by Marcia Jacobs
Alan Clements lived in a Buddhist monastery in Burma during the 1970s and 80s for eight years, five of which were spent as a monk, during which time he trained in classical Buddhist psychology, insight meditation and dharma dialogue with some of the world's most renowned teachers. Since 1983, Clements has been an evocative spokesperson for the transformation of consciousness as the basis of human dignity.
Several years ago, Clements took an extended sabbatical, opting to live in the jungles of Burma to document a genocide of ethnic minorities by the military dictatorship, which he wrote about in his first book, Burma: The Next Killing Fields? He then went to Croatia, and Sarajevo, Bosnia, then back to Burma, where he did a book of conversations with Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Laureate and leader of Burma's democracy revolution. He is also co-author of Revolution of the Spirit, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama.
Marcia: What led you to stop teaching and travel to such dramatic situations?
Alan: It just felt right. Back in late 1990 or so, I had just ended a meditation retreat and picked up a copy of Time magazine; the cover story was "Bullets in Alms Bowls." The military authorities in Burma had raided hundreds of monasteries, arresting many monks and killing others, based on the maniacal fantasy that the order of Buddhist monks and nuns were attempting to overthrow the dictatorship. Since Burma was my spiritual home - the place where I spent the good part of my adult life as a monk - I responded, I think, as any loyal son or daughter would to his or her own family.
The monks and nuns were my dharma parents; they nurtured me in a way I had never known, so I traveled to Burma in an attempt to support my spiritual family in one of its darkest hours.
Marcia: What have you learned from your time in war zones and refugee camps?
Alan: One of the first things that I learned living in conditions of tyranny was to simply feel, listen and love, in order to potentially support those who were suffering, without being so arrogant as to try to heal or fix them. In the process, serve with as little ego as possible - the less focus on yourself the better.
It reminds me of the Aboriginal woman approached by a white social worker who said, rather presumptuously, "I'm here to help you. What can I do?" She replied, "If you are here to help me, please go, but if you see that my freedom and yours are linked, then please stay and we can serve each other."
Marcia: "Dharma in action" is an essential point that I've found largely missing within many Buddhist traditions. Is it just not emphasized enough?
Alan: Some people seem to think that sitting meditation and watching your breath or sending metta (the practice of developing loving-kindness) is action enough, but I wonder whether it's a self-indulgent excuse for dharma inaction. I think that real metta - real loving-kindness - is a behavior, not just a feeling. It must be expressed through action. In fact, it was this very issue that prompted me to stop teaching and reevaluate my dharma understanding, to refocus it.
Marcia: Why did you feel the need to reevaluate your understanding?
Alan: After my journey to the jungles of Burma, witnessing a genocide, seeing people having been tortured and traumatized beyond belief, the local masses being herded up and murdered, women having been gang-raped, I came back to the West really shaken. It made me question deeply.
Marcia: Why would that motivate you to stop teaching retreats?
Alan: It might seem obvious, but it took me some time to realize that it's one thing to speak about spiritual qualities in the safe and sanctified context of a meditation retreat, while it's another thing altogether to manifest those qualities in more complex circumstances. When you teach all the time, as I was doing, you can become rather insulated in your so-called depth - your own insights and realizations. You speak about love, compassion, and freedom, but have limited parameters to express them in any dimensional way that could expand one's heart, say, to include a dear friend who has disappointed you, or a starving refugee, or a screaming child who has just lost its parents to sniper fire. It's plain easier to love calm and kind people, especially when they are silent. Essentially, I needed more life experience to discover the authenticity and the compassion missing in my dharma understanding.
Marcia: So you questioned your own integrity?
Alan: It was more like responding to a natural instinct. I think everyone has quiet inner voices that at some point can no longer be denied and must find genuine expression. It was the same reason that I decided to leave the monastery back in 1983: I wanted to see whether what I had discovered there was real and had any relevance to life and people. The same questions resurfaced years later with regard to teaching. I'm a slow learner, really. However, through it, I did find the next expression of my dharma path. That's been the real gift.
Marcia: And what was that expression?
Alan: It was inspired by a concept attributed to the Buddha, when he explained his basic dharma attitude as a Bodhisattva. He said that he made each person he met his ultimate object of reverence. What that means to me is that as human beings, we are in relationship all the time, and to make each person we encounter our ultimate object of reverence is to empower our relationships as the most sacred space for our dharma awakening. In other words, without people my spiritual growth would not be possible. We cannot become free in isolation. That would be denying interrelatedness. It was just a recognition of the obvious.
Marcia: Your book, The Voice of Hope, sets down a remarkable series of conversations with one of the world's most respected leaders, Aung San Suu Kyi. I was impressed by how fully she brings "engaged Buddhism" to the forefront of her movement - a struggle that has become known as "Burma's Revolution of the Spirit." Could you say more about what she means by that expression, and how it has relevance to our own lives in the West?
Alan: She, like Gandhi, King, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hahn, and scores of other less famous spiritual/political leaders, is committed to using the power of truth and the power of heart as her weapons of choice, so to speak, in response to aggression, violence, and war. Aung San Suu Kyi's "revolution of the spirit" is just that: a revolution born from the spirit, unifying timeless spiritual truths with modern political realities. As she has said, "a people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear." In that sense, the overcoming of apathy and fear is totally relevant to our lives.
Everyone knows how debilitating those insidious energies are and, equally, how difficult it is to fully liberate the mind from fear. Aung San Suu Kyi explains: "Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavor, courage...from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions."
Marcia: Burma is ten thousand miles from our home. What would you say is the common link between their struggle for freedom with the basic struggles most people deal with in the West?
Alan: Everyone in the world wants to be happy, secure and satisfied. No one wants to be frightened. No one likes to live in need, so in that sense the common bond that links all humans is that intrinsic spiritual instinct to live "free of fear and free of want." The marks of truly civilized human beings are in the individual's pursuit of freedom and in what they do to safeguard and elevate the freedom of others. Essentially, this means fostering compassion in one's life. I do think it's time that we came out of antiquated notions of self-realization as being license to keep one's eyes inverted only, to neglect the needy, the have-nots, those folks who need a helping hand. I really liked that Vaclav Havel called Aung San Suu Kyi "one the world's outstanding examples of the power of the powerless." I think he's saying that no matter what, true empowerment is rooted in love.
Marcia: You have written a personal appeal letter to Buddhists and caring tourists worldwide, calling on them to boycott traveling to Burma, while encouraging them to become proactive in supporting the cause.
Alan: We have some devoted volunteers sending the letter out via the Internet daily. Like Tibet, Burma is a sister Buddhist country and one of the last remaining wisdom cultures on earth. It has a 2,500-year-old unbroken lineage of the Buddha's teachings. Dharma continues to come to the West from the East. So many of us who have benefited directly by those teachings; I think it is our duty to support our spiritual elders, like any decent son or daughter would do for their parents, especially at a time when help is needed.
Most of every dollar you spend in Burma goes into the pockets of the oppressors, thus supporting savagery, repression, and banditry. It reminds me of what Gandhi said; "non-cooperation with evil is as important as cooperation with good." My appeal letter is a way to make the need known and hopefully evoke compassionate action in support of the Burmese people.
Just the other day a Tibetan lady telephoned me. She explained that she fled her country in 1955 and lived in the squalor of refugee camps for many years. She concluded by saying, "it was in the camps that I learned what it meant to be the fantasy of someone's compassion rather than the reality of it."
Marcia: In one of your lectures, I heard you say that Aung San Suu Kyi offers a "spiritually infused, feminine-oriented leadership." I think this was the basis of the keynote speech that she gave at the Beijing Women's Conference in 1996 via a smuggled videotape from her residence in Rangoon, where she lives under virtual house arrest by the military dictatorship. What do you mean by spiritually infused, feminine-oriented leadership?
Alan: Aung San Suu Kyi has stated that "politics are about people, and you can't separate people from their spiritual values". I think it's that simple. She offered to me, as she does to all, a great vision of empowerment that places self-respect, human dignity, love, and compassion above material and economic considerations. She's a smart and gutsy women confronting ridiculous male-oriented models of "might is right" with the power of warmth. She's a voice of hope in a world in need of more light, and a voice that should be heard.
Alan Clements will be speaking at Elliot Bay Books on Saturday, November 15 at 7:30 p.m.; call (206) 624-6600. For information on Alan Clements' Buddhist-oriented retreats, to be placed on his mailing list, or invitations for him to speak, contact: The Dharma Forum, 650 Princess Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6A 3E1; telephone (604) 251-1781.
Marcia Jacobs, M.S.W., has been a psychotherapist and a student of Buddhist psychology for over twenty years. She recently returned to Vancouver, British Columbia to resume her private practice after four years in Bosnia and Croatia, providing mental health services for war-traumatized populations.
