The intersection of activism and meditation
Alan Clements is one of the few foreign visitors to Myanmar who has combined a dedication to strict meditation practice alongside a deep concern and commitment to human rights and the betterment of the Burmese people. How his social activism and spiritual come together in the form of Engaged Buddhism can be clearly discerned from the following excerpt, recorded prior to the coup. Although the conversation was from some time ago, it is remarkable how prescient Alan was in seeing the fault lines in a society before these current dark days. This interview, as well as Alan’s 4-book volume set, are essential for anyone hoping to better understand the conflict raging today.
“Where does that kind of Dhamma understanding come from? Where you’re willing to even go beyond forgiving your captor, your torturer?”
“There's an abiding quality among the people that I know and meet often in Myanmar. I would stop sometimes and ask a taxi driver who took me from point A to point B, ‘Would you mind if we could speak a little bit?’ He would pull off and we would talk for an hour, and I'd record it. He would not take my taxi fare, although he was barely surviving in a poor area of the city with a family of three, working 15 hours a day, driving bumper to bumper in Yangon.
What is that quality in someone of high reverence for shared principles? Dana, Sila, and Bhavana paramis, the practice of mindfulness. And you see this goodwill, even among people who are not Buddhists.
Yes, Burma is fraught with these factions of weaponized boys and girls in the ethnic areas, and this long-standing 400,000 boy-man army in Naypyidaw. It's so complex and within it, we have these remarkable voices of reason and of freedom.
In 1995 and 1996, my meeting Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at that time, and I've met her a number of times since then. I like her tenacity, I love her! Her intelligence, her wry humor, her directness, her intolerance of stupidity. Her dedication to high ethics, her courage to take it higher, and she is so deferential to the people in her lives, not just by name, but by principle and value. I love that about her. Now, I was blessed to meet through her and around her other remarkable men and women.
Of course, I'm extremely deferential to Sayadaw U Pandita. When I first met him at Mahasi Sasana Yeiktha, here I am a young, brash, rebel artist, former drug addict, uncertain of who I am, trauma from a car accident and I probably have autism and Asperger's! So I’m socially inept in many ways, but I was dedicated to, ‘What is this meditation that you talk about? Two stages of insight and possibly Nirvana?’
And he talked with me for 43 years, there was nothing that we couldn't talk about! I learned not just information and emotional, I would call it elegance, the aesthetics of interrelationships from him. But the power of the question if you will. Anything and everything can be included in our relationship. And so we talked and we talked and we talked and more so than the content, although his content is remarkable, but it's the space that he created for open dialogue.
I love that about the people that I've met, who've met Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The former General of the Army I met when he was released after six years of isolation, put there by his dictator boss Ne Win. He was released, I think in 1980, had a room at the Mahasi Yeiktha near mine, and I learned about Burma's politics through him and the psychology of totalitarianism. Just a remarkable man, his grace… he went from a natural born killer under Ne Win, being a General of the Army to a man of high redemption, rooted in a timeless quality of Ahimsa or harmlessness. He formed the National League for Democracy with the other men and women in Burma. And it became a non-violent expression of democracy and of metta and of non-violence in transformational action. And the ethos of that was non-demonization, non vilification.
I found in our dialogues, he had not one detectable emotion that I could see in all the times that we spent together over 10 years of interviews. It wasn't just one of all those years he spent in solitary confinement, I think it was maybe 11 or 12, and then another six or seven under house arrest. You could not detect any dosa any anger, any blame at all!
Where does that kind of Dhamma understanding come from? Where you're willing to even go beyond forgiving your captor, your torturer, and he is a manifestation of what I would call Dhamma intelligence. A combination of high mindfulness-practice infused with Karuna (compassion) with metta (loving kindness) and mudita (sympathetic joy). And all the boys and girls and the men and women who spend time in the gulags in Burma, the labor camps, the quality of Upekkha (equanimity), of high engagement, I would call it not just balanced, that's too easy, but rather high engagement with extreme complexity where they're able to move in the emotional, psychic cognitive flow, of torture, of deprivation, of disease of loneliness, with Uppekha.”