All Zen Roads Lead to Hiroshima

In 1988 I visited the city of Hiroshima. I vividly remember feeling physically ill for no apparent reason going in to the city, and I only began to feel better as I left. I'm not a superstitious person by nature, but Hiroshima really is a city of lost souls, you can feel it. During the five and a half years that I lived in Tokyo, another Japanese city with many annihilated souls wandering about, I would also walk the quiet neighborhoods at night and feel their restless presence. Sound crazy?

A recent HBO documentary about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "White Light/Black Rain," talks about the lives of the survivors. It shocked me to learn that the Japanese government has only recently begun to pay medical expenses to victims. There is a group of survivors that has to come to California for treatment. In the words of one survivor, "the Japanese government is just waiting for us to die." In the film survivors also spoke out about their shame and guilt of having lived through the bombings while friends and family died, the stigma of disfigurement and the horrified looks they get when they go out in public.

In the film the American pilots who dropped the bombs were also interviewed. Most expressed no outward regret, that they were only "doing their jobs."

In the Buddhist view, what matters least of all is who dropped the bombs. The essential question really has to do with the nature of desire and suffering, which form the root of all destructive acts and which lie far beyond the phenomenal realms of politics, governments and war. When I look at the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I try not to see just Japanese people, but human beings caught up in the endless turning of samsara, the wheel of suffering.

So when bombs rain down out of a clear blue summer sky, what then? What do we do with our experience? Hopefully, into the void of death and destruction created by the bombs, steps freedom. For if we really examine our fear, hatred and revulsion, so harmfully directed at ourselves and at others, then we will realize that the longer we gaze at it, the smaller and smaller it becomes until it returns to its essential nature, which is emptiness. It is no different from a flower that blooms and then dies, or a city that is born and destroyed. Our realization begins only when we look inward, not outward.

I have no idea about the fate of future generations. If the current political climate is any indicator, hope is a dangerous thing. I just know that when each living being finds inner freedom, then we will have nothing to fear. Nuclear bombs, and the people who have their finger on the trigger, cannot stand up to our indestructible Buddha nature.