Skillful means, not ideology.

[RichardH]

Please takes this posting with a huge grain of salt. It is coming from recent experience of people close to me with passionate views, and I would like to share it here.

Discussions at home around recent political events have brought to mind the nature of ideology. Ideology can be defined as a view-package that selectively screens information in order to draw conclusions about root causes and responsibilities. Ideology simplifies the world, sweeping many disparate lines of activity, happening for many reasons, into a coherent narrative.

Buddhism has an “ideological” component that selects out certain characteristics of our common experience, such as impermanence, emptiness, and dissatisfaction. These characteristic were selected as objects of contemplation in order to effect a deep letting go, not as statements of Truth about reality. They are skillful means...a raft leading to a realization that cannot be reduced to selective perceptions (yet is not other than them). From a place of practice causes and responsibilities appear proximate, and not absolute. Social responsibility is a matter of what can be worked with in effecting change, not assigning root evils. This can include the ideological tools of politics, but the world is not reduced them.. it can't be.

When Buddhist ideas are held as a belief system, an ideology to carry into the world as my banner of Truth, the opening has been missed. It may be better to have a peaceful ideology than violent one, but the most peaceful ideology can turn once it becomes fixed.

Political (and many religious) ideologies do not describe causes as proximate or use them as skillful means, but tend to fix them as first causes, and these first causes are usually fixed to one person, group, period, or human activity. This fixing has a strong emotionally-moral component... so that the object is the villain. There is an interesting flag to look for whenever ideology is strong. All the people involved in a given scenario are seen to behave due to causes and condition placed upon them, while only the villain behaves due to inherent flaw or evil.

I am not arguing against having a position, or fighting for it, only looking at the mind of absolutism, of black and white, which seems to be far more subtle and pervasive than we think. This mind is hard to sustain with Zen practice. The supports are removed, the fuel is removed, it falls apart.

Thanks and sorry for the wordy ramble.


Gassho
Daizan
sat today