“I heard that somebody threw a beer at Ted Cruz,” James* said in his rich southern accent. “Now, that’s just about the worst thing you could do to somebody. I don’t care who he is; that man is a human being.”
I looked at the faces in the Zoom room: four squares of nodding heads, plus James’s square, partly obstructed by a virtual background he had asked his granddaughter to get rid of (she had been unsuccessful). We were a motley crew: we had representatives from the age groups of 70s, 60s, 30s, and 20s, and a near-even mixture of men and women. On other days, we had Asian and Indian friends among us, but today we were mostly white, with the exception of James, who is Black. Our uniting factor was that we were all practitioners of SGI Buddhism, come together for a study meeting. My favorite thing about these study meetings is that the diversity of the organization really shines through in them. I relish the opportunity to hear from elders, who typically take my breath away with the wisdom they’ve gained from being a human for decades longer than I have.
“Now, I can think of few people I agree with less than Ted Cruz,” continued James. “I don’t like the man at all. But I would still bow to him. I would bow to his buddha-nature. I would bow to the enlightened potential of anyone I don’t agree with.”
He went on to say that we need people with different opinions. If we didn’t have people giving us a reason to fight, we would not have anything to fight for.
In “Be Here Now,” Ram Dass said:
“Hippies create police
Police create hippies
If you’re in polarity, you’re creating opposites
You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.”
He also said,
“The only way out of that is to take the poles of every set of opposites and see the way in which they are one. And: if you can get into that place where you see the interrelatedness of everything, and you see the oneness in it all, then no longer are you attached to your polarized position.”
The answer is not throwing a beer at someone you don’t like. The answer is dialogue. We have a duty to talk to our fellow humans, who are endowed with buddha-naturejust as we are. I think that most of the time we are talking only to those who identify with the groups we identify with. That doesn’t cause a spark. There is no friction and there is no fire.
“If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will be no inner struggle in him, no ‘friction’, no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with the desires that hinder him— he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole.”
Ouspensky, quoted by Ram Dass in “Be Here Now”
I have a desire to be right. With politics, with religion, with everything I have an opinion about. I want to be right. I desire group membership; identification with others. My ego longs to identify with a cause, and people, I respect. It longs to be involved in the correct course of action so it can tell itself that it is doing a good job and that it is correct and that it is worthy.
But what if I am already worthy despite my identifications? What if the real difference between groups in opposite poles— Republican and Democrat, hippie and police, etcetera— is simply the group identification one chooses? Nothing deeper than that?
Buddha-nature, the capacity for boundless compassion and wisdom, exists in us all, even people we don’t like. People are worthy of respect whether you think they are or not.
My challenge to myself is to bow to the buddha-nature in a human I don’t like, and engage them in dialogue. There may be more commonality between us than either of us would ever imagine beyond the layers of complex labels and identities we’ve mummified ourselves with.
As a privileged white woman, it may be easy for me to pull the “we’re all one” card. I have experienced relatively few challenges as a result of the body I find myself in, although I do harbor a handful of marginalized identities. I do not mean to trivialize the real suffering that people like police and racists cause. Finding common ground with a fellow human does not excuse them from any suffering they have caused. Racists are not people I want to make friends with. And yet, if racists are shown no friction to their beliefs, the fire of transformation will not be possible for them. If they are not challenged— and challenged in a calm way, through dialogue, so they do not immediately close their ears— how will they ever recognize the buddha-nature in those they cast evil toward?
How will they ever recognize their own buddha-nature— that underlying capacity for goodness that exists in all of us, even the very worst of us?
What if recognizing that takes their breath away?
*I used a pseudonym since I did not ask for permission to share this person’s words.
embracing samsara 