Around 2:00
a.m. this morning, the police and fire departments arrived at the late Hayes
Valley Farm to remove the humans who had taken up protest-residence in the
doomed trees. During the four-hour
extraction, there were some cries and screams, and the occasional small-crowd cheer.
(At what? A fleeting victory as a wily treesitter evaded the inevitable? We’ll probably
never know.) The official vehicles
came and went without sirens, the officials without megaphones.
The
operation ended just as our sesshin, and the buzz-saws, began. So many complicated precepts here: To not take life (the woodcutters). To not take what isn’t given (the
occupiers). To not speak ill of
others, to not praise self at the expense of others (both sides).
How to make
sense of such a complicated, fraught scenario? Nagarjuna’s Four Distortions don’t provide answers, but they
do provide helpful paths of inquiry:
1.
Seeing the impermanent as permanent
“The trees should
be left there forever.”
“Developers
are always greedy.”
2.
Seeing the impure as pure
“The
protesters have the moral high ground.”
3.
Seeing the selfless as having a self.
“I care
about trees and you don’t.”
4. Seeing suffering as blissful.
“Sitting in
this tree/arresting these people/developing condos makes me happy.”
(All quotes
are hypothetical.)
No comments:
Post a Comment