Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness

Book by Thurman Robert

“A wonderful introduction to the entire sweep of Buddhism, pointing out its continuing, powerful relevance for today’s world. All of Buddhism’s breakthrough realizations are carefully explained, along with their direct application to our own experience and awareness right now, so that the Buddha’s radical enlightenment can be our own, here in the midst of ordinary existence.”

—Ken Wilber, author of
A Brief History of Everything

“Thurman shows how self-examination, far from miring the seeker in navel-gazing, can lead to an expanded sense of connection with others.”

—USA Today

“The book addresses the corrosive cynicism of our age, which Thurman attributes to a misinterpretation of reality.... Clear, accessible writing.”

—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

ALSO BY ROBERT THURMAN

Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Essential Tibetan Buddhism

To Shakyamuni the Buddha,

Founder of the inner revolution in our world,

In deepest gratitude and ever-growing admiration.

Your champion insight into selflessness,

Inexhaustible love for beings,

Powerful comprehension of the minute processes

Of history as theater of human evolution,

And inconceivable competence in freeing beings—

All moved You to teach deep relativity

And begin the cool, inexorable, inner revolution;

Founding the Jewel Community for love of freedom,

Introducing generosity, justice, and tolerance,

Enterprise, concentration, and creative genius

To truly civilize our planet home of living beings

In Your Buddhaverse You called “Tolerable”!

And at our postmodern end of history,

to His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,

Prince of Peace and Philosopher King of Tibet,

In amazed appreciation of Your creative effort.

For the people of Tibet and of the whole world—

Champion of the teaching, deep, vast, and exquisite,

Simple Shakya monk, Shakyamuni’s devoted heir,

Upholder of the common human religion of kindness,

Explorer of the sciences of mind, spirit, society, and nature—

You exemplify the fine intelligence and the good heart,

You bring hope and boundless positivity when all seems doomed,

You make peace the path as well as thus the realistic goal,

You live again and again to continue inner revolution,

Effectual for all beings, believers or nonbelievers,

From all world religions and all world sciences,

Blessing other species and all of nature!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been working on this book since my address “The Politics of Enlightenment” to the Lindisfarne Association in 1976, so the list of those to whom I am indebted is a long one.

In the process of writing, I have had the instruction of many people. To thank those whose teachings and writings have been crucially helpful: Vimalakirti, Nagarjuna, Asanga, Shantideva, Tsong Khapa, the Great Fifth Dalai Lama, Plato, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Max Weber, Buckminster Fuller, Peter Berger, Philip Slater, Riane Eisler, Ken Wilber, Jeremy Rifkin, William Greider. To thank those who have personally inspired me on this topic: David Wills and David Little, who helped me learn so much from the inimitable Max Weber; Peter Berger, who helped me with his challenging inquiry; David Spangler, who helped me see the positive potential in the future; Tara Tulku Rinpoche, who made old doctrines new and creative; my friends Joel McCleary and Toinette Lippe, who helped me think about effective action and practical compassion; and, most important, my wife, Nena, my continuing teacher, my eldest son, Ganden, who helped me put this book together. I must also thank the many students who have attended my classes and lectures on this and related topics over the past twenty-five years—the great privilege and joy of teaching is to see new things about what you thought you knew when you reinvestigate them in the light of others’ need to know.

For their indispensable help in getting this book written in its final form, I must thank my agent, Lynn Nesbit, for keeping things moving during the ups and downs of the process, her keen eyes always clear on target. I sincerely thank my consulting editor, Jisho Cary Warner, who has ably helped me with several previous books as well, for all her thoughtful help and hard work. Most important, from the beginning of this project, my special thanks to my good friend and long-term editor, Amy Hertz, for her faith, patience, persistence, critical and creative intellect, and strenuous effort. I also thank everyone at Riverhead Books, especially Susan Petersen, the publisher, and Jennifer Repo, editorial assistant.

Finally, first and last, I have to thank Shakyamuni the Buddha and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, without whom I would have nothing to write about; the Venerable Geshe Wangyal, without whom I would not have been able to write anything; and again, my beloved soul mate, Nena, without whom I would not have wanted to write anything; and all my beloved five children, Taya, Ganden, Uma, Dechen, Mipam, and three grandchildren, without whom I would not have such a clear sense of whom to write this for.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Bob Thurman is one of my oldest Western friends. He has been thinking about this Inner Revolution for a long time. I remember we had talked about it in Dharamsala years ago.

For Tibetan Buddhists, these ideas are not revolutionary; naturally, when you transform your individual mind, the whole society is transformed. As Buddhists we believe that the Buddha had the compassionate plan to help all sentient beings, as well as the wisdom to understand how it works.

Thurman explained to me how some Western thinkers have assumed that Buddhism has no intention to change society, since the Buddha left his throne and created monasteries, and renunciation is fundamental in the Buddhist path. Thurman’s book provides a timely corrective to any lingering notions about Buddhism as an uncaring religion.

I think Thurman gives new insights into the Tibetan society and its special Buddhist culture. Thurman pointed out to me the essential difference between the highly militaristic European, Russian, and Chinese feudal societies and our peaceful, monastic, happy—though not materially developed—traditional Tibetan lifestyle. Thurman is keen to challenge the modern notion that material progress is the ultimate good.

I have noticed that Westerners tend to become cynical about politics and lose hope that any political leader will ever do anything useful or even intelligent. Perhaps reading about the history of some of the leaders of Buddhist societies, such as the Indian kings Ashoka and Udayi and my predecessor the Fifth Dalai Lama, may encourage people that politics can be a Buddhist practice too, and that benevolent and skillful social action can be a path toward enlightenment. It is important that we do not become discouraged and that we shoulder our responsibility for this world and its future generations with great determination and foresight. Thurman’s book attempts to present this aspect of the Buddhist concept of serving others. I commend him for his careful study and clear explanations, and I recommend his insights for your own reflections.

October 8, 1997

PREFACE

I was born in the summer of 1941, and my first memories of the world beyond my family have World War II as the backdrop. We crossed over from Manhattan and went down to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to see off my uncle Byng. He set sail in late 1944 on his tanker ship, a proud captain finally getting away from his shipbuilding duties to see some action. I felt left behind as this man I hardly knew patted me on the head, walked up the ramp onto his ship, and went away. I remember afterward a collage of incidents reflecting the anguish of my mother’s parents, who lived with us, when Byng’s ship blew up in the English Channel, torpedoed by an uninformed submarine the day after Germany surrendered. He was carrying a cargo of aviation gasoline, and no survivors or remains ever were found. Purse and Dunie, as my grandparents called each other, departed in disbelief for coastal England and France, looking in camps and hospitals, hoping desperately to find an amnesiac but living Byng. They continued their search for several years after the war amid the confusion of displaced persons. Dunie had a stroke and subsequently lost her mind, and Purse eventually gave up. Byng’s was an innocent death, preventable but for a trigger-happy hand behind a powerful weapon.

During my teens in the fifties, I remember air-raid drills, the sirens on top of a pole at the corner of Eighty-first and Lexington going off at regular intervals. We were told that there was a danger of atomic war with the Russians and that New York City might be a target. I remember the joy of celebrating my birthday being clouded by images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At my Anglophile private school, I pursued my studies of French and Latin, algebra and English history, Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. I skated along on a surface of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed enthusiasm for life and Western culture that bubbled above the dark currents in which lurked the sudden end of the world in nuclear holocaust. Finally the ice cracked and I could do nothing but face the existential crisis the world had brought itself to. I needed answers to both the world’s danger and my own fear of the potential for devastating violence.

I questioned everything said by everyone after that realization, except the one continuous report to myself that I was “me.” I questioned who I was and why I held the opinions I held, feeling an urgent need to pin down my identity, but I never wondered if I was at all. I wanted to get to know myself, whatever happened to the world. I encountered my own mortality when I lost one eye in an accident, and remained focused on myself. I went on vision quests; I traveled as a pilgrim all the way to India, pursuing myself, giving up everything to get to the land of holy gurus; I suffered my father’s death and became ever more determined to find myself. Briefly back in New York for the funeral, I met Geshe Wangyal, a Mongolian monk living just down the road in New Jersey.

I felt a power, an intensity around him in his pink house with its crude and colorful chapel; on his small acre next to a concrete Russian Orthodox church. In his presence it was hard for me to speak; my knees felt weak and my stomach unsettled. Yet the amazing thing was that Geshe Wangyal himself seemed as if he were not there. He had nothing to do with me, to me, or for me. He seemed fully content and unconcerned for himself. When I couldn’t find “him,” I was forced to ask myself, Who is this “me” I’ve been pursuing? At twenty-one years old, after dropping out of college, leaving a new marriage, barely able to take care of myself, I felt a hint of something beyond my self.

Geshe Wangyal was unlike anyone I had ever met. As a teenaged monk he had nearly died of typhoid in the hot Black Sea summer. His mother heard that the monks had given him up for dead, so she came to the monastery and spent three days sucking the pus and phlegm out of his throat and lungs to keep him from suffocating. When he awoke, the first thing he was told was that she had succumbed to the disease she saved him from and died on the very day he recovered. He was appalled when he observed that though he felt grief at the news, another current in his mind would not let him think of anything else except his overwhelming thirst after his ten-day fever. Noting this dreadful degree of selfishness, he resolved then and there to give his last ounce of effort to freeing himself and others from such involuntarily selfish impulses. I had never encountered directly such unconditional compassion in my entire life. I was hooked.

Geshe Wangyal told me he wouldn’t be my guru, since he felt he was no high being and that I was not capable of traveling the difficult path of spiritual development. But he conceded that whatever he had learned of value in his life had come from Tibetan books, and he had an inkling that I might find something of value in them myself. Since I was not a monk, I couldn’t stay in his monastery, so I would have to find my own lodging. He agreed to feed me and to teach me to read Tibetan if I taught English to some young monks he had in his care. One week later I was back in New Jersey, cleaned up, and ready for studies, having sold my ticket to New Delhi to pay the rent.

During the first Tibetan lesson, Geshe Wangyal spoke of suffering, and my world shifted dramatically. We’re born, we get sick, we get old, we die. We crave comfort and happiness but never seem to find it. We fear losing what little we have. It was a mind-opening experience for me to learn that living without knowing what I was doing and why I was doing it was causing me to suffer. Living with the fear of the world blowing up; chasing after knowledge, sex, pleasure, and myself; and trying to escape reality certainly left me coming up empty—all I did was crave more of everything. Before this lesson, the answers to my questions seemed to be just around the corner. I’d turn the corner only to find something else to desire, and the chase would start all over again. It was the chase that was making me miserable, and somewhere inside me was an idea that was driving the chase. For the first time, someone was telling me that there was a way to free myself from the whole chase. I was being asked to face suffering, but at the same time, I was discovering that there was a way to end that suffering.

Preoccupation with myself was the core problem, the center of the malfunction in my mechanism that prevented me from enjoying life as much as I felt I could, from being as good to others as I wanted to be, from understanding all I wanted to. I began to see meaning in reorienting my life toward freeing myself from “me.”

From 1962 until 1966, I lived on almost nothing, maybe a hundred dollars a month; I wore jeans and T-shirts for the first two years, and then, after being ordained, the simple Buddhist monk’s robe—threefold in the Tibetan tradition, including a maroon skirt, a maroon upper shawl, and a yellow overshawl for special occasions. I didn’t spend a dollar on consumer goods, rarely watched television, listened to no music, read only Dharma books belonging to monasteries, and meditated a lot. No longer did I worry about cars and motorcycles, suits and good-looking shoes. I shaved my head periodically. I never traveled unless someone requested me to do so and paid for it. I was a vegetarian for several of those years as well.

When I look back at my experience during this time, I feel as if I existed in a state of orgasm that was diffused throughout my body and throughout my day, rather than concentrated in the genitals and focused on fleeting moments of intense excitation. I had a great sense of inner well-being, for a change, after having been a teenaged love-seeker and then a married man, never getting enough in either case...