One of the four great vows in Buddhism reads, “Delusions are endless, we vow to cut through them all.” This is generally understood to mean that in order to help this suffering world we first have to perceive it clearly, moment by moment, cutting through all delusions created by our minds, our ideologies, by the very nature of language itself. In my school, the Kwan Um School of Zen, headquartered outside of Providence, RI, we encourage bowing, chanting, walking and sitting meditation practice to attain this vow.
This is very tall order to be sure. The seeming impossibility of it is probably one reason why Buddhist temples and Zen Centers around the world are not usually stacked hundreds or thousands deep with practitioners. But anyone who has paid attention to the political news this year, done some door to door canvassing for Barack or tried to persuade a friend or relative with different political views immediately gets this vow. We encounter social or political points of view that leave us speechless. We often cannot, as hard as we try, successfully rebut or explain the cognitive twists and turns that people take to arrive at their support for an issue or a candidate.
Sometimes it appears easy. While doing voter registration I recently talked to a young woman at a vocational college whose family had always voted Republican. She asked me a lot of questions about Barack Obama and listened with a very open mind. She said she didn’t know these things I was saying about Obama. It seemed like I had made a sale!
After a while she said that she had never had a political conversation with her mother but would like to, and how should she approach this. I immediately began to hear my internal radio bark, “Mayday, Mayday.” She said that her mother had recently said she could not vote for that man, Obama. I asked what it was that made her mother nervous. She said that her mother was unsure about having a Muslim in the White House and that she was afraid that Barack would want to impose some of the Islamic customs about women and begin to roll back the freedoms that women had attained in this country.
“Well,” I said, feeling the room begin to spin a little and wanting but unable to speak slowly, “That should be pretty easy since he is not a Muslim. He’s been a member of a Christian church in Chicago for years. And he was recently endorsed by NOW, the National Organization for Women.”
“Oh,” she said quietly. So, it is easy to want to break out laughing and say, “Boy, was she deluded!” Sometimes these delusions are just misinformation that are easily cleared up. But I’d bet that if she took this information home to her mother it would clear up a surface misunderstanding only to uncover another unusual pattern of thinking and so forth until we finally arrive at assumptions and assertions that are too tangled or too personal to find words for.
This is an easy example because it paints the opposition as wrong and misinformed. But I can guarantee “they” find our thinking just as peculiar as we find theirs. Which is not to say I’m confused about my own preferences. I strongly believe Barack Obama is the better candidate in this race, and I’m working to help him win. But the fact is we all suffer gaps in our cognition about our politics, our families, our jobs, our place in the world. It is hard to be completely sure how large or how significant they are. Our ideas and opinions and many times our life experiences condition us to perceive our moment to moment situation incorrectly.
We think we have a precise and nuanced view of the world only to discover that the next situation we face is yet again more nuanced than we ever imagined. Our certainties about what we know and how the world works have the potential to cause great suffering in ourselves and others. Boiled down, the Buddha taught just two things, suffering and the cessation of suffering.
Perhaps most importantly, after this election is over most of us will continue to live in the same communities with the same neighbors with the same differences of opinion and with the same local issues. To me the candidacy of Barack Obama is both an opportunity to rebuild this nation and create an environment of patience and compassion as we work with each other to cut through our delusions.
Tom Davis
Dharma Teacher
Kwan Um School of Zen
Kansas City, MO
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