Modern Buddhism: 9/11 and Twin Towers Falling
It’s easy to celebrate, or commemorate, the New York City catastrophe of 2001, as the malevolent manipulations of misguided Muslims, but that would likely be an example of what the best Buddhists might call ‘unskillful actions’. Because, if the current excitement over (Buddhist) Monks Walking for Peace has proven nothing, it has proven that the minute you make politics part of the program, then you have lost the narrative upper hand in the Noble Eightfold Path for Right Thoughts, Right Words, and Right Actions, among other noble imperatives.
And if anybody asks why I must tread carefully around politics when Buddhism is experiencing its headiest times in the race for chart placement, then I try to explain as delicately as I can that you might not really want to know the politics of some of these Theravada monks raised in the shadow of strongman Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand in the two thousand aughties when reds and yellow shirts were fighting it out on the streets of Bangkok. And, in retrospect, much of that was tame in comparison to the current politics of the shiny happy USA of modern America.
So, I have a policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, when it comes to modern American politics and Buddhism. Thailand’s Thaksin was at least a genuine populist, not a cheesy con. The point is, though, that politics and religion don’t mix, never have, and never will. There are too many conundrums and contingencies, and too many causes and conditions that can never be reconciled satisfactorily. Burmese politics might be the best example of that, in which a right-wing junta has conscripted the Buddhist sangha as almost something of a right-hand facilitator to Rohingya genocide.
And that’s easy when the victim in question is Muslim, whether Christian or Buddhist the perpetrator. Yet Islam exists for a reason, and it is incumbent upon injured parties to make claims for the rights that they are due. So, Christian and Buddhist onlookers must see this as an opportunity for Right Actions, by condemning the actions and not the actors. Much of this happens in India, too, and not always by Muslims, that the most spiritual country in the world by many measurements.
The Buddhist Middle path is always a guide, balanced actions against imbalanced transgressions in a steady dialectic of understanding. Bottom line: the 9/11 attacks were symbolic, by any measure, though the casualties were significant. But that was never the point, just as the number of miles or kilometers walked is not the point of the Monks Walking for Peace. The point is the symbolism, and that’s what we need to remember, in both cases, both the good and the bad…
“Life is magnificent; be yourself.” These words are taken straight from a T-shirt, so hardly authoritative, but I don’t think any phrase could better demonstrate the differences between East and West, the West being something of a personality cult of ones own self, while the East—Buddhism, at least—denies the existence of a self entirely…
streaming consciousness... 
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