Aung San Suu Kyi's idea of freedom offers a radical message for the west | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | The Guardian

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On the wall by my desk, there's a spread of photos of Aung San Suu Kyi which appeared in the Guardian a year ago. It's a kind of family photo album with snaps of engagement, babies, university, chilly British family picnics and travels. It's a strikingly poignant illustration of everything Aung San Suu Kyi has sacrificed over 15 years of imprisonment in her struggle for Burmese democracy. Every time it catches my eye, it is both humbling and gives me hope: a reminder of what the human spirit is capable of. Illustration by Andrzej Krauze Much has been made of her remarkable biography – catapulted by circumstance from family life in Oxford into the violent repressive politics of Burma in 1988; missing the illness and death of her husband and the raising of her children to pursue the cause. What makes her Reith lectures so fascinating is they represent a statement of the ideals and mindset which have steeled her resolve and inspired her courage. The first lecture addresses the universal human desire for freedom, the second considers her fight in Burma to achieve it. She is taking her stand on an ideal to which the west has a tendency to claim copyright in the Enlightenment. What's more, freedom is an ideal which has been bastardised in recent years by the rhetoric of two disastrous American wars. Deftly, she lays out an understanding of freedom which owes more to Buddhism than western philosophy and, in so doing, injects a radical new meaning into an abused ideal. She is simultaneously quietly challenging western hubris and offering her global audience a new interpretation. She does this not by expounding on obscure Buddhist philosophy – there is only one explicit mention of Buddhism – but by translating her spiritual tradition into a wide range of western thinkers, poets and writers: Vaclav Havel, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, Ratushinskaya, Henley, Kipling and Isaiah Berlin. What is far more important to her than a sales pitch for a much misunderstood religion/philosophy is that her global audience connect to what she is saying and she helps by giving plenty of familiar reference points, slipping the unfamiliar in alongside. She weaves in Christian metaphors and concepts with the Buddhism, Russian poetry and the eastern European dissident tradition. It is a unique synthesis of east and west, only possible in someone deeply versed in both. Many of her western admirers will immediately grasp the language of human rights. It is the Buddhism which may be less comprehensible; for instance she recounts an anecdote in which people ask how it felt to be free after each period of house arrest, to which she replied "my mind had always been free". Or, in another passage, she says "Buddhism teaches that the ultimate liberation is liberation from all desire". Perhaps these are the points where western minds shift uncomfortably at the proximity of spiritual faith to politics. But the most crucial fact about Aung San Suu Kyi's politics is how it is rooted in her Buddhism. For her, freedom is not only a set of institutions, laws and political processes, it is also a quest of the individual spirit, the struggle to free oneself from greed, fear and hatred and how they drive one's own behaviour. That is why she always talks of a "revolution of the spirit". You cannot have one without the other, both are part of transformational change; the individual and personal is inextricably bound up with the political, as she made clear in her interviews with the American Buddhist, Alan Clements, in Voice of Hope. Clements shared a Buddhist teacher with her and he told me that the meditational practices she is known to pursue are vital to cultivate the courage and insight for her political battles. When asked by Clements what her greatest struggle was, she replied: "It's always a matter of developing more and more awareness, not only day to day but moment to moment. It's a battle which will go on the whole of my life." Her greatest aim, she told him, was "purity of mind". It is the awareness which enables her to perceive the fear that lies behind the violence of the Burmese junta and to insist on offering them dialogue. The practice of metta – "loving kindness" – is not passive, she says, and points to the Buddha himself, who went to stand between two warring parties to protect them both at the risk of his own safety. This is a radical message for western politics steeped in a technocratic managerialism and obsession with presentation: that the personal spiritual struggle cannot be stripped out of politics. But perhaps what gets overlooked is how revolutionary her message also is to her own Buddhist tradition. Not only is she a woman, she is a lay woman in a faith tradition dominated by male monasticism. Across Asia, those monastic institutions have frequently become complicit in state structures – in Burma, spiritual preoccupations have often been an excuse for disengagement. In her Reith lecture she picks her words carefully. "There is certainly a danger that the acceptance of spiritual freedom as a satisfactory substitute for all other freedoms could lead to passivity and resignation. But an inner sense of freedom can reinforce a practical drive for the more fundamental freedoms in the form of human rights and the rule of law." She points to the monks who led the 2007 saffron revolution as acting out of "loving kindness" for the people suffering from sharp rises in food prices. She is putting herself at the forefront of the reforming movements in Buddhism in Asia, gently insisting on the interrelationship between practical action and private spiritual discipline. Lastly, Aung San Suu Kyi's Buddhism is challenging one of the most persistent orientalist myths. Just as Islam was characterised as violent by Christian imperialists, Buddhism was scorned for its quietism, and self-absorbed fatalism: both were treated with comparable contempt under colonialism. Theistic Christians found Buddhism incomprehensible. That legacy persists; the current pope has described Buddhism as "self-indulgent eroticism". Bizarrely, Buddha statuary end up as a staple of garden centres, the Buddha as the consumer's symbol of calm and detachment. In a television interview the Beckhams once appeared in their sitting room alongside a near-lifesize gilt Buddha. The popular perception is of Buddhism as a form of calming therapy, much like a massage oil. That is to emasculate the force of a powerful philosophy with radical political implications. Aung San Suu Kyi knows all too well how Buddhism has played a major political role throughout Asia, both for good and bad. Its adherents are growing fast in both India and China, as well as in the west. Like the Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, she is playing a vital role in communicating through her words and her life a Buddhism that speaks to the deepest human needs.

*shrugs* I'm Buddhism's best friend, but I'm not seeing the political side of it really. It's slave morality but where the morality as a sort of if-you-feel-like-it extra. Sure, if you happen to be political and Buddhist at the same time you'll probably associate the two, but you could say the same about being a gay rights campaigner or an anti-abortionist or whatever.

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Hmm, well, there is a difference though between the Western and Eastern experience of religion and philosophy. Christian tradition very much developed a doctrine of obedience and submission, primarily to god but secondly to the divinely ordained political order. Eastern traditions have a very large component of moral, material and philosophical self-improvement and social improvement.

Both of them, certainly, have been employed to justify oppressive political systems. The Western adoption of buddhist self-improvement usually likes to ignore that. But Westren radicals would also often say the hardest revolution is the one in your own head; ie.e. overcoming the huge mass of social indoctrination that justifies the status quo. The Eastern traditions of enlightenment and escape from the "contamination" of the world-as-it-is provides quite a good platform for that sort of thing.

Buddhism is totally about submission - the cause of suffering is desire. Okay, enlightenment can be seen as a moral deal, but pared down to the bare essentials it basically means giving up and enjoying not giving a fuck any more.

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Originally Posted by contracycle

But Westren radicals would also often say the hardest revolution is the one in your own head; ie.e. overcoming the huge mass of social indoctrination that justifies the status quo.

That's actually quite funny. It never occured to me that that would be difficult. It seems to me that there are enough people agitated by one cause or the other and they never seem to have had any difficulty in getting there.

I'd have thought that the real jump was breaking the law. Because, once you do that, especially on a regular and/or serious basis, that's it - You're committed.

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Well, yes, that too.

Actually, I'm thinking specifically of Bodhidarma and the Emperor Wu here, and it's true that there are other more folksy/satisfying versions of Buddhism where if you do good stuff and follow the rules you eventually reach Nirvana and everything makes sense, but I just like this one.

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I always found Buddhism and Zen and koan to be fake... I mean, koans can be pretty or allegoric but I find their wisdom value to be somewhere around zero...

Not that there is moral teachings that I find with real wisdom values. Sometimes a couple of quip that have gotten funny with distance (such as Salomon declaring 4,000 years ago "there's nothing new under the sun" or Socrates' "The children [...] have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers"). Those are excellent moral fables in their own right.

But Buddhism? It seems so nonsensical.

Some of it makes sense in the context of martial arts ('be in the moment', 'be like water' which nowadays military translates as 'maintaining situational awareness') but it's not exactly very helpful with normal life...

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But the whole point of them is that they sound stupid until the day that you manage to work it all out on your own. They're not really supposed to be teaching aids - more like a trail left by people who've been that way before to reassure you when you're getting things right.

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And my point is that there's nothing helpful to say that the universe is a vast emptiness and life a dream.

It's technically wrong and if that's how you feel about things, clearly, suicide is the superior option... In death, you are free of desire.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Buddhism is totally about submission - the cause of suffering is desire.

Is that really even submission? It's not exactly the Divine Right of Kings. A buddhist would probably say, certainly that is the Western way. To desire trivial an unimportant things, to take from them a sense of identity. Realising these things are unimportant brings not submission, but contentment.

And thus, neatly, we've got an anti-consumerist argument every bit as relevent to modernity as it has ever been. Just as sometimes people come back from long hikes, or near-fatal accidents, or the birth of the children, with the realisation that the bulk of what they have hitherto spent their lives chasing is actually essentially worthless.

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Okay, enlightenment can be seen as a moral deal, but pared down to the bare essentials it basically means giving up and enjoying not giving a fuck any more.

No, it means understanding yourself, and discerning from that what is really imnportant.

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Actually, I'm thinking specifically of Bodhidarma and the Emperor Wu here, and it's true that there are other more folksy/satisfying versions of Buddhism where if you do good stuff and follow the rules you eventually reach Nirvana and everything makes sense, but I just like this one.

Some even claim to culminate in ascension to an actual heaven. I'm not denying that buddhism has religious elements, but they can in fact all be lopped off and you'd be left with what is in effect a kind of psychological analysis. And given how evidenceless the likes of Freud and Jung are, it wouldn't be qualitatively inferior. at any rate I'm not seeing much about submission in the link you provided, it largely makes sense to me.

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That's actually quite funny. It never occured to me that that would be difficult. It seems to me that there are enough people agitated by one cause or the other and they never seem to have had any difficulty in getting there.

Well, at any given momne thtere are of course a certain number of people who defect from the status quo. But the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people accept the status quo. Who's got time to think about what it all means when you're working so many hours and cramming as much fun in the rest to compensate as you can?

As for the koans, there are good ones and bad ones. Some would say that Japanese martial Zen has been pretty egregious in masking junk as wisdom. That is indeed a danger in the form, but even that particular strand is not worthless; frex the "No Mind" doctrine is pretty solid.

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And my point is that there's nothing helpful to say that the universe is a vast emptiness and life a dream. It's technically wrong and if that's how you feel about things, clearly, suicide is the superior option... In death, you are free of desire.

Well yes it is a bit abstruse, but then if everyone could understand it right away then there'd be no value to it - scarcity, innit?

Actually, to a certain extent it's like that translation of the opening chapters of the Tao Te Ching that I posted a while back - a lot depends on the translation and what you choose to read into it, since to the ancient Chinese brevity was the soul of wit. Something like that or the Art of War can be translated in a very practical way or as vague hippy bullshit, because the original leaves it open to interpretation. The original is a list of very plain statements that could easily fit on five sheets of A4 - translators and commentators tend to eke the material out as they personally see fit.

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Is that really even submission? It's not exactly the Divine Right of Kings. A buddhist would probably say, certainly that is the Western way. To desire trivial an unimportant things, to take from them a sense of identity. Realising these things are unimportant brings not submission, but contentment. And thus, neatly, we've got an anti-consumerist argument every bit as relevent to modernity as it has ever been. Just as sometimes people come back from long hikes, or near-fatal accidents, or the birth of the children, with the realisation that the bulk of what they have hitherto spent their lives chasing is actually essentially worthless.

But the Buddha never talked about desiring trivial and unimportant things - he just said desire full stop. You're not allowed to want anything, even enlightenment itself.

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No, it means understanding yourself, and discerning from that what is really imnportant.

In the Zen tradition understanding isn't a process, it just either happens or doesn't happen and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. Trying to solve a ko'an might be helpful to some people, but it's more a boundary marker between one state and another. Moreover, you only really notice it once you've passed it, so it's not even really a great deal of help as a guide.

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Some even claim to culminate in ascension to an actual heaven. I'm not denying that buddhism has religious elements, but they can in fact all be lopped off and you'd be left with what is in effect a kind of psychological analysis. And given how evidenceless the likes of Freud and Jung are, it wouldn't be qualitatively inferior. at any rate I'm not seeing much about submission in the link you provided, it largely makes sense to me.

If you take scarcity as a given, desire is what sets you up in conflict with the rest of the universe. Hence submission is the opposite of desire.

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