Following the Buddhist Path from War to Peace

Anne Lilburn

February 16, 2004

Dmitri Bakhroushin, a self-proclaimed liberal and a Buddhist, has been arrested at anti-war protests and spends his Tuesday evenings handing out fliers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his neighborhood. Last year, he even spent a few weekends traveling on a bus to Washington, D.C. with people he terms "Trotskyites" to protest the war in Iraq and to criticize the federal government.

It's a far jump from where he was 35 years ago, when Bakhroushin, conservative, young and Christian, was proudly serving as a communications specialist in the Army.

"When I was there," he says, "it appeared we were doing the right thing."

The Vietnam War, says Bakhroushin, provided a turning point in his life. While on leave in Japan, he found a Buddhist scripture left in his hotel room. Some of the stories inside mirrored those he knew from the Christian Bible and served as a familiar entrance into what would become his new faith.

Buddhism is also what led Bakhroushin to return to Japan, years later, to visit the former minister of his church in New York, who had moved to Hiroshima. While there, Bakhroushin visited the peace museum that commemorates the 1945 atomic bombing. Moved by the destruction and suffering that he saw commemorated there, Bakhroushin pronounced himself a pacifist.

He's reminded of Hiroshima each week when he attends the New York Buddhist Church, on Riverside Drive. A statue of Shinran Shonin, the Buddhist monk who founded Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, stands somberly outside, clutching a staff. The statue survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. A chain of origami cranes, weathered from white to yellow and strung together into a fan, hangs from his arm. Bakhroushin ties his pacifism to his Buddhist beliefs, which emphasize the interconnectedness of all life.

"War is wrong," says Bakhroushin, "because it's based on a delusion that we're separate, that there's a good and an evil. We play this kind of drama that we're the good people and there's an evil tribe on the other side of the mountain and we have to get them."

Bakhroushin likes to think of himself as more than the average Buddhist, who may just attend weekly Dharma gatherings and incorporate Buddhist teachings into his or her everyday life. Bakhroushin has extensively studied the history of Buddhism, including the teachings and the life of Buddha. He's convinced that, if he were alive today, the Buddha, who was trained as a warrior, would not just be against war; he would take an active stand against it.

Bakhroushin cites stories from the Buddha's life to make his case, and particularly likes the story of Buddha renouncing his former life.

"When he left home, he was a warrior. He had a crown and a sword and he knew how to shoot a bow and arrow, and how to lead elephants into battle," says Bakhroushin. "He threw the crown into the river, cut his hair, then threw the sword into the river. It was a symbolic gesture: the heck with this, I don't believe in this."

Buddhism is not always seen as an activist religion, and part of that may be in fact due to its emphasis on peace. Buddhist teachings center around striving for harmony among all people, so when conflict arises, even if it is a conflict about conflict, like in the anti-war movement, some Buddhists may feel uncertain about whether they should become involved.

Eric Spiegel, a Dharma teacher at the Shambhala meditation center, tells people there working for social justice and activism "to do those things without creating more aggression in the world. It's helpful," he says, "to have a very stable mind and not just be doing it for yourself as well."

Spiegel brings up, as an example, Bernie Glassman, a Zen master and activist. In 1982, Glassman founded the Greystone Mandala, a social service organization in Yonkers. Based on Buddhist principles, the organization now focuses on bringing jobs, health care and housing to low-income residents. Glassman later founded Peacemaker Circle International, an international multi-faith, multi-ethnic group that brings together activists and social change organizations from all faiths and ethnicities.

Circles meet in different cities and coordinate events such as "street retreats", in which participants take to the streets, deliberately unwashed and carrying no money. Street retreats, according to the Peacemaker International website, serve as "an initiation into the life of a street dweller" and serve to raise awareness, mostly among the participants, of the plight of those living on city streets.

Bakhroushin, who is not involved with Peacemaker International, says he respects Glassman's work. He worries about Buddhists who become too introspective. He thinks that too often, Buddhists get caught up in the images of a passive Buddha that they see in statues and sculptures. He points to a framed picture of the Buddha on the wall.

"He's just sitting there, happy, content, and some people say he's very introspective, spending time thinking about his own mind. I don't think that's the truth. He was an organizer," says Bakhroushin. "He made a decision after his enlightenment to spread the message to all people. He had a mission to teach it."

Bakhroushin says that his temple, the New York Buddhist Church, has not organized around the anti-war movement as a whole, but fellow churchgoers have offered support on his cause, like when he wrote articles for the church newsletter, or when he got arrested at a faith-based protest organized by a Catholic nun last spring. He occasionally runs into fellow parishioners, and even his minister , at demonstrations.

After a Sunday morning Dharma service, Bakhroushin sat, talking politics, peace and religion with a middle-aged woman who would identify herself only as Monte. Monte declares herself vehemently anti-war, but says she can't quite call herself a pacifist, and her political beliefs and her religious beliefs sometimes find themselves contradicting each other.

"Bush," she begins, "I hate the man -- no, wait, bring it back in again, not hate." At that, Bakhroushin refers to the day's sermon, delivered by a guest, Bhante Kondanna, the head monk of the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara-Sri Lanka temple. In the sermon, Kondanna told a story about how the Buddha confronted Angulimala, a serial killer known for wearing a garland made out of the fingers of his victims, as he was about to kill his parents. Instead of turning him in, the Buddha persuaded him to become a monk, because he saw enough good in the serial killer to believe he was a worthy person.

Having compassion, even for those who have done wrong, is one of the hardest things in life, said Kondanna. He said there were four circles of people in the world to reach out to: the first is ourselves; the second, our family and those we love; the third was all other sentient beings, including animals; and the fourth, and toughest to reach out to, were those we did not like or did not know.

Bakhroushin says he tries to live by those words. At the urging of a fellow churchgoer, he helped to organize an anti-death penalty talk at Columbia University by David Kaczynski, the brother of Ted Kaczynski, known popularly as the "Unabomber".

Still, Bakhroushin says, he is no Buddha. If he ran into the serial killer from the story, he says, he would turn him in.

"I'm not going to have compassion for him," says Bakhroushin, "but I'm not Buddha. Buddha was a special person that had the ability to have compassion for all living things."

(Updated April 26, 2004)