A Buddhist Perspective on Abu Ghraib

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh comments on torture, war, fear, and compassion, in this excellent interview:

"It is very easy to create a pretext for why it is necessary to torture a prisoner when we have fear and anger in us. When we have compassion, we can always find another way. When you torture a living being, you die as a human being because the other person’s suffering is your own suffering. When you perform surgery on someone, you know the surgery will help him and that is why you can cut into his body. But when you cut into someone’s body and mind to get information from them, you cut into your own life, you kill yourself as a person. [...]

"An act of cruelty is born of many conditions coming together, without any separate, individual actor. When we hold retreats for war veterans, I tell them they are the flame at the tip of the candle, they are the ones who feel the heat, but the whole candle is burning, not only the flame. All of us are responsible.

"The very ideas of terrorism and imagined weapons of mass destruction are already collective karma in terms of thinking and speaking. The media helped the war happen by supporting these ideas through speech and writing. Thought, speech and action are all collective karma.

"No one can say they are not responsible for this current situation even if we oppose our country’s actions. We are still a member of our community, a citizen of our country. Maybe we have not done enough. We must ally ourselves with bodhisattvas, great awakened beings, around us to transform our way of thinking and that of our society, because wrong thinking is at the base of our present situation, thinking that has no wisdom or compassion. And we can do things every day, in every moment of our daily life, to nourish the seeds of peace, compassion and understanding in us and in those around us. We can live in such a way that can heal our collective karma and ensure that these atrocities will not happen again in the future."

Comments

[Tracy]

Dear Friend,

Thank you for the reminder that we, only one person can still contribute by active PEACE in ourselves to reduce the WAR.

Critizing others or the gov'tment, won't help.
But active PEACE will help!
Thank you, Thich Nhat Hanh!

[Kai]

Thanks, Tracy, for your elevating comments and thoughts.

Peace,
Kai

[Yolanda Carrington]

We must ally ourselves with bodhisattvas, great awakened beings, around us to transform our way of thinking and that of our society, because wrong thinking is at the base of our present situation, thinking that has no wisdom or compassion. And we can do things every day, in every moment of our daily life, to nourish the seeds of peace, compassion and understanding in us and in those around us. We can live in such a way that can heal our collective karma and ensure that these atrocities will not happen again in the future."

It was easy to get angry at what those fools did at Abu Ghraib, because it was so heinous and dehumanizing. The toughest job was owning that I'd internalized the same dehumanizing values as Charles Graner et al, dominance, manipulation, conquest, and violence as a means to an end. Remember how progressives mocked Lynndie England for all sorts of things---her poor Appalachian background, her rural whiteness, her deeply internalized misogyny and propensity for violence? After I'd read her story, I realized that anyone of us could have been in that situation because the wrong thinking that produced England is still with us.