Someone tell Mark Sanford about Angulimala

Mark Sanford is a funny guy. After embarrassing himself and his state - but seriously, is it really possible to embarrass South Carolina?- by carrying on an illicit love affair in the Southern Hemisphere while governor and attempting to throw off discovery by claiming he suddenly decided to hike the Appalachian Trail, he has seen fit to rise from political exile and run from Congress.

As if people would forget about, oh, I don't know, that whole marital infidelity thing.

But Sanford's no dummy, because while most voters will remember their former governor's previous juvenile horn-doggery, they just might ignore that transgression and choose, instead, to view Sanford as an opportunity to throw more obstruction at that evil black president.

We'll have to wait and see how Machiavellian South Carolina voters really are. And if they're not so inclined to give Sanford another chance at public office, we shall then see how Machiavellian Sanford had been. Because in his effort to turn over a new leaf, it appears that Sanford has become, well, Buddhist.

I was enlightened about Sanford's "practice" by this article in Yahoo! News. Apparently after Sanford's political demise, he retreated from the spotlight and began learning about Buddhism and even asserts he has begun meditating; at least that's what he calls it. It's difficult to tell just what type of practice Sanford has begun, what were his influences, and how serious he is about it. The article was scant on detail.

Understandably, people are skeptical. It's likely that the only Buddhist thing Sanford is up to is working a little bit of mindfulness into his life. After all, if he's really taking a serious look at Buddhism, he will need to confront one of its basic concepts: Karma.

Someone needs to tell Mark Sanford about Angulimala.

Angulimala was a murderous thief who killed travelers and cut off their fingers to wear in a gruesome necklace about his neck. Despite the wide-spread fear Angulimala inspired in others, the Buddha successfully tamed this beast and turned him into a monk.

 But Angulimala quickly learned that simply becoming a monk and following the Buddha didn't erase his past, unlike the concept of being "born again."  In fact, even after the Buddha accepted him into the sangha, Angulimala's past continued to catch up with him.

At first, Angulimala couldn’t get anyone to offer him food during his alms rounds because he remained feared and despised for all of his past murderous actions. Even after the Buddha set up an act of truth to show others Angulimala’s new noble birth and he became accepted by more villagers, there remained a group who refused to believe that Angulimala was nothing more than a murderous monster. Whenever he went for alms, these holdouts threw rocks and sticks at him. One time he comes to the Buddha, his head bleeding, to show the Buddha what had happened. The Buddha tells Angulimala to buck up and endure this because he is lucky to be suffering this torment now as the continuing fruits of his past actions rather than to suffer those consequences by spending eons in a hell realm.

Angulimala does buck up and eventually he attains the fruits of the holy life, but it wasn't easy. It took considerable time for him to work through all the karma he had accumulated as a murderous thief.

Will Mark Sanford buck up and comprehend that he doesn't get a free pass? That he may be suffering the consequences of this extramarital excursions to Argentina for years to come? Should Sanford lose his bid for Congress, we shall see whether he continues his dabbling in Buddhist practices, or abandons it as a failed expedient device. And even if he wins, who knows how his past karma will continue to manifest itself. The mere fact that he might win is no indication that he has completed that karmic journey.

As the farmer in a fable about the various fortunes and misfortunes of his son said to his neighbor: "We'll have to wait and see."

Image courtesy of Buddhism - Being Truly Human.

40 years after Roe

Forty years ago we got Roe v Wade. And the battle has waged ever since. Forgive the length of this post, but I want to share my thoughts on this divisive topic. And while my thoughts are not necessarily "Buddhist" in construction, how I feel about this topic is guided by my Buddhist understanding of how the world works.

First, I must clearly state that personally I believe that taking another person's life, including that of an unborn person, is simply wrong in any and all circumstances -- even in self-defense. I believe that way because killing another person represents an outcome one has hurled him or herself toward through a series of extraordinarily poor decisions that could have been interrupted just about anywhere along the way.

Having said that, should I find myself in a situation that defending my own life means taking another's, I suspect I will fight to the death. But if I should emerge from such a fray victorious, there will be consequences for my actions. Even if I am found legally innocent of any criminal act, I will nonetheless face the karmic consequences of my actions, consequences that may manifest themselves in any number of ways, not the least of which will be an unsettled mind that will on a daily basis struggle with what I did and how I might have avoided it.

I cannot foresee every situation, but I can take steps right now to avoid potential situations that may put me in a position of behaving in a manner contrary to the way I believe. And on occasion, despite my intentions, I do act unskillfully and find myself in awkward situations.

But I got there because of the choices I made, even when I thought the choices I was making were good ones.

Which is a long, round-about way of explaining why, despite my personal belief that taking someone's life, including that of the unborn, is always wrong and never without consequence, I will fight to ensure that abortion is kept legal and easily accessed.

To impose my personal belief on another person about whom I know nothing, about whose life challenges I know nothing, strikes me as a supreme form of righteousness that frankly makes me sick. Yes, perhaps that person made a series of poor decisions, but they were his or her decisions and to suggest that I know what consequences he or she should suffer and how these consequences out to be delivered when my own life is far from perfect - well, I'm not a Christian, but it seems to me that Jesus said something about fretting over the speck of dust in another person's eye while ignoring the rock in my own.

The Buddha taught us also that all our actions have consequence and that we cannot always predict the outcomes of our actions. Besides, there are some things, the Buddha taught, that we really don't need to know. Despite that he gave us tips, such as his guidance to his son Rahula, to avoid making unskillful choices, and with the simile of the salt crystal he explains that we have the ability to mitigate future consequences via our current actions. The Buddha is also quite clear with the story of Angulimala that while we have the option to renounce our past completely and pick up a new, more virtuous life - sort of like being 'born again' - we can never escape our past and the consequences we have set in motion.

Believing this, I know that anyone facing the ominous decision of abortion has been through a series of events leading her to that choice and that she will experience consequences unknown to me - and frankly none of my business - that she may or may not be able to resolve in her current life.

Even if you don't believe as I do, there are societal benefits to having legal access to abortion, and one of these benefits is not always part of the public discussion: The impact legal abortion has on crime.

What raised this connection was a 2001 study that is highly cited within the scientific literature and at the time of its release got a fair bit of attention in the popular press. But since then it has oddly disappeared from the primary discourse. The study notes that crime rates in the U.S. began a decline roughly 18 years after Roe v. Wade, and in states where abortion was already legal and widely available as early as 1970, crimes rights there began a similar decline much earlier than the rest.

While purely correlative, it does strongly suggest a causative relationship when you consider certain key facts about crime: who commits the most crime, and what environmental circumstances are more likely to lead a person to crime than others. Let's start with the last and work backwards.

For starters, it's pretty well established that low income areas have higher crime rates than more affluent neighborhoods; that low-income households produce more members who commit crime; that substance abuse is strongly connected with crime. In my journalism career I've worked with many police chiefs and sheriffs who repeatedly said that if we, as a society, could get a handle on substance abuse, crime would drop out of sight - especially alcohol abuse. While things like meth and crack and other harder drugs certainly are connected with crime, the law enforcement folk I worked with universally said alcohol abuse is the number one problem.

It is also pretty well established that those who regularly commit crime are individuals with a number of behavioral and character flaws. Often these flaws develop in childhood while being raised in highly stressed households, either economically or emotionally. For about 15 years I worked with delinquent and emotionally disturbed children and not a single one of them was unable to sense on some level that their parents just really didn't want them. As one boy told me, "My mother had a choice to keep me or the dog. She kept the dog."

Growing up in that type of environment frequently leads to substance abuse, which law enforcement will universally will say is the sin quo non of most crime. Substance abuse impairs one's decision making skills, and criminal activity is the result of flawed decisions.

Next, who commits the most crime? Crime statistics year after year report the same thing: most crime is committed by young men between the ages of 18 and about 26. In fact, it is mostly young men of color.

Maybe it's starting to become clear how abortion plays into this. Because a reasonable hypothesis to make based on the above information is that there ought to be a decline in the population most likely to commit a crime roughly 18 years after abortion becomes legal, which in turn should result in a decline in the number of crimes committed.

And that's exactly what this country saw. Just take some time and look at this chart. Starting in 1960, the data shows crime continuing to rise along with population. But low and behold, beginning in 1991, we see that trend reversing! And when we look at the specific types of crimes more likely to be committed by a young male - property crimes, robbery, and vehicle theft - the reversal in trend is even more pronounced despite a few stutters between 1991-93. There's even a reversal in murders committed started in 1993.

Granted, this does not on its own suggest a causative relationship, but it's nonetheless worth noting and worth further study. It's quite reasonable to conclude - and Occam's razor would suggest this as well - that with abortion legal and widely available, you have fewer unwanted children born and being raised in highly-stressed conditions that are very closely associated with anti-social behavior such as substance abuse and criminal activity.

In Buddhism, virtually all unskillful behavior arises out of either greed, hatred, or delusion. As a man, let alone a gay man, imposing on women this notion that they must carry to birth all pregnancies no matter how conceived is far more evil than terminating an unwanted pregnancy.

Any woman who faces that choice is facing a terrible decision, and not all of them do so with caprice. In fact, I firmly believe that most do not look at such a choice without it weighing heavy on their hearts and minds.

It is their choice and should remain so.

Gradients of kamma

The other night at dinner a friend of mine was asking me about kamma, which led to me explaining that kamma was often misrepresented even by those who call him or herself Buddhist. People tend to think of kamma as the result of an action. For example, “Don’t do that, it will bring you bad karma.”

I tend to use the Pali term kamma rather than the Sanskrit term karma because my Buddhist education is grounded in the Thai Forest Tradition. Either term will work, however.

Anyway, I told my friend that kamma isn’t created by the action, but rather the intention behind the action. One creates kamma via his or her intentions. He then asked me about light and dark kamma, and that’s when I had to admit ignorance. I had an idea of how to explain bright and dark kamma, but I didn’t want to misstate something. So I told my friend I would study the matter first.

The best expression of what bright and dark kamma is can be found in the Anguttara Nikaya. The particular passage can be found in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s Beyond Coping in the section on Heedfulness. And while not dealing specifically with the concepts of bright and dark kamma, the story of Angulimala also provides some excellent insights into the workings of kamma.

In the Anguttara Nikaya, the Buddha lays out four types of kamma: “There is kamma that is dark with dark result; kamma that is bright with bright result; kamma that is dark & bright with dark & bright result; and kamma that is neither dark nor bright with neither dark nor bright result, leading to the ending of kamma.”

As the Buddha explains each of these four types of kamma, it’s important to note the language used. “And what is kamma that is dark with dark result? There is the case where a certain person fabricates an injurious bodily fabrication...” The Buddha uses the phrase, “a certain person fabricates…” The concept of fabrications is pretty important in Buddhism; trouble is most people have the wrong idea of what it means.

Many people think that when something is a “fabrication,” it means that object or construct is not real, that it doesn’t exist at all. In my view, that’s not at all what the Buddha means when he talks about fabrications. On one level, fabrications are not real in and of themselves, but the object or event to which we attach the fabrication is real. In the Buddhist sense, a fabrication is merely a mental construct created by our mind to give some object or event a characteristic that we wrongly view as permanent. Think of it like the line Juliet speaks when thinking of Romeo's family name: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

A rose is a rose no matter what we call it. As a collection of matter, a rose simply is. The name “rose” is the mental fabrication we create to ascribe to a plant that has certain physical characteristics. Go to a different country where a different language is spoken and the mental construct has a different pronunciation, but the rose is still a rose.

When the Buddha describes kamma, it is associated with the mental fabrication associated with the intent to commit an act of either speech, body, or mind. So in the case of dark kamma, that fabrication begins with wrong intent, with an intent to cause harm. The consequences that manifest after an intention of dark kamma are the results of kamma, the fruits of kamma, not the kamma itself. Bright kamma, hence, begins with a fabrication that causes no harm. Hence, the fruits of bright kamma are pleasant.

We often get confused when we seem to get mixed results from our actions because we think we have a good intention. This is what the Buddha refers to as kamma that is both bright and dark. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu explains here, we may think we have good intentions, but if we really examine our intentions, they are often unclear and confused; hence the outcomes of our actions bring us confusing or mixed results. This happens a lot in interpersonal relationships, particularly among we moes.

Remember the film “The Broken Hearts Club” and how Dennis befriended the cute newby Kevin (oh god, Kevin was such a darling!)? Dennis clearly had the hots for Kevin, but he wanted to appear more virtuous than the callous Cole, so Dennis concocts this idea that Kevin needs a true friend when Dennis’ real intention is to get Kevin in bed. All of Dennis’ friends see this for how it really is, but Dennis chooses to believe in his false intention. While the outcome is not completely messed up, the results definitely are mixed.

Most of our lives are filled with this combination of bright and dark kamma because for most of us, we really don’t understand our real intentions, either intentionally or because we just never really took a close look at our actions and the motivations behind them.

This is why we meditate. To stop the chatter in our minds so that we can see the truth behind all our thoughts, words and deeds.

Angulimala ran into this problem even after the Buddha accepted him into the sangha. At first, Angulimala couldn’t get anyone to offer him food during his alms rounds because he remained feared and despised for all of his past murderous actions. Even after the Buddha set up an act of truth to show others Angulimala’s new noble birth and he became accepted by more villagers, there remained a group who refused to believe that Angulimala was nothing more than a murderous monster. Whenever he went for alms, these holdouts threw rocks and sticks at him. One time he comes to the Buddha, his head bleeding, to show the Buddha what had happened. The Buddha tells Angulimala to buck up and endure this because he is lucky to be suffering this torment now as the continuing fruits of his past actions rather than to suffer those consequences by spending eons in a hell realm.

The final type of kamma is what the Buddha describes as being neither dark nor bright. This is when we abandon all kamma and we are free of any other intention other than to liberate ourselves from the cycle of birth and death. I haven’t a clue as to what that must be like. My days are still mixed with brightness and darkness, a muddle of intentions that I am barely able to discern.