveness" resonates powerfully. Here's a relevant excerpt:
Rigidity arises because we find ourselves trapped in the helplessness of the chaos. When I know this and can remember this, my relationship to the carceral state can be an experience of liberation because when I transition from reactivity to responsiveness, the state no longer dictates what I am, and I can start directing my energy towards liberation. When I forget this and start habitually reacting to the chaos, I am consumed by the chaos (39).
There's also a lot that challenges (and in fact implicates) me. For example, this: "To bypass the struggle of people surviving systems of violence in favor of an anesthetic life is itself an act of violence" (20). That really hit home. Also, this line (for context, Lama Rod Owens is Black): "Racism isn't my problem: therefore it isn't my work. [...] Although all Black and Brown people deal with the violence of white supremacy, we do not have the capacity to turn it off" (42).
There's just one thing in the book that REALLY doesn't work for me, and it's the central premise—which means that my issue isn't really with Lama Rod Owens, it's with the Buddha. In Owens' words, the Buddha "cut out a path of liberation by realizing the dreamlike nature of reality" (19). Owens develops this idea further in a section called "The Yoga of the Dream":
The yoga of the dream for the New Saint is the realization that this reality that we live and struggle through is not our true home. It is a dream, an illusion, or even a figment of our imaginations. [...] To free unconscious phenomena, such as unconscious biases or narratives that are not true, means disrupting our perception of what things are so that our experience of phenomenal reality becomes transparent, fluid, and basically, less real. This is how we experience freedom from the realness of things; when things are less real, we begin to feel more spacious, and, therefore, freer (26).
I find it helpful to recognize my unconscious biases and narratives as illusions, but I don't find it helpful to regard, say, a tree as an illusion. I don't think the phenomenal world IS illusion, and I don't think it would be helpful to me to cultivate a discipline of training myself to believe that it was. This brings me to my BIG issue with the book: the way that Owens uses the phrase "the carceral state." Here's what he writes: "The outer level of change is the recognition of the phenomenal world and the basic reality of suffering and delusion, which I call the carceral state" (30). In other words, the carceral state is "the phenomenal world," not just the messages on our phones and our social norms, but the plants, the soil, and the ocean.
To me, describing the entirety of reality as "the carceral state" feels like ascribing human problems to the world. In fact, not human problems, but systems of domination, which are no more innately human than systems of liberation and mutual aid (it's just that communities that devote themselves to domination tend to crush communities that devote themselves to liberation and mutual aid, because if you devote yourself to domination you tend to get good at it*).
To be clear, Lama Rod Owens has done WAY, WAY, WAY more than I have to liberate us all from systems of domination, so it's a little sketchy for me, in the midst of my too-often anesthetic life, to take issue with his work. But to me, for my thinking, and for my work, it's important that the phrase "the carceral state" refers to a specific way that humans organize our shared lives, one which is only made possible by our collective acquiescence. And my belief is that if we overcome it, we will be free (as long as we are able to sustain our liberation), but we will NOT find ourselves still imprisoned by the oppression of the phenomenal world until we reach enlightenment and recognize that it's all illusion.
This made me think about the film The Mission—I saw it in my seventh grade social studies class, and it left an impression. There's one exchange in particular that stopped my dead in my tracks. The film is about a Jesuit mission in what is now Brazil and, ultimately, about how disputes between European powers and the Catholic church ultimately lead to a group of Guaraní people being massacred and forced out of their homes. After the massacre, there's an exchange between a Jesuit Cardinal (Cardinal Altamarino) who can't really metabolize the horror of what's happened (which he had reluctantly agreed to) and a Portuguese political representative (Don Hontar), who takes a more "pragmatic" approach. Here's the exchange:
Don Hontar: We must work in the world; the world is thus.
Cardinal Altamarino: No, thus have we made the world. Thus I have made it.
It seems to me that if we use the term "carceral state" to refer to EVERYTHING we're accepting the idea that "the world is thus," and I don't accept that.
Having said that, the film is also about the conflict between spiritual and material views of the world, and the film generally sides with the spiritually-minded (the Jesuits) so it's likely that all the main protagonists would side with Owens more than me on the whole "is the world illusion" question.
*For powerful refutations of the idea that "domination" is "human nature" or otherwise inevitable, I recommend reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything
A note on the title: There's a Buddhist saying, attributed to the ninth century sage Lin Chi, that goes "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The title is a reference to that. Many years ago (possibly before I was born) my dad composed the music for a play called The Man Who Killed the Buddha.