Insurgent Heart: A Vipassana Manual for the Guerrilla Yogi — {1}
Sabotage: Dana / Sila
Table of Contents
~ Preface
2. Indigenous Knowledge: Bhavana
3. Contact: Aim /Attack / Harass
4. Mobility: Bases / Fluidity / Agility
5. Distrust: Suspicion / Investigation
6. Medicine: Metta / Divine Abodes
7. Retreat: Encirclement / Escape
8. Diversion: Distraction / Misdirection
9. General Strike: Invisibility / Cessation
10. The Guerrilla Band: Camaraderie / Community
11. Independence: Responsibility/ Self-Retreat
12. Intelligence: Education / Reporting
13. The Revolutionary Spirit: Discipline / Determination / Faith
14. Protracted War: Land Reform / Regular Army / International Support
15. {Afterword} Mindfulness: A Balm or a Bomb for Babylon?
~CHAPTER 1 ~
Sabotage: Dana / Sila
The death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine or gun or charge of high explosive, was more profitable to us than the death of a Turk…
The attack might be nominal, directed not against him, but against his stuff; so it would not seek either his strength or his weakness, but his most accessible material. In railway-cutting it would be usually an empty stretch of rail; and the more empty, the greater the tactical success.
~ T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
In his leadership of the guerrilla campaign against the Turkish army in Syria during WWI, T.E. Lawrence quickly determined that sabotage must be the primary focus of his efforts. Small bands could easily attack remote bits of railway and disappear back into the vast desert: severely disrupting enemy functionality and affording little opportunity for casualties on his own side. By avoiding direct confrontations with large enemy units and debilitating the enemy’s lines of supply and communication, Turkish control of the territory was functionally confined to urban areas which could then be increasingly isolated. The tactic used the greatest gifts of the irregular fighters to their advantage and avoided the pitfalls of their weakness. It comprised the near-totality of their campaign.
For destruction of railway tracks, bridges, and stations in enemy-controlled territory, it is necessary to gather together demolition materials. Troops must be trained in the preparation and use of demolitions, and a demolition unit must be organized in each regiment.
~ Mao Zedong, Guerrilla Warfare
In a guerrilla warfare, various kind of sabotage can be used to disrupt the enemy’s lines of communication, movement of supplies, functionality of industry, and governmental operation without engaging in physical violence against people. Disruption is, at the very least, irritating, distracting, and depleting of the enemy’s energy. But over time these disturbances to the status quo are crucial to building the social tension that forces people to take conscious sides in the conflict, amplifying the intensity of revolutionary crisis. At its maximum potency sabotage creates the foundation for the overthrow of a dictatorial regime and does so without the dangers of direct engagement.
In our spiritual conflict, sabotage can similarly be thought of as an intervention that disrupts the patterns of behavior which create and reinforce the empire of delusion we are living under. This empire is also dependent upon a vast and complex infrastructure of communication, supplies, and mobility. In some ways that is all the “Self” is: entrenched patterns of habitual behavior linking the body and mind. Any disruption to these networks is weakening, destabilizing, and frustrating to the system and lays the groundwork for the rebellious forces of insight and love to assert themselves more directly.
Our most important tactics of spiritual sabotage used to weaken the enemy also form the basis of our entire spiritual endeavor: our commitments to generosity (dana) and ethical conduct (sila). Dana and sila along with bhavana, mind-cultivation or meditation, are considered the three pillars of the spiritual life — and it is essential for the guerrilla yogi to understand how the three work together to disrupt and dismantle the empire of self.
Dana means generosity in its broadest sense: it can mean the giving of money or material objects, of time, or our energy and skills. Sometimes patience with another person is the most powerful form of generosity we arrive at in a moment. It is the giving of our goodness.
Dana is, of course, of benefit to the receiver. But dana also decimates the strength of greed in the donor by strengthening the power of and building up the capacity for generosity in our minds. When we give that which is precious to us, in particular, it helps us break the bonds of attachment and release us from its burden. It interrupts the smooth channels of stinginess, ill-will, contraction, and indifference whose grooves can be dug so deeply in the mind. Generosity cuts the cables of the infrastructure of attachment — disrupting the relentless flow of self-centered greed in our hearts. It digs the channels of virtue and benevolence within which the mind can more naturally flow.
It feels good to give and it is good for us to feel our own goodness. When we give we should try to allow that good feeling to penetrate our hearts. I may seem indulgent to spend time reflecting on our own virtues but these remembrances give us something to hold onto when we are engulfed by the forces of self-hatred or self-doubt. They are a base we can find safety in when ambushed by doubt. During periods of intensive practice we may find so much fault in ourselves that we cannot recognize our own worthiness of liberation. This is a most dangerous trap, one that can derail our entire project. Remembering instances of our own generosity during these times, the ways in which we have helped others, is of vital importance. We need to develop a taste for and a sensitivity to the wholesome pleasure of feeling our own goodness so that the heart can build a wholesome preference for it over the deadened security of mental contraction.
I have a practice of carving small wooden spoons for the newborn babies of my friends. As I work on a spoon I get to spend time wishing these children well: imagining them being fed with the spoon, thinking about the love I know is being showered on them, attuned to the struggles they will face, and reflecting on my hopes for their future happiness. When I give the spoons away it feels wonderful to feel the appreciation from my friends. Long after, when I am on retreat struggling with some internal demon or another, it is invaluable for me to be able to recollect and consider these good deeds of mine. When the battalions of my less esteemable qualities are lining up against me it is basic survival for me to be able reflect on the beauty of these offerings and remind myself of my own goodness. Dana is one of the most fortified blockades we have against the forces of self-hatred.
Dana also undermines other people’s ill-will toward us. Showing up for others, helping out, bringing gifts, being kind-hearted — even in informal encounters — these are things that can help us soften many relationships, especially ones that have become difficult. Generosity is hard to fight against and therefore makes it harder for others to generate animosity toward you. It sabotages by disarming and is disarming in two ways: internally and externally.
Sila, ethical conduct committed to non-harming, provides a fundamental safety for our selves and others by destroying the bridges from mind to body, from thought to speech, from impulse to action, that would otherwise carry the supplies of greed, hatred, and delusion out into the world beyond. It is protective of ourselves and others and thus also provides attunement to our own goodness — in the form of remorselessness — a quality that the guerrilla yogi cannot survive without.
Sila secures our blamelessness and provides the matrix in which the spiritual life has the foundation to play out with success. The commitment to not kill (panatipata), to not steal (adinnadana), to not harm with our sexual activity (kamesu micchacara), to right speech (musavada), and to refrain from intoxicants that lead to heedlessness (Surameraya majjapamadatthana) — these five basic precepts of the lay Buddhist directly and profoundly undermine the ability of greed, hatred, and delusion to manifest in gross physical and verbal behaviors, even if they take root in our hearts. They are road blocks to the free-flow of violence and greed, an obstruction and a barricade against the fires of hatred, a dyke against the floodwaters of ignorance. They are the first protection against our own future kamma (karma). With supply-lines cut, they bring the forward march of our bad kamma to a grinding halt. They weaken and inflict true harm on the power-plants of our suffering.
Sila also provides protection for all beings that come into relationship with us. We become a haven for others seeking sanctuary, a refuge for those who cannot find safety elsewhere. It defends us against the suspicion or ill-will of others.
The guerrilla fighter, as a person conscious of a role in the vanguard of the people, must have moral conduct that shows him to be a true priest of the reform to which he aspires. To the stoicism imposed by the difficult conditions of warfare should be added an austerity born of rigid self-control that will prevent a single excess, a single slip, whatever the circumstances. The guerrilla soldier should be an ascetic.
~ Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare
Panatipata
The precept to refrain from killing, panatipata, is intended to protect ourselves and the world around us from the momentum of our anger and aversion. We not only restrain from killing other human beings but from all living things: including animals and insects — even the ones that irritate, hurt, or scare us. This concern for small beings is more important because, generally speaking, it is the situation most often encountered and one that we tend to take more lightly. Finding a mosquito in the summer while outdoors is a common phenomena, one that we tend to give very little thought or ethical weight to. Caring for the trivial-but-easy builds the capacity to care for the signficant-and-hard.
We are trained to think that it is the most dramatic and enormous challenges and ethical dilemmas which define us. But in truth it is in the small interactions, with beings that we don’t often honor or respect, that we train the mind to be sensitive to its motivation, to attune to the worthiness of another being’s life, to have the courage to feel the moral shame of violence. A guerrilla yogi knows that it is actually in these small skirmishes where the battle for ethics is practiced, developed, and won. This is the guerrilla approach to ethics.
When we commit to non-harming, we are committing to a deepening sensitivity to the motivation behind our potentially violent actions. We see how carelessly we can kill or harm another being for the simple fact of mild irritation or for the pettiness of slight discomfort. Restraint against the most egregious expression of anger is a training that sensitizes us to even the subtle burst of speech or attitude than can carry violence within them. We train in these small places of moral inquiry so that the heart becomes more and more rooted in its desire to be kind, to be caring, to be a sanctuary for all beings. The precept is a protection not only for others but for ourselves because riding on the wave of “right action” we have generated we are not burdened by the weight of remorse.
Then, when it comes to larger and more powerful spiritual dilemmas — where we may feel the need to kill in order to eat, to protect someone we care about or defend ourselves from violence — we have a baseline from which to make a clear-eyed decision, one we are willing to be responsible for because we know exactly what it means and how serious the consequences can be. We need to be able to see anger clearly in order to understand it and therefore unbind from it, but this capacity only grows from the training in seeing minor irritation, annoyance, subtly aversion, clearly.
We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.
~ Archilochus
Adinadana
Similarly, the precept to refrain from taking that which is not offered, adinadana, is a protection for the world and for our own hearts from the power of greed, of wanting. It creates safety for others and safety for ourselves as we avoid the weight of guilt that comes from unrestrained greed.
Again, the practice of adinadana is not often fought at its most extreme ends. If we are in desperate poverty or consumed by greed because of psychological conditioning or other factors there can be a greater temptation to take that which is not ours. But generally speaking, most people are not commonly compelled to rob a bank or stealing someone’s car — no matter what our socioeconomic or psychological conditions are. So we are instead engaged in the more subtle dynamics of non-consensual taking — sneaking this or that, borrowing without consent, listening in to other people’s conversations, etc. Our care for other people can take the shape of respecting that which they feel is theirs. It is the guerrilla tendency to focus our energy on small battles that can be won and staying away from deeply entrenched enemy positions until we truly have the conditions to succeed.
Our initial concern with the precept is to not harm others or ourselves with our craving. Our next interest is to investigate this power of greed, of wanting, in our hearts. By putting up a barricade in front of greed-fueled action we are confronted with wanting. If we take responsibility for it and pull back from the fascination with the object of wanting we feel the burning intensity in our hearts and engage in the investigative process that leads to understanding and to peace.
We are not trying to create a police state of self-discipline. We are not trying to create a prison by which any greedy impulse results in the chopping off of a hand or the heart. We want to understand craving because that is the only way to truly uproot it. But this investigation must happen in the context of safety, where we are not acting upon these impulses and feeding the fires of self-oppression we are trying to subdue. This is how dana and sila set the stage for bhavana, mind-cultivation. Seeing the mind colored by greed and understanding the ways in which it causes suffering, we commit to refraining from gross acts of infringement upon other people’s stuff, belongings, securities, whether ill-gained or not.
Adinadana requires more intimacy, honesty, and vulnerability with others, things that are generally good for us. To ask for something rather than simply taking it is an action that induces trust and kinship — solidarity — in a way that is often very powerful, even if at times it feels unnecessary or threatening. Asking for help requires an honest vulnerability — an admission of dependence — that many people will avoid at all cost. But when we are honest about our needs, our worries, our weaknessess, other people feel safe around us and in asking their help we give them the opportunity to be generous.
The Eighth Route Army put into practice a code known as
“The Three Rules and the Eight Remarks,” which we list here:Rules:
1. All actions are subject to command.
2. Do not steal from the people.
3. Be neither selfish nor unjust.Remarks:
1. Replace the door when you leave the house.
2. Roll up the bedding on which you have slept.
3. Be courteous.
4. Be honest in your transactions.
5. Return what you borrow.
6. Replace what you break.
7. Do not bathe in the presence of women.8. Do not without authority search the pocketbooks of those you arrest.
~ Mao Zedong, Guerrilla War
Kamesu Miccacara
The precept to refrain from harming others with our sexual activity, Kamesu miccacara, continues the principle bulwark of adinadana against the most harmful tendencies of wanting. Sexual desire is probably the most powerful form of wanting that human beings experience. It is a fire. And while it can generate great pleasure it also torments people through vast expanses of their lives. We also know how harmful this force can be. Rape, sexual assault, harassment, and intimidation are the most gross forms of violence associated with sexual desire and these actions should be strictly abandoned. But even in consensual sexual activity, great harm can come and we want to be as careful as we can for ourselves and for the sake of others — never mind the pain of longing or despair that can arise from its unfulfulment. Once again, it is in the more subtle dynamics in which we have the potential to learn, to unbind from the powerful prisons we find ourselves in as human beings.
The basics of sexual attraction are common and easily accessible. We can be overwhelmed with desire based on the subtle impression of an inexplicably evocative shape or gesture. It is within these much more available experiences of regular everyday fantasy and projection that we can begin to explore the pain associated with this kind of wanting.
Because the object of attraction is fantasized of as pleasurable, it can be hard to sensitize to the pain of wanting and the alienation inflicted on the object. A person once conveyed their attraction to me in a completely inappropriate context and expressed their interest in engaging in sexual activity with me. Initially, I was only aware of my anger for the person’s lack of respect for the container we were in. When I attuned to their mind I could see how much confusion and pain was entwined with their wanting and I was awash in pity for them. Later I began to feel genuine compassion for them, a person who at that point couldn’t have a healthy sense of human connection unrelated to sex, for whom seduction was their primary relational tool. Later, I became more sensitive to my own experience, to waves of ickiness — of the dehumanizing sensations of this person’s projection being laid upon me, the strange invisibility of being fixated on as a source of sexual gratification that actually had nothing to do with me.
The dissonance of this experience helped make clear to me that sexual attraction is, at some level, always alienating. It creates distance as it aims for intimacy. Whether the attraction is shared or not, it is always an imposition. It is a self-centeredness that paradoxically abandons ourselves and the objectified person. It is a pain in the heart we think can only be soothed by contact with another person; but this longing can never be satisfied through fulfillment, by clinging masquerading as connection. It must be felt directly, cared for directly, understood directly, and in doing so release the object and ourselves from the grip of wanting. Consider what a relief it would be to be entirely free from this dehumanizing impulse in our hearts and what a gift it would be to everyone we encounter.
We cannot simply crush these patterns of desire through aversion or rationalization. That will not uproot anything. We need to be willing to go through these feelings over and over, explore — and, yes, even carefully indulge them at times— as long as they don’t cause harm to anyone. If we learn to observe the heart’s contractions ever more closely, we will eventually come understand them fully and thus develop our full capacity for wisdom and care with them — for release from the bondage of craving. Over time we begin to experience the pain of wanting overwhelm the pleasure fantasy and become happily and naturally disenchanted with the entire process. Desire is almost never really about the object of desire but about our lack of loving and clear-seeing connection to our own restless hearts.
Seeing nothing in the end
but competition,
I felt discontent.
And then I saw
an arrow here,
so very hard to see,
embedded in the heart.
Overcome by this arrow
you run in all directions.
But simply on pulling it out
you don’t run,
you don’t sink.
~ Buddha, Attadanda Sutta
One of the great oppressions we experience as a society — and have internalized individually — is a taboo on sexuality and sensual pleasure. We have been trained to see pleasure as wrong, as immoral, as misguided, and evil. This is ubiquitous and also more intensely imposed upon disenfranchised groups: Women’s pleasure is deemed more scandalous than men’s, homosexual sex is more perverse than straight, interracial relationships more suspect than monoracial ones, poor people’s drug use more vilified than rich people, black pleasure is denigrated and white pleasure is uplifted, etc. This culture of anti-pleasure comes from Western religious heritage but can easily be seen in, adapted to, or adopted by other traditions including Buddhism. This is an essential underpinning of the patriarchy, the result of millennia of the ossification of genuine spiritual transcendence into institutions of social control and points to the challenges of pursuing a genuine spiritual path that seeks to uproot greed without relying upon aversion to pleasure.
On the one hand, we must recognize that craving is a prison and that our thirst for satisfaction will never be quenched through gratification. Without this understanding we are reinforcing the foundation of the empire that we propose to dismantle. It is an oppression that we face internally and that as students of the Buddha we are seeking to overcome. But we are not seeking to overcome it by force, by violence, but rather to disentangle the heart through the slow understanding of its own longing for satisfaction. Sila, as a commitment to ethical conduct, is a disruption to the normal mental and physical behaviors of craving and it is in this space of disruption that wisdom can enter through insight.
We have a challenging but meaningful path to follow that must accept that pleasure happens, that it is not unethical, and that longing for it is not immoral; but that we need to take extreme care in actions that seek it out. We need pleasure — especially when it helps create enough buoyancy for the mind to deal with the hardships of life. If we learn to regularly and skillfully bring in healthy measures of wholesome pleasure and joy into our lives we won’t need to rely on harmful doses to numb out to the pain when conditions get hard. Sense pleasure will never be ultimately satisfying because all phenomena are impermanent and undependable. But pleasure itself is not the problem, is not even avoidable, and can be used to support the path of liberation. The problem lies in a misunderstanding of the heart. As the heart comes to see the truth of the undependable nature of all phenomena, it no longer grasps painfully at them, and is released through wisdom — not through control or self-abuse.
Musavada
The fourth precept is musavada, the precept to refrain from incorrect speech. Generally, this is an encouragement to refrain from lying, from speech that is harmful or deceitful, to not encourage delusion or fabrication through our verbal actions.
If we consider our kamma unfolding in the realms of mental actions, speech actions, and physical actions we can come to see how extreme care with our speech is one of the most vital ways that we protect ourselves from ongoing drama and defilement production in our lives. Conditions in our lives impact our ability to practice fruitfully, and so the more volatility, the more exasperation, the more conflict we engage in and are having to manage and defend ourselves against in the outer world, the less supportive conditions we will have to engage our inner practice. If we are always arguing, in our practice we will encounter obstacles to our basic sense of safety. We may encounter increased “monkey-mind” and mental proliferation (papañca), ill-will, remorse, and embarrassment. These affect our concentration most profoundly and can cause significant harm to our meditation practice.
Knowing how powerful our words are to create harm or to generate deeper connection, through musavada we sabotage the free-flowing lines of communication: the wires and signals of word speech through constant vigilance on these pathways. Speech is seeded in thought, this engine of views and opinions which is one of the most powerful ways by which the empire of self resupplies and reproduces itself each moment. When we interrupt the smooth flow of impulses between thought and speech, we undermine these systems and mechanisms of defilement.
This does not mean that the guerrilla yogi does not argue or get involved in difficult conversations in the world. Rather, they understand that there are inevitable impacts of this kind of speech action and so they are cautious in the extreme to only take on engagements that they are willing to follow through on, accept the kamma of. The guerrilla yogi must be willing to go through the results of their actions, to own them, take responsibility for them, and do their best to orient their destination not merely toward winning, but toward deeper understanding and care.
The most powerful form of musavada is silence: the utter restraint and disruption of this flow of experience between thought and speech in which we are willing to take on the full impact of the sometimes violent force of the mind as our impulses and volatility and pettiness are reflected back to us entirely and we bear the burden of the relentless engine of the mind. This refusal to generate kamma based on these mental impulses, to receive the repeated hammering of thoughts on our attention and to protect the world around us from the violence and craving and delusion, is a great gift to all we encounter.
Of course not all of our flow of mental experience is so toxic. We may have plenty of beautiful, kind, and generous thoughts as well. But in the case of the guerrilla yogi committed to silence we hold the baseline standard as the deepest form of protection, as the deepest security from causing harm, and the deepest commitment to try to learn from the activity of the mind rather than subject the world to all of its whims and worries.
Silence is not only a weapon but also a reward. Silence is the deep refuge of the guerrilla yogi — wherever we can find it we soak in it, nourish ourselves with it. Silence is the echo of nibbana in the conditioned world. It is a sacred relief: relief from the pressures of social world, from performance and posturing, from projection and the millions of moments of unnecessary propagation of the empire.
The seclusion afforded by silence is of utmost importance in our practice. Few of us can find ways to live long swaths of our lives in silence, but most of us can find ways to punctuate the normal social flow of our verbal engagement with periods of silence — of long or short duration — in order to reap the rewards and taste the value of this commitment. We have limited energy and capacity to attend to the relentless stimulus of life. When we commit to attending to the internal, we see that we barely have enough energy for that and each engagement outside of ourselves takes away from our inner reserves.
The guerrilla is also adept at the practice of “invisible destruction.” This means that you destroy the enemy’s transport, stores, and so on, without letting him know about it until the time comes when he needs to use it. If you make a noise, or if you burn or blow up something, he may be able to catch you; also he has earlier warning of his loss, and therefore more time in which to replace it.
~Bert “Yank” Levy, Guerrilla Warfare
Suramereya Majjapamadatthana
Finally, suramereya majjapamadatthana, is the precept to refrain from intoxicants that can lead to carelessness. Carefulness, or appamada, is an esteemed quality of mind in the Buddha’s teaching and intoxicating substances have the power to detach us from the sense of responsibility of our actions, to not recognize the harm we can create, and to not care about it. Even though we have not overcome the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion in the mind we become increasingly aware of their potential to cause suffering for ourselves and others. This sensitivity to what is at stake in the struggle deepens our commitment to wholesome, non-harming actions. We are at war with mental defilements and the more we recognize the gravity of that, the greater responsibility we feel to show up for the battles with as much force of mindfulness, compassion, and skillfulness as possible.
Games that have no social function and that hurt the morale of the troops and the consumption of alcoholic drinks should both be prohibited.
~ Ernesto “Che” Guevara, On Guerrilla Warfare
The levity and detachment that comes from intoxication is of course one of the primary reasons we do it: to get relief from the burden of responsibility, to let loose and take the pressure off. On one hand this impulse helps show the intensity of the pressure we feel — the prison that we experience life as — and so it is understandable that we long for relief. But when do we seek medicine that provides true relief and when do we seek “medicines” that end up creating more problems for us, more suffering, because of our heedless actions while we are under their influence? Our lives can change course dramatically from a brief moment of distraction, of unchecked aggression, of unrestrained craving. Why would we want to induce delusion? Why would we not want to take full responsibility for our actions so that we can secure the goodness of the future results?
Of course we can also become addicted to things like our electronic devices that we use to distract us, to numb us out. This precept is just as meaningful for social media as for alcohol. What are we ingesting and why? What is the impact on our minds, hearts, bodies? This is a crucial investigation not just for the sake of moral purification, but for wisdom — of seeing what leads to what.
It does not mean that we do not take our medications that we may need for mental or physical health. It does not necessarily mean that we don’t have a place of moderate and careful use of foods or substances that may stimulate or relax us to some extent, or which are used for cultural or spiritual purposes. It means that we are committed to being extremely careful and motivated by genuine concern for our wellbeing, our growth, and the growth and wellbeing of others so that we make these decisions in the safest way, in the safest conditions, for all. These precepts are meant to make us more relaxed, not more rigid, because we are confident in the wholesomeness of our actions.
There are places where we can take the precepts too far, where we are compelled to create uptight or dogmatic lifestyle choices that end up increasing the brittleness and bitterness of our hearts. Dana and sila are designed to make the mind more malleable, more workable, by infusing our actions with beautiful carefulness and well-wishing. If we notice that our commitments are making us more rigid — more judgmental about ourselves or others — we should take precautions to re-evaluate.
For the guerrilla yogi ethical rigor is more important than ethical purity. We live in society and need to be able to adopt to and adapt to social norms to some degree if we are going to be able to create the stable and supportive conditions for our own development. This can be a difficult path. There are norms in our society that may strike us as deeply immoral and through our participation in them we feel responsible for their propagation.
We can be agents for social good and should do our best to be on the side of historical righteousness, but we should also be humble and recognize where it is important to make hard demands of ourselves morally and where it is essential to have some flexibility in order to survive and practice. There are no hard and fast rules but certainly the more deeply we are entwined in society the more we must acquiesce. The guerrilla yogi is in an in-between land that can be hard to balance, but the fruit of this struggle is some of the richest part of our spiritual lives if we bring to it a flexible rigor.
On the other hand, we may decide that we need to take a hard stance against a social norm that becomes irreconcilable. This is a powerful practice and we should simply be aware of the ways that it is also a purifying practice, one that may call up all kinds of tensions and hardships in our lives. Moral actions can be the direct cause of negative repercussions for us, turning some of the traditional notions of karma on their heads.
As acts of sabotage the tactics of morality can cut both ways. The tensions brought about by such disruptions can bring a person, a family, or a society toward crises. If conditions are right, that crisis will lean toward revolution.
It is possible to paralyze entire armies, to suspend the industrial life of a zone, leaving the inhabitants of a city without factories, without light, without water, without communications of any kind, without being able to risk travel by highway except at certain hours. If all this is achieved, the morale of the enemy falls, the morale of his combatant units weaken, and the fruit ripens for plucking at a precise moment.
~ Ernesto “Che” Guevara, On Guerrilla Warfare
If the people are on your side, it can go this way. On the other hand, if conditions are not yet ripe and the population not fully supportive, the crisis can backfire and without lights, food, gas, etc a society can easily turn against you. This can cause catastrophic and existential harm to a guerrilla movement.
The internal costs to over-rigid ethical commitments can be equally destructive. For ten years I refused to pay federal income taxes out of moral disgust with the war in Iraq. Instead, I gave that money to underfunded people and organizations I felt were doing important work in the world that I believed in. While this moral stance was strengthening and clarifying, it was also destabilizing for my social, material, and mental well-being. Eventually I came to the conclusion that in order to protect the conditions to sustain my physical and spiritual development I needed to live in a less ethical relationship to society. There are others who determine that the risks are worth the commitment and continue in their commitment clear-eyed but taking responsibility for the inevitable results of their actions. The most important part is not the outcome but the willingness to struggle.
Society — as well as culture, family, friends — are real forces determining the conditions of our practice. We often need to find appropriate distances from the negative or stuck aspects of these, but we should be very careful about total rejection, of bringing them to crisis, because often we need the support of these relationships more than we imagine. We must be careful not to turn our moral determination into judgmental moralism toward people in our lives. People will turn against you if they feel you judging them, if your parameters are too dogmatic and uptight they will exclude everyone in your life. That degree of isolation should only be taken if absolutely necessary. You may not want to use a cell phone, social media, gasoline because of its perceived negative influence on the world, but in doing so the yogi also alienates themselves from the world, whose support, one some level, they may need. We cannot starve ourselves as an effective means to cutting off the enemies supplies.
Additionally, we must remember that most restrictive decisions about sugar, gluten, caffeine and the like, are not moral questions. Limiting our consumption of those things may be healthy for us, we should be careful to think of those decisions as ethically significant. The decision of whether or not to eat meat does have profound moral dimensions but it is important to remember that most Buddhist monastics around the world are not vegetarians. Even though eating meat involves killing, they abide by what they believe to be a higher ethic to accept whatever food is offered to them. Most of their offerings come from impoverished laity and the monastics don’t want to place any extra burden on their generosity. This basic lesson of gratitude and adaptability over preference and rigidity is something most westerners could use some education around especially when it takes into consideration what mental qualities we are supporting by our restrictions.
When Queen Liliʻuokalani’s kingdom of Hawaiʻi was overthrown by American sugar and pineapple plantation owners, she had to accept that the conditions were not right for the Hawaiian people to successfully defend their nation. It was not worth the bloodshed that would not have worked. One can only imagine what soul-ache this position must have caused,
The way to lose any earthly kingdom is to be inflexible, intolerant and prejudicial. Another way is to be too flexible, tolerant of too many wrongs and without judgment at all. It is a razor’s edge. It is the width of a blade of pili grass.
~ Queen Liliʻuokalani, 1917
Dana and sila are always available. We may not be able to practice vipassana formally all day long, but we are acting all day long, making nearly invisible decisions about our behavior that have a moral quality to be careful about but also to explore. We may not be penetrating into the deepest nature of all conditioned phenomena when we are at work, but we are interacting, getting triggered, getting excited, and we have the power to use these places and times to chip away at the infrastructure of greed, hatred, and delusion in our lives. It can be the most meaningful activity of our daily insurgence as as guerrilla yogi. The Buddha spoke of sila as a garland, our greatest adornment. If we cultivate this garland and the beauty and purity of our hearts, it is the greatest gift to ourselves and to the world around us.
Those who engage in bodily misconduct, verbal misconduct, & mental misconduct leave themselves unprotected. Even though a squadron of elephant troops might protect them, a squadron of cavalry troops, a squadron of chariot troops, a squadron of infantry troops might protect them, still they leave themselves unprotected. Why is that? Because that’s an external protection, not an internal one. Therefore they leave themselves unprotected. But those who engage in good bodily conduct, good verbal conduct, & good mental conduct have themselves protected. Even though neither a squadron of elephant troops, a squadron of cavalry troops, a squadron of chariot troops, nor a squadron of infantry troops might protect them, still they have themselves protected. Why is that? Because that’s an internal protection, not an external one. Therefore they have themselves protected.”
That is what the Blessed One said. Having said that, the One Well-Gone, the Teacher, said further:
Restraint with the body is good,
good is restraint with speech.
Restraint with the heart is good,
good is restraint everywhere.
Restrained everywhere,
conscientious,
one is said to be
protected.
~The Buddha, Atta-Rakkhita Sutta
As the guerrilla yogi slowly dismantles the infrastructure of the enemy’s pathways, they also build their own network of resistance paths: trails, roads, and information networks within the mind and between the mind and body that facilitate the rebellious forces of kindness, generosity, wisdom, compassion, and love.
The Ho Chi Minh trail was a vast network of interlinking roads and paths through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that allowed the North Vietnamese guerrilla forces to penetrate the South and supply their allies there during the war in Vietnam. It’s functionality or destruction was essential to the success of the war — and both sides knew it. Relentlessly bombed by American forces for their strategic value, these roads required tireless work rebuilding and rerouting on the part of the Viet Cong.
The guerrilla yogi must likewise acknowledge the way in which the flow of good actions, of generosity and care, lays the basic groundwork for the success of their broader campaign — like a Ho Chi Minh trail of the mind. Even without attack, any trail in the jungle will quickly become absorbed back into the forest if not regularly trodden and maintained. The paths of morality will be the most obvious and vulnerable target for the enemy’s attacks and must be protected and reinforced relentlessly.
When the great vipassana master Sayadaw U Lakkhana was dying in a Mandalay hospital, a friend Steven was at his bedside, distraught. Sensing this, Sayadaw opened his eyes, turned to him and said, “Don’t worry Steven: I have total faith in my kamma.”
If you let yourself feel the power and beauty of what a mind like that would be like: to have no fear of death, no fear of the future, no fear of anything in the next moment, utterly confident in the momentum of your past actions, you will imagine the deepest freedom of the heart. Sayadaw used to say, “Our actions are our only true inheritance.” In other words, all other phenomena in this world are fleeting and undependable, changing out of our control, but if we take responsibility for our actions — and for the forces motivating our behavior — we will benefit most abundantly from the peace and beauty that this purified heart provides us. This is the essence of the teaching of kamma. It is the force of our inevitable victory.
Keeping a connection to our goodness and our worthiness is not trite feel-goodism, it is essential to the path, to our sense of confidence and our capacity for concentration and development of the mind. We have all done harm, engaged in unskilful behavior which we cannot undo. But we can have confidence in our actions from this point forward and that possibility is a great promise.
Generosity and morality as acts of sabotage are not merely preliminary practices: they represent the entire trajectory and fulfillment of the path. Dana, Sila, and Bhavana are constantly reinforcing one another, supporting one another, purifying one another. Creating a foundation of ethical care provides the internal stability, the revolutionary infrastructure, to begin the work of investigation of the mind and body. To fully develop our generosity and purify our ethics the tools of insight are required, particularly as we start to be curious about and able to see the motivations of our actions. In this way we see it is not a one-way path to bhavana but that the three are like a tripod, mutually supporting our practice, a perfect and powerful tool for destroying the machinery of confusion.
They represent the fulfillment of the path because all acts of stinginess, greed, or harm have their roots in the misunderstanding of the mind that we are a solid self, that we can find security and happiness in transient things. Dana and sila are destructive to the infrastructure and mechanics of the self but are only fulfilled in entirety when the empire of the Self is completely overthrown. They are building the new world as they destroy the old.
O house-builder, you are seen! You will not build this house again. For your rafters are broken and your ridgepole shattered. My mind has reached the Unconditioned; I have attained the destruction of craving.
~ The Buddha, Jaravagga Sutta
Click here for Chapter 2 (Indigenous Knowledge: Bhavana)
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