Momentum

Some notes on the Japanese Buddhist ethic of tariki – other power – and on losing track of what I’d mean by hope or despair. (A previous edit published with XR Buddhists in October 2022.)

Five years ago I took part in organised civil disobedience for the first time when I joined Extinction Rebellion for their October 2019 uprising. On my fourth day out with XR I was finally arrested, minutes after my friend Satya Robin had been carried past me by six police officers, sobbing deeply. I’ve written before of that first experience of arrest but what’s kept coming back to me from those four days isn’t any of that, but rather the long walk home along the Thames, on the previous three nights.

There was about 5000 of us taking action in Westminster that October, but the moment you stepped outside the protests there was no sign at all that anything was happening. Everywhere else London just hummed along as normal. So too on the UK news channels that we looked to in vain for evidence of our actions’ ‘impact’. Barely a mention. The cognitive dissonance this generated – as if stepping back and forth each day between two completely different realities – came to a head on the third of those slow night-walks home, as I found myself looking across the Thames at the ongoing redevelopment of Battersea Power Station. The familiar old chimney-stacked giant was surrounded by the dark outlines of cranes, whose limbs were lit by red safety lights. It presented an eerily beautiful spectacle: the massive station hulked against the dark skyline beyond the river’s swirling current, surrounded by little votive red lights. As I stood looking at it that gnawing unease finally coalesced into a question that, once spoken, has never really gone away: Who exactly are you kidding?

Three years on I travelled up to London to take part in my first action with XR’s more fractious offspring, Just Stop Oil. There’s much to say about how the nature and tone of JSO’s campaign has differed from those heady weeks of mass arrest in 2019. What’s on my mind here, though, is how it felt to revisit the revamped power station – or rather, shopping mall – the day before our little JSO team sat down in the middle of a busy Aldgate junction and locked ourselves together.

Stepping inside the illuminated interior of this newly completed playground for the rich (‘every inch monetised’ as one reviewer put it) wasn’t so different to looking at it from across the river three years ago. Here in this newly unwrapped shopping mall, then, I met more or less what I’d come expecting to meet: the sheer momentum of the brightly lit entrancement which these various civil resistance campaigns have been attempting to set their shoulder against, one way or another.

The reason I’m bothering to talk about this here isn’t simply to trawl over all that though. It’s a conversation I had with my friend Geoff the following day, limbs still heavy with that spectacle of cheerful omnicide, a few hours before heading off to meet up with the JSO team.

Geoff’s an artist and builder, and someone for whom honesty’s an involuntary virtue. When we first met around twelve years ago I’d recently become drawn to Japanese Pureland Buddhism, in large part through the unforgettable book on this tradition by the novelist Hiroyuki Itsuki: Tariki: embracing despair, discovering peace. Itsuki’s spiritual memoir spoke deeply to me at the time, as it does now. It also connected with Geoff in a way I doubt any other ‘dharma book’ would have. The melancholic authority of Itsuki’s account of his lifelong survivor’s guilt, and of how he found in the Pureland dharma of ‘other power’ (tariki) a recourse that stayed his hand more than once from taking his own life. All this feels as alive and real to me now as it did then. As I sat with Geoff in a cramped Conway Hall coffee shop I told him about that sense of overwhelm before the old power station, three years ago and then again the previous night, and about the shrillness or silliness of any of us pretending we might somehow turn this juggernaut around ‘in the next two or three years’.

Geoff listened, intent as always. Then he asked if I might not have all this the wrong way around. Suppose it was more the case, he said, that whatever comes of it the turn’s already here, embodied not least in each of these irritating little roadblocks: an inexorable process of slippage with its own unpredictable tipping points, as our dying culture transitions or collapses, for better or worse, into whatever comes after it.

We might choose to try and influence this transition or not, as we wish, but what it may or may not evolve into later is not only radically unknowable from where we stand, but curiously irrelevant.

At the heart of Itsuki’s memoir is a memory. As a 13-year-old boy he nearly lost his life when he attempted to swim the Taedong river, in full spate after heavy rains. As he reached the middle of the river Itsuki realised he wasn’t going to make it, his limbs weakening in the cold as the river’s ferocious undertow began to overpower him. By the time he somehow made it back to the bank and crawled out, that experience of the inexorable drag of the Taedong current had filled the young Itsuki with a deep sense of his own powerlessness – a physical sensation rather than an abstract idea, one that never left him.

It’s this heavy-limbed understanding of his incapacity as an isolated individual, Itsuki tells us, that forms the beating heart of his lifelong understanding of Pureland Buddhism’s foundational tenet of Other Power: ‘A single drop of water in a mighty river. A person is a single drop of water in a mighty river.’

For more than ten years now this sense of being carried on an invisible current is how I’ve most viscerally related to a sense of other power. Sometimes I’ve addressed this current as Beloved Mother, sometimes as Amida, Oya-Sama – sometimes as Jesu, Abba. Whatever. I’m not very good with names – an incorrigible fidget – but insofar as Other Power feels palpable to me it’s in these gravitational terms. Like Itsuki says, an involuntary bodily sensation rather than an idea – neither a reward for anything, nor something achieved through effort or ‘spiritual attainment’. Just, how things are when we stop trying to manipulate reality to suit our preferences.

As the familiar wait to be processed after the JSO roadblock played itself out, I spoke to my arresting officer about the chances of survival if one were to fall into the Thames at night. Not good, apparently. One of the things I learnt from this young man is that the Thames has up to eleven different currents moving within it at any one time, which along with the deep cold, are part of what makes it so dangerous. I don’t know where any of this goes next, and I seem to have lost track by now of what I’d even mean by hope or despair, but I think Geoff’s right about these campaigns. Our individual actions and the transient alliances they coalesce into are of course an integral part of whatever transition we’re living through. A single drop of water in a mighty river. But more simply than that, what our involvement in these campaigns offers us is a way to live our lives as if causing harm to others – or rather, seeking not to – mattered, caught up as we may be in an intergenerational harm whose scale and momentum renders it literally unthinkable within the entranced bubble that is business as usual.

None of this feels resolved, but in here somewhere is why I feel responding to biospheric collapse, now, includes finding and connecting with others with whom to lean into that current of other power, by whatever name, and whether or not we find ourselves presently locked on to anything.