Face to face

Recently I went out for a drink with a friend who worries a lot about money.  She worries so much, in fact, that she told me she'll only feel financially secure when she has about $80 000 dollars in savings.  I said, 'Do you know that passage in the Bible?'  (That's not something I say very often.)  'The bit about the lilies in the field?'  I've sat through a lot of church services in my time.

'Look at the birds in the air', the passage runs.  'They do not sow or reap and store in barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them...Consider how the lilies grow in the fields; they do not work, they do not spin; and yet, I tell you, even Solomon in all his splendour was not attired like one of these...So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself'.

It's not great financial advice.  All the same, there's something true and valuable about the main idea it expresses: we constantly fall into the habit of worrying how we'll survive, and yet somehow usually do.  (Except when we don't, in which case there's really nothing to worry about).  In case you're wondering, the lines are spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, the 1st-century CE religious leader.  (And the lines are at Matthew 6.19-34.) 

That's a strange way of introducing him, of course, because most people know who he is.  All the same, it's often useful to look at things that are familiar to us as if we were considering them for the first time.  That was partly what led me to read through the whole of the Bible over the last three years.  I've already written about the Old Testament, and now I've finished the New Testament too.

I thought the Old Testament was mostly really bad, in both the moral and aesthetic senses.  Since I wrote about it, a few people have told me that I should have read it with a scholarly commentary or companion.  And there's no doubt I would have gained a better knowledge of the text that way.  But I didn't have time to do that.  I also thought it might be interesting just to read the thing and see what struck me about it.

The New Testament is a lot better than the Old Testament, in both the aesthetic and moral senses.  For a start, it's much shorter, taking up around 300 pages of my 1000-page Bible.  It tells a coherent story, running from Jesus' life, through the early history of the movement he founded, to the writings of one of that movement's early leaders, Paul.  It's a bit repetitive, but it's not a bad thing for historians that it includes four different versions of Jesus' life.

Jesus is a pretty nice guy, and his teachings have a lot of good in them.  He thinks the peacemakers are blessed, wants us to love our enemies, and claims religion boils down to loving God and loving your neighbour.  What he says at Luke 6.28-9 neatly encapsulates this side of Jesus: 'Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you.'

Jesus is also something of a revolutionary.  Often this is a good thing: Jesus is impatient with pointless rules, and tells a rich man to sell all he owns and give his money to the poor.  Sometimes, though, he can be a little unsettling.  'You must not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth', he says, strangely enough, at Matthew 10.34-6.  'I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a son's wife against her mother-in-law'.

In other words, he is complex.  Despite all his talk of love and forgiveness, he occasionally loses it and talks about how sinners will be flung by angels into a burning furnace, 'the place of wailing and grinding of teeth' (Matthew 13.47-50).  He also believes that he is the Messiah and the son of God. 

But we are now in the murky territory of things the gospels attribute to Jesus, but which he might never have claimed to be true.  All the gospels say that he was a miracle-worker, for example, and that he rose from the dead. 

One element of his teaching that emerges clearly is his belief that the world will end sooner rather than later.  To be precise, he believes that the world will end in the lifetime of some of his disciples.  As he says to them, 'There are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they have seen the kingdom of God already come in power' (Mark 9.1).

That was what struck me about Jesus as described by the gospels.  He's a religious leader with his heart in the right place but who also has a vengeful streak and who believes he's the son of God.  His followers for whatever reason were inclined to attribute miracles to him.  Finally, he explicitly predicts on several occasions that the world will end within the next century at the latest.

That looks like an example of a falsifiable claim that was falsified, but that didn't stop the early Christians.  The Acts of the Apostles were for me the most unfamiliar and surprising part of the New Testament. 

On the one hand, they're heartening, the story of the survival and growth of a tiny sect in the teeth of violent repression.  The early Christians are simple folk, and live in a kind of commune: 'Not a man of them claimed any of his possessions as his own, but everything was held in common' (4.32).

On the other hand, they can seem like a cult that comes under the increasing control of a violent and unscrupulous leadership.  Peter kills two dissidents by miraculous agency (5.5-10), and claims the privilege of passing on God's word through the laying on of hands - a monoply he vigilantly protects (8.18-25).

Once we get to Paul, things have normalized somewhat.  The Paul whose words we read in the letters is clearly the head of an organization, who is giving instructions to subordinates.  At the same time, his advice is often wise, and always well expressed.  The influence of Greek literature on his paradoxical prose style is noticeable; this is an educated man, learned and literate.

A lot of the highlighs I was read as a child were written by Paul, including the famous passage on charity (or love, depending on the translation: Cor. 13.1-14).  He tells us that we brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out of it.  He reminds us that we reap what we sow.  He encourages us to be humble, helpful, and cheerful.  In the best tradition of his master, he assures us that 'He who loves his neighbour has satisfied every claim of the law' (Rom. 13.8).

In Paul's writings there is no trace of Jesus the revolutionary.  Instead, Christianity emerges partly as a way of being stable and dependable.  As he says, you are free to do anything - but not everything is for your good, including extra-marital sex (Cor. 6-12-20).  Members of the Christian community should be honest and upright and religious teachers should lead especially blameless lives. 

Paul's moralizing often spills over into condemnations.  Women were made from men, and therfore should be subordinate; a woman preaching a sermon is an abomination; in fact, women should just be quiet (Cor. 11.8-9; 14.35; Tim. 2.12).  Homosexuality is unnatural and will be punished (Rom. 1.26-7).  All of these judgments are extremely clear in the text. 

Those were my main impressions of the New Testament.  (Revelations is just batshit.)  What conclusions do I draw from my reading of it?  That Jesus meant well and was a charismatic leader but was probably delusional; that his followers very quickly clouded his life with stories about miracles; and that Christianity had both good and bad in it from the very beginning.  I won't try to substantiate those judgments further; they're simply what I concluded after reading the Bible.

I was raised as a Christian, both at home and at school.  Am I still a Christian?  Culturally, yes: I still celebrate Christmas, have an understanding for Christian mythology, and am often moved by Christian art.  I can't imagine being married or buried without some sort of Christian ceremony. 

I also think that there is a lot in the New Testament that makes sense and is ethically valuable.  It's just that I don't see why you need to believe the miraculous portions of the text to value kindness and humility.  I also don't think that we should cling to every word of a book that advises us to punish homosexuals and prevent women from having a voice. 

This is part of the reason I practice Buddhist meditation.  It's true that the more Buddhist scriptures I read, the more offended I am by their nonsensicality and superstition.  But none of the Buddhist scriptures has quite the status or authority of the Bible; there are scriptures, but not one Holy Bible.

It's an interesting historical question how this came to pass.  And an important one, too.  It might explain why nobody (at least in the West) has ever told me that I have to believe anything at all about the Buddha's life, while most Christians would still say that believing in the resurrection defines them.  It might explain how I can (at least in California) be a Buddhist without being a Buddhist.  And why, until Christians stop being Christians, I can't be one too. 

Game of lives

This Christmas holiday, besides reading the Diamond and Heart sutras, I also finished reading Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.  Hesse was a German (later Swiss) writer who was deeply influenced by Eastern mysticism.  He traveled to India and Sri Lanka, practiced meditation, and wrote a novel called Siddhartha based on the life of the Buddha.  The Glass Bead Game, his last novel and his greatest, is profoundly marked by Buddhist themes and perspectives.

The novel takes the form of a biography, written in the distant future, of one Joseph Knecht (whose life is in the narrator's past but the reader's future).  Knecht's life plays itself out in the utopian realm of Castalia, a 'pedagogic province' that has been set up to protect and foster learning and the arts after a period of warfare.  The most promising pupils in every school in the land are sent away to Castalia, where they receive an extensive and varied education before joining the order of scholar-monks.  Joseph Knecht is among them.

The scholar-monks of Castalia spend their time engaged in the study of literature, history, languages, physics, mathematics, and music (they are especially keen on these last two).  They are also devoted to meditation.  But the activity they value most highly is one they invented themselves: the glass bead game.  This is a sort of game that is also a public performance, in which the artistic and scientific productions of the past are condensed and translated into an array of glass beads that provide unsurpassed material for contemplation.

The narrative follows Knecht's progress from diffident pupil to magister ludi, the Master of the Game and one of the chief officers in the Castalian elite.  It also describes the master's eventual decision to leave the order to dedicate himself to teaching in the outside world.  Since the hero of the novel ultimately repudiates Castalia, it might seem that we are being led to mistrust, rather than encouraged to realize, the ideal which the province represents.  But a number of elements in the novel conspire to ensure that our view of Castalia cannot be entirely negative.

The narratives of two characters in particular make the case for the defense.  The first is the Music Master, the high-ranking yet humble official who first discovers Joseph Knecht's promise as a boy.  In his old age, the Music Master attains a sort of enlightenment - described in the most orthodox Buddhist terms, yet without dogmatism or pretentiousness.  The second character is Plinio Designori, a politician who had some experience of Castalia as a boy, but left it to return to the workaday world.  Overwhelmed with anxiety, he exemplifies all the harm the world can do, and thus (by implication) showcases the real value of contemplative repose.  

The message of the novel is perhaps that meditation and learning are fine (even indispensable) things, but that they need to be put to the service of others to have any value.  This is the point of minor characters such as Elder Brother, a sinologist whose reclusiveness comes ultimately to seem selfish, and Father Jacobus, the Benedictine monk who criticizes the Castalian order for not submitting itself to a guiding deity.  This is also the point of Knecht's final renunciation of the Castalian way of life.

If the novel has a weakness, it is in the final part of the narrative of Knecht's life, when he returns to the world to teach but dies soon after.  Hesse clearly wanted to make Knecht into a Christlike figure (he dies while trying to engage with a pupil by swimming across a lake with him), but I would have liked to see evidence of a more genuine educational contribution to a larger number of students (his one pupil is the privileged son of Plinio Designori).

If this is a weakness, it is quickly compensated for in the novel's final section, a collection of three stories that were supposedly written by Knecht as school exercises but which Hesse originally wrote as previous incarnations of the novel's hero.  The first story imagines Knecht as a rainmaker in a primitive village who eventually sacrifices himself to the weather gods to appease his people.  The second reintroduces him as Josephus Famulus, an early Christian ascetic who serves others by hearing their sins and forgiving them.  The last and longest of the three stories is set in ancient India.

This last life tells the story of Dasa, a prince who is raised as a shepherd, ignorant of his true pedigree, because of palace intrigues.  In this brief narrative, Dasa gains a kingdom and loses it, gains a wife and loses her, fathers a son and loses him.  In the background is Dasa's growing relationship with a holy man who sits in silent meditation in the forest.  At the end of the story is a Borges-style twist that forces us to reevaluate what is actual and what is illusory.

The interest of the final three tales lies not only in the number of fine passages that they contain, but in the question of their relationship to the main narrative of Knecht, the supremely sophisticated master of a future artform.  All of the stories show some appreciation for learning, while making clear that true attainment comes only with service.  They also suggest that a form of devotion that combines deep contemplation and useful action can provide a refuge, perhaps even a release, from the turbulent trajectories of our lives.

I was disappointed with the Diamond and Heart sutras partly because in their dry intellectualism they failed to provide an appealing picture of what a good life looks like.  This is precisely what The Glass Bead Game is ultimately all about - ironically, the abstruse intellectual exercise of its title is eventually displaced from the center of our attention.  In the lives of Knecht, Famulus, and (especially) Dasa, we find as attractive and as vivacious a presentation of the central tenets of classical Buddhism as I have seen anywhere.

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.

Black widows

Mind training in seven stages, stone scorpions moving up the river, green female superheroes hovering above my head: these are the main things I think of when it comes to the Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies on Webster Street at Oak in the Lower Haight.  After a few months of going to the SF Zen Center every Saturday I decided it was time to check out something in the Tibetan tradition, and I'd come across this place online.  It's just up the street from me, but it's hard to tell that it's a Buddhist center from outside.  What you see is just a largish San Francisco house, although once or twice I've stumbled across red-robed lamas when I've set off for runs in Golden Gate Park.  Once you climb up the long stone staircase, you know you're entering a place of peace: there are potted plants and flowers all the way up, and a stone statue of the Buddha at the top.  It's like the memorial staircase leading up to chapel at my boarding school: before evensong there were candles on either side.  You had to keep silence, and if you didn't your friends would punch you on the arm.

The first time I went in I'd decided to show up for their Saturday morning, 9am meditation session, which is supposed to be welcoming to newcomers and seems to serve the same purpose as the 'Introduction to Zazen' period at SFZC.  There was a determinedly kindly man with hippy jewelry and a pony tail who let me in.  To the left there was a bookstore full of yellow and orange volumes about tantra by lamas called Rinpoche; there were also some large metal containers with tea and coffee.  To the right of the entrance was the main part of the temple.  At the far end of the smallish room was the kind of ritual paraphernalia I'd last seen at the Tibetan place I'd once frequented in London.  There were seven glasses of water on the altar.  There were statuettes of lamas with saffroned hats that made them look like they were portaging with bright yellow canoes.  There were framed potraits of real lamas grinning piously and looking nice.  On the walls were tapestries full of strange deities of various colours and shapes and sizes.

That first morning I happened to be the only person to show up for meditation, along with the man who was leading the session, a gentle middle-aged guy with glasses.  We sat in silence for half an hour, and then for the next half-hour he read me the scripture the center had been working with for a few months, the Seven-Point Mind Training.  The text as we have it was composed in the 12th century by Geshe Chekhawa, but the tradition was inaugurated by Atisa some three hundred years earlier.  The Seven-Point Mind Training is not so much mind training and a set of ethical principles and pieces of advice on meditation practice; also, it has 59 points, though these are grouped into seven sections.  These include genuinely helpful reminders ('Don't expect gratitude'), sensible but rather obvious reccommendations ('Don't eat poisonous food'), haunting but hard-to-interpret aphorisms ('Don't make gods into demons'), and bizarre proverbs ('Don't transfer an ox's load to a cow').  My favourite was 'Don't make sarcastic remarks'.  Yeah, that's really going to work.

The following week I went on Sunday morning for the 10am dharma talk by the resident lama, Ngawang Dakpa.  This time the room was full of extremely earnest Western students, most of the sitting cross-legged on cushions, wearing beads on their wrists, and taking notes in notebooks.  Dakpa sat cross-legged on a raised platform at the front and began the session by chanting a series of Tibetan sutras in a guttural voice at an unfollowable pace.  The Western students did their best to keep up, mumbling the weird syllables printed in their liturgical handbooks.  The actual sermon was also in Tibetan, and was translated into English sentence by sentence by a thin white-haired Englishman sitting nearby (with occasional input from a very young Tibetan monk who seemed to have a better grasp of English than his elderly teacher).  In my limited experience of Tibetan Buddhism it has always struck me that native Tibetans still seem to have a monopoly on teaching; I haven't come across senior American teachers in this school to compare with the convert masters at SFZC or PZI.

Partly because of this, I've always found that the cultural distance between the Tibetan teacher and the Western followers is often very great, even if the Western students have spent some time in Tibet.  To the newcomer, the experience of trying to piece together what a lama is saying from a simultaneous translation is often nothing short of bewildering.  Dakpa gave level-headed advice based on the Seven-Point Mind Training, but also enlivened his points with anecdotes from his youth (for example, the story of a monk who gave away all his possessions, only to have a change of heart soon afterwards and go around asking for them all back).  At one point there was a story about a monk with evil thoughts who encountered a scorption underneath a stone.  Here the translator looked puzzled, and the younger monk intervened.  It was actually not a live scorpion, but a stone one.  Everyone looked very relieved that the matter had been cleared up, so Dakpa went on to tell us how the stone scorpion travelled every year a few meters up the river, towards the stupa with the miniature stupa inside it.

Confused?  I was.  I was also surprised that there had been no formal meditation as part of the morning's service.  So I went back two weeks later to the Saturday morning meditation.  This time it was led by a different person, a younger man called Scott wearing an T-shirt advertising Iceland.  He led us in the kind of visualisation exercise that I tend to think of as typical of Tibetan practices and that I'd come to the center partly to explore.  After the usual calming preliminaries (easing tension in the body, watching the breath), Scott invited us to visualize green Tara, a deity that was pictured on one of the tapestries hanging on the wall.  She was a princess, sitting cross-legged; she had silver bracelets on her wrists, a crown on her head, and a large blue flower in her hand.  On her face was an expression of serenity and compassion.  Her body was green but immaterial, and she was floating right above our heads like a green light.  We were invited to identify our mind with hers, and both of these minds with the minds of our personal teachers.

This was probably the most complex (and, frankly, trippy) meditation practice I'd experienced, so it's not surprising that I found it strange and difficult.  I noticed a resistance within me to meditating on my teacher as if he were an object of religious devotion; I felt a resistance to visualizing a deity (although Scott said it was fine to see her as an archetype rather than an actually existing spirit).  Above all, there was something that was just a bit Star Trek about a beautiful green woman.  Beautiful?  Well, I have to admit that when I was asked to visualize a woman, my mind immediately started visualizing a sexy woman.  Since I'd just seen a trailer for the new Avengers movie, green Tara in her regal attire started out looking uncannily like Scarlett Johansson in a one-piece leather outfit.  Then when we were reminded that G.T. symbolized active social virtues, she began to look a bit like my girlfriend, who does a lot of volunteering.  Then we were supposed to integrate our personal teachers, so that green Tara - an alien avenger version of my girlfriend - started to take on some of the features of my teacher David, who is a man in his fifties with a white goatee.

All of this was very confusing, so I asked about it at the end of the session, half wondering if the instructor would be shocked by the places my mind had gone and cast me out on my green-woman-fancying ear.  In fact he said that this was a very common reaction, and not at all to be discouraged, as long as the practioner was able to use the momentum of his natural desire for a greater enthusiasm for the practice.  He said that human desire is actually welcomed in the Tantric traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, and that the Gelugpa school he was a part of sought to unite the Tantra and Sutra traditions.  The danger was that students would misinterpret the advice and let themselves go, so that meditation turned into sexual fantasy, and an esoteric practice of liberation into a familiar habit of dependency.  In this way, he said, Tantra was like walking a razor's edge between not using the energies you have natrually arising within you, and being wholly directed by those tendencies.  I wasn't too worried: David did recently tell me that when he visualized Guanyin the image that most came to mind was Alfred E. Neuman, so I took my experience in that spirit.

When I came out of the center and walked down the steps I noticed that the guy with the pony tail seemed to be holding a garage-sale.  I asked him about it, and he told me that they were getting rid of all the stuff they didn't need for their impending move.  Move?  It turns out that the Tse Chen Ling Center will only be at its current location only for a couple more months.  Where are they moving to?  They're not sure, but they are looking for a smaller place, in the city, with good links to public transportation.  It sounds like they have the resources to move, but haven't yet been able to confirm a new location.  They'll need quite the moving van for all their ritual objects.  In the meantime, they're there every weekend.  Go up the stairs past the flowers and pass the stone Buddha, who may or may not be a scorpion mounting an aggressive (yet very slow) takeover against a stupa inside a stupa.  Inside there are tapestries of kick-ass green superheroines, who will dance right above your head if you will only sit still and be quiet.  Because, you see, though it might look like there are 59 stages to Mind Training, there are really only seven, and they are all right here.  

A testament

Around the time that I was becoming aware that I was going to become deeply involved in Zen Buddhism, I decided to start reading the Bible.  Not its greatest hits, not passages I could remember from chapel at school, but the whole damn thing from beginning to end (in translation, admittedly).  I figured that if I read a book a weekend, I could be done in about a year.  Why did I decide to do this?  A range of reasons.  I had a copy of the book at home, and don't have enough money to buy new books (especially Buddhist books, which are always pricey).  It's undoubtedly one of the classics of world culture, so I thought I should have some familiarity with it.  It might teach me more about the ancient societies of the Near East and so help me put my own work on classical Greece into perspective.  Finally, I was expecting it to be, if not the good book, at least a good book, full of memorable tales, powerful phrases, and ageless wisdom.

It's been about a year and a half, and I've now finished reading through the whole of the Old Testament, so I thought I'd tell you how it went.  To sum up, the Old Testament is rubbish.  More precisely, it is terrible, since 'rubbish' captures the wearying incompetence but fails to communicate the active maliciousness radiating from many of its pages.  I remember reading a quotation to the effect that the God of the Old Testament was the most unpleasant character in any work of world literature.  It struck me at the time as the sort of exaggeratedly aggressive claim made by atheists with an axe to grind.  But after reading through the whole book, I must say that it strikes me as true.  Yahweh hates everyone but his chosen people, and takes a childish joy in annihilating his enemies.  He wreaks horrible revenge even on his own people for petty transgressions of his pathologically fussy law, killing people for collecting firewood on the Sabbath, for example.

There are a few passages in the Old Testament that unambiguously condemn homsexuality (like Leviticus 18:23).  There are many more which are clearly misogynistic (like Leviticus 12:1-6, in which a woman is said to be twice as unclean after giving birth to a daughter than to a son).  Granted, most ancient societies were misogynistic (though the Greeks rarely had problems with homosexuality), so perhaps we should judge the people of the Old Testament by the old standards of their time.  But even in this perspective, they and their God seem peculiarly vicious, for example in several times putting to death everyone, without exception, in the cities they conquer (Deut. 2:34; the Greeks tended to kill all the men and let the women and children live on as slaves).  Among all the sacred slaughter and self-righteous hatred, a few episodes of bizarre cruelty distinguish themselves by their sheer randomness, like David's wedding-gift to Saul of two hundred freshly plucked Philistine foreskins (1 Samuel 18:27).

But the problem is not only that the people and God the Old Testament describes are pathological, but also that for the most part the Old Testament simply does not work as literature, let alone as transcendent revelation.  It is incoherent, patchy, and all in all shabbily written.  Why does the Lord put a mark on Cain, 'in order that anyone meeting him should not kill him', (Genesis 4:16) when there is nobody else around on earth yet?  Why do we need to know, in the midst of one of the interminable lists of names that the Old Testament goes in for, that 'this is the Anah who found some mules in the wilderness while he was tending the asses of his father Zibeon' (Gen. 36:26)?  Even as ancient history, the Old Testament does not really work: its ideological biases are painfully obvious, it jumps around between equally repetitive accounts of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and written as it is from the often confused and inevitably parrochial Jewish perspective, it fails to give any clear idea of what exactly is going on.  Jerusalem is often taken, but it is usually hard to know who has taken it.

I should make clear at this point that I don't write any of this with pleasure.  I have an interest in religious syncretism, and am attracted to the idea that all the great religions say more or less the same thing once we look beyond the particular words in which they are saying it.  So I was hoping that the Old Testament would help me relate the Christianity of my youth to the Buddhism that's become my daily practice.  But there's no use mincing words or shrinking away from my own impressions: the Old Testament is on the whole a boring, confused, and evil book, and the less time you spend with it the better.  This is doubly disappointing to me because there are so many Jews in Buddhist groups in San Francisco who keep up a dual practice in the temple and the synagogue and who build bridges between monotheistic and atheistic religions (like Tova Green at SFZC).  I am forced to believe that the modern Jews I know who are open-minded and generous have become that way not because of their sacred text but in spite of it. 

I also want to add that I haven't posted this in a spirit of religious one-upmanship.  I haven't had time to read through many of the ancient Buddhist scriptures, but I have no doubt that they contain an equal or greater amount of inconsistency, randomness, and sheer nonsense as their Jewish counterpart (partly, admittedly, because they are so much longer).  I doubt that they contain quite as much malicious war-mongering, but I'm well aware that Buddhist societies have inflicted their fair share of that all-too human brand of suffering.  Nonetheless, I would notice here that the undisputed centrality of the Old Testament (or at least the Torah or the Pentateuch) means that its deficiencies drag down Judaism with it to a much greater degree than any specific sutra can ever drag down Buddhism.  It may not be fair, but Buddhism's lack of a stable hierarchy of texts allows it to slip out of accusations against any single passage.  Judaism doesn't have that luxury; and nor does Christianity.  But that is for another day, and another post.

I should end with some exceptions to what I have said above.  There are a few books of the Old Testament which are readable (Ruth), exciting (Daniel), or even profound (Job).  But the most spectacular exception of all is Ecclesiastes, a 3rd-century BC treatise traditionally attributed to Solomon.  If I had any rabbinical authority (I don't unfortunately - can you tell?), I would reccommend tearing out all the other books of the Old Testament and letting this book stand on its own.  'Emptiness, emptiness, all is empty' it begins, like the Bodhidarma in the first koan in the Book of Serenity.  'The end of all man's toil is but to fill his belly, yet his appetite is never satisfied' it goes on, like the Buddha in the Dhammapada.  It continues: 'Better one hand full and peace of mind, than both fists full and toil that is chasing the wind'.  Solomon reccommends hard work and feasting as the only real response to the all pervading emptiness, not meditation and oryoki, but it is hard not to see in his brief letter the very spirit of Zen. 

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.'