Zen and the Anarchy - a meditative battle cry

Written by hannu

Dedicated to Sisli

Translated by Samppa Sirno

'We can not ever be sure. They have their own laws, they know exactly what has to be done' (Anthony de Mello)

Zen

Zen ‘is’ the once and for all an overthrow of the things which have stuck in the mind, their sudden and complete outburst. Traditionally Zen ‘happens’ as an experience, where Zen masters word, sign or act gets suddenly the double knots in the trainers mind opened, that is, (Zen masters) mind points directly to other (the trainers) mind, who grasps her real nature which has not stuck in... In the language of the Zen: she becomes awakened.

”When the self-mind is realised, either speech or silence, and motion or stillness, is unexpectedly Ch'an [i.e. zen]. At the moment of this unexpected Ch'an, automatically the mind manifests itself. Thus we know that Ch'an does not stray from mind and that mind does not stray from Ch'an. Ch'an and mind are, therefore, two names of the same substance.” (Chung Feng)

Enlightenment means the complete deconstruction of all the bonds that determine the mind, that is, the outburst, scattering, and the end of their authority. Zen ‘happens’ beyond the words and concepts, beyond socially/culturally determined conventions, limitations and constraints, beyond the binaries, hierarchical structures and presumptions that structure the mind. For the enlightened mind reality is just in the way it ‘is’: a void, the conditional being of all, non-permanence.

The Archy as attachment in the fear of being

”All evil gets it's beginning from the ignorance and fear, from the fear caused by ignorance. So begins also violence.” (Anthony de Mello)

The most basic character of archic structures is either the readiness for the state of war or actual state of war. To put it simply, for example the oppression is based on that the oppressed one submits, because otherwise she is threatened by coercion (the readiness for the state of war). If the oppressed one tries to repeal the oppression, the oppressor tries to eliminate the effort to promote the revolutionary idea (the actual state of war). If the revolutionary ideas succeed, then there will be a revolution.

As an event a revolution is a state of war between the forces occupying the power and the forces trying to subvert it. In a revolution the latter repeals the formers positions of power or either occupies or, if necessary, constructs its own positions of power and the necessary organisations; or the power is totally disbanded, when there will not be reorganised any power centres or positions of power and there will not be any reorganisation of hierarchical power relations – that is: there will be an-archy.

The basic structure of archic centres of political power and power in general and the hierarchical structures is always organised on the base of some principle, whether it is question of philosophical, religious, political or traditional legitimisation or legitimisation by its own power, that is by violence or the threat of it. And whether the legitimisation is explicit in any dim or philosophical way, it is always arbitrary; it is always a violent cut in to reality to divide it arbitrarily, to compel it.

Archy as a principle is, and when it is put in practice, always tries to be self-immortalising commanding power and to legitimise itself it needs an enemy, one which is outside, an another, something that stands lower. An identity and with it permanence is possible only apparently, as an illusion, and even then only through the act of expulsion, an act which in the pressure by the conditional essence threatens all the time to crush in to the provisional nature of reality. In this way the identity created by the archy is at the same time the principle of fear, the vanishing of its own essence, the violent principle of fear. The enemy is the creation of archy itself, which it manifests in its act of legitimisation by expressing in this way the right order of things: the another, for example, a woman, homosexual or intellectual, is anarchy for the archy, a potential state of disorder, chaos, contamination etc., which must be put straight, to be watched, to be punished, to be destroyed etc.

All societies are based on many different kinds of archic structures - different kinds of legitimisation and practices of relations of domination - which are grouped in different ways towards the basic omnipotent archy, which claims to have the monopoly of legitimate violence.

(Remark on political anarchism #1: Archy is inevitably binary, and in this way includes in itself also the pseudo negation of itself, the anarchy, or to put it more specifically, pseudo anarchy, a condition, where archy has pushed the disorder, which threatens its nature, also those so called political anarchists who oppose it, or to put it in another way, they have pushed themselves into it. Anarchists who make lofty this condition of pseudo anarchy by reinterpreting it and who fight to revolutionise or reform archy on basis of the metaphysics of archic shutting out, only affirm the shutting out in their own conception of good and that which they have shut out by their own concept of good ... to create a new archy in their own concept of enemy. The circulation is endless, unless the whole legitimisation of the archy, that is, the metaphysics of fear is refuted.)

An-archy

With the word an-archy, as a metaphysical concept, can be alluded to a situation that has no beginning; or in a situation that lacks the first principle that would characterise it. For example in the middle ages with that word was meant the essence of god as an entity without a beginning.

”Anarchy does not mean that there is not any government. It means that there is no need for government, because everyone governs her self. Our rulers do not fear that anarchy does not work, they are afraid that it would work.” (Sangharakshita)

Violence is the basis of all legitimisation of archic structures... on the other hand the an-archy is on its basis a situation of ‘being’ ‘without a beginning’. The reality just ‘is’; and in it's ‘being’ it is a continuous state of change (which state of affairs reins at least in unstable spaces, like on Earth). We ‘live’ all the time in an an-archy, into which are pointed the methods of force (archy). To put it in another way: an-archy is to ‘live’ in reality, ‘being’ without adding anything extra in it... and with extra is meant in here the principle of legitimisation splitting reality in to artificial, that is higher vs. lower structures or hierarchical structures of representations, the archy.

(Remark on political anarchism #2: In political use of language the concept anarchy has historically meant: without a general, that is without a higher governor or power to govern; or without a state, when the word archy means the state. The derivatives of this political use of language are the representations of anarchy and anarchic society as egalitarian state of affairs without master, without dominance and submission, and authorities that are based on them. These derivatives are consistent interpretations of anarchy as a state without a general, and they could be at least understandable in relation to an-archy as the lack of beginning or the first principle, if the deconstruction would be drawn not only to its conceptual but also to its practical conclusions. In reality the political anarchism seldom does that, which means the turning of anarchism upside down, into an idea of ruling and force, that is: archy.)

The policy of inter-being

The reality can be described with the concept created by Vietnamese Zen-master Thich Nhat Hanh, inter-being, which expresses the lack of “I”-substance in the beings, their conditional being. This “I” can come in to being only if the conditions for it are met. If inter-being is studied anthropocentrically and even egocentrically, the ”I” ‘is’ the sun, because a human individual cannot exist without sunlight. In a modern society the ”I” ‘is’ a peasant or a worker, because the ”I” does not exist without food grown by the peasant, without the dwellings made by the worker. The ”I” ‘is’ an ape, because there exist no human being without the preceding species of ape, the ”I” ‘is’ my grandparents, because if they had not existed there wouldn't be ”me”. Etc., etc. This is the inter-being of an-archy, the continuous state of change: ”Seemingly separate creatures are only rising and falling waves of the one and the same endless sea.” (Tae Hye)

An-archy expresses in its relationship to archy a total revolution, a revolutionary paradigm. Subsequently the concept of inter-being will be used as a methodological tool to derive the strategically basic principles of this revolution; in this way we are making starting points for the cross roads of the an-archy and the Zen. In what follows is not the truth about the cross roads (to put it simply about the an-archy), that is, although it is not question about ideology or fundamental ideology, the following is still true: ”No reality can be grasped with an ideology. Life is always bigger than it is.” (Anthony de Mello) ”The surface of mind is only a way to express, that can not be measured, what is not measurable. Reality can not be spoken, and when it is spoken, it is no more reality.” (Khrisnamurti)

So what follows is a shape of an-archy, which is a sort of a still-photo, an attempt to capture something with words, which is and will be beyond words. It is a deconstructed picture, which is overturned immediately when the mind attachs on it. In other words, by making it a fundamental principle, a guiding line for a doctrine, for an ideology or predestined action, it becomes just another principle of arcich violence. It can be only met by living it with most different variations, here and now.

(A remark on political anarchism #3: The existing relations of power are always open to chance, deterritorialization, and most of all for subversion. The nature of archy is the to conserve the existing or to make the existing prevail, a centripetal system. Those social theories, which are based on system building - also political and philosophical anarchisms - are doomed to failure in that sense, that they are always based in shutting off the future, that is: violence, a readiness for state of war or actual state of war. In most if not in all political and philosophical concepts of anarchy is included that kind of concept of anarchy, idea of a social arrangement or where the conceptual description, an essence, a model, or principle dates before or represents that kind of reality, where one has to go, that is hierarchically higher in relation to something lower; but this illusion of representation is always the nature of archy. With this observation is a central importance also when one judges the revolutionary practices of an-archy: not the strategy in itself, and not the tactics of an-archy alone can represent an-archy so that they implicate the total contents and ends)

Humanity is one of the constructed realities. Humanity is being horizontal, it does not include hierarchical dichotomies, which artificially separate people from each other. Archy means to make one stand still by means of violence, that kind of intervention, which with force (upbringing, education, propaganda, discipline, pure force, violence) tries to shape a human being to one arbitrary ideal imbecile (loyal citizen, consumer, wife, soldier etc.); in archy there exists a war against humanity and its creativity. At the level of classifying this means class war by the capitalists, racial repression, sexism, nationalism and so on. One of the conceptual shapes of this war is the claim of the state for the monopoly of the use of violence.

ii)

Humanity as a species is not distant from the rest of the nature, she ‘is’ because everything else ‘is’. The ecological awareness is the awakening of inter-being, of conditional understanding of ‘being’ and getting closer to the situation. An-archy is an ecological essence that notices also nature and the beings of nature as societal practices. If things would not be like this, would an-archy be as arbitrary towards nature as statist practices have been, it would be archy.

iii)

The points i) and ii) are analogical with the economic arrangements: an-archy has communism as its economic essence, on the other hand the basis of an-archy is radically individualist so that communism gets its local essence in the singularities of humanity and its creativeness and activity. In other words the different phases of an-archy have very different solutions. Essential is that an-archy is the overthrow of exploiting forms of private property – legitimisation of which is the greatest scam of western philosophy. The private ownership of nature (land, forests, animals etc.) is absurd. The larger amount of private ownership of means of production and real estates is central basis for archic legitimation, that is, the basis of hierarchy and societal violence. In this way property is really theft.

iv)

An-archy is not a return to past – to a golden lost utopia – because nothing of that sort has never existed where to return. On the other an-archy is to return somewhere in a sense that the returning ‘act’ happens to the ‘existing’ consciousness. Or maybe as finding a path to the consciousness. Inter-being is as reality ‘being’ and in that humanity as ‘being’ it is the consciousness. It is factual journey of evolution toward cultural evolution, which expresses itself as a more deep understanding and consciousness about what ‘is’… and what we human beings are and can be, as creative and non-violent beings, here and now. It is sad but true, that these kind of ideas must be fought for still today.

An-archy as practical strategy

Let us move on… What both the practical strategy of an-archy and the common strategy of war have in common is to try to minimize the number of casualties, especially the number of civilian casualties. Sun Tzun says that “The peak of the art of the warfare is not to win hundred victories in hundred battles. The peak of the art of the warfare is to beat the enemy without a fight.” (Sun Tzu) Sun Tzu expressed over 2.000 years ago this still today accepted maximum of strategy of warfare, which is valid also in the art of revolution.

If the strategy of an-archy is thought more seriously, then one has to recognise, that the idea of building battle strategies for revolution and making them true is not based on reality: on the contrary they mean suicide. In stead some sort of practical strategy must be based on the fact that an-archy expresses a total revolution in front of archic realities and the power relations and power structures which in many shapes try to destroy humanity and its liberty.

What, then would be a strategy of revolution, the peak of the art of revolution? An-archy is not for offensive warfare. And it is not question about offensive in an-archic revolution - it is question about taking back “your” own life and its conditions, that is about self-defence, the getting back what belongs to humanity and inter-being.

“In the Art of Peace we never attack. An attack is proof that one is out of control. Never run away from any kind of challenge, but do not try to suppress or control an opponent unnaturally. Let attackers come any way they like and then blend with them. Never chase after opponents. Redirect each attack and get firmly behind it.” (Ueshiba)

One can say that the strategic and practical paradigm of self-defence, which exists for example in aikido developed by Ueshiba, is equal with the an-archy. The central idea is the non-enemy, the essence of reality, in which the enemy is just a product of lost mind – an idea common in zen, especially samurai-zen. This product is in practice made by a state of war, which is a product of the archy.

The archy needs an enemy, as on the other hand the revolutionary strategy of an-archy is to live and act an-archically, also in archy, by obeying the principle of non-enemy, by spreading and without submission.. That would be inter-being in practice, an understanding co-living in a society and in the world, which makes “you” “their” enemy, but “you” do not make the same to “them”, because if “you” would do it, “you” would affirm “their” power, “their” legitimity which ”they” do not posses. “You” would admit to “them” the power over “you” and would weaken “yourself”; and then when “you” would as a weak one try to strengthen “yourself” in order to meet “them” “you” would give birth to “your” own lust for power and hierarchy.

“The secret of our way is complete fearlessness. But it has to be complete. Some there are who are not afraid to face enemies with sword, but who cringe before the assault of passions like greed and delusion like fame. The end of our way of fencing is to have no fear at all when confronting the inner enemies as well as the outer enemies.” (Tesshu). A perfect fearlessness is that the archy, the enemy (both inner and outer) is abolished, transformed in to non-enemy, to inter being.

War is cruel, but it is not always possible to avoid war. That is true also what it comes to revolutionary war. But that war has not and will not be started by an-archy, to start it is the inner nature of archy. To live, act and spread, without submission – if it will be a threat to current way of dominance, domination and oppression, is enough for archy: it will be ready for war.

To live an-archically demands a lot of courage, including the courage to die. Every moment. “Suppose man were all of a sudden to make his appearance here and cut your head with a sword” (Hui Chung) “Life is within death, death is within life; you must exist right here, right now!”(Ueshiba) To live an-archically means to be ready to face the fact that “they” will attack “you” – in reality archy has done it for thousands of years ago and makes it every day, every moment – and that the one who attacks “you” will suffer; but if he is injured, he will injure himself.

“To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.” (Ueshiba) It is not always possible in reality, because meaning of attack is war: to try to suffocate, to hurt, and most of all to kill… “you”. “They” are not “your” enemies, “you” are “their” enemy so that “you” and “your” weapon are only a tool, with which “they” hurt “themselves” – with “their” own power. “ It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy.” (D.Tsuzuki) “You” simply empathize ”their” power, “their” attack, and make “them” harmless. “You” will repeal archy – both inner and outer.

Zen and an-archy: a revolution

If archy in its all forms really would be repealed, then what would the an-archic society look like? A creative, constructing and positive, individualistic, empathizing, i.e. non-attached mind – the vitality of an-archy itself – can give, that is to ‘live’, with its practices, also to current life its colour, but nothing final content it can’t a priori have.

The violence which an-archy can in its repealing acts allow, can only be humane self-defence. In any way if “you” do not attack, but neither will yield, then “you” are the one who best controls that violence. In inter-being an-archy ‘is’ by “you” here and now, all the time. “When you walk, walk. When you sit, sit. Most of all do not stagger.” (Yün Men)

An-archy can act only by its essence. Or maybe, rather without an essence. Anyway you want. (To give up last of the attachments which are historically, culturally or socially and so authoritatively forced to zen, that is, inter-being come to itself, means that) absolute non-submissiveness and total fearlessness are the way to create real ‘being’, participating and ultimately militant way to empathize ‘being’… which can’t be, in this world of injustices which are structured by archies, anything else but: an-archy of ‘being’, where humanity ‘is’ – a total Revolution…

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