How Do We Make Peace?

Roshi Bernie Glassman spoke often of his close spiritual friendship with Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement. Tikkun olam, Hebrew for ‘repairing the world’ could also be understood, according to Bernie, as ‘healing’ or ‘peacemaking.’ God had sent his light into the world in vessels which shattered as they went from refined realms to the grosser, earthier ones. Sparks of light were scattered, trapped in a universe of suffering. According to the mystical Jewish teaching, tikkun olam, peacemaking, elevates and restores the sparks of light, healing the world.

When Bernie talked about tikkun, he was also talking, as he frequently did, about Indra’s net, a Buddhist way of imagining the interconnectedness and interpenetration of all things. It’s an image from the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. Every person, every thing, is a node in the net, connected with every other. To experience this is to experience the Oneness of Life. I am not sure if or how Bernie connected the tikkun story with Indra’s Net, but the two teachings have been sitting side-by-side somewhere in my brain for thirty years. Recently they’ve overlaid in my mind: Indra’s Net has been torn apart, an analogue to the shattering of the vessels, and the peacemaking task is to reconnect the tattered fragments, to make whole, to heal the Universe.

To experience the Oneness of the Universe is a beautiful, peaceful feeling, but we cannot deny the tremendous suffering around us. Indra’s web desperately needs repair. Peacemaking, seen in this way, is not a matter of grand gestures. It is a painstaking process, reconnecting nodes in the net. It’s personal. It’s finding ways to reconnect people who are not talking to each other, people who refuse to be in the same room with each other and people who, when they sit side by side at a family thanksgiving dinner, avoid all talk of politics or religion or whatever has torn the net. We have to talk to each other and we have to listen. Can we find a way?