OCT. 25, 2001 | By DOUGLAS IMBROGNO, Editor

Yes, it is. So is a hatred and bile so extreme that one day of mass murder is not enough, that a second wave, a la the successive Biblical plagues against Egypt, must follow. Except instead of frogs it's anthrax, spewed indiscriminately across the American landscape, a poisonous mind trying to spray poison on whomever it can reach, however many happen to be in the line of fire. (Even if it turns out the anthrax attacks were launched by unrelated domestic wackos, they were given cover—permission, really—by the jaw-dropping horror of Sept. 11.)

A lot of fast and loose talk has been poured out across the land by many observers—myself included— who have suggested, pondered, argued or teased out the thought that the attacks of Sept. 11 were terrible in the extreme, but that there were grievances behind them that need study.

Certainly, the populist support for bin-Laden and the rage against America in large swaths of the Muslim world requires long-term attention, ongoing introspection, careful politics, and some serious housecleaning. Where did I read that America's Central Intelligence Agency did not have a single seasoned speaker of Pashtun—the main tongue of Afghanistan—on its payroll?

Yet's let's also sum up clearly the mission statement of Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaida organization: 'Die, You Bastards, Die!'

So what's a Buddhist-oriented publication like Hundred Mountain got to say about all this? What should a right-thinking person do, in the spirit of Right Thought from the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path?

What's a Buddhist to do?

PERSONALLY, I'M JUST TRYING to muddle through. I read as much as I can—or as much as I can stand before I flick off the radio or snap shut the newspaper in despair and exhaustion. I shift my opinions daily depending upon whose forcefully argued article I've just read. I wrestle with an inadequate understanding of Buddhist teachings on nonviolence, compassion and skillful means (which is the idea that different situations call for different, sometimes unconventional and unexpected responses).

I ponder the fallout from the ongoing bombings of Afghanistan and the need to catch this sucker, or just to stop him dead, and the equal need to irradiate the infected wound called Taliban, where this cancer took seed, was nourished and flourished. I watch the rising death counts and the rising refugee floods, hoping it's over soon. Hoping that it is not, as one friend suggests, "1938 all over again"—meaning we are on the brink of a worldwide conflagration.

What's a Buddhist to say or do?

I dunno since there aren't any Buddhists here, I don't think. I've said often that it seems to me to run counter to the Buddha's teachings to call yourself a 'Buddhist.' The label seems limiting to me, and beside the point. The real point is in your moment-to-moment living, in studying your thought habits, in altering your attitudes, and an changing your daily behaviour and interactions with other people as a result.

Yet I am a serious Buddhist sympathizer, I'll go that far. Despite the Buddha's teachings on the hazards of attachment, I am attached enough to the Buddhist path to have flared in annoyance at a phrase the writer David Rieff used in a recent piece in Salon. The piece, called "Love-bombing bin-Laden," takes to task the entire town of Berkeley, California, whose city council voted recently to urge an end to the bombing of Afghanistan. Rieff blasts soft-minded compassion that might suggest that what bin-Laden did was evil, but that we shouldn't act evil in return—and maybe we should not act at all militarily. "Enough ill can never be said about the depraved rationalizations of the antiwar faction with regard to the Sept. 11 attacks," says Rieff, who then speaks as much ill as he can fit into the piece.

Despite his self-righteous tone, Rieff has points to make. In Buddhism, the phrase "idiot compassion" would apply here—or as I heard a Buddhist monk once put it, "unwise compassion." That is to say, as I understand the phrase, the simple-minded, sincere urge to be loving and well-meaning in the face of circumstances where something stronger and more skillful is called for. An editorial cartoon I saw recently summed it up well: an idiotically beaming bearded fellow, arms outstretched in a hug-to-be, strides across the desert toward Osama bin-Laden and a scowling compatriot. "Do you want to cut off his arms or shall I do it?" says the bin-Laden figure.

But while trashing Berkeley's soft-hearted citizens, Rieff goes on to dis Buddhism itself:

"Berkeley knows otherwise. It knows that violence solves nothing; it is sure, as a student I met on campus put it to me, that the only proper response to the terrorist attacks would be to build, as she put it, 'bridges of love' to the future. And it is resolute in its cheap Buddhist certainties that the problem is one of the anger that resides in all of us..."

Cheap Buddhist certainties. There's the phrase that tugged my chain.

I AM NOT REALLY QUALIFIED TO DEFEND Buddhism against Rieff's sneer. Besides, those teachings can stand on their own, and have done quite well for themselves these past 2,500 years. Nor can I speak authoritatively as to the "Buddhist" viewpoint for dealing with an Osama bin-Laden and the mess he has caused in the world. But I do have a modest understanding from years of Buddhist training, talking, listening, shutting up and meditating.

Here, then, are some not- too-cheap or uncertain thoughts from a Buddhist sympathizer, with apologies to all of my teachers for any misstatements, misunderstandings and misapplications of their teachings. They begin with general Buddhist takes on things and move on to specifics of the current crisis:

1. Buddhist teachings don't come cheap—they ask of you to understand that you bear total responsibility for the results and the fallout from your thoughts, words and actions. So it behooves us to get our minds in order. To learn to calm the mind when agitated. To work at seeing how we create suffering in ourselves and for others in the world because of the mind's confusion, obsessions and strong emotions. This is no different in extraordinary times than in ordinary times.

2: You can't change the world. But you can change how you move through the world in which you live. And so you can, after all, change the world in which you move on a daily basis.

3: You can change the world in which you move by committing yourself to a lifelong practice of mental and spiritual development. This means quieting the mind and spirit on a regular basis. In Buddhist practice, this involves sitting meditation and then working on mindfulness—a keen, lively awareness of your surroundings and mental states —during the rest of your hours.

Once you start becoming seasoned in establishing or regaining mindfulness, you will have more of an ability to calm agitated, confused mental states. As you work more and more at this process, you will have greater insight into your mental habits and how you choose the behaviors that cause you suffering and grief, and that cause suffering and grief to others. The end result of walking this path is enlightenment or final liberation from suffering.

4: The implications and results of your habits of mind, as they play out in your daily behavior, are the only thing you truly own. The Buddhist word is karma. Unless we begin to understand how we create unwholesome karma, we will forever be creating it, causing ourselves and others ongoing pain and misery.

5: Moving on to Osama bin-Laden, if we don't get him and his network, he and the members of his sick little club will continue to try to get us. So we must try to put them out of commission. This is, in fact, an act of compassion for the larger community. Yet we must also try to operate at a level of minimal harm since in dealing with such a man and his people we are also responsible for our own actions, our own karma, just as much as they are responsible for theirs. What have we done, for example, if in avenging the deaths of 5,000 people, we kill another 5,000? Or create a humanitarian disaster in which 10,000—or 100,000—Afghan people die from starvation in the winter cold of 2002? Are those lives any less important than America's 5,000 dead? Can we shrug them off as merely "collateral damage"?

6: "Dependent Origination" is the Buddha's teaching on the complicated interplay of all the forces that create what we call reality. Things arise in the world entirely dependent on other things, nothing arises independently of itself. This teaching offers insight into how reality ticks, and how to break out of the cycle of suffering we experience life after life after life, as Buddhist teachings have it, through awareness of the root causes of suffering. But this more subtle view of reality also applies to events in the world.

It might be nice and neat to think Osama bin-Laden is the simple incarnation of this independent force called Evil that haunts the world and erupts now and then. And that if we stomp it flat, we'll have dealt with it good. But nothing arises independently. Unless we understand those causes—how bin-Laden and his supporters and sympathizers came to be, why such hatred took root and flourished, why it might live on after this hateful man's death— we will not be able to completely understand the situation in which we find ourselves. We will not know how to deal with this crisis most effectively, what role we might have played in these events, and how to avoid being in that same place again in the future.

7: Osama bin Laden is one deeply confused dude. Call him evil, yet what is evil but ultimate confusion and delusion in the human mind? He and his followers are extreme examples of how the mind can become warped and ruined by hatred and confusion. But how will we answer such hatred? Obviously, he and his organization must be dealt with forcefully or they will continue to harm many other people. But we have to be careful not to catch the virus of their rage and hatred in our own righteous response. "Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world," said the Buddha. "By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a Law Eternal."

8: How does the mind work, after all? What about your own rage and hatred? What about your suspicions and panic, your fear and despair generated by the events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath? How has your mind handled these states—or been overwhelmed by them—since Sept. 11? How have you suffered and why? How will you go on from here, especially if new attacks occur, or if—as many people fear—the world is headed toward years of dissension, hatred and conflict as fallout from Sept. 11? What spiritual tools and life practices do you have at hand, or have you learned that you need, from Sept. 11?

9: What are you doing about that?

10: Um, what are you doing about that?

THIS FALL ISSUE MARKS the return of some regular features— such as the 'Poetry' and 'Review' sections— that went by the wayside as I put the journal into all-crisis coverage mode as a result of Sept. 11. Thank goodness for other things to think and read about, I say.

Yet this will also be the last web edition of Hundred Mountain for awhile, perhaps until early in the new year and the Winter 2002 edition. I have a book project—not mine, but someone else's—that needs my editing attention and fast. And, since Hundred Mountain is not my day job, but my night job down in the basement, something had to give. I may, though, pitch a couple of Hundred Mountain e-mail newsletters to subscribers, which is yet another reason to subscribe to the journal, which is, of course, free as fresh air.

(By the way, I would love to make Hundred Mountain my day job, and increase the frequency and regularity of its publication. If there is a well-heeled Buddhist, or well-to-do Buddhist sympathizer out there who'd like to make that happen, and bring Hundred Mountain up out of the basement, please mail a check for $50,000 made out to 'Hundred Mountain Media' to the address at the bottom of the home page. Oh heck, I'll even take $40,000!)

My apologies to contributors whose work is in the queue to be published and others who have sent in stuff but have not yet heard. If I promised you your work would run, it will run. If I am still holding your submission and have not yet said 'yay' or 'nay,' I will try and get back to you with a decision, or you might want to bonk me on the head again with an e-mail reminder. The events of Sept. 11 required a different focus for awhile in this journal. I hope Hundred Mountain has been of some use during these amazing, trying times.

Be well.