Not that King Hsinbyushin took his Buddhism lightly. Seven years after his great victory, the king made a royal progression down the great Irrawaddy River, worshipping at the important pagodas on the way, and asking Buddha to bless his armies with more victories. When Hsinbyushin reached Rangoon, he rebuilt and expanded the most sacred structure in all Burma – the Shwedagon Pagoda. He then gilded the enlarged edifice with his own weight in gold, and erected a gold spire on top of the pagoda and studded it with precious gems (perhaps looted from Siam). He also used the occasion to execute the captive king of Pegu, his brother and his son.23
In 1930s Japan, people even found imaginative ways to combine Buddhist doctrines with nationalism, militarism and fascism. Radical Buddhist thinkers such as Nissho Inoue, Ikki Kita and Tanaka Chigaku argued that in order to dissolve one’s egoistic attachments, people should completely give themselves up to the emperor, cut away all personal thinking, and observe total loyalty to the nation. Various ultra-nationalist organisations were inspired by such ideas, including a fanatical military group that sought to overthrow Japan’s conservative political system by a campaign of assassination. They murdered the former finance minister, the director general of the Mitsui corporation, and eventually the prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. They thereby speeded up the transformation of Japan into a military dictatorship. When the military then embarked on war, Buddhist priests and Zen meditation masters preached selfless obedience to state authority and recommended self-sacrifice for the war effort. In contrast, Buddhist teachings on compassion and non-violence were somehow forgotten, and had no perceptible influence on the behaviour of Japanese troops in Nanjing, Manila or Seoul.24
Today, the human rights record of Buddhist Myanmar is among the worst in the world, and a Buddhist monk, Ashin Wirathu, leads the anti-Muslim movement in the country. He claims that he only wants to protect Myanmar and Buddhism against Muslim jihadi conspiracies, but his sermons and articles are so inflammatory, that in February 2018 Facebook removed his page, citing its prohibition on hate speech. During a 2017 interview for the Guardian the monk preached compassion for a passing mosquito, but when confronted with allegations that Muslim women have been raped by the Myanmar military he laughed and said ‘Impossible. Their bodies are too disgusting.’25
There is very little chance that world peace and global harmony will come once 8 billion humans start meditating regularly. Observing the truth about yourself is just so difficult! Even if you somehow manage to get most humans to try it, many of us will quickly distort the truth we encounter into some story with heroes, villains and enemies, and find really good excuses to go to war.
The test of reality
Even though all these big stories are fictions generated by our own minds, there is no reason for despair. Reality is still there. You cannot play a part in any make-believe drama, but why would you want to do that in the first place? The big question facing humans isn’t ‘what is the meaning of life?’ but rather, ‘how do we get out of suffering?’ When you give up all the fictional stories, you can observe reality with far greater clarity than before, and if you really know the truth about yourself and about the world, nothing can make you miserable. But that is of course much easier said than done.
We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality. Overlooking this difference has been a matter of survival for us. If you nevertheless want to know the difference, the place to start is with suffering. Because the most real thing in the world is suffering.
When you are confronted by some great story, and you wish to know whether it is real or imaginary, one of the key questions to ask is whether the central hero of the story can suffer. For example, if somebody tells you the story of the Polish nation, take a moment to reflect whether Poland can suffer. Adam Mickiewicz, the great Romantic poet and the father of modern Polish nationalism, famously called Poland ‘the Christ of nations’. Writing in 1832, after Poland had been partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and shortly after the Polish uprising of 1830 was brutally crushed by the Russians, Mickiewicz explained that the horrendous suffering of Poland was a sacrifice on behalf of the whole of humanity, comparable to the sacrifice of Christ, and that just like Christ, Poland will rise from the dead.
In a famous passage Mickiewicz wrote that:
Poland said [to the people of Europe], ‘Whosoever will come to me shall be free and equal for I am FREEDOM.’ But the kings, when they heard it, were frightened in their hearts, and they crucified the Polish nation and laid it in its grave, crying out ‘We have slain and buried Freedom.’ But they cried out foolishly … For the Polish Nation did not die … On the Third Day, the Soul shall return to the Body; and the Nation shall arise and free all the peoples of Europe from Slavery.26
Can a nation really suffer? Has a nation eyes, hands, senses, affections and passions? If you prick it, can it bleed? Obviously not. If it is defeated in war, loses a province, or even forfeits its independence, still it cannot experience pain, sadness or any other kind of misery, for it has no body, no mind, and no feelings whatsoever. In truth, it is just a metaphor. Only in the imagination of certain humans is Poland a real entity capable of suffering. Poland endures because these humans lend it their bodies – not just by serving as soldiers in the Polish army, but by incarnating the joys and sorrows of the nation. When in May 1831 news reached Warsaw of the Polish defeat at the battle of Ostro??ka, human stomachs twisted in distress, human chests heaved with pain, human eyes filled with tears.