In Buddhist lore, there is a story about a woman named Kisagotami who suffered from the death of her only child. In her grief and desperation, she went to the Buddha hoping that he would know a way to bring her child back to life. As the story goes, the Buddha told her to bring him a handful of mustard seed—and that such seed needed to come from a household where no one had ever died. The woman agreed to this task and immediately went about going from house to house in search of the mustard seed. However, after visiting one household after the other, she realized that there wasn’t a single one where death had not visited. Acknowledging this sad fact, she returned to the Buddha who in turn told her, with great compassion, that she was not alone in her grief. Death—the ultimate sign of life’s impermanence—was a natural part of human existence.
Kisagotami coming to the Buddha with the desire to resurrect her child.
This now-mythic story appears at the beginning of a chapter on suffering in a book entitled The Art of Happiness (1998), co-written by the Dalai Lama and psychiatrist Howard C. Cutler. In the book, Cutler interviews the Dalai Lama to examine the Buddhist prescription for finding happiness in a life badgered by constant stress and suffering. Regarding the story summarized above, they write: “Kisagotami’s search taught her that no one lives free from suffering and loss. She hadn’t been singled out for this terrible misfortune. This insight didn’t eliminate the inevitable suffering that comes from loss, but it did reduce the suffering that came from struggling against this sad fact of life… Although pain and suffering are universal human phenomena, that doesn’t mean we have an easy time accepting them.” [emphasis mine]
As I’ve noted in previous posts, I began looking into Buddhism seeking answers: a way to deal with inscrutable health issues that created an impassable chasm between my current sickly living and the life I had become accustomed to. For sure, my life before was filled with struggle—but it was one where I found fulfillment and hope in the very process of struggling. Being in the thick of a fight gave my life meaning—even when I knew I was up against impossible odds.
Today, my chronic pain prevents me from moving forward the way I once secretly envisioned. Whether I acknowledged it to myself or not, I hoped that at this point in my life I’d be more engaged in explicit activist efforts, working side-by-side with my communities, developing old friendships while making new ones. And while some of that has occurred, my invisible pain has kept me bed-ridden more times than I can count. My entire worldview has been altered by a web of health conditions that makes simple survival—getting by day to day—a struggle. To avoid slipping into a seemingly inevitable abyss of loneliness, I sought a philosophy that dealt directly with the issues that now mattered to me most: coping with pain and illness, finding a sustainable way of living in peace without compromising my revolutionary integrity. The dharma seemed to bear that promise, and I’ve been adamantly trying to learn as much about Buddha’s philosophy ever since.
Front cover to the 1998 bestseller co-authored by the Dalai Lama
All of this said, I quickly found myself dealing with an internal turmoil. An earnest desire to learn more about the dharma resulted in many questions on my part, and I sensed a common motif between many of the issues I was confronting. Namely, I sensed a friction between struggle and acceptance, two paths of action in a world filled with decision-making junctures. The story of Kisagotami highlights the role that both struggle and acceptance play in Buddhism and in our daily lives. Are there struggles—like the internal struggle Kisagotami had against the death of her child—that should be tempered with acceptance? Is acceptance always the way to finding peace and happiness in this world? The more I examined the questions of when to struggle, when to accept, the more I realized that this was an incredibly nuanced discussion that merits explicit attention.
Below I will attempt to explain the emotional/philosophical quandary in question, first by examining how I came to the quandary in the first place. As the discussion is highly detailed, I fragmented this written exploration into parts meant for easier access and readability. It is part autobiographical, part historical, part philosophical, and part social and political commentary. I encourage readers to read or skim through sections as they see fit.
My Path: From Revolution to Dharma
I hesitate to use the word “revolutionary” to describe myself, largely because of the ways in which that label has become colored with meanings that seem to obfuscate more than clarify, but I would most definitely say that I see a need for “revolution.” Having grown up in a working-class immigrant family in the heart of Empire, seeing daily the costs of our run-amok capitalist world on the very livelihood of my family—and my own personal suffering—it’s hard for me not to desire change. Not some pennies-and-nickels reformism, but a veritable radical revolution that will bring an end to elite favoritism and greed, and lessen the unjustifiable suffering of the world’s oppressed. So before I became severely ill, I had already suffered and struggled through depression, suicidality, and constant efforts to prove myself in academic environments where who you knew was more important what you knew.
But things changed as I became involved in political struggles, building an activist’s optimism that infused my life with meaning. Although I battled depression and fatigue while I worked long hours, it all seemed worth it. As Victor Frankl notes in Man’s Search for Meaning, individuals who suffer with purpose are more likely to survive through the most hellish circumstances. And having spent years working around immigrants’ rights, housing, and labor rights, and building a career in political education, I felt fulfilled in being able to fight the good fight. Things were never easy. Everything seemed to be a struggle. But I was at least healthy enough to put up a fight.
Things radically changed in a short period of time as a tornado wrecked havoc on my body, leaving irremediable changes in its wake. My brother’s paradoxically long-but-young life of suffering was over, but a new set of struggles had only just started for me. As if the Universe had left me with the pieces of his unresolved struggle. Like my brother, I started a downward path of debilitating symptoms, a lessening in quality of life, a withdrawal from the communities that gave me a sense of personhood and hope. Chronic pain had set in, and as months rolled by and as one medical treatment after the other failed me, my future started to seem bleaker and bleaker.
“What kind of a life had I in store for me now?,” I thought. One where I was in constant pain, unable to pursue the dreams that once brightened the landscape of an already-arduous life?
I couldn’t find solutions for my intensely personal struggle in the activism or revolutionary politics that became embedded in my identity. At best, perhaps a theory for understanding how my autoimmune condition arose, an understanding of the larger picture of transgenerational suffering and marginalization that led to where I am now. But reading Marx or Alinsky or any other revolutionary writer provided no prescription for what to do with my body, mind, and spirit. (And, of course, the literature from mainstream biomedical industrial complex only offered weak suggestions.)
I felt like a soldier down, too wounded to fight side-by-side other activists, taken away from the battlefield when that was the very experience that gave me energy. I became a homebody for once in my life as my pain made spending time outside too uncomfortable. And much like anyone else first learning to cope with chronic pain, I wanted to treat it and get it over with. I wanted to think that it was like a terrible flu or a broken bone, something that could heal with the proper assortment of pills, diet, and exercise. And given that this was pain, I wanted to put the healing process on turbo-drive so I could go quickly resume life as normal.
Time made me realize that this was nothing like a flu or a broken bone. Whenever I felt any relief I was quickly slammed against the cold concrete of interminable pain. I came to truly recognize my former able-bodied privilege—and to this day, I feel stuck in a perpetual straddling of an amorphous line between healthy and unhealthy. Most disturbing of all was my realization that I wasn’t going to be soothed by the answers of our dominant, seemingly effective system of medical institutions (what many recognize as the primacy of allopathic medicine). Since I was already critical of the medical industrial complex, and since I had already opened my heart to yoga and meditation, I chose to trust my gut and move from there.
In my research I learned about very different paradigms of health and healing. I learned that unlike the positivist approach that underlies the allopathic medical establishment (feigning absolute “objectivity” in its efforts to maintain power over human minds and bodies), other forms of medicine—such as homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, or Ayurvedic medicine—were very overtly affiliated with philosophies that examined the entirety of human experience and the interconnectivities of the Universe. Unlike the current Western medical establishment, embedded as it is within a capitalist-postmodernist zeitgeist, the other forms of medicine I investigated treated the body holistically, as being connected with something vaster and more Supreme. Rather than treating the body like a machine with various interchangeable parts, these other medicines saw the interconnections between mind and spirit (way before the emergence of ‘psychoneuroimmunology’). They saw how stress could impact the body, and how practices like meditation and yoga could remedy these impacts—all without the need for potent, potentially harmful pharmaceuticals.
Reading about the medicinal practices of yoga and meditation that originated in India, I was slowly drawn into studying Buddhism. I was intrigued by the dharma’s focus on impermanence and its willingness to examine dukkha (translated as suffering or stress). I found a way of thought that directly addressed illness and suffering and gave a prescription for how to cope with these. It gave me a sense of optimism much in the same way that activism did for me before. Although I had done yoga and meditation before, I started to take these very seriously now that I understood, more intimately, how stress can deteriorate one’s health. For certain, I started these practices for quite selfish reasons: improving my health. But over time I was drawn to the worldviews that these practices emanated from, and so I kept reading and researching vigorously.
Unsurprisingly, what are likely naïve questions on my part began to surface. Having come to see struggle as a part of our existence, a part of our survival, even a part of our happiness, I started to have issues with the way “acceptance” was discussed among certain Buddhist writers. Wasn’t acceptance, after all, a form of complacency? How does acceptance of suffering lead to peace and happiness, for is it not the struggle against suffering that enables us to overcome it? Furthermore, the mantra-like focus on changing one’s “perspective,” “looking inward,” and “taming the mind” all seemed to explicate larger socio-political problems onto highly individualized cognitive appraisals (this is a point I don’t wholeheartedly disagree with, but lack of space prevents me from engaging this point any further). I was baffled and intrigued by this seemingly large conundrum.
I once asked for advice from an energy healer (an obvious act of desperation if one ever existed). His suggestion was that I shouldn’t seek to change the world. “There’s nothing wrong with the world,” he said. The world is full of beauty and goodness, and there’s no need to change it. His very suggestion implied passive acceptance.
All of this seemed to go counter to my education as an activist. I never questioned whether there was suffering in the world, and I never questioned the importance of struggle. Collective struggles are what enabled us to achieve certain victories that many of us (really, the most fortunate among us) take for granted today: an eight-hour workday, weekends, the ability to work without fear of injury or the ability to go to a hospital if we do get injured. Of course, many of these victories are being curtailed as we speak, but fighting seemed to be the key to seeking the world of peace and happiness we wanted. In my mind, sitting back and devoting our energies to accepting our suffering—interpreted in the wrong way—could lead to the sort of interpretation given by the healer who offered me “advice.” Coming from a place of affluence and privilege, it was easy enough for him to suggest an individualistic path of focusing on one’s own mind, on acceptance. But that struck me as completely unacceptable.
And I started to encounter a similar sort of advice being propounded by more self-identified Buddhists in essays and films. It was as if collective struggle was worthless, or at least, not the right way to solving the world’s problems; rather, it was turning to our minds, learning acceptance, that was crucial. My confusion was augmented when I read about Buddhist activists who held views that were admittedly more palatable but nevertheless question-raising. Briefly put, I encountered what seemed to be a dialectical friction between struggle and acceptance.
What’s in a struggle?
Having become accustomed to a paradigm of ‘struggle’—both in my personal life, and in my way of understanding social conflict and power dynamics—I recently started thinking more deeply about its relation to suffering and how it was playing out in my disease-ridden life. Upon questioning myself on the matter, I immediately realized, in spite of their oft-accepted conflation, that struggle is not suffering. At the very least, they’re not equivalent in the way we typically understand these terms in the English language. One can struggle for higher wages, respect, security, love—and these struggles, while they may involve some level of suffering, can be exercises that confer fulfillment and purpose to our lives. As an action, struggle can involve contending with a difficult situation or challenge; suffering, on the other hand, is an experience that can result from loss, failure, or mental unrest.
I also realized that although the concept of struggle was constantly on my mind, the very term finds form in different meanings. We have collective struggle and personal struggle. We struggle against issues within ourselves (against illness, confusion, fear or general unhappiness) as well as without (against an abusive boss, a hot-headed partner, environmental injustice and war). Struggle can be conscious and voluntary (as when we choose to fight back against the police) or unconscious and involuntary (as when we struggle to remain alive after being beaten). A ‘struggle’ can be a small tussle in a boxing ring or a large-scale power play between forces of corporate domination and the preservation of people’s livelihoods. Additionally, what I realized for myself was that being able to struggle with community meant something far different than this more personalized subjugation of struggling with chronic pain and health issues. And it is this difference between collective and personal that I want to give a closer look.
Undoubtedly, written history is rife with examples of collective struggle, almost invariably a struggle between those with less power and those with more. Whether we examine the examples of historical interplays between plebeians and tyrants, slaves and masters, it is clear that people have long forged common bonds and fought against mutual enemies. Although history is always written by the powerful and winners of wars, lurking beneath is the undeniable truth of people’s revolts, battles, and struggles against the oppression of emperors, monarchs, and entrenched elites. Occluded from mainstream history texts are the individual plights and perspectives of those of an oppressed class, whether they be the plebeians of Rome, the untouchable castes of India, Japan, or Tibet, or the peasants and slaves of the Mesoamerica. In spite of what we’re taught in schools, the brutal examples of global imperial colonization and domination that resulted in an immeasurable loss of life and culture among indigenous Americans, Africans, Asians, and non-continental nations did not occur without protracted wars, rebellions, and individual mutinies. Certainly, the very many people’s revolts have left indelible markers on the historical landscape, but were quickly suppressed and forgotten via the willful dictates of the powerful in particular times and spaces.
Of course, one need not look deep into the historical canon to see examples of collective struggles of what we commonly call the ‘common folk’ or ‘the people.’ The American and French Revolutions would have been impossible without the vital support of the supposed commoner (although, as critical historians have seen in both cases, the more powerful of the ‘oppressed’ quickly gained the helm while the individual plights and perspectives from the lower classes rarely made it into the history books). The protracted labor struggles that came in the advent of industrialization in Britain and the United States gave rise to new reconfigurations and models of organizing that we continue to utilize today. And although many today look to the revolutionary movements of the late 60’s and early ‘70s to find examples of collective struggle (from antiwar demonstrations to women’s rights to black, indigenous, Asian and Latina/o struggles for liberation), the socially-aware observer will find all sorts of examples of collective struggle in our “postmodern” informational age in the form of multiscalar progressive organizational coalitions and networks (e.g. Right to the City Alliance, Take Back the Land, the various independent struggles lumped under the ‘Arab Spring,’ Occupy Wall Street and its offsprings, Yo Soy 132, and Idle No More).
The examples of collective struggles are endless and I can do no justice here trying to engage them all. But as a non-religious person trying to critically engage with Buddhist thought, I couldn’t help but wonder what Buddhist scholars thought of collective struggles, particularly people’s resistance struggles, much of which was necessarily violent. If, as I hinted earlier, acceptance meant compliance with an unjust brutal world that was shaped (and could be changed) by humans, then this was an acceptance I wanted nothing to do with. It reeked too horribly of thoughtless compliance and bourgeois ideology. But when I thought of historical examples of Buddhists fighting in the trenches against ostensible injustices, I began to really question whether Buddhism (a religion or spiritual system of thought that has as many varied interpretations as any other religious/spiritual system) had a single, homogeneous understanding of acceptance—and, for that matter, struggle and suffering.
Buddhists in Collective Struggle
In thinking about Buddhists in collective struggle, the first example that came to mind was the famous role of Buddhists in the Southeast Asian War (aka Vietnam War). I thought back to the memorable account of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in a public square in Saigon (June 1963) to protest the U.S.-backed Diem regime. This, of course, was all I was taught in my high school U.S. history course. Researching the topic further, I found information that resonated with my knowledge of history and politics in the Americas—information that is deliberately ignored, obfuscated, or suppressed in the most accessible outlets of public media. Although I make no claims of being a historian (let alone an “objective” one, which does not exist), I will try to briefly narrate what are verifiable accounts:
Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, burns himself to death on a Saigon street on June 11, 1963 to protest persecution of Buddhists by the U.S. puppet government of Ngo Dinh Diem. (AP Photo/Malcolm Browne)
The history of Euro-American imperialism in Southeast Asia dates back to the so-called Age of Exploration, becoming most clearly manifest in the military conquests of France in a period between 1859 and 1885. As with other examples of imperial-colonial domination, the people of what was then called Indochina fought endlessly for self-government and basic civil liberties. After generations of struggle against French rule, another imperial power (Japan) came into the fold following the defeat of France to Germany during World War II.
It was under oppressive Japanese occupation that a communist-nationalist liberation movement, the Vietminh, came into power with a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, as its leader. As Howard Zinn (1980) writes in his renowned chapter on the Vietnam (Southeast Asian) War, the Viet Minh successfully defeated the Japanese and its puppet government in 1945, celebrating their victory by issuing a Declaration of Independence that modeled the U.S.’s. This proved to be a short-lived victory, however, as French forces (now liberated from the Third Reich) began bombarding communist-led Vietnam in 1946. This was the beginning of the First Indochina War that lasted until 1954.
The Geneva Conference of that last year dissolved French Indochina and partitioned the region into four independent countries: Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam (under the Viet Minh government), and South Vietnam (under Emperor Bảo Đại). It wasn’t long before this partition of nations led to conflict, primarily in a Cold War geopolitical environment that drove the McCarthyist U.S. into “defending” its Southern sphere of influence. After a U.S.-backed coup d’etat by then-Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch anti-communist who blocked efforts for democratic elections, the socio-political atmosphere of South Vietnam quickly became heated. In a nation that consisted mostly of poor rural laborers who were Buddhist, rule under a Catholic U.S.-puppet president (who had recently moved back from living in New Jersey) was completely insufferable. By siding with large landowners, much-needed land reform for most of the population was never implemented. He imprisoned and killed communist-supporters and critics of his corrupt regime while replacing locally elected leaders with his own men. In 1960, a National Liberation Front was formed in South Vietnam that united various strands of Diem’s opposition, including (most importantly) disgruntled peasants.
By 1963, Buddhist discontent circulated after Diem (who for years implemented policies favoring Catholics) placed a ban on flying the Buddhist flag. In droves, Buddhists had protested the ban by publicly flying their flags and facing government gunfire (and in many instances, death). A turning-point was reached when Mahayana Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, with the support of several other monks and nuns, performed a self-immolation that was publicized around the world. Many Buddhists thereafter followed his example, following his last words in a letter written immediately before his death:
“I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organize in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.”1
In the ensuing years, a number of other monks set themselves on fire in a flagrant dramatization of what was truly a people’s oppositional movement. Given the vast abundance of literature about the Southeast Asian War, there is no need to recapitulate the obvious facts. However, it is noteworthy that a largely rural peasant counteroffensive in South Vietnam with a substantially weaker military arsenal defeated a Goliath superpower. This is perhaps one of the greatest testaments in recent history to the power of collective struggle against inhumane injustices.
Another prominent example of Buddhists engaged in collective struggle is showcased in the fight for Tibetan independence. Much like with Southeast Asian Buddhists, the struggle among Tibetan Buddhists involves a long history of fighting against imperial powers. For centuries, Tibet’s autonomy was challenged by nearby Chinese and Mongolian empires as well as by a brief effort by British forces (in 1904). The year following Mao Zedong’s takeover of China in 1949, the People’s Liberation Army entered Tibet and immediately began to assert influence on the Tibetan government, headquartered in the capital city of Lhasa. In 1951, under significant duress and following defeat at the Battle of Chamdo, representatives of the young Dalai Lama signed onto a seventeen point agreement with Mao’s regime. The agreement affirmed Chinese sovereignty while claiming to provide for some degree of Tibetan autonomy.
In the years following, however, considerable unrest brewed under oppressive Chinese military rule, most especially in the eastern Tibetan section of Kham. There, the native Khampas faced starvation, beatings, and imprisonment as many of them (numbering in the tens of thousands by the late 1950s) chose to join the resistance. Kham leaders, without the explicit approval of the Lhasa government, contacted the CIA under President Eisenhower to request support—which it did, by training and arming Tibetan guerrillas. Needless to say, this strategic U.S. support was given as part of a larger effort to subvert the imperial foe of Communist China.
As the Tibetan resistance movement spread, many Tibetans in Lhasa started to agree with their local Tibetans in Kham. On March 10, 1959, after years of Chinese military intervention and a fear that the Chinese would abduct their Dalai Lama, several thousand Tibetans gathered around the Dalai Lama’s summer palace 2. This launched an uprising (celebrated annually by Tibetans) that was eventually crushed and led to the exile of The Dalai Lama and other Tibetans to Dharamsala, India. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Tibetans who stayed in Tibet were executed in the guerrilla warfare that ensued (again, with the intrusion of the CIA). Along with the extreme and brutal loss of life came a replication of an oft-seen pattern that has persevered since the early 16th century: colonization in the form of territorial occupation and cultural co-optation, marked here by the destruction of thousands of Tibetan monasteries and cultural institutional as well as the coerced influx of Chinese from the interior.
Tibetans gather around the Potala Palace in Lhasa on March 17, 1959.
A recently produced documentary, The Sun Behind the Clouds (2010), examines in-depth the contemporary issues facing Tibetans, torn between clashing interpersonal views and divergent spheres of imperial influence (those of China and the United States). Although the detailed politics of Tibetan independence are beyond the scope of this review, what’s clear is that there exists an ongoing collective resistance among Tibetan Buddhists against Chinese imperial rule. I find that my attempt to understand the dialectic between acceptance and struggle within a Buddhist paradigm is illuminated by the conflicts exposed in this film. Whereas the Dalai Lama demonstrates a willingness to negotiate with (and even forgive) the Chinese government, those supporting the Tibetan independence movement, including many Tibetans and non-Tibetans, within Tibet and beyond, seem willing to engage in further collective struggle. This schism that places many Buddhists at odds with a Nobel Peace Prize-winning spiritual leader makes it clear that choosing between when to fight back and struggle, and when to forgive and accept, is a highly contentious terrain.
The Meanings of Personal Struggle
As with individual Tibetan Buddhists who must choose between resisting, accepting, or finding a middle ground, all humans are challenged to make decisions about when to fight and when to stand back or run away. Although there can be no collective struggle without personal struggle, I’ve come to understand the importance of acknowledging the latter as something in itself, as something quite different. Of course, there is much that intertwines collective and personal struggles: as two examples, personal issues can be shared by others in the community, helping build cohesion; and community struggles, which often work to create mass consciousness, may challenge individuals to take sides. However, I may also deal with personal struggles that others may not share. This is something that requires much nuance to explain, but briefly put, even if I suffer from conditions (chronic pain and multiple sclerosis) others do share, the uniqueness of my symptoms, medical history, etc. makes this an incredibly personal struggle. (You can even choose to see this as another dialectic, between the personal and the collective)
Of course, this notion of personal vs. collective is nothing new. There is a widely-held belief that through our inherent humanity we are also all unique individuals with unique needs, unique relationships, and unique histories. Canonical history itself shows us that, even when we forge common bonds and build collective struggles, there are almost always cracks in any surface of homogeneity. One need only consider examples of well-known historical struggles (e.g. women of color in the feminist movement, blacks in the early U.S. labor movement, trans-people and other marginalized queers in the gay and lesbian movement) to see that movements are often fragmented by sub-group differences. At the more micro level, divisions are also fostered by personal differences, even within well-organized political groups (e.g. the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Wobblies, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers).
Figuring out how to navigate a social landscape of strategic political coalitions and nuanced viewpoints is never easy, as any one actively engaged in community struggles can attest to. Identity politics, philosophical views, spiritual beliefs, and economic well-being all collide in our conflict-ridden world. This is not to say that unity and solidarity are impossible—just that they are contingent upon a recognition of each other’s intrinsic humanity and individual differences. Even when we are seemingly well-situated in a group, collective, or movement, each one of us must contend with problems that are intensely singular, sometimes threatening to any belief in shared humanity or “one-ness.” In my case, the very real threat of loneliness emerges from intensely personal medical/socioeconomic/spiritual struggles around which it’s hard to foment movement or solidarity. In my brother’s case, I saw how a rare ailment and a set of conditions very few could relate to brought upon despair and social withdrawal.
It is all this, of course, that led me to seek answers beyond a conventional Leftist political paradigm. I’ve started to wonder what happens when we no longer have the energy to fight. What do we do when we’ve exhausted all our possibilities of struggle? What do we do when (physical) struggle is no longer viable? What if compromise, submission, or downright resignation are the most rational choices?
Moments of Acceptance
I have no doubt in my mind that I am conflating many issues from multiple scales of experience. But my own experiences lent themselves to a very complex understanding of what struggle and acceptance mean, and it is the latter that I turn to next.
Not surprisingly, like the term ‘struggle,’ ‘acceptance’ has variegated meanings that shift from one moment to the other, one space to the next. Unlike ‘struggle,’ which has been a forceful word in my vocabulary for years, ‘acceptance’ echoed strangely within the pre-articulated limbo of my mind. When I conjured up examples of how the word could be used (“to accept one’s fate,” “to accept payment,” “to accept one’s apology”), I realized that my understanding of the word “accepting,” as used in the Dalai Lama’s Art of Happiness, could be entirely muddled or even misguided. I thus decided to look up its definition on dictionary.com:
Needless to say, the alternate definitions of acceptance left me confused. In the context of Buddhism, I was left with many possible interpretations: When writers talk about acceptance of suffering, do they mean that we must receive suffering with approval, like a gift from the heavens to help us reach enlightenment? Do they mean that we must take it like foul-tasting medicine, awful to bear but good for the soul? Or does it simply mean that we must believe that suffering is a fact whose undeniable veracity we must assent to? All of these may be possibilities, and for all I know, maybe all true. Certainly, the evident semantic issue is not helped by the fact that these writers are translating ideas from Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, and Pali texts which were in turn written by scholars who did not write in the Buddha’s (unknown) native tongue.
Yet, even in contending with the confusion, I came to certain realizations about what acceptance does not mean. Acceptance does not mean complacency, subservience, or willful ignorance. Acceptance does not mean admitting defeat. Acceptance does not mean falling into despair. Acceptance does not mean giving up.
I realized these things when noting that resignation, complacency, and defeat are nowhere in any of the writings or videos with Buddhists discussing ‘acceptance.’ And the word ‘struggle’ (which has the less-ambiguous meanings of “to contend with an adversary or opposing force” or “to exert strength, energy, and force”) bears no apparent conflict with the meaning of acceptance. Wanting to resolve the issue, I decided there is no contradiction between struggling and accepting, and that, in fact, the two often work in tandem. For instance, when accepting the fact that you’re up against an incredible enemy (whether that be your mother, your boss, your partner’s ex, your government, or advanced neoliberal capitalism), you may decide that struggle may be useful if not blatantly necessary. Likewise, when struggling against a difficult situation at home, you may choose to accept the situation, accept its difficulty, and accept the fact that you are only human.
During the time I had my first significant MS flare-ups, I had to deal with a number of experiences that coerced me into acceptance. The first notable instance was accepting the fact that my brother was approaching death. I saw how hard my parents struggled with this notion, and though their reactions were understandable, I couldn’t help but feel as if it was (like Kisogatami’s story) a struggle against an undeniable fact of life. When they chose not to disclose to my brother the doctor’s intention of putting him in a hospice facility, I yelled at them because I thought it was dishonest and unhelpful in the long-term. None of this, however, gets at the fact that each one of us was dealing with my brother’s impending death in different ways. We were united in our suffering—and yet our responses, our struggles, were markedly unique.
Shortly after news that my brother’s life was as visibly short-termed as the sands at the top of an hourglass, I suffered a flare-up that gave me intense vertigo for a week. After recovering and going back to work, I experienced severe dysesthesias that made getting by on a day-to-day basis excruciating. From my desk in Manhattan I read about the encampments at Liberty Square, feeling at once disconnected from the world and my body. Just months after playing an organizing role for an earlier demonstration on Wall Street, I was angry that my body was not letting me join the fight. The stress of my brother’s health, my parents’ reactions, my alienating job, and my newly-formed health problems began to unravel in my body. Rather than voluntarily accepting issues that were boiling up for years, I was forced—finally—into submission. At that time, I was too caught up struggling against my new stressors (my disease, my disabilities, my parents’ failure to accept the undeniable) to continue my struggle against the old (“the system,” corporate greed, the non-profit industrial complex, and my internal propensities to loneliness and depression).
In my continuous turmoil and struggle that slowed the pace of time, the months of October and November trudged on by painfully. I was incapable of walking during one week in November, during which time I wondered what would happen to me, my brother, and my family. Shortly after my brother was transferred to a hospice facility in Brooklyn, I was able to make my way down there alone, albeit with obvious impairments: my feet and hands periodically numb, my energy drained. Making my way into the hospice facility, I was surprised by how unfazed I was at the sight of dying bodies. I found my brother cold asleep in his room and chose to take advantage of the time by reading my book on a hallway bench. It wasn’t long before an elderly white woman—presumably a volunteer from the church—sat next to me and asked me who I was waiting for.
In my typical, New York-conditioned skepticism, I gave her a curt and somewhat-dismissive answer: “My brother.”
I just didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t even want to speak. But she persisted.
“What’s his name?”
“Anthony.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-six.”
Before long I was telling her that I was dealing with MS, that I had just suffered continuous flare-ups in a short period of time, and that I wasn’t sure whether I would be at my brother’s bedside when he moved on. My voice felt monotonous, detached, cold.
And in an attempt at a conciliatory tone she said, “There’s only so much any of us can do. We’re only human. And sometimes we just need to accept what we’re able to do.”
It was a painful learning experience, for sure, but I did learn to accept—in a post-superficial way—that I was person with a body and that I was thus prone to illness, aging, and death. Slowly, too, I saw my mother’s anxiety-ridden face melt into a calm obeisance, as if she understood that the inexorable mysteries of God were beyond her. As if this particular struggle was found to be no longer sensible and worthy.
And it is in what we both experienced that I’ve come to appreciate another (emancipatory) meaning of acceptance: letting go. Letting go of an obsessive need to control all aspects of life. Letting go of views that no longer make sense in our actual spatio-historical context. Letting go of what we think our lives are, and letting go of who we think we will become.
The Middle Way
In thinking about this turning point in my life, I realize that struggle and acceptance have always coexisted. After all, my struggle to get by with illness continues, but I accept that this is now a part of my life. You can accept the existence of struggle, or (as Kisagotami did) struggle against an acceptance of our impermanence.
Thinking in a way that acknowledges a dialectical co-existence between acceptance and struggle lends itself to all sorts of transformative analysis. For instance, although Buddhist monks in Vietnam struggled against the Diem regime for years, it was likely an acceptance of death that enabled some of them to set themselves on fire. And in Tibet, while many continue to struggle against the oppressive Chinese regime, many also accept that the fate of the country is beyond the workings of a single player.
Acknowledging such co-existence, however, doesn’t offer the definitive resolution one might seek. As I’ve noted earlier, the problems with mere semantics creates an issue with framing a struggle-acceptance dialectic, and trying to untangle meanings from context and using them for practical ends is an incredibly arduous challenge whose purpose may ultimately prove worthless. With respect to the semantics issue, we can easily find ourselves in a rut of arbitrariness if, say, we can accept our struggle, or struggle with our acceptance, or accept and struggle at the same time. We can easily find ourselves reconfiguring meanings ad nauseum, shifting the meaning of ‘struggle’ and ‘acceptance’ at will while moving about like a pendulum in frictionless space. And once we’re able to reconfigure meanings in a relativist fashion, cherry-picking which definitions or meanings we choose to utilize in a particular context, we have to contend with undesirable consequences, such as the ambiguities of how to decide and act. We can, for instance, interpret the Dalai Lama’s (and other Buddhists’) advice on accepting suffering as implying, by the very fact that it was even suggested, that acceptance is itself a struggle—and, absurdly, a struggle we must accept. This potentially infinite regress reeks of nonsense and vacuous non-sequiturs that give us no basis for action.
Although all of this reads like a perplexing koan, I do find a saving grace in Buddhism’s very understanding of impermanence and the cyclical nature of life. Within this view is a recognition of the world as both changing and immutable, something shaped by one’s point of view and consciousness. As we are susceptible to highly polarized views, we are advised, in our search for peace, to find a “middle way” between extremes in thought and feeling. Much like a synthetic resolution to a Hegelian dialectical quandary, the “middle way” might be more than just an approach expounded by the Dalai Lama around the issue of Tibet. It may actually mean that no one perspective can give us Truth, and that our peace and happiness lies in an art of balancing (and shifting between) decision-making polarities: whether to be violent or non-violent, to be forgiving or unforgiving, to be struggling or accepting.
To be sure, this is a most irresolute of resolutions—but so is the nature of philosophizing on life. What bothers me most, however, is how such inconclusivity will be understood. I can’t help but hear a Left critique that says that any “middle way” is automatically a compromise in a war between enemies, a most despicable form of concessionary politics that uses divide-and-conquer to pare the edges of a revolutionary momentum. Maybe. Maybe not. Although I’m prone to be sympathetic to such a view, would it really apply in all cases? I’ve come to think that “middle way” approaches are more likely to be de-radicalizing accommodations in the context of collective struggles, but when it comes to personal struggles, a “middle way” approach may offer a much-needed balance in the aim for mental clarity and corporeal health.
And when it comes to the question I first presented—of when to accept, when to struggle—I will deliberately avoid universalizing maxims of ethical behavior (even at the likely expense of seeming like a post-modern relativist). As simple as it sounds, I find this to be true for me: I don’t think we will find an answer that makes sense for all of us all of the time. There is a certain relief that comes from this recognition, this letting go of a need to control the world under a paradigm of universal truths. Realizing this, I’ve decided that I need not find answers in Buddhist thought, but can rather allow new thoughts and resolutions enter through the personal dharmic road that led me here.
I’ve thus decided that there are moments when it makes sense to struggle—often with all the passion our bodies and souls can muster. I’ve also decided that there are moments when we must accept that, as humans, there is only so much pain, suffering, and injustice we can bear alone.
Doing a bit of word-play, I would also like to end by adding that we can also accept into our hearts not only the truths about illness and death, but also the beauties and joys of simple living. We can live with a revolutionary acceptance of different forms of life, one that goes beyond a superficial multicultural tokenism to a realization that all humans have a right to freedom. By accepting such freedom, we allow room for a diversity of tactics, a diversity of views, a diversity of ways in which to live and love. Such is an acceptance I can truly embrace.
Decolonize Chris! 
Reblogged this on The Deliberate Observer.