With a Little Help from Our Friends…

When Siddhartha Gautama was a young man, he was outside with his cousin Devadatta when the latter shot a beautiful swan.  When the bird fell to the ground young Siddhartha raced over and took it to be healed, much to the dismay of his cousin. They decided to bring in a third party and took the case to Siddhartha’s father, the King, to be decided to whom the bird actually belonged. Devadatta who shot the bird presented his case first: “I shot the swan. It is mine.” The King then listened to Siddhartha, who he knew was already very wise beyond his years. Siddhartha approached the King and quietly asked “To whom does the bird belong, Father, to the man who tried to kill it or to the man who has tried to save it?”

This short parable of the Buddha’s life demonstrates his compassion at a very early age for all of life, not only for human beings but toward all sentient creatures. It shows us that through his wisdom, he understood compassion as the very basis for the expression of love and friendship. In this story, Devadatta embodies attachment to the material world. That world has us to claim ownership of something, to call something our own, because we exercise power over it, even as far as the power to give or to take life from it, even to the extent that  killing another creature to prove that one is worthy of respect from others. The Buddha-to-be in this parable however demonstrates that this way of thinking is unworthy of us at a fundamental level. We become worthy of one another’s respect and trust by ending suffering and nourishing one another. While violence is the path of the former, nonviolence is that of the latter.

Nonviolence is the awareness of the reality that all of life is interconnected and that all of life is fundamentally one, which is borne not only from modern scientific discoveries but the ancient wisdom traditions. The underlying reality that makes up and holds all life together is love. Yet it is not the kind of passive or romantic love that takes over the senses and the mind, but a force of love that is both generative and positive. It is upheld by the awareness that there is a law of cause and effect surrounding all of our actions and interactions. This is true for violence as much as nonviolence. Whenever I choose violent means, I will, in effect, generate more violence. When it is nonviolence in question, in the words of St. Teresa of Avila, amor saca amor, love begets love.

Michael Nagler coined the term ‘collateral healing’ to describe the overall  effect of nonviolence at its best. Unlike ‘collateral damage’, the phenomenon of ‘collateral healing’ bears witness to the belief that nonviolence always injects a situation with positive energy and that the energy is subject to the scientific law of causality. Even if we can’t know exactly where or when the effect will manifest,“the result will always be constructive.“ The law is applied to the individual as well as much as the nation, for according to Gandhi, “It is a profound error to suppose that whilst the law is good enough for individuals it is not for masses of mankind.”

The point I want to make, however, leads us to a very serious question. What message is the United States sending to other nations, if through the law of cause and effect, we prepare them to fall into harm’s way? Though not through the way typically understood. It is not that we are failing to act or failing to protect, rather, we are by failing to use the right means in doing so. Through the law of cause and effect, we can understand that by supplying another country with arms and nuclear weapons to act out violence is never in that country’s best interest for self-defense (not to mention our own) in the bigger picture because that country is only building up a reaction, an effect, of greater violence to be reflected back at itself. It is, as the Buddha says, like looking up and throwing sand into the air. In order to “help” a country to make peace, we ask them in effect to create more enemies. The reasoning is not only logically flawed; but it is subtle. It strikes at the very root of our common security.

It also makes a greater statement in regard to the sincerity of our plea to friendship with another country. Who is the true friend, the one who has tried to heal the country, or the one who has perpetuated harm?  It is a scientific as well as a spiritual fact: violence begets violence.

Take Israel for example. Befriending our nation or our national corporate interests a country would only stand to make enemies. Would we not be better friends to Israel if we built up her self-confidence to help her make friends, to create better diplomatic ties from those strengths, and most importantly, while doing so, we emphasized nonviolent means, and promised collateral healing? That would entail Israel renouncing the weapons we are selling her, and to begin living the message of peace that she so desperately seeks. As a true friend to Israel, we would tell her that we have faith in her abilities and her promise. We would want to see her thriving and successful for now and for her future generations. We would want to see an end to the fighting and violence and give her wise advise on how to make that happen. That is friendship. That is the basis of strength and wisdom.

While the United States professes this friendly commitment in words toward Israel, it is still very far from our hearts. Because in our hearts we know that violence begets violence. We know that Israel can never be independent and thriving while she uses violence because violence does not create the conditions for peace to emerge. This may be hard for us to see because our country thrives (or does it?) on a war economy.

Indeed a renewed assessment of friendship building would not only be best for Israel, it would actually be best for ourselves. With more people enlisted in the military and prison-industrial complexes than in Ph.D. programs in the United States, we might even begin to suspect that we are a nation who is addicted to violence– at the very least, that we have a problem. We are also in need of a friend. We need Israel to help us end our violence by helping us to see our own hard truth in a way that only a friend can do effectively.

The time is now for Israel to decide and truly act on the future she wants: does she want continued violence or is she ready for peace?  If she wants to be healed and she wants peace, then in respect to cause and effect,  she will have to imagine whether she could find it nonviolently. She would have to realize within herself the courage and the love to quit United States and actively create a nonviolent future.