The whole of BC is saddened and nervous about the terrible wildfires… Over the past days many from all over the world have offered prayers and continue to send positive energy to the victims and their families. The whole world is shaken by the disasters not only in BC, but also in Maui and many other parts of the world.  

These events urge us to look deeply and consider the condition of the human species. In Christianity, the question of why there is this kind of suffering has been discussed through the ages. Why does God, who created the world with all its species, allow such suffering to take place? This has been a subject for theologians throughout time.

Buddhists speak of Cause and Result. They say that we have to bear the consequences of our actions. Still, people ask: “How can children of three or five years old have done such evil acts that they have to lose their homes or even worse, the lives of their parents?” How can we explain the law of karma?

Whether we are Christian or Buddhist, these disasters poses questions for us. Christian believers ask: “How can God, who loves mankind, allow things like this to happen?” Buddhists ask: “How could people who have come with the best of intentions to help others and were doing charitable work, or innocent children, have committed such a crime that they should die in this way?”

The French poet Victor Hugo at the age of 40 or so lost his daughter who was about 20 years old. Her name was Leopoldine. He suffered deeply and asked God why this should have happened to her. She too was drowned. A tender young person just blossoming suddenly snatched away by a wave.

When his daughter died, he went back to his birthplace Villequier. In the poem entitled At Villequier, he says: “Mankind can only see one side of reality. The other side is plunged in the darkness of a frightening mystery. Mankind bears the yoke without knowing why. Everything he sees is short-lived, futile and fleeting.”

Victor Hugo calls on God: “I come to you, God, the Father in whom we must believe. Calmly I bring you the pieces of my heart filled with your glory, which you have broken. I accept that only you know what you do, and that mankind is only a reed that trembles in the wind.”

Man is powerless, man is of no worth. That is our condition. Only God knows what He is doing and we, His creatures, have no understanding of what He does. Theologians have tried to give explanations. Some say that if we did not suffer, we could not grow. Thus, God wants us to mourn and suffer so that we have a chance to grow. Some people can accept this kind of reasoning, but others cannot.

At The Emily Dahl Foundation, we have often studied rebirth and the cycle of samsara. We know that in popular Buddhism, the teachings of rebirth are based on a belief in a self or soul. It is said that when someone dies, they are reborn as another person or an animal. There is faith that we continue. When we die, we do not cease entirely to exist. We continue in a different form, and that is what we call the cycle of birth and death.

We have learned, however, that in the deeper Buddhist teachings, we have to understand rebirth in the light of no-self. The basis of Buddhist teachings is the teaching on no-self. If we understand rebirth and the cause and result of action in terms of a self, we have not yet touched the deepest levels of the Buddhist teachings.

All the questions of cause and result, retribution and rebirth have to be resolved in light of the teachings of no-self. We have studied karma according to the Manifestation-Only teachings of Buddhist psychology, and we have seen that there is both individual and collective karma.

When an aircraft explodes and crashes and nearly all the passengers die but one or two survive, we ask: “Why? Why did they not all die? Why did one or two live?” This shows us that karma has both an individual and collective aspect. When we discover the principle of individual and collective, we have begun to resolve a significant part of the matter already. If we continue in the direction of the insight of no-self, we shall gradually discover answers closer to the truth.

It is very clear that when someone we love dies, the person who dies suffers less than those who outlive him. Therefore, suffering is a collective and not an individual matter.

Victor Hugo, in his life as a poet, was seeking and looking deeply and therefore many of his poems are meditative in nature. His contemplative poems are collected in a volume called Les Contemplations. Contemplation means looking deeply.

Victor Hugo also found that human destiny is a collective destiny, and he caught a glimpse of the no-self nature of all that is. If any accident happens to one member of our family, the whole family suffers. When an accident happens to a part of our nation, it happens to the whole nation. When an accident happens to a part of the planet Earth it happens to the whole planet, and together we bear it.

When we see that their suffering is our own suffering, and their death is our death, we have begun to see the no-self nature. When we pray for those who died in Maui, we see clearly that we are not only praying for those who have died; we are also praying for ourselves, because we, too, are a victim of that disaster.

We ourselves have died, too. There are not just the hundreds of dead. Whenever we love, we see that the person we love is ourselves; and if our loved one dies, we also die. Although we are sitting here, and we have the impression that we are alive, in fact we have also died. What happens to one part of the body happens to the whole body.

In reality, the human species and the planet Earth are one body. 

Bravo to Victor Hugo who was Christian; Hugo found a way to go beyond the separate self. We have to look deeply to understand his immense teachings.  

The Emily Dahl Foundation 
August 2023