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 Embracing our pain
Posted: Monday January 31, 2005 5:55 PM EST
How can we explain the Asian tsunami disaster and heal our grief? Here, Thich Nhat Hanh, the renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk, poet and peace advocate, offers words of wisdom to comfort us
 Paris, France—The whole human race is in mourning ... Over the past days I have offered incense and recited Buddha’s name every day to send energy to the victims and their families. The whole world is shaken by the disaster in southeast Asia. Indonesia and Sri Lanka have suffered most of all. The tsunami even reached the shores of Africa and hundreds of people on the coast of Africa have lost their lives. Although we are sitting here, a part of our heart and body has died also. Many people from northern European countries such as Sweden had gone on holiday to this area looking for a quiet, unpolluted and warm place to take a break, and in a few moments the tsunami took their lives. Scientists are saying that if Southeast Asia had had a system of alert, some people could have avoided the catastrophe. A warning system could have given people four hours time to leave the coastal areas. However, even if there had been a system of alert how could ordinary people have been alerted; those who do not have radio, TV, those who are working at sea, on the land or the children? The westerners who lost their lives in the tsunami were mostly vacationers, who went there to escape cold winter weather, but some of those who died were here to do charitable work. They did not come here on holiday but to offer their services. This calamitous event urges us to look deeply and consider the condition of the human species. In Christianity, the question of why there is this kind of suffering has been discussed through the ages. Why does God, who created the world with all its species, allow such suffering to take place? This has been a subject for theologians throughout time. In Buddhism we speak of Cause and Result. We say that we have to bear the consequences of our actions. Still, people ask: “How can children of three or five years old have done such evil acts that they have to lose their parents or their own lives?” How can we explain the law of karma? Whether we are Christian or Buddhist, this disaster poses questions for us. Christian believers ask: “How can God, who loves mankind, allow things like this to happen?” Buddhists ask: “How could people who have come with the best of intentions to help others and were doing charitable work, or innocent children, have committed such a crime that they should die in this way?” Some people say that although during this lifetime they had not committed crimes they may have done so in a past life. We try to provide answers like this. The French poet Victor Hugo at the age of 40 or so lost his daughter who was about 20 years old. Her name was Leopoldine. He suffered deeply and asked God why this should have happened to her. She too was drowned. A tender flower just opening suddenly snatched away by a wave. When his daughter died, he went back to his birthplace Villequier. In the poem entitled At Villequier, he says: “Mankind can only see one side of reality. The other side is plunged in the darkness of a frightening mystery. Mankind bears the yoke without knowing why. Everything he sees is short-lived, futile and fleeting.” Victor Hugo calls on God: “I come to you, God, the Father in whom we must believe. Calmly I bring you the pieces of my heart filled with your glory, which you have broken. I accept that only you know what you do, and that mankind is only a reed that trembles in the wind.” Man is powerless, man is of no worth. That is our condition. Only God knows what He is doing and we, His creatures, have no understanding of what He does. Theologians have tried to give explanations. Some say that if we did not suffer we could not grow. Thus God wants us to mourn and suffer so that we have a chance to grow. Some people can accept this kind of reasoning, but others cannot. In Plum Village, we have often studied rebirth and the cycle of samsara. We know that in popular Buddhism, the teachings of rebirth are based on a belief in a self or soul. It is said that when someone dies, they are reborn as another person or an animal. There is faith that we continue. When we die, we do not cease entirely to exist. We continue in a different form, and that is what we call the cycle of birth and death. We have learned, however, that in the deeper Buddhist teachings, we have to understand rebirth in the light of no-self. The basis of Buddhist teachings is the teaching on no-self. If we understand rebirth and the cause and result of action in terms of a self, we have not yet touched the deepest levels of the Buddhist teachings. Similarly the matter of evil also has to be resolved in the light of no-self. When people ask: “Why do I have to undergo suffering and calamity, while others live carefree?” and “Why should an innocent child be forced to bear such wretched misery?” Most of the answers we receive to these questions are based on the idea of a separate self. We know that when we base our thinking on the idea of a separate self, we have not yet found an answer that is consistent with the teachings of the Buddha. All the questions of cause and result, retribution and rebirth have to be resolved in light of the teachings of no-self. We have studied karma according to the Manifestation-Only teachings of Buddhist psychology, and we have seen that there is both individual and collective karma. We might expect that the people of Southeast Asia who are born, grow up, and make their living there would be killed in the tsunami that took place there; but why should tens of thousands of Westerners go there to meet their deaths? At this moment there are thousands of Westerners who still do not know whether their loved ones have survived, and as every hour passes their hope diminishes.
When an aircraft explodes and crashes and nearly all the passengers die but one or two survive, we ask: “Why? Why did they not all die? Why did one or two live?” This shows us that karma has both an individual and collective aspect. When we discover the principle of individual and collective, we have begun to resolve a significant part of the matter already. If we continue in the direction of the insight of no-self, we shall gradually discover answers closer to the truth.
Source: http://www.bangkokpost.com/
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