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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