Episode #93: Alan Senauke, Engaged Buddhist
From Jack Kerouac to anti-nuclear proliferation, from Sōtō Zen to student protests, from shaping the definition of “Engaged Buddhism” to the current conflict in Myanmar, the life of Alan Senauke has been shaped by dynamic events and eclectic influences.
Brought up in a Jewish home in Brooklyn, New York, and later a student at Columbia University, Alan got caught up in the university strikes in 1968. In the aftermath of those events, many of his friends began moving West, and Alan followed, landing in Berkeley, California. He was expecting something quite laid back, and was in for a shock.
“In the summer of 1968,” he says, “[Berkeley] was a police state. It was really scary. We had thought we were coming to ‘liberated California’. But there were tremendous tensions in the street.”
Living just off Telegraph Avenue, Alan found himself encircled by a whirlwind of social unrest: the counter-culture movement, anti-war protests, and increasingly violent crackdowns by the police. And like many others his age at that time, he was experimenting with mind-altering chemicals. But eventually, that came to feel “tedious,” which lead him to seek other means of exploring the nature of reality and consciousness. A year later, Philip Kapleau’s book, The Three Pillars of Zen, came out. Alan was immediately intrigued.
Zen was not completely unfamiliar to Alan. Coming from New York, he had met some of the Beat Generation authors and poets who are largely credited with bringing Zen to America. Among them was Jack Kerouac, one of the key figures in the Beat movement, an author who wrote The Dharma Bums and many other well-known novels. Alan observed that Kerouac was a dedicated practitioner who genuinely saw the value of the teachings. “Kerouac was was somebody who really seemed to get at the essence of things,” he remembers, “and yet it didn't free him, which is really painful.” He attributes this to Kerouac not benefiting from a teacher nor a Sangha of fellow practitioners. Contrasting him with Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, Alan notes that the latter two embodied the full practice of Triple Gem, while in his estimation Kerouac focussed mostly on veneration towards the Buddha.
Before reading Kapleau, Alan had always felt there was something missing from the way the practice of Zen was described to a Western audience. “Zen is freedom to do whatever you want, and we were sorting this out,” he notes. Later he would read other Zen teachers such as D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, but he found their work too theoretical, and lacking a coherent practice. In this regard, Alan found Kapleau’s work groundbreaking, as it “actually described it as something that you did with your body.” This led to Alan’s first engagement with Buddhist practice, initially at the Berkeley Zen Center, and later at San Francisco Zen Center.
In the years that followed, Alan spent some time figuring out the particular type of Buddhist path he wanted to follow. Having been a high-performing student at a top-tier college, he was fed up with systems that require its students to achieve at all costs. “I wasn't interested in a practice that was about accomplishing something,” he says. This led him to Sōtō Zen, “a practice that is quite receptive and fluid.” Notably, Sōtō is not a concentration practice, but one that encourages an open awareness, which fit nicely into Alan’s burgeoning career as a professional musician. Alan notes that music “is really about paying attention… You have to pay attention to your personal interaction and your musical interaction with those around you. And I love that. It was always such a great pleasure for me.”
Into this mix came Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, the story of the author’s spiritual journey in the Himalayas. While admitting it did not inspire him to travel to Nepal to meditate for hours in Himalayan caves, the mere fact of an American peer committing himself to Zazen practice with such dedication had an extraordinary effect on Alan in encouraging his own practice.
But as Alan was refining his life as a practitioner, society around him was anything but calm. At first, it was difficult for Alan to see how the work he was doing on the cushion was connected in any way to social and political issues. “I thought the spiritual was in one box, and the political was in another box,” he says. “At that point, I did not see the integration of the two, and I wasn't seeing anybody integrating them.”
Then in 1984, Alan chanced upon a newsletter of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. At that time, the organization was focused on oppression in places like Vietnam, Tibet, and Bangladesh, as well as protesting nuclear proliferation. For the first time, Alan was able to make the connection from a practice that focused on his own, internal suffering, to the greater suffering in the world. For Alan, this insight came to be how he would define his role and work as an “Engaged Buddhist.”
Alan explains what Engaged Buddhism means to him. It is “a way of looking at the world, not through the eye of an individual, but through the eye of communities, and societies, and systems… From the perspective of Engaged Buddhism, [one] sees that our societies are fluid, interdependent, and dynamic between individuals who are operating in the context of a system or systems. And so what we have are systems of suffering.” He says that systems of social oppression result in collective suffering; it is not simply the suffering of one individual or of a number of individuals, but affects whole communities. Alan adds, “We don't necessarily see our own individual agency in the proliferation of a system. And so everything goes along with a sense of disconnect. I think that for Engaged Buddhism, one way to look at it is that each of us is completely responsible for everything that happens in the world.” Alan’s thinking about Engaged Buddhism has been seminal in helping advance this concept to a wider world.
As he was learning to integrate his spiritual practice with a broader, social engagement, Alan became increasingly interested in Myanmar, combining visits and pilgrimages with fundraising for needy causes. However, observing the constrictions that had been placed on the monkhood under a military dictatorship for so many years did not leave him feeling optimistic about the direction of Buddhism in the country. “I don't have a lot of encouraging thoughts about the Sangha in Myanmar,” he says. Largely this is due to the outsized influence of corrupt military officials, who he describes as being “very successful in co-opting the monastic communities and also probably the monastic hierarchy.” While some younger monks did come out in numbers in 2007 to protest military control, Alan believes that the brutal response, which left many monks arrested, tortured, and even killed, has led to the almost total lack of involvement since the military coup last year.
This monastic silence has not gone unnoticed by Generation Z protesters, who are now sacrificing everything for their country’s freedom. Alan notes, “They’re saying, 'We don't need that, we don't need this kind of Buddhism!’” One of the unintended consequences of the coup is that, however it ultimately sorts out, the future of Buddhism in Myanmar is uncertain.
Alan’s life experiences have made his perspective on the current democratic movement in Myanmar very relevant. Like so many young Burmese protesters today, Alan was a committed Buddhist youth during a time of great upheaval in his society, and like many of Myanmar’s current activists, Alan ran with a crowd who began to consider the use of violence as a means of resistance against an increasingly oppressive police presence.
However, Alan came to the conclusion that personally supporting violence would ultimately not be effective. “To the extent that people made efforts in that direction, it didn't work. It was self destructive. It was destructive of others. And it stood no chance in the face of the massive repression that was mounted by US government.” But Alan further reflects on his fellow activists who did choose the violent route following 1968. “People took various radical steps. And they may have been foolish. But they were not motivated by cowardice. And to some extent, it was courageous, even if it may have been misguided.”
Moreover, he acknowledges that 2022 Myanmar is not 1968 California. He doubts that nonviolence alone will be effective in Myanmar’s case, with the military so hell-bent on violent oppression. So he understands that he is in no position to judge the resistance. “I'm far removed from the circumstances, so I'm not evaluating or preaching.” And he admits that he could not contemplate a nonviolent strategy ever working in a place like Nazi Germany, a more apt comparison perhaps. He is even unsure about whether Gandhi’s protest movement in India, the model and example par excellence of non-violence, was ultimately responsible for ending British colonialism and gaining independence.
Today, Alan leads Clear View Project, which has contributed in a number of ways to providing humanitarian support to Myanmar since the coup. The organization’s mission states: “Our vision reflects the Buddha’s view of dependent origination, that life on this planet is contingent on the collective action and understanding of each of us. The Buddha’s moral teachings can be expressed in a single great vow: not to live ones life at the expense of other life.”
Such Engaged Buddhist action stands in stark contrast to the widespread spiritual bypass that seems to characterize a large segment of the Western meditator community. Alan has also observed this, commenting that it occurs “often in an individual context where people allow their practice to just cover for the work that they need to be doing on themselves. And, to me, that work implies working within society… The spiritual bypass is putting on blinders so that you really can't see what's in front of you.”