The Man Who Is Awake

“If you wound or grieve another
You have not learned detachment.”
                                    - Dhammapada

Visions of Mahatma Ghandi come to mind when I read this quote from the Dhammapada.  One individual can change the world with their words and actions.  In the pursuit of enlightenment, it is the individual choice to follow the way.  The choices of each individual is a big part of the Buddhist philosophy.  But what about actions on a larger scale?  How can the Dhammapada be applied to corporate life, to government, to international affairs?

The neo-cons are vying for world dominance.  To achieve their goals, they create bloody messes, destroying cities, countries, families.  They fix markets and manipulate trade.  It seems they have their hand in nearly everything… when it’s convenient.  Their actions are the antithesis of detachment.  In fact, it is desire and greed that fuels the world domination agenda.

Between 1964 and 1975, the United States dropped over 2 million tons of bombs on Laos – one plane load every eight minutes.  According to a 2003 news article in The Age,, nearly one quarter of a million cluster bombs were dropped on Iraq (cluster bombs are nasty weapons designed specifically to maim and kill people).  There are millions of statistics to illustrate to what extent a nation will go in order to quench it’s thirst.  It’s clear the Pentagon has read The Art of War by Sun Tzu, but if any of them have read of the Dhammapada, they might want to go back and read it again.

Or am I misleading you?  Could it be that sometimes they practice detachment?  Here’s a example, a quote from The International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University said this about unexploded ordinances in Laos:

"Just because we dropped the stuff doesn't mean we're going to go in there and clean it up," said a Pentagon official recently. "The cleanup of ordnance is the responsibility of the people who caused the conflict."

Wasn’t it the US who feared the spread of communism to all of Southeast Asia?  Maybe I’ve got my facts twisted.  The whole era was such a mixed up scenario, it’s pretty convenient to detach from who caused what.

Another bit from today’s chapter on The Man Who is Awake (I especially like the word “slaked”)…

“The rain could turn to gold,
And still your thirst would not be slaked.
Desire is unquenchable
Or it ends in tears, even in heaven.”

In Laos, for 11 years, the rain turned to something even more expensive than gold – weapons.  The desire to prevent the Domino Effect was never quenched.  In the end, someone ended up drinking the paper dominos.