If your karma is on the upswing, you will be born in the human realm, the best of all possible samsaric addresses. Why? Because there is just enough comfort in this realm to allow you the time and concentration to devote to sustained spiritual practice. But there is also suffering aplenty as a human being, as we all know. This goads us to seek spiritual answers to the painful questions posed by existence.

And if our aim is true, if we are finally able to wake out of our habitual delusion, if we can let go of our hatred, if we can let go of our desperate clinging to the things of the world, we can finally escape the interminable round of rebirths in samsara.

THIS IS THE BIG ENCHILADA of Buddhist practice. Endless lives in samsara, yes -- if you want. But there's a way out and Buddhas point the way. (There have been many more Buddhas through the aeons than just the one you may be thinking about, by the way, though never more than one during any one age. And there are more to come).

Put another way, a Buddha awakens to the enlightenment that awaits anyone once they come to see it's really a shell game, this place we call existence, this thing we call our 'self.'

That's where Dependent Origination comes in. But I'm not even going to try to explain the Buddha's radical insight into the illusory nature of reality. I'll leave that to the monks. That's why they're paid the big bucks -- well, actually, no bucks at all. But it's still good work if you can get it.

Or if you get it.

Suffice it to say that when we become enlightened, we break out of the cycle of samsara for good. We awaken to nirvana -- a tricky thing to explain. It's not heaven, it's not any where, really. But it is a final end to suffering. Take it up with a Buddhist monk, if you want the official response. But they're just as likely to tell you, oh, now, you just pay attention to what's going on in your mind right now, this very moment. Nirvana? You can take your tea break now.

YEAH, OK. Karma. Samsara. Enlightenment. Sounds good.

But what happens, if say while in the human realm, you take a boxcutter, slit a pilot's throat and ram an airplane full of other humans into the side of a major landmark in the downtown of a major city, killing thousands of other beings in the process?

The samsaric process works exactly the same, says Bhante G. This means that even major league mass murderers can -- far, far down the line of a parade of painful, sorrowful incarnations to come for aeons -- achieve enlightenment. You mean that Osama bin Laden could become a bodhistava or arahat -- these are Buddhist terms for enlightened beings -- someday?

You bet.

"They themselves have to go through suffering in samsara for long, long periods of time," says Bhante G of such factory foremen of evil works. Then one day, "they will be ready to be humble, simple," he says.

At long last, the worst of their karmic debt paid down, they will be able to hear the siren call to enlightenment -- the Dhamma. That is to say, the Buddha's teachings on suffering. How suffering arises. How suffering ends. And the path that leads to the ending of suffering for good.

And, oh yes. That is exactly the same work which the rest of us have to undertake, too-- all of us who are not mass murderers in our current incarnations.

If, that is,we want our own experience of suffering to end. If we want to deal responsibily with the suffering inflicted by mass murderers. If we want to deal with our own responses to that suffering and not create answering waves of suffering, thus spinning the wheel of samsara onward.

Same story. We're all in this together.

IT IS 4:55 A.M. ON SUNDAY. I am dressed and standing just outside the men's dorm near the edge of the forest. I gaze up. About ten thousand stars hang in the West Virginia sky above North Mountain, at whose base the monastery is located. A meteor bolts across my line of sight.

I have slept well. My first night on retreat, I'd had a bad dream -- car crashes, bodies of children in the road. (One of the side benefits of intense meditation practice is that you may recall your dreams with greater clarity. Fun when they're good dreams, not so fun with bad ones.) I chalk it up to all the intense news. My mind is doing some weird processing.

I hear a plane. Then I see its blinking red lights and track it across the sky. So let me tell you how it has gone for for me during this retreat:

The first day, every plane I hear in meditation is a potential bomb.

The second day, every plane is a question mark. How have we -- the United States, the people on those planes that crashed, the ones who could have been on them such as my loved ones and myself -- how have we gotten into such a fix?

The third day, when I hear planes while sitting on my cushion deep in meditation, they are just planes. Just planes.

I stroll through the chilly air down the stony path to the meditation hall.

BHANTE GUNARATANA'S REMARKS on the terrorist attacks, read at American University, Sunday Sept. 16.

DHARMATALKING: Loving-kindness for Osama Bin-Laden and his Ilk? Are You Kidding? An E-Mail Exchange on Cheerful Assassination and Metta in a time of Mass Murder.

	Page One | Editor's Notes | Buddhascope | Buddamerica | Dharmatalk | Foundobjects | GuestColumn | Meditation | Poetry | Quotes | ReadingRoom | SiteIndex | Contact Us | Subscribe