BACK FROM INDIA: REFLECTIONS ON GUNS, NONVIOLENCE, AND DREAMING THE DREAMS THAT WILL KEEP US ALIVE

Sidney Burris and Geshe Thupten Dorjee

I recently returned from India, where I lived for three weeks in the Tibetan refugee settlements that lay scattered from Drepung Loseling Monastery in the south to Delhi in the north, and even farther north, in Dharamsala. I went to India with my friend and teacher, Geshe Thupten Dorjee, and 17 University of Arkansas students who are helping gather the stories of the Tibetans who are currently living in exile in India. These stories comprise an oral-history project at the University of Arkansas called The TEXT Program (an anacronym for Tibetans in Exile Today).  This was my fifth trip to India living with the Tibetans, and as always, I returned with a different India in mind, as well as a different notion of the Tibetans' struggles.

Before I left, several of my colleagues and I at the University of Arkansas had spent the previous five months struggling to keep guns off of our campus—currently, forty-six Arkansas institutions have voted on Act 226, and forty-six institutions have declined to allow faculty and staff to carry concealed weapons. While it was a difficult period for all of us who were involved in the campaign, it's heartening to see that our university communities have spoken out unanimously against our legislators and their top-down legislation.

I went to India, then, with guns on my mind, and I'll confess that I was relieved to spend a few weeks in a country that isn't as obsessed with guns as America currently seems to be. India, of course, has its share of debilitating problems, and living in the refugee settlements, I saw them regularly: inadequate housing, a crumbling infra-structure, homelessness, pollution, over-crowding, sanitation . . . all of these issues confronted us on a daily basis.  India also has a long-standing relationship with religious terrorism, as the recent attacks at Bodh Gaya dramatically illustrate.

So I'm not going to romanticize India, even though the Beatles introduced me to the subcontinent decades ago, and I could excuse myself for doing so. All I can say is this:  on my fifth trip to India, I noticed a couple of things I should have noticed on my first trip.  The reason I did not previously pay attention to these things, I guess, is because they were so obvious. But because they are so obvious, they are deeply connected to Indian culture, as guns are connected to American culture. They're cultural clichés, in one sense, but they became clichéd for a reason.

So I thought I'd share these observations because, for me, at least, they demonstrate to
Americans the kinds of things that remain within the realm of possibility, even though violence seems to be more and more a part of our daily life. 

1. It doesn't matter where you go in India, the truck stops, tea shops, and cheapest lodgings in the middle of nowhere hang hand-lettered signs that simply say, "Veg and non-veg options." I'm not suggesting that the truck drivers who order up a dal fry are highly principled, articulate, and devoted adherents to the long tradition of ahimsa, or nonviolence, that distinguishes their country, but I am saying that the attempt to avoid the unnecessary spilling of blood in pursuit of human nutrition is part of the fabric of Indian life. Once this simple idea finds its footing, the other decisions we make—about how we confront others, how we envision our collective futures, things like that—will see compassion as an increasingly important component in making those decisions. Valuing all sentient life becomes part of our climate and is no longer quarantined as a potentially interesting, though radical, decision a few of us might make.
2. The cow thing is for real:  they're everywhere.  On the interstates, walking through intersections, wandering into shops and homes, and no one—I mean no one—would dream of hassling them.  Cows have been revered in India for thousands of years, and they figure prominently in India's sacred iconography.  Part of this reverence stems from the fact that they provide milk and cream, as well as sheer labor.  Tractors can't negotiate the soaked rice fields that cows negotiate with relative ease, and so cows have gained a reputation of being labor-saving, food-providers that deserve protection. Modern science supports the ecology behind the protection extended to cows—meat is a dramatically inefficient way to get protein—and so I am always struck by this confluence of ancient spirituality and contemporary sustainability that accompanies every cow down every back alley of India. These meandering cows speak to the same Indian reverence for life, or cow-life, at least, that I mentioned above. The simple optics of the thing—cows wandering through the nation's capital—demonstrate that all forms of life, from the Indian perspective, deserve and demand respect and preservation. This is yet another face of Indian nonviolence.
3. Finally, let me offer this proviso. I realize that poverty, radical income inequities, and a health care system that is unavailable to the lower rungs of a population are all forms of violence. I realize that India suffers from these kinds of violence.  Also, I know that India is
   

   Geshe Dorjee and tutelary spirit
   not Shambhala, nor was meant to be. But I also know that we do not measure a country's potential solely by its current socio-economic data. We also plumb its essence by looking at its dreams, and everywhere in India, I find the dream-residue of nonviolence.  I find the deeply held conviction, no matter how that conviction is currently faring, that both violence and nonviolence are choices that we make, and that when we make these choices, we must also be aware of the consequences that ride those choices and surely, inevitably, dismount at our doorsteps. In short: the world that we see around us is the world that we have made.  No excuses.  And we had best get used to the second person plural, "we," because that is our new sense of community ably represented by a very old grammatical form. If this is a special kind of awareness that seems in short supply in America just now, I can only say that India has been cultivating this awareness for millennia. We've got only a couple of centuries behind us.  So I'll cut us a little slack.  But I'll look to our elders in India to remind me, on a daily basis, that violence, and whatever policies, weapons, or programs encourage its growth in our culture, must be resisted, now and for as long as we wish to nourish our own American dreams of a civil and harmonious nation built on self-respect and liberty. 

There's nothing left for us to do.  We shouldn't draw such hard lines between our dreams and our realities. Besides, it's time for us to start dreaming again.