Growth

Ah, Saturdays in Brooklyn - I'm going to miss you! Today I went from the farmer's market (where I made a contribution to "textile recycling") to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Expecting (actually dreading) the uniform green of summer I was delighted to find blooming rosebay (a rhododendron native to the eastern North America), irises, mountain laurel, extravagances of little roses and the splendid red display below. From there it was on to the Brooklyn Museum for coffee, a glimpse of Clarissa Dalloday (a Woolfian riposte to Bloomsday), and a stroll through the wonderful American collection. Nice neighborhood I live in!

This was braided with work on an essay I'm finishing on teaching comparative religious ethics. It's based on my AAR paper last year  - our panel on teachingreligious ethics is becoming a special section in a journal! Somewhat awkwardly, though, I find my thinking has changed.

The paper
is called "Wider Moral Communities," but about "Exploring Religious Ethics," which traversing Buddhist and Christian traditions. Yet because of "Buddhism and Modern Thought," along with the enduring questions of "Buddhism and Liberal Arts," my understanding of Buddhist ethics has deepened. Hsiao-Lan Hu's account of anattā (non-Self) as the flip-side of pratītya samutpāda (interdependent co-arising) is central to the change, I think. Will I incorporate this new understanding in the paper? I can't, really. For one thing, there's a respondent, who's expecting my paper to be basically the same as the one she responded to in November. For another, I'm not sure where this will lead - an ethics without selves!?

New questions and old

Had a quite fascinating conversation with a colleague who studies education today. My head is still abuzz with the miracle that was "Buddhism and Modern Thought" so it was nice to have a chance to reflect on it, and to reconnect with broader questions of pedagogy and liberal arts - the objects of her work. It's always nice to have a conversation like this, though it also makes me realize how easily I lose the wood for the trees... we need friends to remind us of our broader commitments and questions! A few highlights from the conversation:

Was our course valuable as part of a liberal education? I've been thinking about Buddhism and liberal arts for a few years, as you know, but it wasn't a main concern of our project this semester. (In fact, I can't remember the last time I thought it about explicitly - d'oh!) But the answer came easy: yes. Why? Because, I extemporized, it was an occasion for developing a deeper, truer sense of agency - of the world and one's place in it, of its challenges and the things one might do in response to them. You don't need to buy into the Buddhist answers, but engaging its questions is valuable. Also: ours was an adventure in liberal education because it schooled us in respect for others' efforts to make sense of these things: the Buddhism we encountered was emphatically plural and appropriately so.

What does it feel like to encounter a new idea? My first thought (which I went with) was that it should feel at once bizarre and familiar. We encounter a lot of weird ideas all the time and don't pursue them. It should be "out there" enough, different enough from your usual way of making sense of things, as to strike you as odd; but at the same time it should resonate in some way, something you thought you knew will shine with a new clarity in its light. So you abide with it a while. I mentioned William James' idea of how knowledge grows, but might also have mentioned his idea of a "live option." One of the benefits of small seminar classes is that you can experience more things as potentially live options for you as you witness them resonating with others. But - another thing I'd forgotten (and forgot while talking to her) - this was one of the recurring questions of the first part of our course! Remember? It appeared as the question of (how) it is possible to really encounter anything new...

The hardest question to answer was actually the first one she asked me: How did I think the course went? I was surprised that I hesitated in responding, since I think - I know - we had an amazing seminar. But the very nature of its success made the question somehow tricky. As a truly collaborate venture, with a syllabus recalibrated as we went along, our course ended up in a truly different place than I thought we would. This was of course by design! But still, I was suddenly aware of a gap between the retrospective coherence of what we had done and any of the things I had imagined we might do when we started. What tripped me up was something I don't even think my friend meant as part of the question: how the actual course would measure up to its starting intention? In many cases that's just the right question to be asking but it seemed somehow too easy to say "it was an open-ended course." I'm still now sure why I was tripped up here... it may be because not just the syllabus but the instructor were changed by the experience!

We talked about other stuff than "Buddhism and Modern Thought," of course, as one does. But it was refreshing to be reconnected to these big questions about education which - I'd nearly forgotten this, too! - are among those which led me to decide to spend next year in China! What do we teach? Why do we learn? How do we live?

10,136 words

My final reflection for the "Buddhism and Modern Thought" class. It came at the end of a series of reflections, each as distinctive as the person whose reflection it was, just before our final experience of mindful commensality.

You’ve been getting my reflections in the class follow-up e-mails throughout the semester (with this we should hit 10,000 words, not to mention all those links), so I won’t recap those… beyond noting how often I said “thanks.” I meant it then and I mean it now. Thanks for signing up at this god-awful or maybe bodhisattva-blessed time, and thanks for showing up week after week. Every seminar, but in some ways especially a seminar like this one, is an example of the generation of knowledge by a group, but that works only when people show up. You didn’t just show up, you amazed and sometimes alarmed me with your early morning alertness. I’ll come back to this group energy at the end.

I could give you the bigger story of this course again—

-- how it started as essentially a modern western thought class (the role of imagined and encountered eastern others in the history of western thought is an important story, rarely told, but this wasn’t the time for it)

-- how it was shaken up by bell hooks (beyond bourgeois Buddhisms!), and

-- how we’ve shaken it up in turn (ten syllabi almost make a flip-movie!).

I daren’t make predictions for what its next iteration will look like, but this feels alive to me in a very rare and special way.

I’m tempted to review some of the important Buddhist categories we’ve encountered, and make some final points about them:

-- the 4NT [Four Noble Truths], which I think we finally got after turning them three times (like the cup in Japanese tea ceremony), though I remain convinced that anyone who claims to be abiding with the truth of dukkha intellectually probably isn’t

-- upaya, which it’s become clearer to me presupposes the existence both of great ignorance and of beings who have broken through it: it can’t just mean appropriation or application in new circumstances, and it’s certainly not available for self-medication

-- interdependence, something both critical and distractingly vague: remember Thanissaro Bhikkhu vs. McMahan (and the distinction we perhaps never dwelt on long enough between those Buddhists who are really about breaking free of this world and those who are trying to make a home in it)

-- anatta, as Hsiao-Lan Hu argues, is another way of thinking about pratitya samputpada: awareness of the sedimentation that makes you you connects you/reveals you are connected profoundly to others who are embodied and humanized or dehumanized the way you are: it’s not just that the wall between self and other (or self and world) fades away but that we discover there never was something “inside” it distinct from the rest.

But final reflections are for trying to hold on to things we’re particularly keen not to lose, so here are some things I learned that I want to make sure I don’t lose sight of:

-- Buddhism is and isn’t about the individual: work on the “self” is central to it, and/but it’s the way not only to discover true interconnectedness but to ground agency which works around rather than into the hands of the dukkha-engines of “self” … our brief metta sprint gave the teensiest taste of that. And from Alice Walker and Thich Nhat Hanh I got that part of the interconnectedness discovered and owned here involves our ancestors

-- “Modern Buddhism” isn’t white and it’s not just western. (Resist the lure of the idea that Southern, Eastern and Northern Buddhisms have now been complemented and completed by a Western Buddhism with a face like mine). Marilyn Ivy’s “cooeval modernities” idea provides a template for a better approach—it’s what we did with our Buddhism in the Modern World presentations, and it took us (me!) places I hadn’t been before, a very different, complicated and productive way of thinking about the interdependence of Buddhism and modernity

-- Also from the Buddhism in the Modern World presentations (I had to do the reading for all regions, though you can too!) I’ve come to a deeper understanding of the question of Buddhism and politics. In a word: we won’t take Buddhism seriously until it becomes politically salient. Currently its lack of a political shadow in the West makes it seem the quintessential niche phenomenon—a celebration of nichiness—which corresponds all too well with the liberal western understanding of religion as something private, whether the private tending of wounds or the private cultivation of self. Buddhism is no more a private religion than any other, and we’ve only just begun to understand how its ways of structuring public life and engaging political power might unfold in our shared modern world

-- Buddhist-inspired art needs to be part of the picture. The nationalist context of the export of Zen aesthetics from Japan needs to be taken seriously (but again, we have to be as searching in our interrogation of western Buddhisms) but the effect of Suzuki’s and others’ ideas on artists isn’t just part of the story of modern culture but of the story of Buddhism too. In particular it may help us imagine and enact an ethics and a politics beyond the dukkha-engines of self and other (individual, tribal, national, species)

-- Finally, and this I learned from Thay [Thich Nhat Hanh], some parts of Buddhism’s work on/with the “self” work well, maybe even best, in groups. Think of how our 20-minute circumambulation of the block of 10^th-11^th/Fifth-Sixth was followed by one of our most intense engagements with the depth of the problem of dukkha. Don’t skimp on your jewels, you need all three: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. The group project/experience may not be an accidental part of learning about all those things we’ve been exploring.

I have a tendency to relate everything back to the seminar experience… there, just did it.

Let’s finish with tangerines. But this time let’s marry our mindful tangerining with two other practices we saw in the film about Thich Nhat Hanh: the smile and the shared group experience. So eat it mindfully, but look at others as you’re doing it, savor this group we’ve had the pleasure of being part of. And smile.

円相

"Religion and Modern Thought" came to a sweet end today. All of us - the students, me, and two researchers who've been observing our class from time to time - sat around our big table (the pleasures of a small class!) and shared some final reflections in various forms. (One of them was this big mandala, whose circles somehow refer to each of the fifteen weeks of our course; details of the others, including mine, atsome point in the next days.) We closed with a repeat of the Thich Nhat Hanh "Eating a Tangerine" exercise, with a difference. As we mindfully ate our California tangerines - five weeks ago it was Smiles; this time it was Halos - I invited people to smile at each other. (Smiling is an important practice for Nhat Hanh, too.) It was silly and profound: a sweet farewell. The circle we started with a dial ended with a halo!

Where there never was a hat

The semi-serious soundtrack to "Buddhism and Modern Thought" got another number today. Better still, the song has actually featured in this blog before, not quite six years ago - when it would never have occurred to me that it might have affinities with Buddhism!

It happened quite accidentally (if there are accidents). A student was describing his final project, a rather technical exploration of the affinities between Nāgārjuna and Derridean deconstruction. To illustrate the key move, which he called the "demolition of causality" of noting that things are both entirely caused by conditions and distinct from them, he invited us to imagine a hat. The hat both is nothing but the cloth (or whatever) of which it's made, and not that cloth - just as the cloth is nothing but the threads of which it's woven and not those threads, and the thread... well, you get the idea.

The lumpy hat he ultimately drew was a reference to Le petit prince - really a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. I didn't notice, as I was sure he was alluding to Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, whose perhaps most lovely song is called "Finishing the Hat," but he claims never to have heard of it. (He's heard of it now - I sent him this link to Mandy Patinkin's singing it in the original Broadway production.) The song, like the musical, is about the glorious tragedy of the artist - in this case Georges Seurat as he was painting La Grande Jatte - whose attempts to capture the true nature of experience somehow prevent him from ever finding a home in human reality.

... Finishing the hat,
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat...

At the end of the song, encountered in this accidentally Buddhist context, comes aa rather profoundly Buddhist sounding dénouement:

Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat..
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat.

And even before that, something that certainly could be about emptiness, the emptiness apprehended when one mindfully notices the arising and falling away of all apparently solid experience.

Mapping out a sky.
What you feel like, planning a sky.
What you feel when voices that come
Through the window
Go
Until they distance and die,
Until there's nothing but sky...

I don't want to overdo it! ...

But I did do an internet search on Sondheim and Buddhism. Nada - but that established nothing. Derrida was, as far as anyone knows, as unaware of Nāgārjuna's work as Nāgārjuna's of his. Isn't the nature of truth that it can and will be discovered independently over and over again? I'm out on a limb with the particular case of this hat trick, I'm aware, though Merleau-Ponty might agree that the hat is the perfect representation of the world we feel comfortable enough in to take shelter in yet never see. (If we had to be able to see it all the time we wouldn't be able to take shelter under it, now would we?)

Enough of that! A few other searches did call up something interesting, though: an essay on La Grade Jatte by someone who's becoming a favorite Buddhist writer of mine, Cynthia Thatcher, "Disconnect the Dots." (The image at top is from the article.) She doesn't engage Seurat's quixotic attempt to disaggregate our sensations of color, but she might have. She's discussing her meditation teacher Achan Sobin Namto's promise that it's possible to have an unmediated experience of the world, in the split second between sensation and naming, though it takes much meditation. The experience is always fleeting, and can't be commanded, but it can change everything. As she recounts it, her first such experience involved what, that split second later, she realized was birdsong:

At first I didn’t even recognize the sensation as an auditory form as opposed to a sight or smell. The next moment, the mental dots connected and the word “bird” slid into the mind. But the label didn’t erase the experience. Some veil had slipped, if just for a second.
When Achan Sobin walked in, I could hardly wait to blurt out: “It’s just a sound! It has nothing to do with the bird.” The event had somehow shaken my world.
“Nothing to do with the bird?” he asked.
Bingo.
He laughed and nodded. “Very good!”
“But it’s not even a sound.”
“No,” he confirmed, “by the truth, not even a sound.”

"Nothing to do with the bird" -  she wouldn't say it, but I call that the song of emptiness! (Nāgārjuna's "emptiness" has recently been nicely described in another piece noticing affinities between Buddhist and ostensibly non-Buddhist knowledges, Graham Priest's "Beyond True and False": things are ‘empty’ (sunya). This does not mean that they are non-existent; only that they are what they are because of how they relate to other things.)

You may think I've completely lost it by now, having gone from a student's presentation on an uncaused correlation to something it wasn't inspired by, and pushing onward from that through a failed internet search to arrive triumphantly at nothing! (It turns out that things are what they are because of how they relate to all other things.) But who said there was a hat in the first place?  咱们在公园一块儿逛吧。

Nothing much

Well, were we ever experimental in "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today. Could it be that we were "Zen" too? Our focus was John Cage. (Actually I first gave the promised summary of the dāna conference. In Western theories, I recounted, the minute a gift succeeds in being a gift - freely given and accepted as a gift - it ceases to be a gift because it establishes or continues a quite unfree relationship of reciprocity. Buddhist traditions can outwit this, I proposed. When a liberating gift succeeds it evaporates into pure freedom: it reveals that nothing has changed hands, as there was never a distinction between giver and receiver to begin with: no giver, no receiver, pure gift! Say what? I meant for this to be opaque and to seem unrelated to the topic of the day, and I think I succeeded. A good start for the discussion!)

We took a roundabout way in. Already before class began I called up this image on our screen, some of the "White Paintings" by Rauschenberg which Cage said opened the way to the (in)famous "silent piece," 4' 33". As planned, nobody had realized it was an image of something. Check!

Students discussed our texts on their own as I made some photocopies, perhaps galvanized by Cage's "Ten rules for teachers and students," which I shared with them before leaving the room. I returned to find D. T. Suzuki's blithe claim (in the opening chapter of  Zen and Japanese Culture) that Zen outwits words provoking strong verbal reactions: the possibility of going beyond words is tantalizing but wasn't Suzuki using words, too? Borrowing one of his images I opined that we should regard words as like the clouds that are generated by the peaks of really high mountains (mountains again!): they're not the mountain, but to wish them gone or even to wish they wouldn't obscure the mountain peak is to misundertand both their nature and that of the mountain. It is because it is a mountain that its peak is shrouded in cloud; it is because it is a mountain that the clouds are clouds. To wish there were no clouds is really to wish there were no mountains. Wordclouds indeed!

In any case it was time for a change of pace so I distributed the translation of the Heart Sutra Kay Larsen appends to her book Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists (our other main reading). It's the most compact of sutras (see image above) so we read it aloud, everyone taking a few lines. The Heart Sutra famously negates everything, including everything you knew about Buddhism, like the Four Noble Truths:

... no ignorance

and no end to ignorance,

no old age and death

and no end to old age and death,

no suffering, no cause of suffering,

no extinguishing, no path,

no wisdom and no gain.

No gain and thus the bodhisattva

lives Prajna Paramita ...

Despite a noble struggle we failed, of course, to have a satisfying discussion of the Heart's Sutra's nestled negations - what could one ultimately say? - so it was time for another intoning, the first page of Cage's 1951 (?) Lecture on Something. It's scored like a piece of music.

 

Piece of music, you may ask? The talk is ostensibly about composer Morton Feldman (though Feldman said it was not his but "John's"), who, inspired by Cage, invented the "graphic score" as a way of creating musical events. (I called up an image of his very first such score.) See it?

 

Dazed at the words we had uttered without being able to follow their meaning - we had just channeled Cage saying (and not saying)

it is of the 

utmost importance not 

to make a thing but 

rather to make 

nothing. And 

how is this done? 

Done by making 

something 

which then goes 

in and reminds us of 

nothing.

we were ready for our discussion of what on earth Cage was up to, and what in heaven it could be said to have to do with Zen.

 

As photos of Cage's legendary course on "Experimental Composition" at The New School looked down at us (how exciting to think he taught here, I enthused) we faced the provocation which is 4' 33". It's hard to approach for us today, as it's known as a monument of contemporary art: we project a something into what has to be experienced as a nothing. (Larsen recounts that when Cage presented his Thoreau piece at Naropa Institute the rowdy followers of Chögyam Trungpa booed and hissed and mocked and catcalled so energetically - for over two hours! - that Trungpa offered Cage a job the next morning). We didn't watch one of the many videos of performances of the 4' 33"; instead I had someone read aloud a reaction to the first performance: "sound pompous," I exhorted. (Next time, I think I'll have us all declaim it together!)

This form of phony musical Dadaism, built up by sensational publicity, frightens audiences away from the real music of our times. The arrogance of its nihilistic sophistries might be just amusing to most people. But there is a war of nerves against common sense today particularly in all fields of art. And if we don't check these insipid fungus growths that eat into the common sense of our people, their destructive influence will grow and gradually undermine the health and vitality of our civilization. (Larsen, 274-5)

Two plucky students dared to agree. One invoked the common experience in a modern art gallery that "I could have done that, though I didn't." I suggested Cage wanted you to think that, indeed he wanted you to go do it yourself, maybe even realize you already were doing it. Still: is this art? Is Cage an artist or a con man? Are we supposed to thank him? Surely something's wrong when someone gets celebrated for doing nothing!! (When I asked the other scoffer at the end of class "are you indignant or are you jealous?" he replied, after a rather brief pause, "both...!") Our time was running out. We had just enough time for each of us to read - one by one now, not in a group as with the other - four lines (sixteen bars) of Cage's Lecture on Nothing (1950?). You try, too!

Cage and Zen? About that we had nothing to say, and we've said it.

Tuning into enlightenment

Don't think that I have abandoned the effort to provide an accompaniment to "Buddhism and Modern Thought" of musical works. To energize the students as they pull together the research projects I sent them these two youtube links. The first is a karoake breathing song (!),

giddily performed by followers of Thich Nhat Hanh. It's entirely disarming: once you realize that it comes not from musical expertise but from overflowing happiness, it produces titters of giggly joy. If you don't sing, there are hand gestures to follow. And of course the breath.

The other is a 1967 song by Donovan whose refrain takes the famous Zen sokuhi 即非 line about mountains that aren't mountains and turns it into a dangerously catchy refrain - listen at your own risk, for it's a skipping little jig you'll find yourself whistling for days.

First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is ...

Take your pick! If you're up for it, there's also a film of Donovan performing live on television in 1972 in full psychedelic color, a change in whose lyrics suggests an intervening encounter with Chogyam Trungpa:

First there is a hang-up then there is no hang-up then there is ...

Mountain ranges

As we near the end of Buddhism and Modern Thought, we finally have a syllabus! Well, we've reached the point where no further updatings are necessary, because no more are possible. More than any other course I've taught, this class really has reshaped the course in its own image, with all the riddles about rivers and riverbeds applying.

Our program of readings ends with a bunch of readings on Zen, a little ironic since there is no tradition in Buddhism as suspicious of words. But it's (sorry Vajrayana) the Buddhist tradition to have engaged most interestingly with the unfolding of modern sensibilities and cultural production. That's why it was at the heart of our very first reading, which explored an elective affinity between modernity's claim to transcend history and similar aspirations in "Buddhism," both as western construct and as Asian tradition. Words beyond words: I'm hoping this will help us come to some useful insights about acts, contemplative as well as ethical as well as aesthetic: our readings are about the nexus of Zen (through the charismatic D. T. Suzuki) and modern arts: John Cage, and improvisational dance.

By way of preparation, we read some Suzuki today, too, along with part of David Loy's The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, and building on Monday's discussion of Keiji Nishitani's "What is Religion?" It's a discussion of what he calls "Affirmation-in-Negation" (a translation of 即非, sokuhi) and argues is the central logic of Zen Buddhism - and what makes Zen masters sound so irrational. Drawing on examples from the Diamond Sutra Suzuki identifies the structure

For A to be affirmed as A, A has to be non-A; therefore it is A

and argues that this is the central insight of Zen and of Japanese spirituality and also - as these turn out to be in his generation's understanding of world history - of human nature at its truest.

We spent a large chunk of class trying to puzzle this out, much of it focused on mountains. In what way could it be true that "The mountain is not a mountain, therefore it is a mountain"? For Suzuki and the tradition he claims to speak for, this is not epistemology or psychology (though it might be those, too) but ontology. To accept the suchness of the mountain, we need to understand that it is not a mountain.
In effort to shed light on this I conjured up all sorts of mountains, from the mythical Mount Meru, so tall you cannot see it, to the Ochtruper Berg, the little bump celebrated as the closest thing to a mountain in the town where my mother grew up, from the ancient Alabama Hills subsiding near Mount Whitney to the perfect Mount Fuji I saw emerging one day on twenty student easels set up on the shore of Lake Hakone facing where, on a less foggy day, Fuji would have been seen. But I was really thinking of a line I fell in love with the year I studied phenomenological geography in Paris, and another I found once in a book of literary aphorisms. (I'm amazed neither has found its way into this blog before today.)

A l’esprit qui contemple la montagne pendant la durée des âges, elle apparait flottante, aussi incertaine que l’onde de la mer chassée par la tempète: c’est un flot, une vapeur; quand elle aura disparu, ce ne sera plus qu’un rève. 

Élisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne (1875-6)

All stones are broken stones.

James Richardson, Vectors: 47 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2004)

Students were better on the negation than the affirmation part - better at seeing how words come between us and the things whose nature they are thought to disclose, how they substitute abstractions and memories and projects for the thing there facing us - but that's par for the course. If there is anything to this form of non-thinking, it involves actual experiences of the irreducible thisness of every this, irreducible even though evanescent, suspended like Saint Francis' inverted Assisi but as real as real can be.

I'm not sure it helped when I suggested that a mountain, a contingent aggregation of stuff which rose and fell as all things do, was like our supposed "selves," too. When I asked, rhetorically, "Can you get from the acceptance of thisness to ethics? Isn't Buddhism supposed to be about compassion?" I had to answer myself, rhetorically, "Didn't you hear the compassion in my description of the arising and subsiding of the mountain?"

Perhaps this will put us in the right frame of mind to sit through Cage's 4' 33". It certainly puts me right in the zone of my Wider Moral Communities project. Agency is blown wide beyond the human, decoupled from the toxic fantasy of a self. But there are still things you have to be human to do, or to be engaging another person.

Inset quote from Suzuki Daisetz, "The Loic of Affirmation-in-Negation" (1940),

trans. in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis

and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012), 214-18, 217

Hu's on First

What does non-self looks like? Today we learned it looks like this:

Hsiao-Lan Hu brought "Buddhism and Modern Thought" to this profound insight. Hu's This-Worldly Nibbana offers a compelling alternative to the common Four Noble Truth-centered depiction of Buddhism. Together with her new project on Avalokitesvara (above), it gave us an exciting new vision of what Buddhism offers - and demands.

I called our session "Hu's on First" for more reasons than the irresistibility of the pun. In their famous baseball routine Abbott and Costello may prove to have been bodhisattvas - a lesson in anattā and social kamma! But it was also only with Hu's description of the persistent failure of Buddhism to combat gender and class hierarchy in Asian history (in the reading for Monday's class) that we really faced the First Noble Truth, the truth of dukkha. Doctor, heal thyself?!

Can it really have taken us until our twenty-second class to arrive at square one? Most presentations of Buddhism start with the First Noble Truth! We encountered the Four Noble Truths early on, too (though our first Buddhist category was upāya). But you'll recall that I ensured they came with a wobble. Walpola Rahula recommends that those new to Buddhism start with the Fourth Noble Truth (Noble Eightfold Path) and proceed to discussions of meditation and engaged lay practice, before looping back (as needed and if necessary) to the first three Noble Truths and the puzzles of anattā. You don't start with suffering but with practice. Hu puts the point plainly: the Buddha may have shared the Four Noble Truths in his first speech, but it was to seasoned ascetics. Most people aren't ready. They'll misunderstand it or be laid low by it.

(As I suggested when we read Rahula, Perhaps we aren't able to face the overwhelming reality of dukkha before we know from experience, however elementary, that there is something we can do about it, however difficult. Likewise the doctrine of anattā, which is not only paradoxical but paralyzing if we don't already know from experience, however limited, that and why and how we cling to the idea of a perduring soul - and that we don't have to.)

In Hu's account, the central concept is pratītya samutpāda, which she translates as "interdependent co-arising." This is something you might begin to understand through meditation - or through reflection on ways in which your subjectivity and sense of self have been shaped by your culture, things well observed in reflection on what we actually do. She deftly braids classic Buddhist analysis of the "five aggregates" with constructivist feminist accounts of the non-naturalness of gender. What had seemed given, even predestined, is now revealed as the performed artifact of a culture and of your socialization in it - a socialization which, you realize in seeing it, leaves you some options in contributing to or disrupting the "sedimentation" (a concept from Judith Butler) which gives things the appearance of a perduring identity (self).

There isn't always much space for agency, but there is always some space - and this is enough to turn kamma from fate into freedom. Tracing the ways things you had taken for your "self" in fact reside in contingent cultural practices, discourses and structures beyond you, you are at once dislodged from them and brought to the realization that they are shared with others, who may suffer from them just as you do. Your participation in norms and patterns such as gender strengthens their seeming solidity not only in your life but in that of others; refusing to participate weakens their hold not only on you but on others. "The twin central teachings of Buddhism, non-Self and interdependent co-arising, are actually the same concept stated from two different angles" (65). Your freedom from a fated "self" and your responsibility in compassion for others are experienced together.

It's a truly wonderful interpretation - I hope many more people discover it! And I can't wait for Hu's new project to come to fruition. In it she explores the story of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Guanyin in Chinese, Kannon in Japanese), whose boundless compassion leads him (her in China and India) to assume whatever form is needed to get through to a suffering being. Thirty-three such forms are enumerated in chapter 24 of the Lotus Sutra, that important locus of upāya. Scholars have analyzed the gender switch as Akvalokitesvara moves from the Indian to the East Asian cultural sphere - another fascinating story. But Hu's analysis takes us a crucial step farther, finding in Avalokitesvara's facility with appearing in whatever form or gender is required a model for all of us.

When I first heard Hu present this material at AAR two years ago, it seemed ingenious, a revelation. Today I appreciated that it provides an answer to a crucial question arising from the understanding of pratītya samutpāda, anattā and kamma. If I have no "self" to be true to, how shall I decide which of my available selves to perform in any given situation? A queer theorist might speak of the exploration of new pleasures here; Hu speaks of ethics. Like the bodhisattva many a Buddhist vows to become, Hu suggests we allow compassion to guide us. Not who am I? but whom does the other need me to be?

Beautiful! And a strong enough sense of agency, and responsibility, in the concrete situations of our lives that we might be able to contemplate the First Noble Truth without looking away. As Rahula suggested, you can get there - when you are ready for it - only if you first enter the Noble Eightfold Path, which comprises not just wisdom but ethics, and thirst-weakening and compassion-strengthening meditation. We can't take down the system of dukkha (or leave it, and all other sufferers, behind) but, once started in responding in our own engaged way, we might as well continue!

Costello: Well then who's on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow's name.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The guy on first.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The first baseman.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The guy playing...
Abbott: Hu is on first!
Costello: I'm asking YOU who's on first.
Abbott: That's the man's name.
Costello: That's who's name?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.
Abbott: That's it.
Costello: That's Hu?
Abbott: Yes.

(watch the whole abhidhammic exchange here)

Around the block

"Buddhism and Modern Thought" began with a walk today. More specifically a group walking meditation, inspired by those led by Thich Nhat Hanh. (He extols the "healing energy" of group meditation practices.) I'd proposed it as a fancy but students wanted it. It fell to me to be the leader, setting the slow pace. I led us around the block framed by 11th and 10th Streets, Fifth and Sixth Avenues, moving clockwise. It took 20 minutes. At first the pace was hard to maintain, then it glid on by itself. The first encounters with other people I was self-conscious, but this soon passed. I was grateful to be in New York, where strange things are met with a bemused shrug, and found myself pleased at the spectacle we must have presented - pleased to look like its insouciant leader. But on noisier Sixth Avenue, my arches ached.

 

I'm no meditation leader, but I can walk resolutely ahead, never looking to the sides or back. I've no idea what went on behind me, except that two joggers needed to ask to pass through the group in the first minutes, but later ones didn't need to ask. I'd told the class it wasn't the point to be more observant of our surroundings, but of course we were. In the early morning light colors and edges were crisp; the occasional patch of direct sun embraced us and let us go as we moved on. We were walking contrary to car traffic, which soon came to seem mere flickers of yellow at the left edge of our visual field. More on our wavelength were dogs and their faithful owners. The reunion with a garbage truck we'd first passed on 11th Street - another slow mover - was happy.The Church of the Ascension's magnolias danced above our heads in stately arcs as we passed. A crowd of miniature daffodils smiled cheerily at us, as if knowing we were a few steps from seeing others already wilting, stiff and awkward with perplexity. (All the photos you're seeing were taken hours later; the daffodils had been in shadow.) But a chain saw we heard screeching from an approaching doorway soon after that was a distant echo before I noticed we'd passed it. I'm making all this sound very significant; it wasn't. I tried to think of a walker in the Thich Nhat Hanh film who said "I slow down for my mother, who never had the chance," but mine was a Jane Jacobs idyll; landmarked gentrified Greenwich Village is already a fantasy enclave of a slower world.
When we returned to class, it was predictably difficult to get back into discussion mode. Once we did, though, it wasn't about the beauty of the world but it's abysses. We'd read some of Hsiao-Lan Hu's This-Worldly Nibbana, which describes the disproportionate vulnerability of women to every kind of social suffering, and the way Buddhism for most of its history has thought this karmically justified. Greed, hatred and delusion produce vast suffering, but it seems not to happen to those responsible for it. My old friend the problem of evil rearing its ugly head! Could it be that even Buddhism was part of the problem, a problem deeper than any proposed solution? The discussion was very intense, even raw. I wonder if our silent and almost too beautiful walk together against the grain of the harried city made this intensity possible, even necessary.

Treetop experience

I'm having such a good time this year watching the treetops in the Lang courtyard step into Spring - wonders you'd never imagine from below.Behold the red bundles which recently exploded like fireworks! Now they are giving birth to the little green seed paddles with which they'll soon helicopter to the ground. Almost as if an afterthought, the actual leaves emerge from the top as from a flower bud - leaves which will fill the courtyard with cooling green for the next half year and then go out in a sustained blaze of color, a return to red. Red-in-green-in-red!

Incidentally, today's session of "Buddhism and Modern Thought" was devoted to Thich Nhat Hanh. Students read his poem "Please call me by my true names" and the elaboration of the Precepts he calls the Five Mindfulnesses, and watched most of the documentary "Colors of Compassion." We also ate a tangerine - something we did last class, as well. On Monday I read aloud his description, and distributed it to students to reread again before class today, but this time we mindfully ate our tangerines in silence. In part, Thich Nhat Hanh observes:

A person who practices mindfulness can see things in the tangerine that others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree, the tangerine blossom in the spring, the sunlight and rain which nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply, one can see ten thousand things which have made the tangerine possible. Looking at a tangerine, a person who practices awareness can see all the wonders of the universe and how all things interact with one another. 

I can't report on the fruit of others' tangerining. I didn't get the ten thousand things but - having noticed that the Sunkist Smiles© clementines were from California - I did get the inland California sun, the migrant farm workers who work in the orchards, the water almost certainly from the Colorado, and the desert areas where the Colorado also, though ever more weakly, flows. And then, with the final section, a final burst of sweetness, interwoven with all this difficulty, which recalled lines from the poem:

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Metta for the dead

As you may know, my life was changed by a Japanese Buddhist priest friend's quip, many years ago, that religion in Japan could perhaps best be described as "ethics for the dead" (死者に対する倫理). That's the grain of sand around which my oyster brain has been polishing the pearl of my "Exploring Religious Ethics" course; the "Wider Moral Communities" project grows out of it, too.

The phrase came to mind after "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today as I reflected on our discussion of a beautiful talk Alice Walker gave at the first African-American Buddhist Retreat in 1997, "Suffering too insignificant for the majority to see" (shared with the wider world here). Walker frames her talk with the account of the murder of George Slaughter, a young African American man in the Antebellum South, by a posse led by his own (white) father, incensed, it was reported, that his horse was too fine. After an eloquent account of Buddhist responses to oppression - she references the Dalits we read about Monday, and is sure young Gautama rejected caste distinctions - and of what Buddhist practice offers oppressed peoples, she returns to the people who participated in Slaughter's murder. She returns, however, in a mode of meditation, building on and building out the familiar formulas of metta meditation.

In metta meditation you start by sending loving-kindness (metta) to yourself. The wishes are versions of this:

May I be happy.

May I be healthy.

May I be free from danger.

May I live with ease.

The circle of metta expands by steps, first to a benefactor, then to a friend, then to a neutral person, then to a difficult person, and finally to all beings.

May he/she/they/we be happy.

May he/she/they/we be healthy.

May he/she/they/we be free from danger.

May he/she/they/we live with ease.

As you know I find this psychologically as well as ethically profound. But today (after doing the guided metta meditation with Sharon Salzberg from last year) we were discussing Walker, who writes:

Let us bring our attention to the life of our young brother, our murdered ancestor, George Slaughter. We know he was a beautiful young man, and that it was this beauty and his freedom expressing it that caused his father, himself unfree, to seek his death. We can see George sitting on his stunning saddle horse. We do not know if his half-sister, white, confused by her liking for her darker brother, gave it to him. We do not know if his mother, dark and irresistible, as so many black women are, gave it to him. We do not know if he bought it himself. All we know is that he is sitting there, happy. And the horse, too, is happy.

George Slaughter, an English name. We might think of Bob Marley, half-English, with his English name; perhaps George had a similar spirit. A kindred look and attitude.

 May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you 

The circle widens:

Let us bring our attention to George’s mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to George’s father. He who trails the murder of his lovely boy throughout what remains of time.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to those who rode with the father, whose silence and whose violence caused so much suffering that continues in the world today.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you

And now let us bring our attention to George’s horse. With its big dark eyes. Who drank George’s blood in grief after the horror of his companion’s bitter death. We know by now that the other animals on the planet watch us and know us and sometimes love us. How they express that love is often mysterious.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you

What Walker does here is an extraordinary thing, supporting her claim that the study and practice of Buddhism ... is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the work of healing our ancestors. Healing our ancestors? It's perhaps an appropriation of Buddhism (Walker claims not to be a Buddhist, and draws explicitly from indigenous, Womanist and other traditions), but it's one that has happened in many places before, perhaps all of them. Are not the dead, our dead, the moral community par excellence? Expanding the circle of our metta to them is, for some, no stretch at all. (The ancestors were very present also at the first retreat for Buddhists of color held at Thich Nhat Hanh's Deer Park Monastery near Escondido, CA in 2004, "Colors of Compassion.")

Metta for the dead. Of course.

Perhaps, indeed, it is widening the circle to the dead which grounds a practice in space as well as time. One of my most thoughtful students (white, a bit of a bodhisattva) saw in Walker's reflection the way towards a true and truly American Buddhism:

as far as America is concerned, Buddhism begins not in 1844 in the European scholar’s office (where surely Buddhism cannot happen at all) but rather only after the European decides it is more profitable to leave his office, to bring dukkha to the New World by ships with sugar and slaves, and to let the slaves really live it.  

May I say: Amen?

Bodhisatta Ambedkar

I'm preparing for tomorrow's "Buddhism and Modern Thought" class, our one session on Ambedkar's The Buddha and his Dhamma. Ambedkar is discussed in the "engaged Buddhism" literature but rather less in the "Buddhist modernism" discourse, although he's certainly part of it. I hope students will be (as, I guess, I am) both attracted by the idea and somewhat put off by the reality of a revival of Buddhism in India in the context of Dalit liberation. Attracted because it shows the Dharma to be politically powerful. But also put off somewhat since the Buddhism Ambedkar describes is so different from the one which has emerged in the West - political and secular rather than psychological and vaguely mystical... which is precisely the point of our reading him!

Ambedkar's take on the Four Noble Truths, holy of holies of western Buddhism, is a case in point. Nobody could be attracted to Buddhism by the "Four Aryan Truths," he writes, since they make suffering an individual thing when everyone - not least the Buddha - knew that it was caused by social strife, and should be addressed that way, too. Indeed, the First Truth should be understood as a rhetorical exaggeration in service of the second - if not, Nibbana risks becoming a fantasy of an afterlife, when the true point is to live righteously in this life. How tellingly different from  the individualized spirituality of the modern West into which our new Buddhisms so conveniently fit!

And while we're at it, Ambedkar asserts that it strains credulity to think that Gautama went twenty-nine years without seeing sicking, old age and death. Following a Marathi play by the doyen of Indian Marxist historians, Dharmanand Kosambi's Bodhisatta, Ambedkar describes Gautama's home-leaving as the result of a political debacle. Most of his clan, the Sakyas, decide to wage war on their enemies, and are at a loss what to do with pacifists iike Gaurama; his leaving solves the problem. But the great epiphany comes when the Sakyas make peace with the Koliyas. Should Gautama return?

He had left his home because he was opposed to war. "Now that the war is over, is there any problem left to me? Does my problem end because war has ended?" On a deep reflection, he thought not. "The problem of war is essentially a problem of conflict. It is only a part of a larger problem. This conflict is going on not only between kings and nations, but between nobles and Brahmins, between householders, between mother and son, between son and mother, between father and son, between sister and brother, between companion and companion. The conflict between nations is occasional. But the conflict between classes is constant and perpetual. It is this which is the root of all sorrow and suffering in the world. True, I left home on account of war. But I cannot go back home, although the war between the Sakyas and Koliyas has ended. I see now that my problem has become wider. I have to find a solution for this problem of social conflict. How far do the old-established philosophies offer a solution of this problem?" Could he accept any one of the social philosophies? He was determined to examine everything for himself. (41) (1.II.6. 4-12)

I'll have more for you after tomorrow's discussion, I'm sure. But here is something which is unlikely to come up but very interesting. It's an articulation of the theistic problem of evil very (suspiciously) close to the theodicy "trilemma" I focused on a few projects ago.

For if the moral law has originated from God, and if God is the beginning and end of the moral order, and if man cannot escape from obeying God, why is there so much moral disorder in the world? What is the authority of the Divine Law? What is the hold of the Divine Law over the individual? These are pertinent questions. But to none of them is there any satisfactory answer from those who rely on Divine Dispensation as the basis for the moral order. (131) (3.III.6:11-12)

If there is a supreme creator who is just and merciful, why then does so much injustice prevail in the world?" asked the Blessed Lord. "He who has eyes can see the sickening sight; why does not Brahma set his creatures right? If his power is so wide that no limits can restrain [it], why is his hand so rarely spread to bless? Why are his creatures all condemned to suffering? Why does he not give happiness to all? Why do fraud, lies, and ignorance prevail? Why does falsehood triumph over truth? Why does [=do] truth and justice fail? I count your Brahma as one of the most unjust, who made a world only to shelter wrong. If there exists some Lord all-powerful to fulfil in every creature, bliss or woe, and action good or ill, then that Lord is stained with sin. Either man does not work his will, or God is not just and good, or God is blind. (133) (3.IV.2:43-44)

Page references to B. R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma: Critical Edition, ed. Aakash Sing Rathore and Ajay Verma (Oxford, 2011) and this online source. Image source.

Philosophical grammar

We've finished McMahan's Making of Buddhist Modernism, our big book of the semester. For today's class I asked students to consider how they'd write a review of it, "sketching out how you'd characterize its main argument, material and methods, and how well McMahan succeeds at what he sets out to do: bring along (at least) one passage illustrating McMahan doing what he does best and (at least) one showing limits of his research, method or analytic categories." A fruitful discussion, by and large, but it's so unusual for students to take time over a whole book here that the experience was a little disappointing for some: nine chapters and still the same argument! And since he is scrupulous in writing as a historian - it's not his business to judge what is and what is not legitimate Buddhism - it seemed to one perceptive student like nine chapters without any argument, though she recognized this as a rare and difficult achievement.

Actually McMahan does make a broad argument for the legitimacy of "Buddhist modernism" by indirection. Buddhism has always been on the make, he argues, its manifold "potential" triggered by encounter with one culture after another. But he's aware, I think, that his fine-grained account of the way modern trends selected and shifted Buddhist legacies risks playing into the hands of critics like Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Thanissaro, you'll recall, derides modern forms as so many flavors of a "Buddhist Romanticism" so embedded in western modern delusions that it has no Buddhist edge - and no saving power.

The formations of Buddhist modernism I have been using as case studies ... have tended to draw Buddhism into the orbit of western thought, rather than vice versa. Their particular kind of hybridity is often like that of Henry Steel Olcott, which, in Stephen Prothero's interpretation, was a 'creolization' that assimilated Buddhism to largely Protestant categories, assumptions, and logic. Like a creole dialect, its lexicon was Buddhist, while its grammar was largely Protestant ... I have also hinted that other, often Asian, Buddhist modernisms, like other modernities, may reverse this situation, assimilating the lexicon of modernity to the grammar of Buddhism. (241-42)

I really like the idea of a modern lexicon creolized by a "grammar of Buddhism" (or grammars, surely). It's what I have long tried to do with my mantra that "religious studies is the discipline that reminds us there is no consensus on the real." In the coming weeks I'll be pushing students to consider that there are Buddhist alternatives to our easy ways of understanding agency, causality, virtue, meaning.

Guided meditation

Interesting addition to our course soundtrack as we started the 2nd half of "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today: Joni Mitchell. The start of her haunting 1976 song "Refuge of the Roads" recounts an encounter with Chögyam Trungpa:

I met a friend of spirit
He drank and womanized
And I sat before his sanity
I was holding back from crying
He saw my complications
And he mirrored me back simplified
And we laughed how our perfection
Would always be denied
"Heart and humor and humility"
He said "Will lighten up your heavy load"
I left him for the refuge of the roads...                                   (source)

This made sense for the class, as one of the assignments over the Spring Break had been to watch that hagiopic about Trungpa. It also fit because here our weight shifts from considering in what ways "western modernity" has reshaped or distorted "Buddhism" to exploring how "Buddhism" might challenge or complicate "western modernity."

Our reading was the chapter on meditation in McMahan. It's pretty tame stuff compared to the intoxication, play and wrathful practice of Trungpa. But the juxtaposition helped me push the importance of teachers in Buddhist practice. One of the myths the "scientific Buddha" has left us is that meditation is an objective, self-correcting technology for approaching reality. Anyone can do it, and, doing it, will discover the truth. Do try this at home.

Trungpa's tantric tradition raises one kind of question about this: some of the fruits of Buddhist practice are very powerful, and can destroy as well as enlighten. You need a teacher to direct and correct your experiments with truth. From the perspective of the religious studies critics of Buddhist modernism a different question poses itself. As Robert Sharf pointed out in a famous exposé of the Vipassanā movement, there is no consensus among Buddhist traditions as to what the stages and fruits of different kinds of meditation are. People achieve what their traditions lead them to expect to achieve. The history of Zen-Catholic dialogue should make that clear - and also that this might not, for practitioners, be the end of the world.

We didn't talk about Sharf but about Descartes, author of his own set of Meditations, whom McMahan brings in in a fascinating way. His method of radical doubt would be congenial to a Buddhist, McMahan avers, if only he didn't recoil from the impermanence he discerns in desperate hope of something permanent - a self, which turns out to need supernatural backup as it tries to live. You don't need to be a Buddhist to see the flaw in the argument. Kant saw it! Ambrose Beirce's had a pithier way of making the leap of faith in the cogito clear: I think I think, therefore I think I am. The existence of doubting establishes only that doubting is, not that a doubter is. To McMahan, Buddhist meditation is thorough and thoroughgoing in a way Descartes' isn't:

(202) But can one adjudicate between the claims of an Augustinian like Descartes who sees through the shards of a skepticism-shattered self and world a God "closer to me than I am to myself" and a meditator guided by Sangha and Dharma to see the impermanence of dharmas?

Interesting discussions await, now on my best effort at Buddhist terms. Not that I'll be able to mirror back the complications simplified!