Genocide and Enlightenment

The Buddhist establishment does have a problem indeed.

I’d rather not talk about either genocide or enlightenment but life isn’t about what we’d rather do but about what is the right thing to do. In fact, that many others would rather not talk about Gaza and the Buddhist tradition is why I felt it’s important to reflect on it in public.

This essay was prompted by the podcast episode from

Vince Fakhoury Horn

¹: Is the Insight Tradition Complicit in Genocide? If you practice meditation and have been concerned about what’s happening in Gaza, I highly recommend you listen to it.

Below I will argue two points. First, the reason this particular conflict touches the nerve for many of us is that on some level many people know they’re complicit but refuse to fully face it.

Second, the failure of prominent meditation teachers to talk about the genocide in Gaza is contributing to the continuation of suffering in direct and hypocritical contradiction of the Buddhist teachings on non-violence. Furthermore, it fails meditation students who implicitly trust those teachers to guide them towards liberation from suffering.

Both of these points have relevance for anyone who aspires to walk the path of elimination of suffering as the Buddha taught it.

Let’s talk about the genocide first and enlightenment second.

Courtesy of nano banana.

Genocide

I am not concerned with the finer details of legal definition of genocide. But I’ll use this term as a shorthand for a disproportionate, unjustified use of force by Israel causing immense suffering in Gaza.

It is not the only horrible conflict in the world. Sadly, it is not exceptional in terms of the number of deaths, or civilians being targeted, or the unimaginable depth of human suffering.

What makes Gaza stand out, though, is that a lot of us in the West know on some level even if we don’t admit it that we are complicit in enabling and perpetuating it. Us, voters, chose the politicians that continue sending weapons to Israel. Israel is not a pariah state. It enjoys political cover. Western tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM and others offer services to Israel that are used to continue the genocide. Plenty of other companies and people work with or for these tech giants. Plenty of people who feel that what Israel is doing is wrong keep silent out of fear of a backlash, and that silence also contributes to the situation.

Gaza is such a hard topic for many because it forces us to acknowledge that Israel is no exception. Our entire civilisation is built on domination, exploitation and violence, from literal slavery, to degradation of biosphere, to American military dominance since WW2. It didn’t start with Gaza, or in the last century, or even last millennium.

Actually acknowledging the extent to which our entire way of life and identity is built on violence requires more honesty than most are willing to bear. I know I’m nowhere close myself. I like my matcha lattes, £7 t-shirts and next day delivery more than thinking about how it’s made possible.

This question runs deeper than most people suspect and are capable of exploring. The moment we start seriously think about what’s happening in Gaza and why, we inevitably come to some very disturbing realisations that Gaza isn’t an exception, isn’t an error that we just need to fix to go back to normality, isn’t an aberration. It’s just the most visible example of how our entire civilisation works: violence and domination. European Court of Human Rights is an exception, not Gaza.

Any sufficiently mature individual comes to realise at some point that the entire world is interconnected in a profound way. Not only in terms of cause and effect, but we can’t draw a clean line between “us” or “me”, our sense of identity, and the rest of the world. There’s no us and them, there’s only us. We truly don’t know what we’re doing. Seeing this clearly while looking at the level of violence that holds our world together is a serious psychological burden.

No wonder most people would rather not think about it and I don’t blame them. It is very hard to integrate on a conscious level. But even if we don’t articulate it consciously, we do feel deep inside that there’s something highly disturbing going on. We’re all interconnected; we’re an integral part of the same reality.

It’s a hard topic. Most of us prefer to look the other way. But if you’re interested in finding out what life is about, and I promise there’s something to find out there, you can’t skip this part of the curriculum.

Enlightenment

Over two and a half millennia ago people have realised that there’s a fundamentally different way to be in this world and experience life that doesn’t involve suffering. This gave rise to countless spiritual approaches and religious traditions. Buddhism may be one of the most widely known and explicit in its description of its approach, but it’s not unique.

The core of the Buddha’s teaching is that life, by default, is filled with suffering or dissatisfaction with the circumstances of our life because we misunderstand reality but it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a method we can practice to change our experience of life and transcend suffering. The outcome is often referred to as liberation or enlightenment, and meditation is at the heart of the approach, but not the only part.

Other essential parts of the path towards elimination of suffering include virtue and ethics. One of the well-known pitfalls that meditation teachers who walked the path to the end have warned us about is that virtue and ethics aren’t optional.

The path isn’t reducible to meditation alone. In Buddhism it’s called the eightfold path, and it’s eightfold and not sixfold or threefold for a reason. In other traditions you’ll find a similar approach described in different terms.

In Buddhism specifically, the ethical framework very much includes non-violence or ahimsa, a key virtue in Hinduism and other traditions as well. While Buddhists still can’t quite agree on whether it means vegetarianism, no one teaching ahimsa can advocate dropping bombs on civilians.

And the problem, as Vince Horn so skilfully highlighted in his podcast, is that many prominent meditation teachers in the West are silent when it comes to Gaza. It would be more intellectually honest to try to publicly defend what Israel is doing from a Buddhist perspective than to say nothing, but very few meditation teachers are trying to do it because it’s very hard to square this circle. Even for someone so intellectually capable as Sam Harris.²

So most stay silent. The hypocrisy of this contradiction has two serious consequences. One is perpetuation of the violence they say they’re trying to eliminate — “may all beings be free from suffering” and all those guided tracks we all love to meditate to as if we actually mean it.

Another is that it undermines the very essence of the Buddhist path, reducing it to a sophisticated bypassing technique that keeps us comfortable instead of free. And this path is most definitely about freedom, not comfort.

I probably wouldn’t be writing this essay if it was just about the teachers, even though some of them may have millions of followers. I mean, someone is wrong on the internet, not my problem. But by allowing the blind spot of the size of Gaza in the teachings to liberation risks undermining the very foundation of the approach.

When much of the Buddhist establishment in the West is ignoring the topic of Gaza like it doesn’t exist, they are effectively failing to do the hard work of radical self-inquiry required to internalise and teach ethics and virtue. I understand, it’s easier to fundraise for schools in Nepal than to talk about Israel. For me too.

But this makes me wonder if they are failing their students who might be sincerely trying to find out for themselves what the Buddha and countless other teachers meant by liberation or enlightenment.

I wouldn’t expect every meditation teacher out there to offer ongoing commentary on societal and political questions. If you’re sitting in a remote Himalayan cave teaching others in person, maybe you’re far away from Gaza. But if a topic is staring us in the face for three years from every screen and we choose to ignore it, we’re failing ourselves, others and the very Buddhist path we claim to practice.

And if you’re a student of meditation who recognises that this path offers not just simple stress reduction through mindfulness but a profound transformation of the very experience of life, you’ll be wise to work with teachers who can teach the whole eightfold path: from ethics to concentration and everything in between.

Not everyone with a big instagram profile clears that bar.

1. For context, I just completed a two-year meditation teacher training under the guidance of Vince and Emily Horn. I choose not to teach meditation, as I explained in this essay, even though meditation and spirituality are deeply meaningful for me.

2. I respect his intellect, the wonderful Waking Up app he built and fascinating conversations he has on his podcast, but if you’re interested in liberation from suffering, please find a different teacher.