Tough Love, Buddhist-style. A Review of Buddha Takes No Prisoners: A Meditator’s Survival Manual by Patrick (William) Ophuls

Reading this book, I sometimes wonder, “Is it worth it? All of this time spent on meditation, all of this concern? After all, I’m pretty old, and I’m never going to escape samsara in this lifetime. I’m a householder, and even after years of mediation and having spent 10 days living and meditating like a Buddhist monk, I’m not sure that I’ve made a dent in taming my monkey mind. My prospects are bleak. And if that isn’t bad enough, I live in society that is perhaps the worst of all possible worlds for hoping to achieve nirvana.”

If you pick up this book and read it in the hope of finding words of praise and encouragement, you’ve chosen the wrong book. Buddha takes no prisoners and neither does Ophuls. Whether he’s talking about meditation or the social world, he isn’t sparing in his assessments. Yet for all his bluntness, he encourages by throwing down the gauntlet of an impossible quest. For every time you read something that suggests your situation or your efforts are hopeless, Ophuls seems to acknowledge the quandary and say “do it anyway”. And why not? If we don’t try, we fade off into oblivion without having attempted the noble quest. As a practical matter, life can be bad. And life can be worse. We can’t escape old age, sickness, and death, but we can experience the “The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to” with greater or lesser equanimity and therefore greater or lesser suffering.

Another reason to continue this book (and the path it recommends) comes from Ophuls’s pithy writing. As Ophuls notes in his beginning remarks:

So Buddha Takes No Prisoners is a different kind of meditation book— one that is quite idiosyncratic, not to say iconoclastic, by traditional standards, because it has no pretensions to orthodoxy . It also tries to inject a note of playful irreverence into what is usually taken to be A VERY SERIOUS MATTER. I want to emphasize the word playful: my aim was to produce something that would be fun to read and, above all, fun to write, while still being instructive. Otherwise, why bother?

Id. “Not another meditation book!”

In fact, Ophuls does provide fresh and engaging ways to consider meditation and the aims of the Buddhist tradition. I came away with some memorable insights, such as this one about the realization of what it’s all about:

[M]any years of intensive spiritual practice had succeeded in clearing [Buddha’s] mind, and one day an early childhood memory bubbled up. Left to himself under a tree by the side of a field in which his father was supervising the ritual plowing, Siddhartha had relaxed into a state of pure presence— a condition of open, amplified awareness in which he saw everything perfectly, just as it was. Feeling with his whole body and mind the clarity, grace, and power of that remembered state, Siddhartha knew he had found the way forward at last.

Id. (p. 8)

We all probably have some like memory of pure presence, of open, unencumbered awareness with which we can identify Buddha’s experience. So this is what it’s all about! This insight alone is worth the price of the book. It gives one a sense of the grace that we seek through meditation, not simply relaxation or some trance state, but an experience of an ineffable relationship with the world.

Another key insight is that meditation is all about purification. We all have a Buddha mind, it’s just covered in dross. Ophuls recounts the ways in which meditators have often described the mind and then he adds an even better metaphor of his own:

[M]editation is like taming a wild beast— traditionally, a spooky horse, a mad monkey, a drunken elephant , or a bewildered ox . But the real beast is, of course, you, so think of it as housebreaking your inner hyena.

  

Id. (p. 14)

Your “inner hyena”? Ophuls later refers to us humans as the “two-legged hyenas” and notes that “[o]ur hyena nature is always scheming, conniving, and chiseling, always maneuvering for advantage. Only the saints refrain—on their better days.” Id. (p. 45). This isn’t your garden variety, soft-soap, self-help book. 

Ophuls emphasizes that meditation is a matter of purification, which is in turn mostly a matter of renunciation. Now how welcome are those words in our culture and in our minds? Nice in theory, but do I really have to give up [cherished pleasures and junk of your choice]? This is where Ophuls pulls no punches (or takes no prisoners). Yup, that’s what it’s about: purging the dross of the mind. It ain’t easy. Meditation may be seem like the ex-lax of purging, but sooner or later, you’re going to have some uncomfortable episodes. For this aspect of meditation, you need endurance and toughness to work through it. Indeed, it’s not just the mind; oh, no, it includes the body as whole, which is the home of the mind. (The mind is not located exclusively in the brain.) Ophuls explains: 

To free your mind, you must dissolve these physical blockages (and, of course, vice versa: to free your body, you must untie your mental knots). The fireworks generated by the collision between healing energy and coagulated defilement will take different forms— and can be more or less intense depending on individual karma—but physical purification and transformation are always an intrinsic and integral part of the meditation process.

Id. (p. 32)

For instance, following a mediation retreat that I attended, a guy that I thought could have been an American pro-football player told me that he balled like a baby during one period of mediation as a damn of physical and emotional pain broke in him. This is not the stuff of wimps. 

Ophuls, like about every other meditation teacher, tells us that we’ll fail in our efforts, especially at the beginning. But he writes: 

Of course, you will fail pitifully when you try to carry out this simple program. Everybody does. But it doesn’t matter. You simply do the best you can, and you keep doing it over and over, not being attached to how well you are doing or to what results you obtain. Even a few brief moments of metta and equanimity are enough to begin the ripening process .

Id. (p. 28)

“I’m a failure.” Big deal. Get over it. “Small, small catch monkey” as they say in Cameroon. 

In what can seem like a stream of discouraging words (which rightly taken are challenging words), Ophuls offers this point of encouragement: 

But meditation is not like art, where a hundred years of practice will not turn a dabbler into Degas. It is more like Edison’s formula for genius: ninety-nine parts perspiration to one part inspiration. So practice is everything . Whatever your talent for meditation, you cannot succeed without practicing ; whatever your lack of talent, you can succeed by practicing. If you produce the perspiration, the inspiration will come— 

Id. (p. 50)

Toward the end of the book, Ophuls includes a chapter “Return to the Marketplace” along with four appendices that deal with these issues more directly in the realm of daily life, including the marketplace and the public square. This is a value-added aspect of Ophuls’s work that I don’t find in other fine works on meditation. How does it fit with the lives we live? (Assuming you’re not a monk or nun.) On one hand, he simplifies the message for us: 

Enlightenment shows us that all the world’s a church, and all of life’s a pilgrimage, so we must live accordingly: with wisdom and compassion. In a nutshell, wisdom is practicing nonclinging, and compassion is practicing kindness.

Id. (p. 131)

But while we’re living the spiritual life, we mustn’t get ourselves lost in our personalized versions of a spiritual trip. He writes: 

The corollary is not to be rule bound— that is, enslaved by some image of holiness that you (and everybody else) have to live up to. Making a big deal out of spirituality or identifying it with political correctness and your personal preferences is delusion, not enlightenment. Spiritual trips are just as obnoxious as worldly trips, if not more so (especially when the two get all jumbled up together). As hard as it might be for some in the spiritual scene to accept, vegetarianism is not obligatory, and a glass of wine with dinner is not anathema. Nor is voting Democratic any more enlightened than voting Republican . And social workers are no holier than sailors.

Id. (pp. 131-132)

For some, this might come like a cold bucket of water in the face. (N.B. Voting Democratic is (nowadays) almost always smarter and wiser than voting Republican, but it’s not a sign of spiritual enlightenment.) Indeed, lest we all go off to live in monasteries, we must deal with the world, and deal with it in worldly-wise ways. Ophuls notes: 

[A]s long as we are living as householders rather than as renunciates, it is entirely appropriate to create and enjoy fortunate circumstances. Fortune fosters joy, and joy fosters generosity and other positive, skillful qualities of mind. So we need to find the middle way between self-abnegation and self-indulgence. We need, in other words, to create a way of living that is simple, beautiful, and life-affirming: a squalid hovel is a blight, and a trophy mansion an extravagance, but a well-designed, well-built, and well-furnished home is a blessing. To mention beauty is to come to the heart of the matter. Beauty is not an option or a luxury, but a necessity. We need beauty in our personal lives, because beauty uplifts the mind and reconnects it to the power and wonder of creation. And we desperately need beauty in our collective life (perhaps even more than we need political, social, and economic reform).

Id. (pp. 132-133)

The “perhaps” in the last sentence is noteworthy; let’s agree that we can use both.

Just as you may think that Buddha and Ophuls are going soft, Ophuls writes that we in the West want to have “healing” and enlightenment; we want the pleasures of life and the benefits of renunciation. No way, he says. Freud sought to compromise with reality, to whittle away the suffering of our neuroses into ordinary unhappiness. Buddha wasn’t willing to take this path. Buddha goes all the way, and team Buddha isn’t going to boost everyone’s self-esteem by letting everyone make the cut and get a letter. No. “You’re going to have to earn it.” (Cue John Houseman’s sneering voice for full effect.)

In the four appendices, Ophuls situates Buddhist thought within contexts of modern science, Western political thought, Western psychology, and contemporary culture. As with the rest of the book, the tone alternates between it’s all FUBAR (for younger readers:  “fouled-up beyond all recourse” or something like that) and “Okay, it’s FUBAR, let’s get to work on it”. (I wrote earlier about the appendix on politics.) 

Ophuls is like a great teacher or coach, at once demanding a level of performance that one can never hope to obtain while providing a pat on the back indicating that you’re getting there. Challenge and encouragement. With this, Ophuls's book goes on my shelf (electronic shelf in this case) as one of the best guides to meditation and what life is really about: living it with wisdom, compassion, and equanimity.   

Buddha, Jesus & Socrates Need Help: Part 2 via Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr, 20th century American

In my prior post on this topic, I touched on the history of Christian political thought up to the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, after which (roughly speaking) the weight of thought veers in a different direction after Machiavelli and Hobbes. I now want to jump forward to the 20^th century and to the thinker whom I’ve found most informative and persuasive in his analysis of politics and the problems of ethics: Reinhold Niebuhr. Taking a cue from Protestant ministers who would announce the text upon which they would base their homily, my text for this blog post will be Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense, published in 1944. 

Niebuhr was an American theologian and political thinker active in public life from the 1920s to the 1960s. In a very helpful introduction to my edition of The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Gary Dorrien (Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary, and Professor of Religion, Columbia University) provides a useful account of Niebuhr’s thinking over his long career. Dorrien also provides a succinct statement of some of Niebuhr’s most important themes and insights about politics and ethics: 

 

• the problems of human “fallibility, sin, and ambiguity”;
• the understanding that human groups will always place self-interest first and foremost and therefore a struggle for power will ensue;
• occasionally individuals could overcome self-centeredness when motivated by love; and
• Jesus provides no direction with the issue of political ethics. 

This last proposition severs Niebuhr from the Social Gospel proponents with whom he once shared allegiance. In arguing that Jesus taught no political ethic, Niebuhr identified a central lacuna in the Gospels that later tradition sought to rectify. Thus, Niebuhr takes up issues that St. Augustine struggled with near the beginning of Christianity in Late Antiquity. Following the lead of Augustine, along with influences (theologically) from Luther and Calvin, Niebuhr develops a realist stance of Christian (and secular) ethics toward the political world. In his Introduction, Dorrien describes The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, as “written at midcareer as Niebuhr was coming fully into his own, is the most comprehensive statement of his political philosophy.” Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense. University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition (Introduction by Gary Dorrien). A careful consideration of this work suggests ways in which we can think about bridging the gap between individual ethics that require love and eschew violence against the realities of political power. 
 

In a quote that should rival Churchill’s for its pithy and ironic defense of democracy, Niebuhr wrote: “Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” Id. (Forward to the First Edition (1944)). Niebuhr identifies democracy with the rise of the bourgeois in Europe and then in America. It arose because individuals wanted to protect themselves and their property. So a new balance was struck, one in which freedom from constraint and arbitrary exercise of power became of the utmost importance. But Niebuhr also realized the larger issues of freedom and community that arise from this background. He writes: 

Democracy can therefore not be equated with freedom. An ideal democratic order seeks unity within the conditions of freedom; and maintains freedom within the framework of order. Man requires freedom in his social organization because he is “essentially” free, which is to say, that he has the capacity for indeterminate transcendence over the processes and limitations of nature. This freedom enables him to make history and to elaborate communal organizations in boundless variety and in endless breadth and extent. But he also requires community because he is by nature social. He cannot fulfill his life within himself but only in responsible and mutual relations with his fellows.

 Id. (pp. 3-4)

Niebuhr is not a simple cheerleader for bourgeois democracy; to the contrary, he is a sharp critic of it and of capitalism as a social and economic system. He states: 

Bourgeois individualism may be excessive and it may destroy the individual's organic relation to the community; but it was not intended to destroy either the national or the international order. On the contrary the social idealism which informs our democratic civilization had a touching faith in the possibility of achieving a simple harmony between self-interest and the general welfare on every level.

 Id. (p. 7)

But it is this faith that Niebuhr spurns, the belief in progress and the inevitability of social improvement endorsed by those he terms “the children of light”. Niebuhr describes the children of light: 

Those who believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law could then be termed “the children of light.” This is no mere arbitrary device; for evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole, whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community, or the total community of mankind, or the total order of the world. The good is, on the other hand, always the harmony of the whole on various levels. Devotion to a subordinate and premature “whole” such as the nation, may of course become evil, viewed from the perspective of a larger whole, such as the community of mankind. The “children of light” may thus be defined as those who seek to bring self-interest under the discipline of a more universal law and in harmony with a more universal good.

Id. (pp. 9-10)

He then describes the “children of darkness”: “The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest.” Id. (p. 10). Where the children of light are naïve, the children of darkness are knowing. Niebuhr argues that for the children of light to succeed in bringing about a better world, they must learn the ways of their cynical counterparts. And in what may shock some contemporary readers, Niebuhr includes Marxists (at least some) among the children of light: idealistic in believing self-will and conflict can be finally resolved. He writes: 

The Marxists, too, are children of light. Their provisional cynicism does not even save them from the usual stupidity, nor from the fate, of other stupid children of light. That fate is to have their creed become the vehicle and instrument of the children of darkness. A new oligarchy is arising in Russia, the spiritual characteristics of which can hardly be distinguished from those of the American “go-getters” of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And in the light of history Stalin will probably have the same relation to the early dreamers of the Marxist dreams which Napoleon has to the liberal dreamers of the eighteenth century.

Id. (pp. 32-33)

Note that Niebuhr wrote this during the war, when Stalin led one of our allies in a great titanic struggle and when Roosevelt believed he could woo Stalin into joining a liberal post-war world. While Niebuhr’s equivalence of American “go-getters” with the leaders of the Kremlin seems far-fetched, his comparison of Stalin to Napoleon and crushed dreams is prescient.  

Niebuhr sums up his brief for the children of light: 

The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice. They must know the power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification. They must have this wisdom in order that they may beguile, deflect, harness and restrain self-interest, individual and collective, for the sake of the community.

Id. (pp. 40-41). 

Niebuhr recognized the modern nation-state as the primary actor in international politics. About it, he writes: “The morally autonomous modern national state does indeed arise; and it acknowledges no law beyond its interests. The actual behaviour of the nations is cynical. But the creed of liberal civilization is sentimental.” Id. (p. 33). Thus a conflict, especially open and obvious (and continuing) in American history between the idealists (Wilsonians we may say) and the moral realists (of whom Niebuhr is perhaps the most articulate). This dichotomy in American practice runs all through American history in the twenthiecentury. Our most “Machiavellian” president[i], Richard Nixon, admired Wilson and saw himself carrying on the Wilson legacy while he proved himself a master of geopolitical realism in the American interest. President Obama, who cited Niebuhr as his “favorite philosopher”, walks a fine line between brutal realism, Niebuhr-like caution, and American idealism, sentimentality, and nationalism. 

Lest one think Niebuhr too pessimistic, we should note that he supports efforts to limit conflict and build institutions: “The problem of overcoming this chaos and of extending the principle of community to worldwide terms has become the most urgent of all the issues which face our epoch.” Id. (p. 153). In fact, that we may think of a “world community has two important sources that allow such a concept to enjoy any reality. The first source is religion. Niebuhr writes: 

While the religions of the east [earlier referring to the Confucian and Daoist traditions of China and the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of India] were generally too mystic and otherworldly to give historic potency to universal ideals, their emerging universal perspectives must be counted as added evidence of the fact that there has been a general development in human culture toward the culmination of religions and philosophies in which the meaning of life and its obligations were interpreted above and beyond the limits of any particular community.[ii]

Id. (pp. 156-157).

Niebuhr identifies the developments in the technical realm as the other impetus toward a world community. Taken together, the reality of a single world community is more than a liberal pipe dream. Yet, against this, Niebuhr identifies the centrifugal force and predicts that “international politics of the coming decades will be dominated by great powers who will be able to prevent recalcitrance among the smaller nations, but who will have difficulty in keeping peace between each other because they will not have any authority above their own powerful enough to bend or deflect their wills.” Id. (p. 171). 

In making these observations, Niebuhr criticizes realism in international relations almost as harshly as liberal institutionalism: 

It is indicative of the spiritual problem of mankind that these realistic approaches [to international relations] are often as close to the abyss of cynicism as the idealistic approaches are to the fog of sentimentality. The realistic school of international thought believes that world politics cannot rise higher than the balance-of-power principle. The balance-of-power theory of world politics, seeing no possibility of a genuine unity of the nations, seeks to construct the most adequate possible mechanism for equilibrating power on a world scale. Such a policy, which holds all factors in the world situation in the most perfect possible equipoise, can undoubtedly mitigate anarchy. A balance of power is in fact a kind of managed anarchy. But it is a system in which anarchy invariably overcomes the management in the end. Despite its defects the policy of the balance of power is not as iniquitous as idealists would have us believe. For even the most perfectly organized society must seek for a decent equilibrium of the vitalities and forces under its organization. If this is not done, strong disproportions of power develop; and wherever power is inordinate, injustice results. But an equilibrium of power without the organizing and equilibrating force of government, is potential anarchy which becomes actual anarchy in the long run. The balance-of-power system may, despite its defects, become the actual consequence of present policies. The peace of the world may be maintained perilously and tentatively, for some decades, by an uneasy equilibrium between the three great powers, America, Russia and Britain. [iii]

Id. (pp. 173-175)

Niebuhr goes on to consider the histories and practices of particular nations: the U.S., Britain, Russia, and China, and how they will relate the new order in the post-war world, displaying prophetic insight through his observations. He also notes (again) the tension between individual morality and political realities that create tensions: “Hypocrisy and pretension are the inevitable concomitants of the engagement between morals and politics. But they do not arise where no effort is made to bring the power impulse of politics under the control of conscience. The pretension that it has been brought completely under control is thus the hypocritical by-product of the moral endeavour.” Id. (pp. 184-185). He sums up the quandary with this pronouncement: “The field of politics is not helpfully tilled by pure moralists; and the realm of international politics is particularly filled with complexities which do not yield to the approach of a too simple idealism. Id. (p. 186). In the end, Niebuhr concludes that we must strive for the impossible: a community where none is fully realized peace where it is never final. 

This book is less fundamental and comprehensive than Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, but both works give us guidance as far as guidance can be found. As with Buddhism, we have to conclude that we have no definitive standards for conducting political life from the founders. The Christian tradition has built theories (often conflicting), but none can fairly claim to have arisen directly out of the Gospels or the New Testament. And we cannot turn to Niebuhr for rules of ethics: he provides none. He opposed Roosevelt’s arms build-up before Munich, and then he rallied in support of the fight against Fascism. In the early 60’s he supported the U.S. effort in Vietnam, but he later became a vocal critic of the war. Niebuhr’s thought is marked by ambiguity, irony, and equivocation. One shouldn’t turn to it if you are looking for the answer to whether a particular policy or course of political conduct meets a given test of morality or ethics. There are no easy answers. For instance, should the U.S. use drones on known Islamic terrorists plotting the death of Americans when we know that innocents will be killed? Should we arm rebels and bomb because Americans have been murdered, even though the “collateral damage” (so Orwellian) will claim innocent lives? The litany of tough practical and moral choices could continue indefinitely. There is no existing answer book unless one takes a position of absolutism. 

Does the liberal-secular tradition provide a more reasoned, easily identified set of answers? I hope to explore that in a future post, perhaps considering Max Weber, Michael Ignatieff, and Michael Walzer. And for a completely different take, I hope to consider the ideas of Gandhi about war and peace, which may prove more nuanced than many would have thought.

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[i] This designation mischaracterizes both Machiavelli and Nixon. For a convincing understanding of Machiavelli that goes beyond branding him a mere cynic (as Niebuhr does), see Bobbitt, Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made, which argues that Machiavelli’s The Prince was a step on the road to a republic and the unification of Italy and therefore a provisional ethic. As to Nixon, he was more Shakespeare’s Richard III, who sought to “set the murderous Machevil to school “(3 Henry IV, 3.2.16) with his personal ambition. Nixon had a mixture of both. Kevin Spacey’s character Frank Underwood in House of Cards, likewise, is almost all Richard III and no Machiavelli, at least in motive.

[ii] This is an over generalization of “eastern” religions, and it overlooks that fact that Christianity was—and is—an otherworldly religion.

[iii]See Henry Kissinger's just published World Order for a consideration and defense of a balance of power stance.