Regarding the Cries of the World

On Tuesday I listened to a teisho about Kanzeon, goddess of compassion, she who never turns away from pain. She has a thousand arms with an eye in the center of each hand, to see and to act—verbs that, for her, cannot be separate. She never resists. She never ponders. She only responds, instinctively, like one reaching back for their pillow in the middle of the night. In some iterations of her origin, her skull broke open from the agony of witnessing the world’s bottomless suffering, and the shattered pieces are used to build eleven heads out of one. Each deforming proliferation is born of her wish to intervene.

Kanzeon is a deity who has endured for many centuries across vast distances and she has more names than I know, but one translation is Regarder of the Cries of the World, or Perceiver of the World’s Sounds. The emphasis on hearing is a little funny to me, given the arms and eyes. She doesn’t have a thousand ears, after all, even if she has twenty-two of them. But it makes sense that hearing precedes doing. I’ve been reading David Steindl-Rast, who says that, according to its etymology, obedience is a type of careful, thorough listening. Obedience in the sense of submission to another’s will, then, renders meaningful listening (true obedience) impossible.

The mourning we’re expected to manufacture in response to Charlie Kirk’s death is like that—contranymic. Alleged to be proof of decency and compassion while embodying the opposite.¹ To play along is to trade moral discernment and personal integrity for racial piety, a pretty tragic bargain. The white supremacy is so flamboyantly on display that to call it such is almost embarrassing, like when a teacher requires you answer a rhetorical question out loud.

Americans are accustomed to the execution of Black and brown people “at home” and abroad. Used to inflicting slow, cruel, premature, lonely, indiscriminate deaths. Used to the homegrown executions of children and women, pregnant women and pregnant children. (Zariah Dodd, Kaylie Corona, Mia Campos, Iyana Sawyer, Morgan Martin, Brenna Rouhselang. You should look at them, in their braces and quinceria gowns. Read about them and the men who stabbed them, shot them, ran them over.)

But for a hate-preaching, violence-loving white man to fall to what he worships is for our nonexistent democracy to break apart. It was the same after the murder of Brian Thompson. Not the white men, not the oligarchs, cried the white oligarchs. It is unconscionable that they face any consequence for their sustained, rapacious aggressions. They are the ultimate innocents, those for whom everything—and everyone else—must be sacrificed.

Anything I could say about this man you’ve probably already thought, said, and read yourself. I believe very strongly that no one on earth need mourn him and that few sincerely are. (Fearing for themselves, maybe? Seeing an opportunity to career-build? Absolutely.) Yet, while thinking about Kanzeon, I was surprised to find that I do not begrudge the thought of her at his side when he took his last breath. It’s because such a moment doesn’t cost her anything: that’s why. It’s the thought of 999 arms elsewhere and her swift attention to others. She is pure compassion, infinite mercy, with no withholding, no limits. And he doesn’t receive comfort or peace at the expense of anyone else because for her, all suffering is equal, equally urgent and equally worthy. Oh, Kanzeon! If America were like this, it wouldn’t be America, and a man like Kirk wouldn’t be dead because a man like him would have never been made.

1  This type of cooperative deception is everywhere. Just like there are Christians invoking Christ in their attempts to oppress others, there are Buddhists who evoke Kanzeon yet deny and even desire the genocide in Gaza. There are entire sanghas pledged to stoppered ears and still hands.