"Restless" by UNKLE ft. Josh Homme just made Summer kick in

Snippets of my last paper...

Just as our country is divvied up between red and blue states, Buddhist schools are comprised of many angles and perspectives. Not one school or one color is wiser or more compassionate than the next, but simply, different balances of the role of self and understanding of universal suffering.

“Why do so many around the world hate Americans?” Though unhealthy, Americans easily take on international anger of people and try to carry it as individual weights. Orr writes, in his chapter “Walking North on a Southbound Train,” that:
“The assumption is now common that markets are “moral,” but that publicly created solutions are not. The result is a continuation of what a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, once described as “a riot of individualistic materialism, under which complete freedom for the individual… turned out in practice to mean perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak,” (23-24).
Suddenly patriotism is a measure of self-indulgence and greed, as Americans grow more distant from our own impermanence and focus more on maintaining the delusion of the spirit of the “atman.” As patriotism harvests a gap between “self” and strangers, salvation and suffering grow closer to blatantly impersonal ignorance.

The weight of suffering is dealt with in many ways, both in Buddhism and in American politics. Theravada Buddhism, for example, focuses on the misunderstood permanent “self” to end the routine of karma and samsara. Attention to deities and the soul of “atman” are equally wasteful on the route to Nirvana. The cessation of atman and suffering are priorities before embarking on the Eightfold Path lifestyle. Removal of self in the US is considered Mo-Fa for a reason: We dignify everything we do with “the system we have built… based on illusion, greed, and ill will disguised by patriotism, religious doctrine, and individualism,” (26). Americans are prone to construing conservatives and patriots as callous inaccuracies pertaining to those who injure the Earth the most.

Politics aside, American culture infuses our language with selfishness. Higher education, Orr suggests, is a generalization of future capital and test-taking abilities. The purpose of American lives is an empty one, devoid of the imagination necessary to approach ideas, science, and technology to alleviate environmental threats such as “land use, buildings, energy systems, transportation, materials, water, agriculture, forestry, and urban planning” (29). The evolution of our government manifests many symptoms that veer further from environmental and social nirvana.

Sutras have been grafted into different contexts over the course of geographical and historical change. The Buddha is constructed into a deity on a psychological pedestal in more contemporary schools of Buddhism, just as Democrats and Republicans try to emulate esteemed historical figures they have never truly known.

Mahayana is contradictory in its approach towards enlightenment, as it advocates that a Bodhisattva, or those who help others reach salvation, is a self-proclaimed savior. Orr suggests that human reason would reach “enlightenment” per se, once human fallibility is recognized and human “interconnectedness and implicatedness” is discovered. Stability, creativeness shared between government and citizens, improved education, and spiritual renewal, or awareness, will accompany sustainable ideas, (60-63).

The road to enlightenment, both in Buddhism and in US capabilities is paved with a greater understanding of who we are as humans. Humans are not inherently corporate monsters that strive on self-interests and maximization of common resources, but socially and psychologically complex, yet interrelated creatures. Our governing documents, much like sutras, may be guides to enlightenment of reason and a sustainable future ahead, but as Orr explains, “It is a living evolving document. Its great virtue is its ‘extraordinary capacity for self-revision,” (126). America’s potential lies in our opportunities to make over, reinvent, and rediscover our world as world citizens.


Read The Last Refuge: : Patriotism, Politics and the Environment in an Age of Terror by David Orr! America under forcepts and dissection needles...