Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness by Robert A. F. Thurman, with a Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
It would be easy to dismiss Robert Thurman as a wild-eyed idealist: When the New York Times ran a favorable review of his book, Inner Revolution, it appeared under the headline, "Honk if You Love Buddha." After all, Thurman is not just writing about enlightenment, or the idea that we can become joyful, fearless, insightful and benevolent human beings. He dares to suggest that our society, and even our world, could become happier places to live. And he speaks with such urgency that, during his talk at the Bodhi Tree, he could barely complete one sentence before the next torrent of ideas began.
Thurman, a leading scholar, holds an endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan studies and is a close friend and associate of the Dalai Lama. In Inner Revolution, he turns to the historical record to show that his vision of an enlightened society is no pipe dream; in fact, under enlightened leadership, whole societies have devoted themselves to the pursuit of inner and outer peace, for decades, and even centuries. When this has happened, the inspiration and energy that is released has inspired cultural and intellectual movements around the world.
Thurman invites his readers to explore the world of enlightenment for themselves; his book leads us through the core teachings and practices that give rise to universal compassion and selfless awareness. Thurman, who practiced for several years as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, points out that the Tibetans have something very precious to share with us: their methods for living human life at a level that totally fulfills our inherent potential. And in today's world, this is not a luxury; but an urgent necessity. -- JC
Among Thurman's other books, we especially recommend his translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which includes Thurman's helpful explanations, other important texts, and a good general introduction to Tibetan Buddhism.
The following is an edited version of Robert Thurman’s Bodhi Tree presentation (edited by James Culnan).
Robert Thurman: There are four things I try to accomplish in this book. The first thing is to show that the Buddha's enlightenment is an event that had a big impact on society. Your enlightenment -- or lack of enlightenment -- has major social implications. Our interior mind is not separated from other beings, or any other thing; we are all connected by what Rupert Sheldrake calls "morphic resonance" -- everything in our minds, positive or negative, resonates with other peoples' minds. We have only had words for this in the English language since the '60's, I think, when we started to talk about "vibrations."
Ordinarily we hold on to the idea of an inviolate, sacrosanct personal interior that is completely disconnected from everything else. This is the basic delusion of egotism. Buddhism, however, teaches that the state of your mind resonates with other beings, especially when you achieve enlightenment. Enlightenment, as the Buddha defined it, is a complete transformation of the heart, unlike the state where the heart is enclosed in the delusion of being a separated self. When you feel completely different from everything else in the universe, you are doomed to endless suffering because of being in a struggle against the universe -- that is, other people and things. And when you struggle against the universe, guess who loses?
The Buddha saw that there is no finite entity opposing the infinity of the universe. Each individual is infinite, and each individual is infinitely connected with the infinite universe. Once you have this realization -- of selflessness -- it does not mean that you don't exist; only that you don't exist as an isolated, separate being. You exist as a relative, inter-connected self, free of the absolute, rigid, unrealistic self that unfortunately, we serve and live for when we're not enlightened. That is why the Buddha said the unenlightened life is suffering, because it means you are a slave to a self that doesn't exist. That's why it's so tiring - we're working for a boss that doesn't exist!
Not that Nirvana is some sort of obliteration where you just go "poof" and leave the world without having any impact on it. Enlightenment is an experience that transcends our sense of "self" and "other," and as a result, it affects "other" as much as "self," or society as much as the individual.
The second thing I try to communicate was a real "Eureka!" experience for me, and one of my reasons for bringing this book to both a scholarly and a popular audience. As you may know, I was a monk for four or five years, when I was younger. Then I resigned as a monk and went on as a lay Buddhist, and went around rationalizing that we don't need monks any more. I had written off the institution of monasticism as something pre-New Age, or pre-modern, that was only useful in its own time. I thought, "Shangri-la is coming, we'll be there tomorrow, or next week . . . You know -- the 60's!"
Then I ran into the hard reality that the rulers of our society have been driven in the absolute wrong direction, on the whole planet, for the last 30 or 40 years. Why? Because militarism is completely entrenched in our culture. Look at the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on weapons, the Rambo movies, the glorification of violence that you see everywhere; look at how militarism influences the family system, where the male uses violence and brutality to exert control as the dominant patriarch.
Then, during the early 70's, I attended a lecture by a sociologist from Columbia University, who said, "The peace movement people are all amateurs. They come out to protest, they wave a flower, they go to the Pentagon, or get arrested by Nixon -- they feel that they have done something. But then, after a while, they have to go back to their day jobs. And they make weapons and plan for our wars, because they are professionals." It was a shattering idea, that there was no such thing as a peace movement institution. Certainly, religions aren't peace movements, because they are all corrupted by the State. They are out there blessing the battleships and praying for the generals as they go into war. So where do you look?
I looked, and looked, and suddenly I came up with it. "Eureka!" The monastic orders of monks and nuns throughout history -- they are the ones who are professionals. They give up the ordinary family life, and ordinary self-indulgence. They give up property, and identity, and divert themselves to peace. They take on the violence in their own hearts, as if it were the enemy, and fight a pitched battle, as they have for centuries. Then I discovered that it was Buddha who created the institution of monasticism; it didn't exist before him.
That brings us to the third thing I offer in my book, which concerns the extraordinary history of Tibet. When Buddhism first arrived, the Tibetans were as ferocious as Genghis Khan, and they were killing people wherever they went. China even paid tribute to Tibet at that time, in order to avoid a Tibetan invasion. They were a violent, militaristic, egocentric people, interested only in domination and not at all monastic, or enlightenment oriented. Then, after a thousand years of being worked over by the tantric masters and the Mahayana Bodhisattva masters and monastic masters, Tibet transformed itself sociologically into a non-violent nation that demilitarized voluntarily. Probably, they were the first nation to do so. And this was not just a small tribe, or some people wandering around with a couple of yaks, but Central Asian conquerors on the scale of Genghis Khan. So this terrifying military conquest dynasty-empire gradually demilitarized itself. That, to me, was a huge insight.
Remember, the historical Buddha gave up his throne at the beginning of his religious quest, and never returned to it. So, while I admired the Dalai Lama, I often thought that the Tibetans ran counter to the mainstream of the Buddhist movement, because their monks took responsibility for running the country. During many years of studying Tibetan civilization, history and religion, I thought this was a mistake. Then I saw it in a different light. I realized that during the 17th century, at the moment when a tide of militarism swept across Eurasia and monasticism was being crushed, Tibet was the only place where the monastic order voluntarily demilitarized the country, destroyed the military order and unilaterally disarmed.
I see Tibet as the only nation in the world that went into modernity in a spiritual, or interior manner. They didn't enter modernity saying "we're going to fix the whole world by paving everything, and making everything out of stainless steel, and we're all going to have plastic hearts and put Apple computers in our brains, and everything will be perfect, and we'll live forever . . . " which is the progress mentality of the West that still predominates.
I don't like it when some want to puncture the love for Tibet that is emerging at a grassroots level around the planet, saying that "Tibetans are no good" or "the Communists were right to invade them" or even "the Chinese invasion was like Lincoln freeing the slaves." What a joke. Some say that people like me are romantics, or that I'm some kind of reincarnation of Madame Blavatsky who thinks that there is a holy Tibetan in every attic, and that every Tibetan is perfect. But it's a sociological insight I am presenting: the importance of the vision of life that the Tibetans preserved. And it is a vision of life that enshrines the principles of what I call the politics of enlightenment or inner revolution: transcendental individualism, non-violence, and "educational evolutionism."
Imagine if you had the view of life that you, yourself came up from lower life forms. You started out as pre-Cambrian slime, then became a crocodile who crawled up on the shore, then a monkey, then an ape, who became more playful and less vicious. Then your brain developed many more folds, and finally, you became a human being. You, personally did that, over millions of lifetimes. What if you realized that you have the opportunity to take the next step out of the cocoon of the human life form and become the butterfly of a totally enlightened being without boundaries, totally happy and ecstatic, and therefore capable of making other beings happy and ecstatic? What if you had a vision of evolving to the point where death is not be a problem, but is like Disneyland, or a gateway to virtual reality? What if you realized that the only way to evolve is to develop your understanding in such a way that your heart opens, and this required educating yourself in a certain way? Wouldn't you come to perceive the purpose of your life as education? You would. Not that you are being educated to make widgets, or to be a great moviemaker, or to be president of the United States - that is just being trained, like rats are trained or soldiers are trained. No, I mean education that draws out of you your wisdom, your love, your Buddhahood. Eighty five percent of the national budget of Tibet was spent on education, understood in this way, as the spiritual unfoldment of the superhuman, or trans-human potential of the human being.
A person who opens up like that becomes vulnerable - and that's my fourth point. Maybe you'll say, "I can't be that relaxed or selfless, because you'll be mean to me, and make me wash all the dishes, and treat me like a doormat . . . " Western psychology has been telling us for a century that all the "turn the other cheek" religious stuff is crazy. You have to go out there and be tough. And we can see how the nations that became gentle also became vulnerable -- it happened to India, China and Tibet, which, as a nation, is virtually finished.
On our universally militarized planet, however, everyone has weapons of mass destruction, and individuals are capable of mass terrorism. It's no longer just one World Trade Center, now they can easily kill everyone in New York with an Anthrax milkshake dumped from a private plane. If we look, we see that this aggressive approach, this hard-shelled "don't open your heart" attitude is no longer a survival enhancer. It's not going to win. We haven't been able to win a war since World War II, except for going bananas over the long CNN commercial of "Technology vs. Baghdad." We didn't win anything there either.
The Dalai Lama still stands as an example of the Buddha's way, saying, "You just killed a million of my people, but I don't hate you. I will dialogue with you, whenever you decide to listen, and actually, we feel sorry for you guys, living in the old Manchu Palace, feeling frightened and paranoid about your own people." The Chinese are a frightened people, and the Dalai Lama does, genuinely, feel sorry for them.
Here are the Tibetans -- one-time ruthless, ferocious conquerors -- who fight with their own hatred, and do not manifest it, or even feel it. They are joyous and creative, even in a disastrous situation. So how can we sit back and say, "I can't stop anything, or I can't do anything, or I'm not even going to vote, since the politicians are all idiots?" I'm trying to bring this enlightenment movement into the context and focus of the 20th Century, and into political reality, because people who have become more enlightened must take action. We have the responsibility, because we in the United States have the power. We could continue to destroy those in the rest of the world as well as our own poor people, and create more misery. But if we show serious, realistic, joyful transformation of our lives, this would have an impact on the entire world. We have the power to turn the planet in this direction or continue towards doomsday. It's simply an impossible position to say there's nothing we can do, while the system we are comfortably sitting within is doing tremendous damage to nature, to other animals, and to other people. It not only leads to unenlightenment, it forces us to close down our awareness and knowledge, and it gives us deep rage and oceans of anxiety. After all, at a deeper level, everyone knows everything that is happening. And that is why we then guzzle billions of dollars of Prozac and all this stuff. Its because we feel badly, sitting on our butts while our machinery is wrecking everyone around us.
(Editors note: After answering some questions from the audience, Thurman concluded with a guided meditation, in which he invited us to share in a totally positive vision of the future.)
Robert A. F. Thurman came to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in 1998 to discuss his book Inner Revolution. Many consider Robert Thurman to be the leading American spokesman for Tibetan Buddhism. He is also the co-founder and President of Tibet House in New York, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the endangered civilization of Tibet.