Choices: Iraq: War & Peace: or, Non-contention with Mara

War & Peace: or, Non-contention with Mara

Published on December 8, 2002, by Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery
"War & Peace: or, Non-contention with Mara"
by Amaro Bhikkhu

Under the Bodhi tree the Buddha’s response to death, ie Mara’s threats, cajolings, temptations and attempts to cause doubts, was not life-affirmation, neither did he go into deep jhana and evade Mara, or blast him with a vajra bolt, or try to be reasonable and negotiate on Mara’s terms, or justify himself. Instead his response was a fearless wakefulness. Almost invariably, throughout the accounts of the Buddha’s meetings with Mæra, as soon as he is aware of the malefactor’s presence, he says: “I know you, Mara.” And the game is over.

This is a myth but such tales maintain their power through their congruity with truth as we experience it. When Mara knows that the Buddha has seen the trick, the
hook inside the bait, he knows his victim is not going to bite. Mara is defeated in that gesture of knowing. This suggests that the opposite to death is not birth, life-affirmation, or destruction of death, but wakefulness.

Perhaps the most meaningful way of considering the encounters between the Buddha and Mara is to regard them as depicting the arising of unwholesome, ego-based
states in the mind of the Buddha; they portray the instinctual fears, doubts and desires that arise but which have no place to land there. By using the myth as a map of our own psyches, Mara also represents our own ego-death experiences (loneliness, anger, obsessiveness, greed, doubt etc.) and the Buddha’s example points the way for the wisdom of our hearts to respond most skillfully: a wakeful and radical non-contention. For as soon as we contend against death we’ve bought into the value system and bitten the hook – when we hate and fear death, or want to swamp it with life, Mara has won, “Such a one has gone over to Mara’s side and the Evil One can do with them as he likes.” (S 35.115) We can perhaps run with the line for a while but sooner or later…

Non-contention is not a passivity, denial or a switching off – numbly suffering the slings and arrows as they thump into us – but a full awareness. The Buddha doesn’t say “It’s all yours Mara.” The point is to defeat Mara BUT he is defeated by not contending against him. One of the most often quoted passages of the Dhammapada states:

So it is a conundrum: how can conquest be the aim if the fundamental attitude is non-contentious?

The Buddha was a warrior noble, a kshatriya, by birth and, like Gandhi, was definitely aiming at victory, but by non-arguement – as he states in the opening
passages of the Madhu-pindika Sutta, when challenged by a cocky brahmin who is looking for a doctrinal fight: “I proclaim such a teaching that advocates not quarreling with anyone in the world” (M 18.4). At this his hapless antagonist, Dandapani, could only shake his head, wag his tongue, pucker his brow and walk off. It is through the refusal of the Buddha to argue with Dandapani, or fight Mara on his own terms that they are defeated.

Martial language and symbolism are often used in relationship to the Buddha, ergo such epithets as “Jina – The Conqueror,” but it is important to recognise that rather than “conquest” necessitating a fight, more accurately it means that ultimately reality has to outweigh the illusion. As Mæra once expressed himself after another frustrating encounter: “you might as well poke a rock with lily stems...” (S 4.25) The rock is not doing any contending even though Mæra is frustrated.

In another encounter, between the Buddha and Bharadvaja the Abusive – after the latter has fiercely criticized the Buddha for disgracing his clan and begging in the
streets, the Buddha asks him: “If visitors come to your home, and you offer them some refreshments but they decline the offer, to whom does that food and drink belong?” “To me, of course,” the aggressor replies. “Similarly,” responds the Buddha, “you offer me your anger yet I decline to accept it, therefore it still belongs to you.” (S 7.2) He is not going to pick up the gauntlet: “It’s your glove, friend, you threw it down, you can pick it up – it’s nothing to do with me, it’s your business.”

All of these points are of crucial importance, and provide clear moral guidance, in this time of warmongering and escalating global conflict. The Buddha was no
stranger to war and interpersonal disputes, and his wise advice relates to those domains as much as to our internal worlds. Whether it be reasonable hatred of the chattering mind, restlessness, doubts and sordid passions (quoting the Dhamma book that says “destroy greed, hatred and delusion”) or of ex-partners who have betrayed us, wielders of painful influence in our world, about whom we have absolute justification to be negative, political leaders we love to decry – when there is commitment to any such urges, the hook has sunk right in.

In his famous Simile of the Saw (M 21.20) the Budhha states that: “ Even if bandits were severing you limb from limb with a two-handled saw, if you gave rise to
an attitude of hatred towards them, you would not be following my teaching.” Instead he advocates being compassionate and wishing for the welfare of the abusers. The bar is thus set dauntingly high, but the Buddha perhaps uses this deliberately extreme example to indicate that all hatred is intrinsically non-Dhammic and that loving-kindness (metta) is always possible. In this respect it’s also important to recognize that metta does not mean liking everything, rather it means recognizing that everything has its place in nature, it all belongs – the beautiful and the ugly – true benevolence is a not dwelling in aversion, a radical non-contention with all of nature.

The mistake of “loving” for “liking” can cause a lot of problems: an ancient Indian tale speaks of a cobra who becomes the disciple of a forest-dwelling rishi. Newly
sworn to vegetarianism and pacifism the cobra is having a rough time, especially when the village boys find out that she will no longer strike or fight back when tormented.

One day, with rumpled scales and broken fang, she comes for an audience with the holy one. “I have tried my very best to follow your teachings faithfully but this is too much – one of those boys just picked me up by the tail, swung me around and tossed me up in a tree. This is the last straw. I take your teachings on non-violence very seriously but one more incident like this and there’s going to be trouble.”

“I deeply admire your commitment to the Path, dear one, and it’s true that I require non-violence of all my disciples, however I never told you that you couldn’t
hiss.”

Thus fierceness is not necessarily equivalent to anger and to act up is not the same as to be enraged. Similarly, we can have true kindness, acceptance of the way things are, yet not condone the attitudes expressed, as if to say: “I love you completely but your opinions are poisonous and deranged.” In the cultural language of the West “not hating” often implies a tacit approval – Noam Chomsky once vigorously defended the right of fascist politician to speak on campus. Whereas he had no sympathy for the man’s views, he also saw that to ban him from speaking was to enact the same quality of prejudice that the man was being held guilty of. To “Serve truth, defy the lie” – as is proclaimed on the hooded sweatshirts of various local Dharma Punx – is to allow the Dhamma to speak, not to start a fight.

As soon as we nibble and get the hook in, even our efforts at practicing the spiritual life can take the heart off in the opposite direction. We want to do good but we
just seem to create more trouble. As it says in Ajahn Mun’s Ballad of Liberation from the Five Khandhas:

The tragedy is that we make all this noble effort: going on retreats, keeping Precepts, serving the Dhamma etc. but if we pick it up wrongly our very religiosity
become an obstruction. Just as in Buddhist tradition, where over time the elder bhikkhus became the corpulent religious aristocracy and privileged priesthood that the
Buddha was so vociferously trying to get beyond and counteract. This initial drift (occurring some 2000 years ago) contributed to the Mahayana revolution and later to the cascade of other reforms and renewals that have occurred in the Buddhist world.

Our eagerness to destroy the “wrong” in our minds creates more of the same pain and darkness. Just as in the attitude of wanting to destroy evil in the world, that
righteous indignation which says “I'm right, you're wrong,” results in the creation of Orwell's pigs: we become the very thing we are opposing. Another example is
Dostoyevsky’s grand inquisitor: when the Messiah returns to mediaeval Spain, we end up imprisoning him so that he won’t disturb the progress of the religion. We end up suppressing the very thing that we’re trying to do. Torquemada thought he was doing the right thing – that’s the painful irony – there is good intention and faithfulness to a system, but that contention against “bad, wrong, shouldn’t be” is actually destructive to the system’s originating spirit.

As Solzhynitsyn once mused, it would be so easy if evil was an absolute and we could just isolate it and wipe it out but, as the Buddha also pointed out, there is no such thing as absolute evil. According to Buddhist myth Maha-Mogallanna was Mara in 37 previous lives. This to say that this great saint, fully enlightened and a chief disciple of the Buddha, had been Satan 37 times over. Or in the example of Angulimala: here is a mass murderer who became a disciple of the Buddha and an arahant. And not only an arahant but also protector of expectant mothers and their babies. It is a beautiful irony that still, 2500 years later, his verses are chanted to impart such blessings to pregnant women.

This indicates that we can’t get so lost that it’s irremediable. Even if we think that this is all just fairy stories, even the symbol alone is immensely powerful – it hints that not only the situation workable, but one can end up as saint, a benevolent radiant presence in the universe, helping to liberate many other beings. When we line up our concerns about “My mind, with its fears, insecurities, lusts etc.” or even being destructive tyrant like Stalin, against being Mara 37 times, the degrees of unskilfulness are incomparable. It therefore implies that no karmic entanglement is inescapable – so there’s hope for all of us!

But what are we to do when things ARE wrong!!! At time of writing [Dec 5th] the drums of war are being vigorously pounded. Soon perhaps that sorrowful war will be well under way. Here is contention on the grossest scale – what to do? Already hundreds of thousands of people around the world have taken to the streets in protest – there are reports of a single million-strong march in Florence, that crucible of the Renaissance. Non-violent protest, civil disobedience and other kinds of useful mischief – fine old American traditions one and all – are fully valid means of expressing the Dhamma. Non-contention is not submissiveness, capitulation or passivity. The Buddha is famous for having forstalled a war between the Koliyans and the Sakyans over water rights to the Rohini River. (Attadanda Sutta, SN 935-954; Phandana Jat. (475))

So, how to encounter Mæra without being swept along by or fighting against those forces? Firstly we can use the principle of non-contention as a flag to indicate the
arising of habits of contention – “It shouldn’t be this way – I’m all wrong…” – to reflect instead: “Oh, contention, look at that” – we respond with waking up, knowing and transcending.

It is as if we invite the Buddha into the picture. And when Buddha wisdom knows that state what do we do: move forward? back? be still? In each moment intuitive
wisdom guides the heart: “Act now,” “shut up,” “do not enter, wrong way” – the heart knows what to do. Sometimes Mara screams, demands reaction, the bait is very tasty, compelling, but with the same aplomb, the Buddha never picks it up. There is utter poise: “I know what this is; I know you Mara.” Passion is there but we’re not sucked in; the motive to be mindful is there but we’re not identified with it. This means a complete acceptance of the way things are but in same breath making efforts to cultivate wholesomeness and restrain unwholesomeness – i.e. right efforts are being made but not with a dualistic attitude. We work to establish wholesome objects of concentration, let go of anger, cultivate metta, karuna, etc. but it is all embraced in environment of nongrasping and noncontention.

All it takes is the gesture of waking up. We respond to the death clamp on the heart, to ego-death with wakefulness – in that moment the heart is freed. This is the
gesture of the Buddha. When it meets with unwholesomeness we don’t allow the heart to impute an otherness that then needs to be destroyed. Indeed, more than just tolerating such negative qualities by observing them from a remote pseudo-supramundane vantage point, the Buddha advocates a sharing of blessings with the
evil as well as the good: “May all beings receive the blessing of my life, may they soon atttain the threefold bliss and realize the Deathless...” Yes, Saddam, Osama, George and Dick as well as our miscreant ex-partners and poisonous mindstates – piling reasonable hatred upon them only multiplies the causes of pain and confusion.

The fundamental gesture of Buddha is that of being faithful to Reality: pure presence and absolute non-contention. And that gesture can produce a miraculous
responsive effect: when the Buddha breaks back into the void the universe bursts into bloom – “the response and the Way are entwined mysteriously” – and the action or stillness that springs forth from that gesture will intrinsically embody the very best that can be done.

Ajahn Amaro is co-abbot of Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery in Redwood Valley, CA, a Theravadin monastic community in the Thai forest sangha tradition of Ajahn Chah and Ajahn Sumedho.

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