Unseating our Karmic Inheritance: Buddhist Reflections on the Death of Queen Elizabeth II - Singhashri Gazmuri

As an American living in Britain, I experienced the response to the death of Queen Elizabeth II as a lesson in contradictions. These contradictions lie at the heart of so much of what is flawed about our world. They mask themselves as virtues when, in reality, they keep us spinning in samsara. This series will examine three of those contradictions using popular phrases in British culture.

Part I: Just close your eyes and think of England: The dark side of duty

This Victorian age aphorism was given as advice to “unwilling women” when approached by their husbands for sex. The implication was that to fulfil their role as wife and mother they must blindly accept their subjugated place within their marriage. The very first thing I heard, and then heard over and over again, in the aftermath of her death was how impressive Queen Elizabeth was in carrying out her duty – to rule as monarch within a system of domination.

As Buddhists, what is our relationship to duty? What are the dangers of simply accepting our duty without question? In my experience, the dark side of duty is when it is used to uphold the status quo. How does this contribute to the perpetuation of delusion? How does the collective, unquestioning fulfilment of duty perpetuate unjust systems of domination?

On the evening of September 8th, 2022 I was working at home when there was a knock at the door. My partner walked in and told me that Queen Elizabeth II had died.

My response was immediate and complicated. I simultaneously felt a deep sadness alongside an empty, hollow feeling. The sadness was understandable. The death of any constant presence in one’s life, no matter how far removed, was bound to stir me.  But the hollow feeling was more mysterious.

 We turned on the TV to watch commentator after commentator marvel at how impressive the Queen had been at carrying out her duty. My ears perked up. I felt an uncomfortable shift within my “deepest seat of consciousness.” It was that word – duty – and how it was being used. The message was subtle but clear – we should all follow in her example by blindly accepting our subjugation, and that of others, within an unjust system.

This word feels like a bar clamp holding me in place. Keeping me locked to the expectations that society has conferred on me and those like me since before I even existed. For the marginalized, be it women, people of color, LGBTQ+, or immigrants, to simply do your duty can be a death sentence. That’s exactly how I hear it, as a violent demand of the masses masquerading as a virtue. If only we could all be as dutiful (read good at staying in our place) as Queen Elizabeth.

I have tried to give the Queen the benefit of the doubt. A friend of mine reminded me soon after her death about how well loved she was by so many -a benevolent force in our world. Sure, I can see that. Perhaps she really believed what she was taught. She certainly wouldn’t have been exposed to any other narratives during her most formative years. Yet she had plenty of opportunities over the course of her life, the unfolding suffering of many of her family members, and the more recent collective reckoning with Britain’s colonialist past, to re-think things, consider other perspectives, bring compassion to complex situations requiring updated thinking and acting. Instead, she mostly stayed the course.

According to Buddhism what is at the root of our suffering is greed, hatred, and delusion. These are the mental states that keep the wheel of samsara endlessly spinning. On a collective level, these mental states are acted out and upheld by aspects of our society many take for granted, like the British monarchy, kept in place by the willing and active participation of not only its members, but a majority of British society.

The dangers of ideologies of dominance aren’t just a British problem. There is a growing trend in the US of people who would prefer to live under an authoritarian government than a democracy. Out of a sense of duty to party many lawmakers and everyday citizens colluded with and participated in an attempted coup after the 2020 presidential election. Others have refused to hold accountable those responsible for the attack on the US capitol on January 6th, 2021.

I believe that these people are thinking and acting out of a misguided sense of duty, unable to question the lies they’ve been fed by their leader and the media that does his bidding. As an American living in Britain I am concerned that the shadow side of duty is compelling a backward step in our collective progress over the past century.  The same trends propelling these dangerous events in the US are also playing out here, with little to any accountability of those in power to change course. As Buddhists, our only response to such narrow-mindedness must be to speak up and challenge confusion, hatred, and violence. As Audre Lorde famously wrote, our silence will not protect us.

I have heard many argue that the British monarchy is a necessary establishment because it provides people with something to hang on to in an increasingly chaotic world. Amongst the shifting sands of politics and the breakneck speed of the 24-hour news cycle, the monarchy symbolizes steadiness, something people can rely on. Of all its figureheads, the Queen embodied this steadiness with a rare conviction so uncommon in our world.

 I can appreciate this perspective. Yet the part of me ill content with simply accepting things at face value is not easily placated with such sentiments. Intuitively I sense something else at play and can’t help but scratch beneath the surface. From a Buddhist point of view, anything designed to provide the illusion of stability should be questioned.

To discover what’s really going on beneath this façade of stability in a chaotic world we have to go back to the beginning. As far as I can tell the beginning and all that’s come about as a result is a messy, violent, sorry state of affairs.

 The modern British monarchy developed over hundreds of years between the 11th and  19th centuries.[1] This system started out as warring parties slowly consolidating wealth and power through looting and pillaging, rape, land theft, forced marriages, treachery, conquest, genocide, kidnapping, enslavement, imperialism, colonialism…the list of atrocities goes on and on.

 The Queen was born into this system and was conditioned by it. Her ancestors dreamed of it, fought for it, and built it. At the foundation of the system is the magical thinking that there are some people anointed by God to rule over others and that this special quality is passed on from one generation to the next. In other words, the system depends on domination as an organizing principle of British society.  It is this reliance on domination and the duty of the royal family members to uphold it that left me feeling so hollow on hearing of the death of the Queen. Buddhism directly refutes this kind of caste thinking.

The Buddha taught that it is a delusion to compare oneself in any way to others – to think of oneself as better than, less than, or even equal to others. This is because we are deeply interconnected at our most fundamental level. The beings that appear in samsara are both interdependent and unique based on their conditioning and, therefore, beyond all comparisons.

The comparing mind is rooted in dualistic thinking, a form of ignorance. The monarchy promotes the idea that some people are inherently better than others and enacts it with real life consequences. Not only that, but the institution itself, and through its symbiotic relationship with the British tabloid press, is rife with misogyny and racism. One need not look any further than the experience of bi-racial African-American Meghan Markle, viewed and treated by the institution and the British media as a”commoner,” to see the suffering this causes. These harmful views are like a pandemic of the mind driving our global community towards catastrophic ends.

Queen Elizabeth II was taught to be dutiful since the day she was born. Throughout her life, the Queen had been and done exactly what was expected of her. I can’t honestly say if I’d been put in the same set of circumstances, I would have done any differently. None of us can know who we’d be or how we’d respond under conditions different from our own. All I can do is apply the mind I have to looking critically at the world around me in an effort towards enacting the most skillful response in any given moment.

I practice taking responsibility for my thoughts, words, and actions. If my duty is to anything it is to how I best use my energy in ways that support greater wisdom and compassion. For me, duty is a way of showing up in the world that recognizes that we are bound to each other. It includes loyalty to the teachings, my spiritual friends and teachers and my civic duties, like voting and protesting unfair policies or injustices.

To simply take on our “duties” blindly, without examining the views they are rooted in and the conditions they contribute to feels like a breach of the first precept – to do no harm.

Perhaps the Queen believed that she was doing the least harm by acquiescing to the role she’d been born into. By taking the path of least resistance. But how would positive social change ever happen if we all did the same? Perhaps that is the very definition of privilege - for your duties to be so seamlessly aligned with a social structure that benefits you, with no expectations, beyond the purely symbolic, to do anything other than continue to carry them out.

 When Queen Elizabeth II did her duty, over and over and over again, she was communicating an important message. Whatever you do, do not ever question the status quo. Do not rock the boat. Better to simply do as you’re told and get on with it, regardless of the consequences.

This goes against the most fundamental principles of Buddhism.

The dark side of duty is that if we all stayed the course no one would ever wake up. Real transformation requires radical acts of rebellion. Fundamentally, we are rebelling against the narratives that we are separate, that there is nothing more we can hope for in this life than to amass as much wealth as possible, at whatever cost, and that some people will do better than others because of their own efforts alone. These lies are literally killing us. To continue to collude with them is to side with delusion and against justice.

The Buddha’s very first spiritual act was to question the status quo. In going forth he stepped out of his inherited place in society to find a different way to live in the world – one in harmony with all of life. He renounced his participation in a system of domination in favor of forging a new path grounded in non-violence and freedom. As modern-day Buddhists I believe it is our duty to continue to exemplify this spirit of rebellion towards anything that does not hold up under scrutiny. The British monarchy is a perfect example of such a house of cards.

Amitabha, the Buddha of the west, blesses us with discerning wisdom. This is the kind of wisdom that sees the myriad differences of all living beings and loves us all equally. This is the kind of wisdom that challenges us to look closely at the conditions that give rise to any phenomenon to clearly see it’s impermanent and insubstantial nature.

This is the kind of wisdom that supports us to know the nature of our own experience directly, to understand which conditions give rise to happiness, and which to suffering, and moves us towards thoughts, words and actions that bring lasting peace. This is the kind of wisdom that protects us from acting out of blind duty and empowers us to be dutiful to the way things actually are – empty of any intrinsic nature and completely and inextricably interconnected. This truth compels us to respond to the world with compassion.

As a global community, we are reaching the end of one way of living and the beginning of an entirely new one. The transformation our world so desperately calls out for begins in our minds and our imaginations. On one hand, we must reject the narratives we have been given, and on the other begin to tell ourselves radically different stories of what life could be like without the systems of domination that currently define our world.

That mysterious emptiness I felt upon hearing of the death of Queen Elizabeth the II? Perhaps it was the part of me that deeply longs for a collective waking up and an unleashing of the potential that awakening would ignite. Perhaps it was the incipient seed of hope that another world is possible, and only we can make it real.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_the_United_Kingdom#:~:text=Although%20England%20and%20Scotland%20were,they%20remained%20two%20separate%20kingdoms.