taking responsibility

From an essay by Robert Aitken for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship:

...Go to Google, type in the words “Buddhist Anarchism,” and stand back. The number of hits will surprise you. Moreover, except for references to Gary Snyder’s article by that name in the first Journal for the Protection of All Beings back in 1962, all the hits will be in Classical Buddhism, in the Buddha’s own words. Gary’s piece referred to the Huayan Sutra—well taken, but there is a world of other possible Mahayana references. The “Three Bodies of the Buddha,” for example. Everything really is empty, personally interconnected, and precious in itself. We don’t need some guy in saffron robes to tell us so. Apart from Google hits and from any kind of Buddhism, our ordinary common sense tells us so......

It’s time to put ourselves in a position where we have nothing to protect. No group ego. No name, no slogan. Like King Christian X of Denmark we can all wear the yellow star. We can all wave the black flag, no color and no design. It is design that does us in. There is only one thing that works in the face of the iron faces, and that is decency. By being decent, I don’t mean being nice. I mean Mahayana responsibility. It isn’t nice to block the doorway. Decent Mahayana conduct means behaving appropriately. It is surely appropriate in these days of justifying torture and white phosphorous as weapons, to hold up an inexorable mirror to the fiends who are raising hell in our name—and then following through with an essential agenda that is not necessarily legal, like smuggling medicine to Iraqi people—the program of Voices in the Wilderness until the situation became too dangerous—or setting up a half-way house for recently released prisoners, like the Olympia Zen Center, or feeding the poor, five days a week, week in and week out for years and years, like Catholic Worker houses across the country. The essential agenda is not a hobby, after all.

:: read the whole essay here