Tricycle | Awake in the World

IN THE LATE SIXTIES JANIS JOPLIN'S voice rallied the bedraggled front lines of the cultural revolution with the refrain from "Me and Bobby McGee": "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose." As she sang, the United States was committed to an unjust war, race riots had some cities in flames and every city on edge, and psychedelic drugs promised salvation from personal despair through sex, love, and ecstatic communion. For Janis and her fans, freedom from convention, freedom from parental and societal restraint, freedom from everything already labeled, categorized, and institutionalized was pursued with an urgency far surpassing that of the United States military fighting to keep Vietnam "free" from communism.

Janis Joplin, Newport Folk Festival, 1968

The Vietnam War created seismic cracks in the American Dream; and through the narrow, yet transformative, crevices of a shattered society crept Buddhism, conveying teachings on the nature of freedom that offered a radical alternative to both the mainstream and the counter-culture of that time. But, one generation later, Buddhism has surfaced and the Euro-American Buddhist communities have undergone their own transformations. Fresh inquiries into the nature of enlightenment and freedom are now required—and Janis Joplin, it turns out, may still be hitting the mark.

In the modern world the word "liberation" is like a chameleon, changing its color with each new attachment: animal liberation, women's liberation, liberation theology, gay liberation, or the liberation of Kuwait. These ideologies are vehicles of emotional energy so deeply entrenched in the American psyche that our rhetoric often displays undeniable irrationality. The emotional pitch of slogans such as Live Free or Die and Better Dead than Red dramatically proclaim the depth of our enslavement.

But liberty, like everything else, is essentially empty of description: one person's bondage is another's freedom. Abraham Lincoln summarized this dilemma in a speech given in 1864:

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.

The wolf, the sheep, and the shepherd can be found in the major players in any war, including the Persian Gulf War: Iraq, Kuwait, and the United States.

Nevertheless, the "civil" liberties guaranteed by the Constitution are still being fought for by groups who do not enjoy the "rights" exercised by others. But when the legitimate and meritorious struggles around the world have been fought and won, when the constitutional rights of all Americans are insured—then who will be free? Will the sheep who has been "saved" from the jaws of the wolf be free? Why indeed has the shepherd protected the sheep? What are his intentions?

While social and political activists struggle on ideological battlegrounds, many Americans experience economic dependency as a form of coercion and oppression—as though the "pursuit of happiness" meant only economic freedom. Those who have attained material wealth and the outer freedoms that accompany it however, often come to realize that economic mobility has little to do with inner freedom. The Buddha's early life as a prince accustomed to luxury represents the good life of maximum "outer freedom." But to experience bondage in the midst of wealth, privileges, luxury, and leisure is to begin to penetrate what Chogyam Trungpa called the "myth of freedom."

A deep recognition of bondage leads naturally to a wish to be free. Initially this wish is concentrated on the cultivation of an inner life and the withdrawal from samsara. One discovers that the attention is not at all free, that the attention is habitually flowing out toward the objects of our senses and the objects of our desires. The movement toward inner freedom is advanced in Buddhism principally through practices of attention and awareness—exercises that usually reveal more about the pervasive nature of imprisonment than any potential state of liberation.

The Stature of Liberty being assembled on Libery Island, 1885

We generally view freedom as the ability to do what we want to do, when and where we want to do it. Our "pursuit of happiness" is deemed successful to the extent that we can fulfill our desires. But at a certain point, one begins to suspect that one's view of freedom is upside-down: desires are seen as having a life of their own and, whether "good" or "bad," desires are—as the Great Vows say—inexhaustible. Understood as a generic force, these desires are no longer "mine" but habitually exert an extraordinary control over "my" life.

Buddhism introduces an artificial aspect to a "natural" life by creating conditions for a struggle between the desires and the nondesires. Exercises, tests, practices, and precepts harness the habitual outflow of our attention, and allow the greed, attachment, and suffering that stems from both ignorance and the habitual indulgence of desires to be recognized. The Buddhist formula of Dependent Origination places desire within a causally determined process, and suggests that as long as the mechanical nature of this process remains unobserved, we attribute freedom to what is not free.

But there is a way out, for the practices reveal, in glimpses, both our bondage and our freedom. Yet one can only take the practices prescribed by the Buddha so far if they remain isolated from conditions of ordinary "outer" life. And the "myth of freedom" is revealed again when tested by the demands and distractions of everyday life. When the householder Vimalakirti found Shakyamuni's ordained disciple Sariputra sitting quietly alone at the foot of a tree he rebuked him:

Reverend Sariputra, this is not the way to absorb yourself in contemplation.... You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you can manifest the nature of an ordinary person without abandoning your cultivated spiritual nature. You should absorb yourself in contemplation so that the mind neither settles within nor moves without toward external form.... You should absorb yourself in contemplation in such a way that you are released in liberation without abandoning the passions which are the province of the world. (From Robert Thurman's translation of the Vimalakirti-sutra.)

SARIPUTRA'S ERROR (from Vimalakirti's point of view) is easy to identify with: in seeking "liberation" from the desires, he was trying to kill the wolf. One of the basic premises of the Mahayana movement is the doctrine that arhats like Sariputra were not fully enlightened. According to this teaching, freedom from desires and passions is not the same as the attainment of "liberation by mind" and "liberation by insight" which alone can cut the root of Dependent Origination: ignorance. Buddhism was not conceived as a means to become liberated from desire, but as a means to become liberated. Struggling with the energies of passions and desires is an important part—but only a part—of the path of enlightenment.