Religions and responses
[ by Charles Cameron ]
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When an enemy dies, the world’s religions do not give us clear signals as to what we should feel – and perhaps this is for the best, since we feel what we feel in any case. Thus the Old Testament / Tanakh provides seeds of rejoicing for some:
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
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Psalm 137:6-9
and of restraint for others:
Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth.
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Proverbs 24.17
I have no great wish to persuade others to take up my own feelings about bin Laden’s death. For myself, I neither danced nor wept at the news…
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You might say my feelings are summed up nicely in this DoubleQuote:
I chose these two quotes partly because I think it is important to keep our religious traditions in mind on occasions such as this, partly because (as I say) they encapsulate between them my own feelings – and partly because I wanted to indicate that every tradition has its hidden surprises, and each one can be “read” in many different ways, by people whose needs and vocations are different.
My own basic emotion appears to be in line with the Judaic position expressed in the first quote of the pair — though I hear an echo of the “phat!” of the second, and can surely sympathize with those who rejoice while I am contemplative and turn inwards…
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Phat! is a mantram which connotes forcefulness. Lama Anagarika Govinda, in his Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism writes of “the onomatopoeic exclamation Phat, which, according to the context and the circumstances, serves as a protection from inimical influences, as well as for the removal of inner hindrances, or for the strengthening of the [practitioner’s] power of concentration, like a rallying-cry to call up the forces of the mind” – while Sir John Woodroffe, in Hymns to the Goddess, writes “Phat is the astra or weapon mantra.”
Susan Piver, who posted that “Phat!” as the epigraph to her Buddhist response to news of bin Laden’s death, followed it with a quote from the Tibetan master (and my old Oxford companion) Chogyam Trungpa:
In the Shambhala warrior tradition, we say you should only have to kill an enemy once every thousand years.
