Making it wrong

For the past year I've been living with two philosophers.  Occasionally they leave books about ethics the kitchen table.  One of those books made me think again about the Buddhist precepts I took about nine months ago now, and about the discussions with a teacher that led up to them.

I didn't take the precepts for purely ethical reasons.  I did so mainly for other reasons - committing to a practice, a community, and so on.  But committing to precepts clearly has an ethical dimension.  So what does it mean to commit to Buddhist precepts?  What are they? 

I was inclined to viewing them as rules.  In that interpretation, 'I vow not to kill' means that you can't kill anything under any circumstances.  My teacher David favoured a more psychological interpretation.  For him, not killing was about not killing your spontaneity or your vitality.

Both of these interpretations I found difficult to take.  I found it difficult to take my own interpretation of the precepts as rules mainly because, if they were rules, I couldn't honestly commit to some of them.  I found David's interpretation hard to take because it seemed to drain the precepts of all content, allowing him to take them to mean pretty much whatever he liked.

Consider the precept against intoxication.  I took it to mean that you shouldn't drink or take drugs.  If it meant that, though, I wasn't sure I wanted to commit to it.  David thought it was about maintaining your attentiveness - whether you'd been drinking alcohol or not. 

Extreme versions of these positions don't work.  If the precept against killing means you can never kill anything, you might have problems dealing with hamburgers and Nazis, let alone E. coli. 

If you think it is guiding you not to kill your spontaneity, you should say how you can tell it isn't guiding you not to kill your depression, or your murderous urges.  You may choose to apply it to spontaneity because you like spontaneity.  But then you're just adapting the precepts to whatever ethical assumptions you happen to have already.

You're also draining the word 'killing' of any content.  If you take the precepts metaphorically, they can all end up saying the same thing: you shouldn't kill your vitality, you shouldn't steal your vitality, and so on.  But there might be ten precepts rather than one because each of them is trying to tell you something different.

There is natural middle way between these two extremes.  You might take the precept against killing to be advising you not to kill things - on a reasonable interpretation of what 'killing' consists in, and within the bounds of what might reasonably be expected of someone.  So it might mean you have to become a vegetarian or a pacifist, but not that you can't take antibiotics. 

This isn't a bad way of taking the precepts.  It makes them possible to commit to while also preserving their natural meanings.  On this reading, it's clear what the Buddhist path is; you may reject it, but at least it's clear what it would mean to embrace it. 

The problem with this compromise position is that it's fuzzy.  What is a 'reasonably interpretation' of what killing is?  And what can reasonably be expected of people?  Some people may find vegetarianism or pacificism as difficult to embrace as toleration of E. coli.

This objection claims that the precepts aren't informative enough.  And that may well be.  They may be best taken as guidelines rather than as a complete ethical system.  They may simply point to things that are important ethically and ask us to be aware of them: be careful about killing.

The book I found on the kitchen table was by a philosopher called Jonathan Dancy, and it helped me think about these issues.  Dancy is a moral particularist: he believes morality isn't about rules but about context.  That's closer to David's views than to my initial take on the precepts.

I didn't read Dancy's book through, but at this stage moral particularism doesn't strike me as particularly plausible.  One view that Dancy canvasses in his book, though, was more helpful.  This was the approach of W.D. Ross, whom I knew as a scholar of Aristotle. 

If Ross had moved to San Francisco and become a Buddhist, he would have called the precepts prima facie moral claims.  On this view, the precept against killing says that if an act involves killing, your starting assumption should be that it's bad.  You may later revise this view, for example if you find out that the beings being killed are E. coli; but it's a good starting assumption.

There are all sorts of reasons philosophers nowadays don't like Ross' theory.  Some of them aren't very important - such as the complaint that Ross should have used the phrase pro tanto rather than prima facie.  Pro tanto reasons are reasons that other reasons may trump, whereas prima facie reasons may, on closer inspection, turn out not to be reasons at all.

Despite this infelicity of language, Ross' main idea is clear.  Killing is a 'wrong-making' feature of actions.  If it has killing in it, it's more likely to be wrong when looked at as a whole.

There are further complexities.  You might (like my housemate) want to distinguish two versions of this idea.  In the first, killing adds some wrongness into the mix.  I may decide that killing E. coli with antibiotics is right in the aggregate, but there's still a bit of wrongness there (in the killing).

In the second, all we look at is the action as a whole.  If we decide that killing E. coli is good in the aggregate, then we have to conclude that killing simply wans't wrong in that case.  This is close to the epistemic claim that if killing is part of an action, it makes it more likely to be wrong.

I might be wrong, but I think that Ross' view offers us a pretty satisfactory way of approaching the Buddhist precepts (or any other ethical guidelines) that avoids the extremes of treating them either as inflexible rules or as nearly content-free suggestions. 

Whether I think the ten Mahayana precepts really identify 'wrong-making' features of actions is another question.  I actually don't have a problem with gossip, for example.  I like gossip.  Maybe I prefer the five Therevada precepts: killing is wrong-making, stealing is wrong-making, sexual immorality is wrong-making, lying is wrong-making, intoxication is wrong-making.  As they say.

The spirit of the way

About a year ago a friend in England sent me some CDs.  He'd done so before, and usually they contained music by obscure UK bands from the 60s and 70s.  This time, though, they contained lectures by Alan Watts, like Aldous Huxley (and Mr. Propter) a Californian Buddhist who was also a transplanted Englishman.

Watts is often called a philosopher, although he had no formal academic training in that field.  He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, at the heart-centre of Anglican Christianity.  After moving to the US, he qualified as an Episcopalian priest, only to renounce his vocation a few years later.  He moved to California, ending up in a circular house in an artists' colony in Marin County.

He is perhaps best described as a free-lance writer, and he is best remembered for his books about Zen.  Watts' 1957 book The Way of Zen was one of the first widely read books on Buddhism in a Western language.  I meant to read it, but its title is so similar to that of Watts' first book, The Spirit of Zen (1936) that I read the earlier work instead.  (I've since noticed a good, cheap edition of the later book on sale at my local bookstore.)

One of the things that strikes me whenever I read Western books about Buddhism from the pre-war era is how rare they were.  Their writers seem to be working in a vacuum of accurate knowledge about Eastern religions.  In his Foreword, Watts states that before the First World War there was 'only one work on Zen in any European language - Kaiten Nukariya's Religion of the Samurai'.  He also claims that his bibliography - which runs to little more than two pages - is an exhaustive list of the books on Zen that had appeared up to the date his book was published.

Watts is therefore reliant on a few personal channels between Buddhism and the West.  One is Christmas Humphreys, the English barrister who founded the Buddhist Society of London and who is the dedicand of Watts' book.  Another is D.T. Suzuki - not to be confused with SF Zen Center founder Shunryu - whose many books for Western audiences Watts credits for a growing interest in Buddhism among Americans.

Since I read Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism only a year ago, his influence on Watts was quite clear to me.  Like Suzuki, Watts moves from a vague yet appealing characterization of Zen in purely psychological and mystical terms to a concrete description of practice in a Japanese monastery.  Like Suzuki, Watts never faces up to the obvious question: if Zen is a way of thinking free of limitations, why are there all these strict practices? 

A third theme of the book is Zen as a key into the cultures of China and Japan; indeed, the book is subtitled A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East.  This theme is treated mostly in the final chapter, which is the weakest part of the book, or at least the part that feels the most dated.  Watts moves from Zen and samurai through jujitsu and flower-arrangement, all the while avoiding asking how common (let alone representative) such practices are in the China and Japan of his day.

In spite of its limitations, though, the book is a valuable one.  Watts has an intuitive understanding of religious phenomena and writes in a way that is both unpretentious and engaging.  The book is not for scholars, but may be for practitioners.  It is full of passages that perfectly encapsulate the essence of some of the central ideas in Buddhism.  Let's end with Watts' lucid description of karma:

'A man may be free to travel where he likes, but there is no place on earth where he can escape from his own karma, and whether he lives on a mountain or in a city he may still be the victim of an uncontrolled mind.  For man's karma travels with him, like his shadow.  Indeed, it is his shadow, for it has been said, "Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark."'

Dark heart

Recently I decided to start reading up on Buddhism.  Of course I'd read introductory books before, but for a long time I avoided studying up on things, since I wanted to focus on the practice of meditation itself.  But I've come to see this approach as naive - Buddhism in a complex tradition, and with so many different brands out there, it's worth being well informed.

Before the Christmas holiday I borrowed a book with the unpromising title Buddhist Wisdom.  Instead of being a repository of bumper-sticker slogans, though, it in fact contained a translation and commentary of two of the most important Buddhist scriptures, the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra.  I thought it would be helpful to start with these, two texts which are central to almost all Zen schools and to many other Mahayana traditions.

Both of these sutras are part of the Sanskrit collection known as the Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita).  These scriptures are supposed to have been rediscovered in the possession of the serpentine kings, the Nagas, by the master Nagarjuna.  Scholars used to date them to somewhere between 500 and 800 AD, but now prefer a much earlier date, somewhere around the turn of the millennium.

Both of them have a central place in most Zen practices, and I've heard them recited at both PZI and SFZC retreats.  The Diamond sutra has the additional distinction of being the text that the all-important Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng (639-713 AD) was reading when he attained enlightenment.  A Chinese edition of it from 868 AD, now in the British Museum, also happens to be the oldest printed book in the world.

So what did I make of these two holy texts?  Very little, I'm afraid.  Both are disquisitions on doctrine given by enlightened figures (the Buddha in the Diamond Sutra and Avalokitesvara in the Heart Sutra) to less enlightened disciples (one Subhuti in the first text and one Shariputra in the second).  Both are concerned with meditation, enlightenment, and transcendence.  Both emphasize the dogmas of non-attainment and no-soul, both central features of the Mahayana path.

Beyond this, I had trouble making head or tail of them.  They are full of technical terms, many of them devotional in character (so the Buddha is at one point referred to as 'the Tathagata, the Arhat, the Fully Enlightened One').  The questions the text raises seem either like tricks ('Is there any dharma that the Tathagata has expounded?' answer: no) or like simple invitations to assent ('If there were as many Ganges rivers as there are grains of sand in the great river Ganges, would the grains of sand in them be many?' answer: yes).

If there is one part of these sutras that rises out of the quagmire of unrewarding obscurity, it is the famous statement in the Heart Sutra that 'form is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form'.  The teaching here is that of transience - objects are nothing but their passing away, and things passing is what objects are.  This may be clear enough, but it is startling (or jarring) to see it presented as a plain contradiction in terms.  We are back with Heraclitus: 'We are and we are not'.

I received little help from the commentary by Edward Conze, the Anglo-German scholar who did much to make Buddhist scriptures accessible to the West.  Conze announces in his preface, 'What I have left unexplained, seemed to me either obvious or unintelligible', and he has left much unexplained, and therefore unintelligible to his readers, who may not find things as obvious as he seems to think they will.

If Mahayana Buddhism has positive doctrines, neither of these sutras make it easy to understand what they are.  Instead, they wrap a few striking insights in a language which is difficult to penetrate, insistently contradictory, and over-pious to the point of sycophancy.  I may yet become more used to this language and become capable of seeing through it more quickly.  But at this point I must say that the Diamond and Heart Sutras will not be much help to those in need of help or understanding.

One reason I became interested in Buddhism was because it seemed to offer a religious path that was less littered with irrational belief than most others.  The more exposure I get to ancient Buddhist texts, though, the more I'm convinced that this Western image of Buddhism as a rational religion is as much of an imposition on the sources as versions of Christianity that seek to downplay Jesus' resurrection, say, or his miracles. 

What allows me to stay within the Buddhist tent is that nobody inside of it has ever insisted that I take what these sutras say as authoritative (though I have been asked to chant them a few times).  And there's also the practice - sitting in silence, avoiding striving, trying to be kind - which somehow is never less glaringly the way no matter how much of a mess the texts make of pointing to it.

Over the bridge

Here I am again, not writing a blog post.  To be more specific: 'Empty-handed I go, and behold the spade is in my hands;/ I walk on foot, and yet on the back of an ox I am riding;/ When I pass over the bridge,/ Look, the water isn't flowing - but the bridge sure does'.  I stole that from the fifth-century Zen poet Fudaishi, and it doesn't make much sense.  I stole the poem from D.T. Suzuki's book, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, which I decided to read the week I did a three-day retreat at San Francisco Zen Center. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki is not to be confused with SFZC's revered founder Shunryu Suzuki; though this in fact often happened, and the priest is said to have invariably responded to being confused with the scholar by saying, 'He is the big Suzuki.  I am the little Suzuki'.  Top of my list for things to read that week had been the little Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, but there wasn't a copy of it in the library, so I went with the big Suzuki's introduction instead.  It turned out to be exactly as nonsensical as Fudaishi's poem.

Despite its emphasis on approaching things as if for the first time, I get the feeling that the beginner is not well served by the existing introductory books on Zen.  If you read the reviews of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind on Amazon, you'll see the occasional note of pious praise punctuating a flow of complaints about the book's incomprehensibility.  Introductory books about Buddhism that are clear, succinct, and accessible are not hard to come by at all, from Damien Keown's Very Short Introduction to Rahula's more scholarly classic What the Buddha Taught.  But for some reason the Zen sect has trouble making itself understood.  Insiders say that this is because the tradition contains mysteries that you can only appreciate if you find them out for yourself; cynics on the other hand will insist that the lack of clarity is a feature of a system that aims mainly to erect high fences against outsiders.  But not only is the language designedly obscure in order to keep people out; how well you can master its eccentricities determines an internal hierarchy, topped by teachers who can say whatever comes to mind.

I can't say how true that was of Zen as practiced at various periods in its long history, but American Zen certainly seems reasonably open to newcomers.  On the other hand, it still has problems with internal hierarchy.  But if you want a satisfying brief statement of crazy Zen, look no further than Suzuki's book, which has a chapter in it entitled 'Illogical Zen', and several more whose content would have justified similar titles.  Many of these chapters seem to consist entirely of mad koans whose point always seems to be the same: abandon all theory and grasp the reality right in front of your nose.  You might think telling that to people in plain language might be enough (and would also allow the ideas behind the recommendation to be criticized), but there's always the counter that people need to be surprised, confused, or shocked into dropping their stories and theories and excuses.  At times, there is an attractive rebelliousness about this tendency.  When Joshu was asked, 'Isn't it a praiseworthy thing to pay respect to Buddha?' he replied, 'Yes, but it's better to go without even a praiseworthy thing'.

After a few of these stories, though, one's patience runs thin.  Suzuki retells one in which the philosopher Doko came to a Zen master and asked, 'With what frame of mind should one discipline oneself in the truth?'  The master answered unhelpfully but typically, 'There is no mind to be framed'.  Doko was a reasonable man, so he persisted.  'If there's no mind to be framed, what are all these monks doing here?'  The master was an unreasonable man: 'No monks here'.  The philosopher was exasperated, and asked, 'How can you tell me a lie like that to my face?'  His Zen antagonist wasn't fazed: 'I have no tongue'.  Finally, the philosopher gave up, admitting to the master that he had trouble following his reasoning.  'Neither do I understand myself', said the master, perhaps with a feeling of triumph, but maybe just with the guilty sensation you sometimes get when you know you've been unreasonable to someone who was just looking for some simple answers.

Suzuki himself presents these stories with apparent approval, but by the end of the book he's doing what the master in that last koan refused to do: he's explaining why there are so many Zen monks in the East, and telling you what they're up to.  That's where the radical antinomianism of Zen breaks down, when it's faced with the undeniable fact that Zen is not just the direct seizure of what's there, but a set of practices and institutions that are as strict and concrete - if not more so - than piano-lessons and the swim club.  And it's probably a good thing that the absurdity gets tired and goes to bed at some point, because there's a point  - somewhere in that story I just quoted - at which it starts to make a fool of itself.  I'm no fan of ossified institutionalism, especially in religious traditions that are supposed to be about compassion and humility.  But I'm also no fan of nonsensicality and claims to have gotten beyond rationality once and for all - the perennial excuse for bad philosophy, or just run-of-the-mill sloppy thinking.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not the kind of rationalist who thinks that reason can explain everything and is universally applicable to every situation life throws at us.  I'm also not so ignorant as to believe that humans are entirely rational creatures - our minds are indeed like icebergs, with the rational tip distracting us from darker masses below the surface.  But I also think that there's a difference between admitting that there are certain situations that rational thought doesn't enter into - falling in love, say - and claiming that such situations trump, disqualify, or defeat rationality in all its forms.  Zen koans, just like faith, may bypass rationality or transcend it, but to say that they preclude or discredit it is going too far.  Indeed, to say that is to fall foul of some well-known philosophical traps.  All of these traps are set by irrationalists themselves when they go to the extreme of saying that nothing makes sense.

If nothing makes sense, neither does the proposition, 'Nothing makes sense', in which case nobody has any reason to believe it; indeed, it has no meaning at all.  Socrates skewered Parmenides by wondering whether his claim that all truths are relative was itself relative.  If it was, Socrates had no reason to go along with it; if it wasn't, the claim provided a counter-example to itself.  The logical positivists declared that all meaningful sentences had to be testable or analytic; but since 'All meaningful sentences have to be testable or analytic' turned out to be neither testable or analytic, it couldn't be meaningful.  And if all the thoughts and stories in your head - as Zen seems to suggest - are equally meaningless, then so are thoughts about Zen and the thoughts of Zen.  Of course, that is a conclusion that most Zen masters would willingly accept, but it leaves them in a dangerous place, where anything can be said because everything is equally senseless.

And that seems to bring Zen perilously close to nihilism, an association that Suzuki is eager to fend off. It's true, he says, that Zen declares that everything is empty, but what emerges when that is realized is joy in the present moment.  But isn't joy in the present moment empty too, bringing us back to nihilism?  Zen sets up an emptiness vortex that it's difficult for Buddhism to escape.  Maybe it's just that I'm skeptical that compassion is really what does emerge when people are convinced that anything goes - maybe what more often emerges is the domination of the less by the more bold, of the more by the less scrupulous.  Which is why my confirmation got me thinking about whether I'm really a Zen person rather than an ordinary old Buddhist.  After all, though Theravada belief is radical enough - it denies the existence of stable individual identities, for instance - it is understandable and coherent.  If you get the feeling that the bridge is flowing under you rather the water, maybe it's time to go back to the four noble truths.

On the lawpath

 
'What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind'.  So begins the Dhammapada, the third-century BC compilation of aphorisms traditionally attributed to the Buddha himself which is generally recognized as one of the most important Pali scriptures.  When I first started meditating, I had little interest in reading ancient Buddhist texts, and what interest I had was mediated through my knowledge of Latin and Greek, later descendents of the ancient Indian languages Sanskrit and Pali.  When I got involved with a Zen group in a lay lineage, this evasion of texts - unusual for me, a professional classicist - became even more pronounced.  Even though we worked regularly with koans spoken into the room, the emphasis on the direct apprehension of the real drove me to the cushion, not to the library.

Now that I'm in the process of taking refuge (a sort of Buddhist confirmation), I've decided that I need to open my eyes a bit and explore what it is that I'm getting into.  This is the case even though I was drawn into Buddhism not because I found its philosophical system noticeably more sound than others I'd encountered, but because I found the practice of meditation helpful.  Deciding what to read, and what to read first, has been difficult.  In contrast to Judaism or Christianity, Buddhism has no single holy text that stands unchallenged at the top of a hierarchy of sacred or inspired works in the way that the Torah and the Gospel (and the Old and New Testaments) are ranked above the Talmud and the Church Fathers, or Maimonides and Augustine.  And the canon of Buddhist sacred texts is large: besides the Pali scriptures - more than ten times longer than the Bible on their own - are the large number of other writings in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan.

Fortunately, my choice is limited to the books I can borrow for free from the 'wine-box of wisdom' at Wind in Grass Sangha and from the library at the interfaith center at Stanford.  (I could turn to academic libraries, but that would feel too much like work.)  After skimming the titles once or twice I settled on the Dhammpada, in a slim Penguin volume translated and introduced by Juan Mascaró, the Mallorcan polymath who has the unusual distinction of having translated several works from one of his non-native languages into another.  The Dhammapada seemed to fit the bill: it looked venerable, authoritative, and old - and when it comes to figuring out traditions, the very beginning is often a very good place to start.  It also looked short, and at this stage of my pratice and my career I have no interest in wading through endless sutras, nikayas, pitakas, or any other sorts of basket.

The most striking - though hardly surprising - feature of the Dhammapada for someone engaged in modern lay practice is that its focus is rather starkly on monks and hermits, full-time mendicant holy-men, and not at all on working people who meditate in their spare time.  It may even seem as times as if monks alone are capable of achieving nibbana (the Pali version of nirvana): 'Few cross the river of time and are able to reach nirvana: most of them run up and down only on this side of the river'.  Connected to this foregrounding of professional meditators is an acceptance that the path of spiritual development is difficult and that it has many discrete steps.  There is nothing here of the Zen insistence that the practitioner is already perfect, already a Buddha.  And this, of course, is one of the main differences between the orthodox Theravada philosophy of the Dhammapada and the reformist Mahayana perspectives of most of the people I sit with in San Francisco.

But to stop here would be to give this ancient work short shrift.  Its chief merit is the lucid simplicity of its verses.  Some would no doubt complain that it sometimes verges on simple-mindedness, but it more often transcends doctrinaire Buddhism in apothegms that would seem equally true in any tradition.  Mascaró in his introduction juxtaposes its verses with choice passages from the Spanish mystics, especially Teresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz.  Such games of syncretism - like that played by Aldous Huxley in his Perennial Philosophy - are easy and pleasant enough to play, though it must cross our minds that in such vast and complex traditions, one can find what one likes, and therefore write whatever narrative one likes too.  Nonetheless, there is such a thing as truth that never dies.  'Hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love.  This is a law eternal.'

The fall of tortoises

Zen Buddhism advises you to step off the 100-foot high pole, but though last week's post was a cliffhanger, I won't walk off that particular cliff until next week.  This week I prefer to talk about a Japanese man who pretended to be a cat.  But wait!  I can explain, though not entirely.  My sister lived in Japan for four years (and now she has lived in Korea for the same amount of time - you can read her blog about it to the right of this post).  During the whole time she lived in that fascinating country, I never visited her once.  Japan, you see, is far away, and in any case I was more interested in traveling to Italy back then.  I also never knew that I'd become interested in Zen; not to imply that Zen has anything to do with Japan, but you know what I mean.  Despite my never visiting her, she did send me innumerable postcards and also give me a number of Japanese novels for Christmas.  I've read one of them now, I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume (in translation!), and I thought I'd tell you about it.

I am a Cat is narrated by - you guessed it - a cat.  Soseki originally wrote only a single short-story employing that particular narrative technique, but when readers whined for more he ended up expanding the story into a full-length novel.  The novel shows the strain of having to stretch out such a simple idea over hundreds of pages: soon enough, the focus shifts away from the cat and his thoughts to the lives and conversations of the characters the cat is constantly watching.  The main character is Sneaze, the cat's 'master' (though we know who is really charge).  A bumbling schoolmaster, he enjoys frequent visits by his friends, Waverhouse, a cynical free-thinker, Coldmoon, a young scholar, and Singleman, a Zen practitioner.  The novel has not one plot but several, as various fads and schemes pass into Sneaze's consciousness and - not too long aftwerwards - out of it.  It is written in a light, whimsical, and thoroughly English style, reminiscent of nothing so much as P.G. Wodehouse. 

Soseki's novel is not Zen scripture in the sense of the Diamond Sutra, nor Zen literature in the sense of the Blue Cliff Record, nor even a Zen book like Bring me the Rhinoceros.  But it does arguably get to the essence of Zen in a fairly direct way, partly simply by swapping the heroic narrator Western readers have been used to since Conrad for an ordinary domestic cat.  But the cat also makes statements that could pass as pithy summaries of the Zen approach to things: hearing humans muttering about how life would be so much easier as a cat, he observes that 'if they really want their lives to be nice and easy, it's already in their own good power to make them so.  Nothing stands in their way.'  There are also occasional references to Zen institutions and traditions, often lightly mocking, such as the story about His Ineffable Holiness the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng, who discovered that placing one's buttocks on a cold stone was a reliable corrective for rushes of blood to the head.

But a more serious case for Zen is made in a long speech in which Singleman tries to convince his friend Sneaze that however hard you try to fix things, new problems will always arise.  'For the real issue', he goes on, 'the problem in your mind, remains unsettled, however hard you wrestle it around, until your dying day...Nobody, however mighty, can do as he likes with the world.  None can stop the sun from setting, none reverse the flow of rivers.  But any man is able to do as he likes with his own mind.'  Hence the importance, says Singleman, of a systematic program for developing control of the mind, and that is what Zen offers.  He ends by quoting a stirring quartet supposedly composed ex tempore by Sogan, a 13th century Chinese master, when faced with decapitation by a Mongol swordsman, which ends with the defiant declaration 'One is not awed/ by threats of such a blowless blow'.  (The Mongol swordsman was apparently so disconcerted that he dropped his sword and fled.)

Singleman's comments are predicated on a distinction between Western 'positivism' and Japanese quietism: 'The progressive positivism of Western civilization has certainly produced some notable results, but, in the end, it is no more than a civilization of the inherently dissatisfied.  The traditional civilization of Japan does not look for satisfaction by some change in the condition of others but in that of the self.'  Placed in that light (and described in that manner) the traditional Japanese way certainly looks attractive, but Western readers may want to reassess their initial reaction after reading one of Singleman's examples: you may, he says 'live under an oligarchic government which you dislike so much that you replace it with a parliamentary democracy', but changing it will do no good.  After a century of Japanese history, this doesn't just look flaky: its falseness has been demonstrated by events.

But it would be misleading to present Singleman's views as if they were straightforwardly those of Soseki, who later on exposes his Zen character to considerable mockery at the hands of Waverhouse.  Waverhouse even claims that Singleman's Zen proselytizing has driven people insane.  One man, he says, 'went to the Zen center at Kamakura [where my teacher David Weinstein studied] and there became a lunatic'.  Another, with a tendency to gluttony, began mixing up his koans and his meals, and 'on one occasion, he informed me somewhat ponderously that beef cutlets might soon be coming to roost in my pine trees'.  Some of Singleman's own statements don't even require outside ridicule: when asked how to practice Zen, he replies: 'There's really nothing to learn.  Just concentrate, as all the Zen masters advise, on the pure, white cow which stands there in the alley.'

But however much institutionalized Zen is - quite rightly - pilloried in the novel, the cat often returns to the essential teachings.  'The proper study of mankind is self', he reflects at one point.  'The heavens, earth, the mountains and the rivers, sun and moon and stars - they are all no more than other names for the self.  There is nothing a man can study which is not, in the end, the study of the self.  If a man could jump out of his self that self would disappear at the moment of his jumping.'  And he tells a story (if this isn't a koan, what is?) about how the playwright Aeschylus thought so much that his hair fell out, at which point he was killed by a passing eagle who decided to try to smash open a tortoise's shell by dropping it on the Greek's shiny pate, which it had mistaken for a stone.  There is no finer use of the Classics than this little anecdote; and no finer admonition about the dangers of thinking too much.

Mr. Propter's koans

It's been some weeks since I told you about my real self, so I thought it might be about time that I told you about my fake self as well.  It is was when I was (really) living in Italy that I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Propter.  He was in a novel called After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley (pictured - no, not there).  I'd read some of Huxley's earlier novels, mordantly satirical and sharply witty observations of the social life of the English upper classes, and enjoyed them well enough.  If you're careful you can detect in them the seeds of the meditative mysticism that would later reach full bloom in Island, Huxley's final novel, and that would eventually collapse into the championing of psychotropic substances in such works as The Doors of Perception.  But I don't know of a fuller or more coherent expression of Huxley's mature views on meditation, God, and much else besides, than that communicated through the speeches of the character Mr. Propter in the first part of After Many a Summer.

The novel follows the progress of Jeremy, an English historian, on his mission to the lavish mansion (modeled on Hearst Castle) of the oil-baron Jo Stoyte.  Jeremy has been employed to examine the manuscripts in the Stoyte private collection, but soon becames absorbed in the drama playing itself out among the residents of the mansion.  Pete, a young idealist, is hopelessly in love with Virginia, Stoyte's unreasonably young and desirable girlfriend, who is cheating on her wealthy lover with the house physician, the cynical and manipulative Dr. Obispo.  Down in the valley, vigilantly independent of Stoyte's money, the luxuries of his mansion, and the lure of his girls, lives Mr. Propter, a retired professor, who dedicates himself to silent contemplation and living off the land, all the while humouring Jeremy, mentoring Pete, and nudging Stoyte towards a more compassionate treatment of his workers.

We first meet Mr. Propter hitching a ride in the car that takes Jeremy to the mansion.  When we next meet him, he is sitting and watching the sun go down and meditating on koans.  Of course, that's not how Huxley describes it, but that's pretty much what's going on.  Sitting alone, he asks himself 'What is man?' and contemplates the answer given by Pierre de Bérulle, the 17th century cardinal: 'C'est un néant environné de Dieu, indigent de Dieu, capable de Dieu, et rempli de Dieu, s'il veut'.  As if that weren't enough, he then asks himself, 'What is God?' and whispers to himself the definition offered by the 13th century mystic John Tauler: 'God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working'.  Like those of any koan practitioner, his thoughts then wander from the object of meditation to thinking about other matters, in this case, how to improve the lot of Stoyte's employees.  But he soon brings them back again:

'Little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself intoa kind of effortless unattached awareness, at one intense and still, alert and passive - an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words.  But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness - what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking?  And as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself...The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality...'

Mr. Propter sets out his philosophy in a series of conversations with Jeremy, Stoyte, and above all Pete, who becomes a kind of apprentice, across three or four of the central chapters of the novel.  Fundamental to Mr. Propter's modus vivendi is a 'skeptical attitude of mind', maintained in the face of  political creeds at both ends of the spectrum, nationalism of any sort, and even organized religion.  Despite his work on behalf of exploited labourers, the only liberation worth seeking, in Mr. Propter's view, is a spiritual liberation: 'Liberation from time...Liberation from craving and revulsion.  Libration from personality'.  The end of liberation is so important that it structures Mr. Propter's ethical system, in which a good act is simply 'any act that contributes towards the liberation of those concerned in it'.  Science and art are good, bad, or simply indifferent depending on whether they aid or hinder people on the way to this over-arching end.

Once we appreciate the importance of liberation in Mr. Propter's system, it becomes easier to see why he rejects attachment or devotion to any other cause.  After all,  'scientists and artists and men devoted to what we vaguely call an ideal.  But what is an ideal?  An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspects of personality...And that's true...of every ideal except the highest, which is the ideal of liberation - liberation from personality, liberation from time and craving, liberation into union with God'.  And even among those who feel the desire to search for God, 'most find, through ignorance, only such reflections of their own self-will as the God of battles, the God of the chosen people, the Prayer-Answerer, the Saviour'.  So where might they find the real God?  Only in contemplation, 'in timelessness, in the state of pure, disinterested consciousness'.

Mr. Propter's determination to achieve spiritual liberation is accompanied by an eccentric desire to free himself from political and economic dependencies of all sorts.  He has solar cells and his own generator so that he can live off the grid; he grows his own vegetables in a greenhouse and builds his own wooden furniture in a workshop.  His explanation for all this is that he is a 'Jeffersonian democrat'.  What does democracy have to do with anything?  He answers simply, 'The more bosses, the less democracy.  But unless people can support themselves, they've got to have a boss who'll undertake to do it for them.  So the less self-support, the less democracy.'  Hence his interest in the generator, which promises to 'help to give independence to any one who desires independence'.

Unsurprisingly, Huxley's Mr. Propter is a pacifist, though his answer to the question of what we should do about Fascists ('something appropriate') is unreassuringly vague considering the year in which the novel was published (1939).  He is also, very surprisingly indeed, committed to violent revolution, although here too concrete details are disturbingly scarce.  He says only that he is willing 'to do active work on the techniques of a better system' and to 'collaborate with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demanded for its realization.'  His final comment on the topic - 'incidentally, the price, measured in human terms, is enormously high' - should be chilling to anyone who has lived to the end of the 20th century. 

So Huxley's hero is hardly an unblemished role-model for the would-be contemplative, the ardent democrat, or even for those (and there are a lot of them here in California) looking to go back to the land.  All the same, he possesses what he calls 'the most characteristic features of an enlightened person's experience', that is, 'serenity and disinterestedness'.  In him, Huxley has provided us with a portrait of someone who has worked towards 'the absence of excitement and the absence of craving' without losing any of his humanity.  And how is he going about it?  As he tells Jeremy and Pete, there is really only one way - the path of direct experience, looking at reality head on.  They can go and look at it just as they can go upstairs to look at the priceless paintings on the walls of Stoyte's mansion.  Except that in this case, 'there isn't any elevator.  You have to go up on your own legs.  And make no mistake...There's an awful lot of stairs'.

Zen cricket

You may have read the phrase 'Zen cricket' on this blog.  I had a go at explaining what Zen is in my second or third ever post; so now here's a shot at explaining cricket, prompted by someone asking me about it the other night.  Cricket is a sport played by men in white trousers with red balls (and green knees).  The pitch is a circle or ovoid of whatever spatial extent happens to be available on your local green; it may include holes, hillocks, or trees.  At the centre of the pitch is a wicket, which is a rectangle of flattened grass, and also refers very confusingly to the two wooden constructions set up at each end of the wicket: yes, at each end of the wicket (rectangle of grass) there are two wickets (wooden things).  The wooden things actually consist of three sticks called stumps and two twig-sized bobbins called bails.  If a red ball knocks the bails off the stumps while you're standing nearby with pads on your legs and a bat in your hand, you're out.

This usually happens after a chap at the other end of the wicket (grass) propels the ball towards you at high speeds.  He does not throw it; this is strictly forbidden.  Instead he must sling it down onto the wicket (grass) with a rigorously straight arm after going through what looks like an attempt at doing trikonasana (triangle pose) in the middle of a forty-yard dash.  You make runs by smacking the ball back at him as hard as you can, or by politely stopping the ball in its tracks and running away.  If you successfully abscond to the other wicket (wood), that is one run, but be careful where you hit the ball!  There are men in white trousers cunningly placed all around you at positions known as slip and gulley and silly mid-off.  A friend of mine at silly mid-off once took a ball smack in the forehead.  It left a red dot that made him look as if he'd experienced a sudden conversion to Hiduism.  He was standing about two feet away from the batsman; hence the silliness.

The first cricket match I ever played ended with 137 runs for us and 4 points for them.  It was a draw (a tie).  This is one of the central ways in which cricket is like meditation: you never really win, but then, you never really lose either.  You'll doubtless be dismayed to learn at this point (after slogging through two paragraphs) that the phrase 'Zen cricket' you've seen in this blog really has nothing to do with a fusion of Japanese spiritual rigour and English sporting eccentricity, interesting though that particular combination would no doubt be.  Instead, the Zen cricket is simply a green plastic bug that hops around from student to student as we speak our minds in the green green field of our Wind in Grass zendo.  Why then did I just give you a delightfully unhelpful description of the English sport of cricket?  Two reasons.  The first is because I've realized that Zen is the last refuge for authentic Englishness; but more on that in a later post.  The second is to introduce a post on our Zen games.

You see, one of the things I've been up to on this blog is giving you the lowdown on what we get up to at Wind in Grass.  We do something different every week of the month: so far I've covered the dharma talk, interviews with a teacher, and community night, and our Zen game nights are the only regular event left.  (Not counting what we get up to on the fifth Wednesday of months with five weeks, when all hell breaks lose, anything goes, and we meditate and walk and drink tea.)  Dharma talks and dokusan are venerable Zen and Chan traditions, and community night is our way of honouring the sangha, but how Zen games fit into the tradition is anybody's guess.  I'm told our teachers approve of our experiments (and this is partly why we like them).  But I must confess I can't really tell you what Zen games are.  I don't think Michael could either, and he runs them most nights.

We've already established on this blog that Wittgenstein was a Zen master (along with Socrates).  In the Philosophical Investigations there's a lot about games, because the word 'game' was a good example in the master's mind of how words meant: there's no essential quality that chess and tennis and manipulation share that makes them all games; rather, they're all linked to each other at different points, the way members of a family resemble each other through different features.  Our games are also like that, though like many things that change a lot they tend to have the same form every month.  After we meditate for half an hour, Michael invites us to meditate again for two or three minutes on something in particular: complaints we have, for example, or why we're here.  Then the Zen cricket does its innocent grasshoppery rounds through the tall grasses of the half-light we sit in. 

If I'd been called into construct a religious group a few years ago, the last thing I'd have done would be to put a businessman with a law degree in charge of organizing it.  And that, it turns out, would have been an enormous mistake, since one of the best things about Wind in Grass is that it's so well-organized despite all the informality, and most of that is Michael's fault.  Everbody gets to speak one at a time, for as long as the Zen bug is with them.  As Michael says, this isn't to put anybody on the spot; it's just because we want to hear what everyone has to say, and because we suspect that extroverted people don't have a monopoly on wisdom.  A- fucking -men.  People comment on what they came up for them in the experimental supplemental meditation party.  And more times than not, that somehow hands the rest of us, and them,  a shiny reflective fragment of their entire lives.

Once there was a game about complaints; I thought I would win, since I thought I had some pretty solid complaints about my life.  Naturally I was aghast when it turned out that other people were also bloody good at suffering; half of them at least had more heartbreaking misfortunes than my own, damn them.  Once there was a mind game about the Buddha; I talked about killing him, Chris told us all he did was wake up, Mick discussed his hairstyle.  Everybody said something completely different about the same bloke; it was like watching Citizen Kane.  Once Toby led a Zen game which was apparently a well-known mindfulness exercise.  Not well-known to me; she gave us raisins and I immediately asked her whether I could eat mine.  It turned out that was the game; we were meant to look at the raisin, smell it, listen to it, sense it and undress it and snort its pheromones.  At some point I'd realized I'd eaten one of mine before she'd told me I could, which I meekly confessed to later. 

I'm not sure who told us to play games like this, to conduct these trailblazing experiments, to muck about in the sandbox; but it's always a new enough joke to feel like an ancient practice.  We are all, we working young of San Francisco on winter nights, Englishmen on village greens in high summer.  Somehow we've figured out that the best way of making use of the space and time we have is to play a careful, bizarre, and elaborate game with each other.  At the centre of it is a red ball that means pain; it will hit you in the head in no time if you're silly and stand too close.  We launch it at other with stiff arms after cartwheels, swing at it wildly with bats, or wait in the outfield watching affectionately its suprising career.  Sometimes we can see it, high in the blue sky, hurtling towards us.  It looks very much like a fearful thing from underneath; but all of us are shouting out to catch it, because we know that there's nothing more joyful than to catch it in your smarting palms and to hurl it up again sky-high.

Meditation and pain

'You're going to be in pain' is the general idea of the first noble truth, usually translated grimly as 'Life is suffering'.  The other noble truths conspire to tell you what's causing the pain (being thirsty) and that there's a way out of it.  I suppose that the orthodox prescription is to adopt the ethical practices of the eightfold path, thus reducing your thirst for things and so your annoyance when you don't get them (or your disappointment when you do).  But is there any evidence that meditation itself can reduce pain?  Isn't the idea that the mind can influence the body a load of hippy shit?  And even if I think that meditation is helping my headaches, couldn't I just be wrong?

In the early days of my headaches, I tried a number of different therapies, some conventional and some less so.  I tried to get an idea through the popular press about what therapies had scientific support and what did not.  I went to various chiropractors, who would give my neck sharp twists, as if they were trying to finish me off around the wrong corner of a Steven Seagal film.  I found out that though there's a cultural bias in the research, there's a relatively good amount of evidence suggesting that acupuncture can help with one or two conditions (mainly idiopathic headaches and nausea), but it didn't work for me.  I went to an osteopath who - I could swear - could make my right arm weaker or stronger by adjusting my neck (and no, I've never been able to figure out how that worked). 

Compared to the uncertain evidence supporting many alternative therapies, studies suggesting that meditation helps reduce pain are rather numerous (though some are vitiated by a lack of proper controls).  In the 1980s Jon Kabat-Zinn conducted a series of experiments at the University of Massachusetts Medical School involving subjects in chronic pain who were invited to take part in a ten-week course in mindfulness meditation.  There was a statistically significant decrease in reported lower levels of present pain, negative body image, and pain-related depression among the patients who completed the course, and no significant improvement on any of these dimensions by members of a control group, who were given more conventional treatments such as nerve blocks, physical therapy, and antidepressants. 

More recently, a research group at the Université de Montréal compared pain tolerance in 13 Zen practitioners (with over one thousand hours of meditation each) to that of 13 non-meditators (with no or little experience of meditation).  The researchers placed heating plates on the subjects' calves, and warmed them up to between 43 and 53 degrees Celsius.  The meditators tolerated greater levels of pain in both meditative and on-meditative states.  More recently still, scientists at Wake Forest University subjected 15 people to the same level of heat before and after a course consisting of only 80 minutes of meditation, and found that the individuals reported significantly less discomfort after the training (and that the reported reduction in sensation was accompanied by differences in brain activity).

But meditation happens in the mind, while pain affects the body, so how does that work?  There are two common misconceptions here: one is about how pain works and one is about the relationship betweend mind and body.  As its happens, both misconceptions could be attributed to Descartes, although both ideas have an insidious plausibility that makes it likely that people have often come to them independently.

The first unhelpful notion is that pain is a signal that travels along a nerve from a stimulus (the tack you stepped on) to the brain (which registers the sensation); pain represents an accurate signal of damage to tissues.  Fortunately and unfortunately, things are actually more complicated than that.  In fact, there's no reliable link between how much you're hurt and how much pain you're in, as suggested on the one hand by soldiers who get their arms blown off and don't feel any pain until they're out of the combat area (lots of damage, no pain), and on the other hand by sufferers of chronic pain (lots of pain, not always much continuing damage).  The neurologists Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall drew attention to cases like these and explained them with their gate-control theory of pain, in which downward inhibitory signals from the brain (saying 'I can't take in that pain signal now because I have to protect my comrades in battle') and constantly-reinforced signals (saying 'your head must still hurt because the experience of that car-accident was so traumatic') have as much to do with what you feel as what is happening to your body.

The second unhelpful Cartesian idea is dualism, that mind and body are two separate substances.  The theory has of course been extensively debunked over the last four hundred years for a number of reasons, chief among them the philosopher's inability to give any satisfactory account of how the two separate stuffs could possibly interact with one another.  And yet the assumption that the mind can be conceived of as existing separately from its physical substrate underlies many of the thought-experiments that seem still to be in vogue (as in Hofstadter and Dennett's collection, The Mind's I).  Against this backdrop, the more of an uncompromising monist you are (believing either that everything is completely mental, like Berkeley, or that everything is entirely physical, like Hobbes), the more likely you are to comprehend how meditation has an effect on physical pain.  Meditation can reduce pain because it impacts the brain, and the idea that the neurological control-centre might have an effect on the peripheral nervous system should not be considered an outrageous one.

Sometimes I wonder whether the benefits I'm deriving from meditation are just all in my mind.  That is partly why I like to look up scientific studies, to reassure myself that all the time I'm investing in meditation isn't being wasted.  But in my better moments I realize that this is a peculiarly ridiculous kind of doubt.  The benefits of meditation are, of course, all in my mind - it's just that my mind includes my body (or, if you want, they're all in my body, which is also where the mind is).  And in any case, can I really be wrong about my own state of pain?  Pain is a subjective state, and if the relief I'm perceiving is merely subjective, that's fine with me.  In the end, whatever regions of my brain are lighting up when I meditate, and whatever neurons are firing or being generated, all that really matters for me is that sitting down on my own, without any desire to get well or change things, makes being or not being in pain not really matter so much at all.