Sunday, August 26, 2012

Buddhism and Anarchy

I'm reading a history of John Cage and what shaped him, especially his interest in Zen and I have over the winter read a lot about anarchy. I am seeing parallels in Buddhism's 'non-doing', in Cage's silences, the abstracts of his contemporary painters (Rauschenberg's white paintings), the sense of being, is-ness (all that from the book), and anarchy's model of flattened hierarchy and direct action, a do-ness. Direct action also reflects my own devotion to self-organization. I would not tag myself either a Buddhist or an anarchist. This morning I searched for 'parallels between anarchy and Buddhism' – I am not the first to have made this connection! There are essays noting like paths, and strong rebuttals, and it seems to me that seeing an overlaps depends on how one defines the terms in the first place. There are many Buddhisms and many anarchies and some intersections.

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