Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. by Marc Andrus. Parallax Press (Berkeley, California). 207pps. $24.95
Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America by Helen Tworkov. St. Martin’s Essentials (New York). 325 pps.
Marc Andrus, an Episcopal bishop, and Helen Tworkov, the founder of Tricycle, the first Buddhist magazine in America, both begin their books with the same event. Andrus writes:
On June 12, 1963, many people around the world, including the president of the United States, opened their newspapers and looked with shock at a photograph of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, seated cross-legged in a posture called the lotus position, engulfed in flame. Thich Quang Duc is composed and upright. The revered monk, in his mid-sixties, had been soaked in gasoline by a younger monk and had then struck a match to set himself on fire.
Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. traces the separate histories that eventually led to the friendship and esteem between
Reverend King and the young, increasingly revered Buddhist monk.
Helen Tworkov records her own reaction to the photograph as a twenty-year-old New Yorker with a nascent interest in Buddhism:
…[As] much as I looked for signs of torment, [it] does not show a man in the throes of physical or mental suffering. There was nothing to relate to, to identify with—and I kept wondering how this could be.
For New Yorkers of the 60s generation—and I’m of the same age and New York lineage as Tworkov—Buddhism was part of a larger discourse that had immediate appeal, given the social and political upheaval of that time, an appeal that endures today. Non-theistic, Buddhism enshrines “mindfulness” as a central religious tenant, Buddhahood a state of consciousness rather than a figure in time, Buddha-mind as opposed to Buddha himself.
The Civil Rights movement led by Reverend King, took Gandhi’s principle ofnon-violent protest into the lunch counters and buses of the segregated South as an “irritant” to the status quo that would expose the inequities to the larger world. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a public letter to Dr. King around the time of the elder monk’s self-incineration to explain that the act itself did not involve a perceived enmity, and in fact was an act of love, embracing the brotherhood of man beyond mortality. Dr. King, having recently received the Nobel Peace Prize, was soon to recommend the young monk for the same prize.
Helen Tworkov writes lucidly of the long and winding road of the Buddhist “cohabitant” exploring the various sects and their leaders in the American world. With firsthand knowledge of scandals on both the American and Asian sides, Tworkov treads charily around central flare-ups, sidestepping Chogyam Trumpa’s notorious encounter with the poet W. S. Merwin, for instance, at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac’s School of Disembodied Poetics.
The image of a Buddhist monk dying at a public crossroads in Saigon with an expression that suggests serenity, brings up the mystery of death itself as a central, albeit largely unspoken question. In Pasternak’s epochal Doctor Zhivago, a character proposes “the two basic ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.” The parallel mandate of the self-actualized Buddhist, the Bodhisattva, is to address suffering on the planet in any way he/she/they can.
Mingling religious traditions, these two books echo a larger perceived consensus between, to name two other instances, New Age health and physics, in both its astro and subatomic categories. If the smallest subatomic particle has no measurable substance, no “rest mass,” and is known to exist only because it reflects its twin particle—now a verb rather than a noun—could its action be characterized as a primary, very pure form of consciousness?
And if a body travelling at the speed of light tends to become infinite, as Einstein posits, is it possible that infinity and/or the speed of light involves a qualitative shift from an unending distance into light, likewise now a verb—and again a form consciousness?
And does this, in turn, give scientific validation to the New Age exercise of visualization to realize a particular goal? To summarize: If consciousness is both the beginning and the end point of matter—either by reflection (mirror) or by illumination (light)—could “visualizing,” in turn, catalyze a goal in the form of matter?
Finally, does a devolution of the mass of atoms we previously knew by name, address and phone number, signal a state of being in which the subject (temporarily by meditation or permanently by dying) enters the empyrean—or, to quote Pharell Williams’ hit “Happy”—becomes “a room without a roof”?
Both of these books address our tremulous times in search of cross-cultural planetary healing.