Time for the yearly roundup. Despite being rather busy with work, travel, family matters, and other worldly affairs, I managed to squeeze in quite a bit of reading regardless. As always, these are books that I finished in 2024, so I started reading the first few in late 2023, and there are a few I've started reading recently that will make it to next year's roundup (possibly next quarter; I keep meaning to do these more regularly, but I end up putting off my reflections too long). I did read a few other books this year, but looking at my past posts, it seems silly to include entries with just a short, perfunctory paragraph amounting to "no comment". So, for future posts of this kind, I am only including books I have comments for.
This is an encyclopedic overview of early Buddhist cosmology, relying mostly on Theravāda literature as well as a few Sarvāstivāda texts. I first came across the Ajahn through his video talks with Paññobhāsa (who I had been following for a while before they did their series of talks). I found that I also enjoyed the Ajahn's solo talks on his own channel, as he obviously has a lot of grounding both in the scholastic-intellectual side as well as the actual practice of Dhamma. He referred to the cosmology so often that I felt I owed it to myself to pick up his book.
The Ajahn really outdid himself as far as depth and breadth of research, as well as presenting a balanced perspective. By the latter I mean that he presented all of the content "on its own terms", that is bearing in mind its ancient Indian background, while still relating things in a way that a modern Western audience could understand. He is leaps and bounds beyond "localizers" like the old Rhys Davids couple and more recent Gene Reeves types, who freely render elves, centaurs, fairies, etc. into their translations without rhyme or reason. Were it not for the rather cumbersome length (but quite readable prose), I would almost rank this as required reading before tackling any canonical texts, not just for understanding minutiae like what a pisāca or a mahākappa is, but for really getting a feel for the ancient Indian view of the world.
Still better than the mere expository content are the Ajahn's own insights regarding the cosmology and Right View. Even though it's more of an encyclopedia, reading this text cover-to-cover will provide one with a basis for properly seeing the world as vast, especially in depth. The chapters on the deva and brahmā realms, as well as the formless realms, are particularly enlightening as a sort of graded hierarchy of existence, with each class of being purer than the classes below. A quote from the Ajahn himself:
Because the Buddha warned again and again about the dangers inherent in sensual desire, students can sometimes take an extreme position. Either they become rigidly puritanical justifying the outsider’s criticism that Buddhism is anti-life, or they cannot take on the teaching at all and revert to hedonistic indulgence. The correct way of understanding this teaching is not to see sensuality as immoral per se but as limiting. Sensual desire and indulgence confine us within the bounds of the plane of sense-desire and our consciousness cannot experience the higher levels or liberation. When we look at the worlds of the devas we see that it is not a matter of absolutes. Sensuality becomes more and more refined as we ascend the levels until in the highest deva realms it is just barely what we would consider sensual: the Paranimmitavasavatti devas make love just by looking into one another’s eyes. From there, it is not such an unimaginable step to the realms beyond sensuality altogether. (p. 450)
I would also say that this book has significantly helped to shape my polytheistic beliefs. I have slowly warmed up to polytheism over the past few years, basically being persuaded of the existence of multiple gods, but never committing to this or that pantheon. I believe the issue for me is that the rituals and beliefs of historical polytheists were usually tailored to their worldly needs: safe voyages, good harvests, victory in battle, etc. I, however, am a rootless individual living in the modern West; I don't take dangerous journeys, I don't live off the land, I don't fight in war, etc. Modern technology has made safety, comfort, and food quite abundant for my civilization, to the point that it would feel quite forced for me to make offerings to get them from celestial beings instead. However, the theology that Ajahn Puṇṇadhammo elaborates in this book provides a decidedly more vertical dimension, where the gods are part of the great hierarchy of being, each one in progressively purer classes of existence. This is in contrast to the horizontal emphasis of most ancient pantheons; there was certainly hierarchy to be found, but for the most part the gods were divided into offices of worldly activity. I have thus introduced contemplation and veneration of the Buddhist scheme of devas and brahmās into my daily practice (though not at the expense of the Triple Gem, by any means).
My own practice aside, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested in any aspect of Buddhism; you will find that the cosmology is quite essential to many of the texts and core teachings, and the Ajahn does a wonderful job providing a detailed but, as I said, very readable overview of the subject.
Dialogues — Plato
To be precise, I read Alcibiades I, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, all intermittently from January to March (all lumped under one heading for convenience). I was motivated to read the first two by two different sources: this schematic recommends starting with Alcibiades, and the Great Courses Plato course by Michael Sugrue recommends Euthydemus as a sort of underrated dialogue to start with. To be honest, I do not have much to say about these two. Alcibiades had very little impact on me, and since reading it I have found out that its authenticity is controversial. As for Euthydemus, I did enjoy the general subject of mocking verbal trickery, however I feel this is not an especially profound insight.
After reading those two, I felt that I should restart my study of Plato the way I had done it in the past: that is, starting with the well-known tetralogy covering Socrates' trial and death. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I did start reading some philosophy in college, however I came from a libertarian angle, so I found myself autistically probing for whether or not such-and-such work agreed with the non-aggression principle, Austrian economics, etc. Questions about the good life were rather lost on me. Now that I have mostly left politics behind and taken an interest in more practical matters, I've been able to get more out of Plato's writings.
I admit that, of the latter four, I got the most out of Apology and Phaedo, and not very much at all out of Euthyphro or Crito. To start, across all these dialogues, Socrates comes across as extremely manly and upright as a character, something that I've never seen emphasized in any popular or even academic presentations on Plato's work. It is more common to focus on Socrates as the "gadfly of Athens", the talkative lover of wisdom (φιλόσοφος), but from there it is easy to get lost in the web of speculative rationalism, as indeed the history of Western "philosophers" (hardly lovers of wisdom at all) has shown us. What is often missed is the style of living that comes with such an intense, cultivated love: fearless, austere, simple, and good in the highest sense. All through his trial, his imprisonment, and his execution, he remains unshakably fearless and even chastises others for showing fear and dread on his behalf.
You should not act like that [i.e. attempt to rouse pity], men of Athens, those of you who have any reputation at all, and if we do, you should not allow it. You should make it very clear that you will more readily convict a man who performs these pitiful dramatics in court and so makes the city a laughingstock, than a man who keeps quiet. (Apology 35b)
Neither I nor any other man should, on trial or in war, contrive to avoid death at any cost. Indeed it is often the obvious in battle that one could escape death by throwing away one's weapons and by turning to supplicate one's pursuers, and there are many ways to avoid death in every kind of danger if one will venture to do or say anything to avoid it. It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death. (Apology 39a-b)
"Be persuaded by us [the city of Athens] who have brought you up, Socrates. Do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness, in order that when you arrive in Hades you may have all this as your defense before the rulers there." (Crito 54b)
"What is this," he said, "you strange fellows. It is mainly for this reason that I sent the women away, to avoid such unseemliness, for I am told one should die in good omened silence. So keep quiet and control yourselves."
His words made us ashamed, and we checked our tears. (Phaedo 117d-e)
These are the kinds of words we would find in the mouth of a warrior, and indeed Socrates did himself serve in the Peloponnesian War, but in these dialogues he couches his fearlessness much more in his love of wisdom than in mere "hard times". I believe this austerity is also a noteworthy source of contrast. Sugrue, who I mentioned earlier, contrasts the deaths of Socrates and Jesus, the two seminal deaths of Western literature: Socrates died laughing and Jesus died weeping ("eloi, eloi, läma sabachthani"). Again, Sugrue is part of the mainstream that emphasizes Socrates' more jovial, social attitude. If anything, the last Phaedo quotation above shows that, in the end, Socrates was really quite upright and serious. The real contrast is that the Jewish prophet died crying while the Athenian philosopher died chastising others for crying. These are the opposing forces that have created the internal contradictions of the West: the lowly and effusive Semitic spirit on the one hand, and the noble and silent Hellene on the other.
Besides the attitude towards life and death, I also greatly enjoyed the discussions on the nature of the soul (which is, after all, the basis for Socrates' fearlessness). First, I will take a brief detour, since some would be quick to argue that the Buddhist anattā doctrine is incompatible with the Platonic doctrine of the soul. I would say that both Buddhism and Platonism give teachings on the immaterial aspects of man, what Buddhism calls nāma and what Platonism calls ψυχή. Furthermore, both schools agree that these immaterial life-forces, "souls" if you will, are composite: in Buddhism nāma is constituted by the four immaterial aggregates—vedanā, saññā, saṅkhāra, and viññāṇa—while in Platonism it is made up of νοῦς, θυμός, and ἔρως. (As an aside, νοῦς and θυμός are sometimes translated as "soul" on their own; and, on a similar note, it seems that the modern languages of Theravāda countries—Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese—all use some variant of "winyan", derived from viññāṇa, to mean soul.) The primary difference is that Plato believed the νοῦς was immortal and the true self, whereas the Buddha taught that all four aggregates are impermanent and dependently originated. Take that for what you will, but I would at least maintain that Platonism and Buddhism disagree about the nature of our immaterial aspect (soul), not about whether we have one at all.
With that out of the way, I believe then it is possible to establish some common ground on the basis of the viññāṇa and the νοῦς, since in both systems these correspond to the pure, knowing mind. In both systems, the mind is cultivated through meditation, specifically with the goal of cutting off the desire for sensual pleasure. Compare Socrates:
And does purification not turn out to be ... to separate the soul as far as possible from the body and accustom it to gather itself and collect itself out of every part of the body and to dwell by itself as far as it can both now and in the future, freed, as it were, from the bonds of the body? (Phaedo 67c-d)
With the stock description of jhāna, or "absorption" as Bhikkhu Ānandajoti translates it here:
Here, monks, a monk, quite secluded from sense desires, secluded from unwholesome things, having thinking, reflection, and the happiness and joy born of seclusion, dwells having attained the first absorption.
With the calming down of thinking and reflection, with internal clarity, and one-pointedness of mind, being without thinking, without reflection, having the happiness and joy born of concentration, he dwells having attained the second absorption.
With the fading away of joy he dwells equanimous, mindful, fully aware, experiencing happiness through the body, about which the Noble Ones declare: “He dwells pleasantly, mindful, and equanimous,” he dwells having attained the third absorption.
Having abandoned pleasure, abandoned pain, and with the previous passing away of mental happiness and sorrow, without pain, without pleasure, and with complete purity of mindfulness owing to equanimity, he dwells having attained the fourth absorption.
This, monks, is called right concentration. (Dīgha Nikāya 22)
The Platonic and Buddhist conceptions of this purified mind are also similar. Socrates persuades his audience in the Phaedo that the mind "resembles the divine" (80a), similar to the Buddhist teaching that jhāna is the natural consciousness of brahmā deities, and that the brahmāvihāras are the affective states of those same deities. Additionally, both seem to agree that this divine, pure state is a sort of proper, original nature of the mind. Socrates describes a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as one who has "adorned his soul not with alien but with its own ornaments, namely, moderation, righteousness, courage, freedom and truth" (Phaedo 115a, emphasis mine). In a similar light, the Buddha describes the inherent nature of the mind as follows:
Luminous, bhikkhus, is this mind, but it is defiled by adventitious defilements.
Luminous, bhikkhus, is this mind, and it is freed from adventitious defilements.
Luminous, bhikkhus, is this mind, but it is defiled by adventitious defilements. The uninstructed worldling does not understand this as it really is; therefore I say that for the uninstructed worldling there is no development of the mind.
Luminous, bhikkhus, is this mind, and it is freed from adventitious defilements. The instructed noble disciple understands this as it really is; therefore I say that for the instructed noble disciple there is development of the mind. (Aṅguttara Nikāya 1.49-52)
The same concept was later elaborated in Mahāyāna as Buddha-nature, buddhatā. There are a number of other cross-references I could provide, but I believe I have sufficiently communicated the kinship I felt in reading these dialogues. Some (like the aforementioned Sugrue) have suggested that these similarities between Platonism and Eastern philosophy are due to some kind of unrecorded transmission from India to the West. In the absence of solid archaeological or textual evidence, I would offer up instead that Socrates was genuinely restless in his yearning for truth, something like what Buddhists call saṃvega. He tells us in the Apology of how he went all over Athens looking for wise men to learn from, but found nobody to his satisfaction. Such a desperate state of affairs forced him to search inward, spontaneously developing states comparable to Buddhist jhāna. This is not a far-fetched story, in my opinion—after all, countless other mystics and sages have arisen all over the world, attaining to various jhāna-like states. Without any hard proof of an Eastern connection, I think it's sufficient to chalk up Socrates' philosophy as the product of his own efforts.
Anyway, now that I have a better appreciation for Platonic philosophy as it is, I feel more confident tackling the rest of the Platonic corpus down the road, perhaps even finally giving the Neoplatonists a proper look.
Eros and the Mysteries of Love — Julius Evola
This is a study of the metaphysical dynamics of sex in religious and mystical practices. As I have committed for some time now to Theravāda, I initially didn't plan to read this book, as I assumed it would only be about sexual rituals as practice in Tantra, Daoism, etc. However, I heard a handful of reviews of this book that indicated that there was a lot more to it than that, and I was happy to find that to be the case. For starters, the original Italian title, Metafisica del sesso, should have just been rendered literally: Metaphysics of Sex. Certainly, the sexual "mystery" cults are analyzed at length in the book, but that's only one part of the whole—it really is a comprehensive study of the metaphysics of sex. Here is an example of the breadth this work treats:
What the Greeks call "heterity," that is, being connected to another or being centered on someone other than oneself, is a characteristic proper to the cosmic female, whereas to have one's own principle in oneself is proper to the pure male. At the psychological level that fact leads to qualities in a woman which can be readily seen in everyday life: female life is almost always devoid of an individual value but is linked to someone else in her need, born of vanity, to be acknowledged, noticed, flattered, admired, and desired (this extroverted tendency is connected to that looking outside which on a metaphysical level has been attributed to Shakti). The practice of wooing, gallantry, and compliments (even insincere ones) would be inconceivable if separated from the obligatory basis consisting precisely of this inborn trait of the female psyche, which man has had to keep in mind at all times and in all places. Let us remark in passing that the values of female ethics are very different from those of male ethics, and this can be seen at once in the fact that a woman ought to despise a man for such fawning behavior, which is often pursued just to possess her body; yet exactly the opposite happens. (p. 157)
The rest of the book covers a lot of similar ground, that is, elaborating on fundamental metaphysics and expounding on how that manifests in worldly norms and activities (here, courtship). In that sense, it is much more like his Revolt Against the Modern World with a stronger emphasis on sex.
From a Buddhist perspective, this book is of interest inasmuch as it delineates the essential, spiritual differences between femininity and masculinity, the latter of which is viriya in Pāli, related to the Latin-derived word virility in English. Now of course, nibbāna itself is beyond all differentiation (nippapañca), and the highest beings of the rūpa and arūpa realms are beyond sex. However, since we are members of the kāma realm, where sex is a salient aspect of our existence, it is not something we can turn a blind eye to. For this reason, the Buddha's admonishments regarding sex are two-fold. On the one hand sexual pleasure in its own right is something to be overcome—I hardly need to provide a quotation for that, since it's such a prominent part of Buddhist practice. On the other hand, the Buddha emphasized the cultivation of masculinity (the aforementioned viriya) over and against any feminine influence in his teachings. For example:
Bhikkhus, while walking, a woman obsesses the mind of a man; while standing … while sitting … while lying down … while laughing … while speaking … while singing … while crying a woman obsesses the mind of a man. When swollen, too, a woman obsesses the mind of a man. Even when dead, a woman obsesses the mind of a man. If, bhikkhus, one could rightly say of anything: ‘Entirely a snare of Māra,’ it is precisely of women that one could say this. (Aṅguttara Nikāya 5.55, emphasis mine)
Given this, I do not think the Buddha would disagree with Evola's own assessment:
It is not wrong to say that in every higher civilization man has never been deemed to be truly a man as long as he submits to the double bond of mother and wife and exhausts the sense of his own existence in that sphere. In the very rites of passage or of puberty among primitive peoples the consecration of manhood and admission to a "society of men" were shown as a surpassing of that naturalistic sphere. ... Not so much as a person, but rather owing to a metaphysical impulse, woman will always tend to lead man back under the yoke of eros or domesticity. (p. 156, emphasis mine)
From a cosmological perspective, this actually has a little bit of sense. In Ajahn Puṇṇadhammo's cosmology book (see above), he suggests that the two highest sensual heavens are actually divided by gender, the second-highest (nimmānarati) being all female and the highest (paranimittavasavatti) being all male. Whenever someone is described as being reborn in either of these realms, it seems that only human females pass on to the former and human males pass on to the latter. Also, it's an established fact that, while devas of the former realm are able to create whatever they like for their own pleasure, devas of the latter realm don't even have to put in that much work; they take pleasure in the creations of the lower devas. That is all to say, the highest realm of sensual pleasure consists of female devas making divine fabrications to please the higher male devas. The metaphysical impulse Evola describes above is laid bare: the highest devas, just a step below the brahmā realms, are held in place by the erotic and domesticating activity of the female devas just below. Femininity naturally exhibits a downward force—it is the gravity of sensual existence.
That having been said, Evola goes on, a few paragraphs later, to explain the two archetypes of woman (mother and lover) and how, of the two, the mother-archetype represents a falling-in-line with the earthly order of procreation ("life-affirming", one might say), whereas the lover-archetype gives the erotic impulse a transcendent orientation, beyond earthly life. This provides the basis for Tantra, Daoist alchemy, etc. What I would say here is that, from the perspective of Buddhist cosmology, it seems that the best one can hope for from sexual practices of that type is a transcendence of the sexual plane (kāma-bhūmi), but of course this only reaches as high as the world of pure form, the realm of Brahmā. That may indeed be a high and exalted state, but it is far from absolute liberation. I also get the impression that a lot of these orgiastic rites are more in the interest of immanence, not transcendence.
Still, an understanding of what is properly manly—critically, not falling under the magical attraction of the feminine—is crucial to any spiritual practice. Regarding the modern West's ideas about manliness, Evola writes:
On a subtle plane, the passivity of man increases the more the material aspects of the "male" and the instinctive violent and sensual traits of manhood are predominant in him. As a rule, the man poorest in inner manliness is the very type that the Western world has adopted as the ideal of manhood. The activist man busy with doing and producing, the Leistungmensch, the athlete, or the man with an "iron will" is among the most helpless of men before the more subtle power of woman. Civilizations such as those of the Far East, India, and Arabia have a more accurate understanding of what is truly manly. Their ideal of manhood differs widely from that of the European or American ersatz male with regard to physical and psychological, spiritual and character traits. (p. 167, emphasis mine)
This is crucial not only to spiritual practice, but even just to worldly life. It goes without saying of course that one of the most severe degenerations in the modern West is the pervasive dependence, bordering on addiction, on sensual pleasures, especially that of sex. Even if one does not set his sights as high as nibbāna, there is no doubt that one who is spiritually autarkic will get on much better in worldly life than one who is constantly under the spell of craving.
This leads us to the more general case of Evola's insights concerning worldly institutions. Beyond the prevalence of sensuality, another modern degeneration is the lack of control over invisible forces (spirits, gods, karma, etc.). It was in the interest of every civilization to keep malefic forces under control (if not banish or exorcise them) and to secure the favor of beneficent forces, these of course being gods and goddesses. Sex forms the basis of many special rites found all across history (e.g. sacred prostitution), since it is a means by which earthly men and women could evoke absolute men and women, that is, gods and goddesses. Today, such rituals are largely gone, and sex itself has been deprived of its sacred character. Evola traces this degeneration to Christianity, which promoted
the mistaken belief that eros and the "instinct for reproduction" should be one and the same thing. Moreover, we should bear in mind the disappearance, in a society controlled by this dogma, of everything that in the ancient family could impart to procreation the higher meaning … which is linked to familial and ancestral cults. In practice, the Christian point of view prevents sex from becoming a sacred ceremony, which leads to its repression and nonconsecration because of the hybrid nature of this point of view. For it has laid down as a general rule, still valid in our own times, that detachment from sex should be viewed in the light of ascetic transformation and not as a puritanical repression of the sexual drive. Thus, the Christian religious rule has only bequeathed us social restraint and the simple mediocre and dull fettering of the human animal, which is devoid of any interest to us. (p. 179, emphasis mine)
And of course, as with many Christian degenerations, they constitute a midway point on the way to modern degenerations. It is not too difficult to see how we could get from "sex is merely for reproduction" to the contemporary attitude, "sex is merely for pleasure." And it's on this note that Evola actually concludes with a sort of pessimism about the possibility of sex magic being of any use, even to the differentiated man, in modern times:
With regard to sex, the rediscovery of its primary and deepest meaning and the employment of its highest capabilities depend on the possibility of the reintegration of modern man and on his arising once more and betaking himself beyond the psychic and spiritual lowlands into which he has been led by the mirages of his material civilization, for in this lowlands the meaning of being truly a man or woman is doomed to vanish. Sex will only serve to take him still further downward; furthermore, even apart from what concerns the masses, sex, being reduced to its content of mere sensation, will only be the misleading, obscure, and desperate alleviation of the existential disgust and anguish of him who has stumbled into a blind alley. (p. 276, emphasis mine)
So, as I said, this work is a lot more like Revolt Against the Modern World than it is like Doctrine of Awakening or Ride the Tiger. In the latter, Evola provides points of reference as to how the differentiated man might still find transcendence even amid the degeneration and spiritual anarchy of modernity. However, it seems that here, Evola is more of a combined historian-metaphysician, as in Revolt, because he is primarily diagnosing what modernity gets wrong or flat-out lacks in comparison to traditional civilizations. Thus, this book certainly elucidates a lot about the world we find ourselves in today, and for that alone it is worth reading, however the reader is left to apply the resulting insights on his own.
Kamikaze — Yasuo Kuwahara & Gordon Allred
This is the biography of a would-be kamikaze pilot. Allred was an American who interviewed Kuwahara on his experiences in the Japanese army, and the two worked together to form it into a readable narrative. I confess that I have been interested for some time in Japanese accounts of the Second World War, because in the West, we are taught the Allied account of how the war went, and it isn't too hard to come by Soviet and Nazi perspectives as well. Some teachers are even open-minded enough to provide this as material for discussion, though usually with the intent of bolstering the Allied narrative. However, it seems that Japanese perspectives are rather difficult to come by; Anglophone conspiracy theorists are overwhelmingly more interested in defending the Third Reich. Even the well-known book by Pat Buchanan (Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War) devotes no more than a couple paragraphs to Japan. So I ended up adding a bunch of narrative books from Japanese spies, soldiers, and especially kamikaze pilots to my wish-list, and as it would happen one friend provided me with two of them last Christmas, this being one of them.
This book provides a good, personal perspective on the tensions in Japanese society before, during, and a little bit after the war. Many were caught between the extremes of zealous militarism and subdued defeatism. Kuwahara himself always seems to be on the defensive whenever he speaks to his countrymen, especially in the military. In one situation, we see a commanding officer explain that he wants a kamikaze mission, and asks for anyone unwilling to carry it out to raise their hands; those who do are then forced to carry the mission out themselves, without escorts. In another situation, Kuwahara is called into the office of one of his superiors, who asks him how he feels about the war; after Kuwahara gives a rather reserved non-answer, the officer wistfully considers that the war really is hopeless and laments wasting the lives of so many good men. Many of the women he meets, from family-members to a girlfriend to complete strangers, also hold this sentiment. After visiting his friend in the hospital, one woman accosts him and argues that fighting on is a senseless waste of life.
The thing about the personal perspective is just that: it winds up being more of a biography than a history. It was quite interesting to get a flavor of what life was like in Japan at this period of history, and while that saves it from being ideological fodder, it does also make the book more of a curiosity than a good source of information. As an example, a lot of space is given to Kuwahara's romantic adventures in his off-base spare time. This definitely gives the story some humanity, but it does feel a little far afield of my original purpose, which was understanding the Japanese attitude towards the war. Then again, maybe that's the point: the civilians and soldiers on the other side were just as human as anyone else. They had their hopes, loves, fears, ambitions, joys, and all the rest, and war, especially modern war, brutalizes these aspects of life. This is shown most sharply when Kuwahara relates his experience at the end of the war: as luck would have it, he was on the way to Hiroshima just minutes before the atomic bomb was dropped there. He relates not only the shock and confusion of the great flash and explosion from a distance, but also the gruesome horror of investigating the scene. For me, the most haunting part of this is his encounter with an incinerated elementary school, where he witnesses several burnt, ashen children crying out in fear and agony with their final breaths. He also adds the quite macabre reflection that those same atomic bombings definitely saved him from having to carry out his duties as a kamikaze pilot.
And yet, on reflection, this human perspective is precisely the reason I wished to investigate the Japanese side of the war. I have become extremely skeptical of the idea that history has true villains, least of all villains who are just psychotically evil for the sake of being evil. Kuwahara certainly relates encounters with men we would reckon as just that villainous, but it seems these irrational zealots are few and far between compared to the sane, everyday people who realize the war is shaping up to be a loss. The tragedy of the situation is made all the stronger knowing that the kamikaze tactic was adopted as a desperate countermeasure by a waning empire—after all, why would you throw away perfectly good planes and soldiers if you're on the winning side?
Anyway, while Allred's and Kuwahara's combined narration proves gripping enough in its own right, I feel I've gotten a decent enough picture of the Japanese side of this conflict that I don't think any further reading would give me additional insights. I do intend to finish that other book I mentioned from my friend (Blossoms in the Wind by M. G. Sheftall), but beyond that I think I will turn elsewhere in my military history readings.
Introduction to the Lotus Sutra — Yoshiro Tamura
The Lotus Sūtra is one of the most important pieces of scripture for understanding East Asian Buddhism, and yet I have always struggled to start reading it. I did eventually read it later this year, so I will discuss that more below. However, in the mean time, I decided that perhaps I should start with an introductory work, just to get my bearings. I came across this book on Library Genesis just by searching "lotus sutra"; the title alone was precisely what I was looking for, so I dove in.
My first issue is with Tamura's discussion of textual authenticity. I'll save myself the trouble of writing an overview on this issue; anyone interested may read an accessible introduction here. To his credit, Tamura more or less sketches out the academic view on authenticity, however he concludes by muddying the waters:
Research has found that some components of the Pali sutras were formed somewhat later than the Agama sutras. In addition, there are definite indications that some components of both the Pali sutras and the Agama sutras were formed after the early Mahayana sutras.
If this is so, the conviction that early sutras are the earliest, and thus the words of the Buddha, cannot be firmly established. To be sure, among the early sutras there are a few that seem to be the earliest. But even within these seemingly earliest ones, analysis of the terms in them suggests that some parts were added later. Thus it is extremely difficult not only to maintain that the early sutras as a whole are the earliest, but to identify definitively the earliest parts within them as well. Given these facts, it would be ridiculous to claim that the early sutras are the words of the Buddha.
...
Thus we can say that early Buddhism is not the words of the Buddha for the same reasons that Mahayana Buddhism is not the words of the Buddha. (Ch. 1)
This is one of the most intellectually dishonest arguments I have ever read. Tamura himself already conceded that the Lotus Sūtra definitely did not come from the historical Buddha, so in order to level the playing field, he takes some comparatively smaller uncertainties in current textual studies and exaggerates them to say that they undermine the authenticity of all early texts as a whole. Tamura's argument is, in simpler terms: the Nikāya and Āgama texts are not 100% authentic, and the Mahāyāna texts are not 100% authentic, therefore they are all equally inauthentic.
From here, he goes on to argue that, since no text can ever really be determined to be authentic, the Lotus Sūtra can instead be called the Buddha's words, not in the literal-historic sense, but in the sense that the Buddha would have said them if he were teaching in India at the time the Lotus Sūtra was composed. I would appreciate that argument a little more if Tamura did not buttress it with such a fallacious mockery of proper academic investigation; he would have done better to simply leave the issue of authenticity aside. More than that, I question how we could even guess at the Buddha's hypothetical teachings in other times and places if we did not have some idea of what he taught to begin with, or if he was even enlightened. Lacking such authority, the Buddha is reduced from an enlightened sage to a literary creation—a position that seems interestingly common in modern Mahāyāna, as we saw with Thích Nhất Hạnh's commentary in last year's roundup (who described the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa as a "stage play").
For my own part, there are texts that I accept as inauthentic that I still regard as worth studying (primarily the abhidhamma texts and some prajñāpāramitā texts), because above all I regard the contents of those texts to be largely true, independent of their historical provenance. The truths we realize in meditation will hold regardless of scriptural authenticity. However, abhidhamma and prajñāpāramitā are fairly consonant with the original teachings, both having precursors in the Nikāyas and Āgamas. In these cases, Theravāda and some currents in Mahāyāna build on the original teachings, or at the very least complement them (one Vajrāyāna friend of mine has commented, in private, "the small wheel is what turns the bigger wheel"). The problem with Tamura's case is that the Lotus Sūtra and others like it serve to subvert and replace the old teachings, while still keeping the original texts as canonical and acknowledging their source, Gotama Buddha, as spiritually authoritative. Thus, the inauthentic-but-true line is much less convincing for Tamura's case, because even though it sidesteps the issue of authenticity, he then has to attribute contradictory teachings to the same authority. Either that, or he would have to take the outrageous stance that the Nikāyas and Āgamas aren't buddhavācana, but the Mahāyāna sūtras are.
This brings us to Tamura's words on the actual contents of the Lotus Sūtra. In general, Tamura presents the Lotus as a critique of the early Buddhists (he uses the stock insult, Hīnayāna or Small Vehicle) for being nihilistic. The accusation of Buddhism as nihilistic is common today from Westerners, but it is quite galling to hear this same accusation from a fellow Buddhist, and an Eastern one at that. All the more shocking is that he takes up almost the exact same line of argument as Western critics:
For the most part, [early Buddhists] fell into nihilism and lost the meaning and purpose of life. As a consequence, they regarded the state of awakening (nirvana) to be a return to nothingness by shutting oneself off from this world. Thus they lost any motivation for practical and socially constructive activity, and felt unhappy when they saw active people devoting themselves to such things. In other words, they became a kind of living dead. Such Hinayana nihilists were said to be people who could not become buddhas, as though the seed for growing into a buddha had been scorched.
In addition, a variety of other terms critical of Hinayana thought appeared at this time: such phrases as "bodies of ashes and dead wisdom," "salvation through solitary training," "seeing emptiness as nihilistic nothingness," and so forth. (Ch. 2)
I might have hoped that a fellow Buddhist, sharing a common core teaching, would at least have more interesting criticisms of his peers. Instead, I find the same tired old line that takes wallowing in saṃsāra to be the highest good, and that any practice or belief that seeks something better is "nihilistic"—with the tacit assumption that there is nothing outside of saṃsāra, since Tamura frequently glosses saṃsāra as "real life".
In the first place, this constitutes an abuse of the word nihilism, which is any belief that rejects certain aspects of human experience (morality, knowledge, etc.). Critically, nihilists offer up nothing (nihil) in place of whatever they reject. As an example, Buddhism rejects the providential theory of morality, i.e. it does not accept that good and evil are the judgments of a supreme creator. This is not sufficient to say that Buddhism is morally nihilistic, because in its place Buddhism teaches that morality comes from causality, i.e. kamma and its fruition. A critic who responds along the lines that "Well I don't believe in kamma, therefore Buddhists are moral nihilists" smuggles his own beliefs into the accusation, whereas on its own terms, Buddhism cannot be called nihilistic (this same argument often comes in the form of "Well I don't believe in nibbāna..."). If we were to accept this use of nihilism, it would basically mean "disagrees-with-me-ism". On the same grounds, rationalists could call empiricists nihilistic and vice versa, and the same could be said of realists and nominalists, materialists and idealists, liberals and conservatives, etc. The word amounts to no more than a shallow, bitter insult.
I believe the impulse for this accusation comes from the general lessening of spiritual tension that produced the Lotus Sūtra and others like it. In Iron Age India, it was much more widely appreciated that the holy life entailed radical renunciation, hence the flowering of so many ascetic schools at that time, including Buddhism itself. At the close of the Iron Age, India developed into a much more commercial, centralized civilization. The more widespread mercantile values of this period fostered a laxer spiritual attitude and, hence, a decline in ascetic renunciation in favor of easier, lay-oriented practices. As a parallel case, Hinduism at this time saw the rise of the Bhakti Movement, which emphasized salvation for the individual, regardless of caste or gender, through devotional practice, in contrast to the more exclusive, initiatic practices that dominated earlier Brahmanism. It thus makes sense that the original Buddhist ideals of "solitary training" and "shutting oneself off from this world" would be looked down on. There's fame and fortune to be had, so naturally Buddhism at this time had to change its tune lest it be abandoned for being "nihilistic", i.e. not in vogue. In short, the people needed to be told what they want to hear, and texts like the Lotus Sūtra came to prominence by doing just that.
Tamura himself basically admits all of this:
Small Vehicle Buddhists also had connections with men of property as sponsors or supporters, and maintained the sangha with their aid, but they rejected secular occupations personally, secluding themselves within monasticism. In contrast, Mahayana Buddhists situated themselves within society and probably affirmed the activities of everyday life. Thus we can imagine the development of a commercial economy to have been the background for the rise of Mahayana Buddhism. From about 50 CE the Kushana dynasty, centered in northern India, prospered with the help of trade with Rome and had a money-based economy and commercial production. The Mahayana Buddhist movement developed aggressively during that time. (Ch. 2)
To quote Evola, "We no longer have before us the Ariyan Doctrine of Awakening, but a religion put together for the satisfaction of the faith and sentiments of the masses, to the detriment of the knowledge and clear vision that conforms to reality" (Doctrine of Awakening, p. 222).
Tamura also quite poignantly illustrates this degeneration through a connection with the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa. Here his point of departure is the imagery of the earth-born bodhisattvas from Chapter 15 of the Lotus Sūtra:
... They emerged from the earth like a lotus flower untainted by water, coming together in the here and now, untainted by worldly things. Here the bodhisattva way is explained through the symbolism of the lotus. That is, the idea that the lotus flower can only grow in muddy water, but also blossom there into a beautiful flower, is applied to the image of the bodhisattva. Moreover, it is taken from the title of the Lotus Sutra.
The lotus flower has been admired in India from ancient times, and was included in the Vedas and Upanishads as an object of religious admiration resembling the pure human spirit. It was also adopted in Buddhism and used with various meanings. But as we have seen, it seems to have been used mostly to symbolize bodhisattva practice in the early days of Mahayana Buddhism. The Vimalakirti Sutra, for example, says, "One is untainted by worldly things, just like the lotus flower, and is always able to enter the practice of emptiness and tranquility" [Watson tr., p. 25]. On the other hand, it also says that those who remain in a state of emptiness and willful nonaction will not blossom into Buddha-dharma flowers and cannot become buddhas, and it criticizes such people for using the lotus symbol. Further, this sutra uses the metaphor "the lotus does not grow in highlands, but blossoms in muddy swamps," and says, "Only living beings in the mud of passions can rise to pursue Buddha-dharma." (Ch. 2, emphasis mine)
The imagery here quite literally illustrates what I mean when I talk about a fall in spiritual level. The virile ideals of the heights, of clarity and knowledge, are abandoned in favor of low, chthonic existence, of the vow to remain in saṃsāra amid passion and excess.
Tamura also attempts to contrast the early Buddhist understanding of emptiness to that of the Lotus, though still while slinging "nihilism" around.
... We will not be able to understand emptiness, or gain a good general idea of it by continually analyzing actual things (form) into abstractions, as if peeling away the layers of an onion. Emptiness, understood in such a way, is taken to mean nihilism. The truth is that emptiness can be experienced only in the midst of the dynamic movement of things as they are. ...
Small Vehicle Buddhism analyzed things, came to see them finally as empty, and fell into nihilism. In contrast, Mahayana Buddhism viewed emptiness as in all things, just as they are. The Small Vehicle view of emptiness later came to be called "the view that analyzes things into emptiness," and the Mahayana view was designated as "the view that sees emptiness in all things." ...
In nihilism, nothingness is tenaciously held to be a "no-thing"—a kind of thing. Such is nihilism. Small Vehicle Buddhists tenaciously clung to emptiness as a thing, and as a result they fell into nihilism. In order to correct such misunderstandings, the idea that emptiness, too, is empty was taught. (Ch. 2)
In brief, the early Buddhists were too engrossed in the analytical method, and the Lotus Sūtra corrected this with a more synthetic method. Tamura would probably help his case better by citing actual early Buddhist texts, to show us what "abstractions" he means. Properly understood, the abhidhamma method of analysis distinguishes what is ultimately real (paramattha-dhamma) from what is only a designation or abstraction (paññatti), such that the latter can be neutralized and not mislead the practitioner. By its very nature, analysis can never yield abstractions, because it breaks things down into their component parts; it is the opposite, synthesis, which yields abstractions that have no reality in themselves. Precisely in this way, early abhidhamma avoids reifying emptiness in the way Tamura accuses. It seems to me that it's really the Lotus view, that "emptiness, too, is empty", which reifies emptiness and synthesizes it into "a kind of thing" (I can accept the prajñāpāramitā view, where "emptiness is empty" is treated as a kind of kōan meant only to produce a catharsis, though that doesn't seem to be Tamura's intention). I would also add that Tamura's choice to gloss emptiness as "nothingness" betrays a poor understanding of emptiness to begin with. I have enough good faith that more serious Mahāyānists do not make this equivocation, as early Buddhists certainly do not:
One Pāli commentary also refers to a prevalent misconception, namely, that when the Paṭisambhidamagga says "the material form (and the other aggregates) that is born is devoid of own nature" (jātaṃ rūpaṃ sabhāvena suññaṃ), it means the nonexistence of material form in an ultimate sense and not that it is devoid of any substance or of anything substantial [Nāmarūpapariccheda 632]. Refuting this view, the commentary points out that the very use of the term "born" (jāta), which means "arisen," falsifies this interpretation: for how can the material form that has arisen (jātaṃ rūpaṃ) be nonexistent? [ibid. 632ff.] The equation of emptiness and nonexistence, it is said, "is contradicted by the general agreement of the world at large, by the word of the Buddha, by logic, by word meaning, by textual evidence, and by many forms of proper reasoning" [Paṭisambhidamagga-aṭṭhakatha 634-35]. (Y. Karunadasa, Theravāda Abhidhamma p. 45)
Furthermore, it is inaccurate to say that early Buddhism (or rather, the abhidhamma sects) is entirely analytical, because synthetic knowledge plays an equally important role in understanding the conditional relations of reality. As Ñāṇaponika Thera explains:
...By showing that even an infinitesimally brief moment of consciousness is actually an intricate net of relations, the erroneous belief in a static world is attacked and destroyed at its root. In that important but much too little known chapter [Paccayākāravibhaṅga] of the Vibhaṅga, both methods of the Abhidhamma, the analytical and the relational, are exemplified and harmonized simultaneously. (Abhidhamma Studies, p. 24)
Understanding this "intricate net of relations", that is to say dependent origination, may be what Tamura meant when he said "emptiness can be experienced only in the midst of the dynamic movement of things as they are". Nonetheless, both methods must be harmonized; analysis shows what there is, synthesis reveals their interrelation. I admit that I can only speak for Theravāda, but if there were indeed schools of Buddhism that were analysis-only or defined emptiness as non-existence, Tamura would have done better to indicate precisely who they were and cite what they said. Lacking that, he appears to merely straw-man the early Buddhist sects. This gets particularly egregious when he ties emptiness into a discussion of compassion:
For some Small Vehicle Buddhists, compassion is an act of being engaged with this world, while the realization of emptiness is a state that goes beyond it, and so compassion should be discarded in order to realize emptiness. (Ch. 2)
I will emphasize, again, that this is asserted without a citation.
There are plenty of other ideas from this sūtra that Tamura explains, as well as a history of the text's reception and development in East Asia, however in general the two issues above—the laxer spirituality and the synthetic tendency towards reification—remain issues for me all throughout. The two come together quite nicely in his discussion of the trikāya theory, where he says "even though Shakyamuni Buddha is everlasting in the immortal truth, since this is abstract, it does not satisfy people's hearts. So Buddhists sought a concrete buddha, and views of the Buddha developed side by side with the theory of the Buddha-bodies" (Ch. 3, emphasis mine). The boldface statement shows the essentially popular trajectory of Lotus-centric schools, particularly Nichirenism and its off-shoots: again, "a religion put together for the satisfaction of the faith and sentiments of the masses".
In closing, I do not begrudge those who engage with the world—I myself am a layman with a job, family, friends, and all the rest. What I disapprove of is arrogantly vaunting worldly activity at the expense of genuine austerity. I admit I cannot be too harsh on Western activists, existentialists, etc. who cannot even accept the possibility of an unconditioned reality. It is quite another thing to see a fellow Buddhist smear the teachings as "nihilistic" and embark on a pseudo-existentialist quest to affirm earthly life. At the very least I can say that the idea of abiding in purity while remaining in the world is not in itself objectionable—I tend to support that as it appears in other Mahāyāna currents, because purification is still respected as the ultimate goal. My problem with Tamura's strain of thought, in particular, is it so vociferously touts the lay life over and against renunciation, which—returning to the historical origins of that text—I cannot help but see as sacrificing the truth to appease the commercialized laity. I am not fully against the Lotus Sūtra, as I realize Tamura has only presented one perspective on the text. I am also aware of the text's importance in Sōtō Zen and Shingon, through the exegeses of Dōgen and Kūkai, respectively. So, I plan to give them a look down the line, as well as the Lotus Sūtra itself, but I will probably steer clear of Tamura and his ilk.
Musui's Story — Kokichi Katsu
This is the autobiography of a samurai who lived in the early 19th century, close to the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and the samurai caste as a whole. This book felt very much like a picaresque novel, as it is mostly a series of criminal escapades. The story starts as far back as Katsu's childhood, during which he ran away from home several times and got involved in a number of gang scuffles. Even as an adult in office, it seems he spent a lot of time wandering penniless looking for money, usually rather dishonestly. (Interestingly, he did undertake some religious austerities, though really for worldly gain. I no longer have the book, but he said something like "When you practice austerities, there is nothing you cannot accomplish", which has stuck with me.) Katsu wrote this as an old man, as he starts and ends the book with admonitions to his progeny to live more moral lives than he did.
While this would probably make for good material in another format, like a comic book or a TV series, the book itself is in a very dry, stilted style. Events are related in very succinct, matter-of-fact sentences, with almost none of Katsu's inner life included. The translator remarks in the preface that autobiographies were extremely rare in this period of Japanese history, so being a trailblazer (and, apparently, really only wanting to teach his grandchildren a lesson), Katsu probably didn't have any forerunners to shape his literary style. Even if he did though, he spent so much of his life money-laundering, stealing, fighting, gambling, etc. that I doubt he ever even opened a book until old age.
So given its rarity, this is a very good primary source on what life was like towards the end of the Edo period, especially among peasants and low-ranking officials like Katsu himself. Those who have any interest in that period of Japanese history would thus probably find it at least worth a look, even if its prose isn't as polished as, say, Kuwahara's book above (although the simplicity makes me wonder if the original text would be good for a beginner Japanese-language student). Katsu himself, if you haven't gathered by now, is an extremely dishonorable and rather mediocre character, in stark contrast to the samurai ideal even many of us modern Westerners have. The book thus stands as an interesting complement to the Hagakure (see below), a more anthologic but nonetheless documentary work of a much earlier, more conservative Edo-period samurai. But whereas the Hagakure furnishes us with some sage and austere advice, Katsu's life amounts only to a piece of history.
The Island — Ajahn Pasanno & Ajahn Amaro
This is an overview of the Buddha's teachings on nibbāna, a very seldom-discussed subject in the Buddha's own dispensation and in modern Buddhist literature. I found this book recommended by Ajahn Puṇṇadhammo, basically as a complement to his cosmology book above; his book studies the workings of saṃsāra, whereas this book covers the one thing beyond that. As well, while Puṇṇadhammo's work is quite comprehensive and schematic, this book is (as the subtitle indicates) an anthology of the two Ajahns' various thoughts, interspersed with quotations from the Pāli suttas and other Theravādin teachers (as well as Nāgārjuna, interestingly).
As the authors are from the Thai Forest Tradition, they occasionally break away from Theravāda orthodoxy, though in ways that I find mostly positive, for example the aforementioned citation of Nāgārjuna. For a more significant example:
The attainments are not so formidable and daunting that lay-people living within society [at the time of the Buddha] were not able to become anāgāmis, sakadāgāmis, and sotāpannas. (p. 281)
This is in contrast to the commentarial view that laymen can only aspire as high as sotāpanna, the lowest attainment, and that the remaining stages of awakening are accessible only as a formally ordained bhikkhu. Some might claim that it's precisely this kind of monastic conservatism that provoked a pro-laity reaction in some Mahāyāna sects, and that the Thai Forest monks are here only just catching up. However, the Ajahns do not leave room for compromises of that sort:
Particularly in modern Western culture, inundated by advertising and the overstimulation of the consumption ethic, the mind can be constantly searching for anything with a superlative prefacing it—the ultimate, the perfect, the refined, the exquisite. If this is the case in our spiritual aspirations, we will tend to overlook the foundations when trying to reach the ultimate too quickly. This impatience can easily lead to frustration and a feeling that the goal is impossible to attain. So reflecting on stream-entry [sotāpanna] can play a very important role, especially in that it allows us to see what can be incorporated into our daily lives and practice.
... The ultimate goal of the teachings is not a one-shot affair—[as if] either you get it or you miss it completely and are forever out of luck. There is a progressive maturing of insight into the nature of the goal that leads the practitioner to relinquish the obstructions blocking realization and to fulfill the qualities commensurate with realization. (p. 279)
Coming from a much slower-paced, more traditional civilization, the Buddha did not have to emphasize this aspect of his teaching in his own time. Just as one accepted his station in this or that clan, caste, profession, etc., the earliest Buddhist laity had no problem assuming the roles appropriate to their spiritual capacities. The assurance that a sotāpanna, for example, would attain enlightenment within no more than seven lifetimes, and that these rebirths would be exclusively fortunate (i.e. human or divine), comes across as entirely too slow to the untrained Westerner, who most often can hardly accept the idea of rebirth to begin with. Ironically, this makes sotāpanna a worthy subject of contemplation, precisely because it counteracts the fast-paced neurosis encouraged by materialism and hyper-commercialism.
Hagakure — Yamamoto Tsunetomo
I have been aware of this book for a long while, and somehow I had the preconception that this was a lot about Zen. I was quite surprised to find very little mention of any Dharma at all. Bushidō, as it turns out, is more of its own thing entirely, and if anything it owes more to Confucianism than to Buddhism. Until I read this book, I tended to dismiss Confucianism as mere political philosophy, right there with libertarianism or Marxism in the world of speculative system-building with no real wisdom to offer. I was pleasantly surprised to find Jōchō quote Confucius and others as a source of personal, quite practical wisdom, rather like Roman Stoicism. Among other things, I came away with a greater appreciation for the Confucian tradition as a philosophy. What I've gotten from the Hagakure, and it seems this is key to Confucianism, is that politics is ultimately the aggregate of individual ethics. All the pontificating and system-building in the world of Western politics amounts to nothing: good politics arises from the works of good men, bad politics arises from that of bad men. Therefore, the most sensible thing is to study wisdom and virtue, and above all to practice them in one's station. This is reflected in much of Jōchō's own advice:
Discrimination, harboring animosity, and causing others to feel estranged is born of a lack of compassion. Conflict won't rear its ugly head if everything is enveloped in compassion. (2.109)
A retainer must pledge to "Amend the minds of all the people in the domain so that no one is disloyal or immoral, and serve his master well so that all can live peacefully."
If you speak of a man's foibles in an accusatory manner, he most likely won't pay attention to you. Why would he feel gratified if you are condescending, and treat him as if he is flawed?
… If one has wholehearted intentions of repenting sins, traces of all transgressions committed eons ago will vanish. No matter how wicked the man, attempts for redemption must never be abandoned. There is nothing more wretched than an imprudent fellow. There is nobody beyond redemption if various tactics are tried. Failure is a consequence of the wrong approach, or your own apathy. (2.130, emphasis mine)
It is best not to mock the transgressions of others. Needlessly making enemies will give rise to further damage. Invite even an evil man to trust you, and venture to put right his character. (2.133)
We can see here a distinct contrast to the Western obsession with checks and balances, or the fictional "rule of law". In reality, there is only the rule of men, and so Jōchō's philosophy focuses on training and cultivation, not just of oneself, but of others too. This is the kind of philosophy one could only find in a more traditional, personalistic system like Tokugawa feudalism; the faceless bureaucracies and corporations of the modern West seem to be utterly irreconcilable to such an ideal. Even so, this should not be an excuse for laziness; Confucius himself made his name as a man of virtue in similarly corrupt times. Like the Buddha-dhamma and the Roman Stoa, the bushidō virtues are timeless.
What I have said so far might lead some to believe that bushidō is the harsh, stiff discipline of a stone guest. This is thrown into quite sharp relief by Jōchō's comments on much lighter matters as carrying extra makeup, hosting dinner parties, folding envelopes, or devoting time to hobbies (in 2.86, Jōchō's confessed pastime is, of all things, napping!). I do not bring this up in mockery, but to point out that the gravity of bushidō was meant to suffuse all aspects of the samurai's life—there was nothing "profane", nothing that could not be aligned with the samurai spirit. As Jōchō himself says:[The samurai] must internalize the virtues of wisdom (智), compassion (仁), and courage (勇). Although it may seem impossible to embody these three virtues, it really is easy. To nurture wisdom simply requires listening to others. Immeasurable knowledge comes from this. Compassion is for the sake of others. It is opting to do good things for other people rather than through selfish motives. Courage is found through "gritting one's teeth." That is to say, gritting one's teeth and charging forth without concern for the consequences. There is no higher mind-set than this. (2.7)
If you differentiate between public space and your private quarters, or being on the battlefield or on a tatami mat, you will not be able to respond in timely fashion as the exigency of a crisis may require. Be Argus-eyed at all times. Inability to demonstrate valor even on a tatami mat in your house means that you cannot be relied on in battle. (2.75)
Thus, a samurai is able to carry out his station even in a tea ceremony or in the composition of poetry:
The former Nakano Kazuma said: "The original purpose of the tea ceremony is to purify the six senses. The eyes are cleansed by looking at the scroll and flower arrangement in the tearoom, the nose by smelling the incense, the ears by listening to the sound of the hot water being poured, the mouth by the taste of the tea, and the arms and legs by correctness in etiquette and form. As the five senses have thus been cleansed, next, the mind's sensibilities will also be purified as a matter of course. The tea ceremony will sanitize the mind when it is choked with superfluity. I never deviate from 'the heart of tea' at any hour of the day, but not because it is simply a pastime. Also the utensils used in the ceremony should conform to one's social standing.
There is a poem about plum blossoms: 'Beneath the deep snows in the village that lies before, many branches of the plum tree flowered last night.' The lavish phrase 'many branches' was changed to 'a single branch.' This conveys equanimity and refinement." (2.119)
Regarding poetry, I used to assume that it was a frivolous art, the kind of thing that was taken up only for decadent, snobbish pleasure. But here we see it has its place even in the way of the samurai, being a vehicle for introspective development. Jōchō adds:
A person said, "I always wondered why eminent men could make sage remarks, but the reason occurred to me one day. Lower-class men are too busy being selfish and thinking lewd thoughts, so their hearts are polluted. They are incapable of eliciting a wise opinion and don't have the inclination to compose poetry. Noble people of high stature are void of impurity in their hearts to start with, and are inherently able to formulate sage ideas through their chasteness." (2.54, emphasis mine)
As well:
When people are flummoxed by something that has happened in the world, not knowing what to do, they will reflexively talk about nothing else. Talking is pointless at such a time. A careless slip of the tongue may spark a quarrel. Or, you may make enemies who nurse feelings of indignation. At such times it is best not to venture out; stay at home instead and compose poetry. (2.103)
This, too, ultimately comes from Confucianism:
The Master said: "In the book of Poetry are three hundred pieces, but the design of them all may be embraced in one sentence: 'Having no depraved thoughts'." (Analects II.2)
The Hagakure has been a great font of moral and in some ways spiritual inspiration to me. I find that the warrior ideals of clarity, resolve, and constant reflection are quite congenial to the ascetic ideals of Buddhism. I will close with one more quotation, which Jōchō attributes to his Zen teacher, Tannen:
If a Buddhist monk is not compassionate on the outside and courageous inside his heart, he will never become enlightened in the Buddhist Way. In the case of a samurai, unless he is courageous on the outside and bursting his gut with great compassion on the inside, he will be unable to execute his duties. Through mingling with samurai, the Buddhist monk is able to understand courage, and conversely, the samurai learns compassion from the monk. (6.21, emphasis mine)
Dīgha Nikāya (Walshe tr.)
After years of only thumbing through suttas on SuttaCentral and AccessToInsight, and reading much more about the suttas than their actual contents, I decided that it was high time I actually began to acquaint myself with the teachings I claim to follow. In general, seasoned Buddhists tend to recommend either the Dīgha Nikāya (Collection of Long Discourses) or the Majjhima Nikāya (Middle-Length Discourses) for beginners to read cover-to-cover, as the discourses in these two tend to be less technical and more approachable than the rest of the canon. Despite the name, Dīgha appears to be the shortest of the main Nikāyas, being that it has considerably fewer discourses than the rest, so I opted to start with that.
For starters, having spent a few years now familiarizing myself with the Pāli texts and listening to dhamma talks (both in person and on YouTube), there was not all that much new to me in the Dīgha. In general, it seems that this collection is lighter on philosophy and heavier on the cosmo-mythological aspects (devas, past buddhas, cakkavattis, etc.), and even those were nothing new, since I've spent a lot of time recently absorbing the cosmology through Ajahn Puṇṇadhammo's book (see above). In addition, what philosophy there is, as in the rest of the Pāli canon, is fairly cut-and-dry, not requiring much exegesis or pondering. For those two reasons, no one sutta elicited much of a response from me. Even so, I did copy down a few noteworthy passages, which I'll comment on below.
My favorite, by far, is somewhat supported by an endnote by the translator, Maurice Walshe, but I think the main point is still there in the Buddha's original statement. This comes after a layman, Poṭṭhapāda, has just finished a long line of questioning about the nature of the self (attān), to which the Buddha has consistently upheld the principle of anattā and regarded the various attān theories as fictions. He says:
I teach a doctrine for getting rid of the gross acquired self … the mind-made acquired self … the formless acquired self, whereby defiling mental states disappear and states tending to purification grow strong, and one gains and remains in purity and perfection of wisdom here and now, having realized and attained it by one's own super-knowledge. Now, Poṭṭhapāda, you might think: "Perhaps these defiling states might disappear …, and one might still be unhappy."* That is not how it should be regarded. If defiling states disappear…, nothing but happiness and delight develops, tranquility, mindfulness and clear awareness—and that is a happy state. (9.40-42)
To the asterisked statement, Walshe adds an endnote: "Doubtless
alluding to the well-known fact that higher states tend to appear very
boring to the worldling who has not experienced them". I have encountered this same sentiment in discussions both online and offline. The most delusional spin some yarn about how, beyond just boring, the un-defiled mind is somehow more susceptible to demonic possession or some such. All of this springs from the naïve assumption that the ordinary mind of wandering, unwholesome thoughts is the default state, or worse yet (owing to some evolutionary or psychoanalytic bias) is actually a high achievement over lower instincts. High meditative states are then presumed to be either lies (being covers for some kind of sleep or self-induced narcosis) or as surrendering some great treasure. The reality is that the purified mind is actually the default, and that what we ordinary humans experience is in fact a degenerated form. Another sutta from the Dīgha, the Aggaññā Sutta, provides a mythological basis for this, in that the first life-forms to appear as the Earth was taking shape were ābhassara-brahmās (who otherwise naturally abide in second jhāna, free from discursive consciousness), and as they continued to indulge in the pleasures of the Earth, they slowly degenerated into coarser and coarser forms of devas until they produced the first humans. In many of his talks, Ajahn Puṇṇadhammo has referred to this story to described jhāna as "remembering a more primordial consciousness", a phrase I quite like.
Speaking of the Aggaññā, another big discourse from this collection, I have a pet theory on that that I've been brewing since I read Ajahn Puṇṇadhammo's book. In particular, I think that story combined with the technical framework of Buddhist cosmology syncs up quite nicely with many other world mythologies. The first beings to appear are, as mentioned, originally without any discursive consciousness; in fact, this is the only sutta where they do much of anything, as they are normally unengaged with the earthly world (in fact, no named characters appear from the ābhassara realms or higher). This, I think, is related to how many mythologies feature a "first god" or two (and their wives) who really don't do much beyond the creation myth: Uranus, Izanagi, Búri, etc. This first generation of gods is simply too pure and exalted to participate much in further exploits, in much the same way that any brahmā being beyond the first level is totally disengaged with the world. The Aggaññā focuses more on the development of human beings and their institutions (agriculture, farming, government, etc.), but I wonder if a parallel discourse could have been given to explain the origin of Tavatiṃsa gods and the Four Great Kings, since these would after all parallel the more prominent gods of other mythologies: the Twelve Olympians, the Egyptian Ennead, the Æsir, etc. More pertinent to the Dhamma, the origin of Māra as a bandit-leader in the parinimittavasavatti realm would also have been interesting.
For now, the last thing I'll touch on is the few suttas that deal with the legend of the cakkavatti, or wheel-turning monarch. If a mahāpurisa (great man) is born after eons of accumulating exceptional kamma, he may either renounce the world and become a buddha, or he may remain home and be crowned king of the world. Many Western Buddhists tend to read their own pre-conceived notions of individualism and liberalism into the Dhamma. Yet, if one reads the canon, there are many stories, especially those regarding the cakkavatti, that are ideological antivenom for such people. We should remember that Buddhism arose among the north Indian noblemen of the Iron Age, and that its contents definitely reflect its heritage. Whatever the ethnic/mythic provenance is of the cakkavatti legend, the texts tell that it was well-known to the Buddha's many audiences. The Buddha himself regarded it highly enough that he declared, in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, that his body should be cremated the same way as that of a cakkavatti. Besides that, he dedicates a few whole suttas, and parts of others, to relating the lives of past cakkavatti. In one case, he speaks about one cakkavatti who decided to innovate in his administration, and so lost one of the Seven Treasures, which were standards of his power:
Then a man came to the King and said: "Sire, you should know that the sacred Wheel-Treasure has disappeared." At this the King was grieved and felt sad. But he did not go to the royal sage and ask him about the duties of a wheel-turning monarch. Instead, he ruled the people according to his own ideas, and, being so ruled, the people did not prosper so well as they had done under the previous kings who had performed the duties of a wheel-turning monarch. Then the ministers, counsellors, treasury officials, guards and doorkeepers, and the chanters of mantras came to the King and said: "Sire, as long as you rule the people according to your own ideas, and differently from the way they were ruled before under previous wheel-turning monarchs, the people do not prosper so well. Sire, there are ministers … in your realm, including ourselves, who have preserved the knowledge of how a wheel-turning monarch should rule. Ask us, Your Majesty, and we will tell you!" (26.9)
Quite against the formula of liberal democracy, the Buddha teaches that politics is a conservative sphere governed by a sacred, almost cosmic tradition. The cakkavatti legend is also quite clearly patriarchal, though not misogynistic (using that word seriously) as are some of the more ascetic-oriented suttas. In addition to the aforementioned Wheel-Treasure, a cakkavatti receives six other "treasures" as part of his coronation, which itself seems to proceed as a spontaneous fruition of his excellent kamma (as if reality itself crowns him—quite an illiberal idea). One of these is as follows:
Then the Woman-Treasure appeared to King Mahāsudassana, lovely, fair to see, charming, with a lotus-like complexion, not too tall or too short, not too thin or too fat, not too dark or too fair, of more than human, deva-like beauty. And the touch of the skin of the Woman-Treasure was like cotton or silk,and her limbs were cool when it was hot, and warm when it was cold. Her body smelt of sandal-wood and her lips of lotus. This Woman-Treasure rose before the King and retired later, and was always willing to do his pleasure, and she was pleasant of speech. And this Woman-Treasure was not unfaithful to the King even in thought, much less in deed. And that is how the Woman-Treasure appeared to King Mahāsudassana. (17.1.15)
To top it off, the cakkavatti keeps his original wife and harem in addition to this new Woman-Treasure (in case it isn't obvious, all cakkavattis—and buddhas—are men). In the same sutta, King Mahāsudassana decides to engage in some charity by establishing buildings all over his kingdom where people can go to get free bathing, food, drink, clothing, vehicles, beds, money, and women (17.1.23). I have read varying translations that dispute whether that last item is meant as wives or just women in general, but the patriarchal bent seems quite prominent in either reading. Some may object that these are ancillary details, or more forcefully that these stories are "cultural baggage", but in any case we are left to consider that there is nothing inherently liberal or modern about Buddhism. I tend to side with Ajahn Puṇṇadhammo, that these and the many other legends in the canon are important in understanding the ancient Indian worldview, which was not incidental but really quite essential in giving rise to Buddhism in the first place.
As one more aside on that sutta, Mahāsudassana establishes a large Dhamma Palace with the help of the architect of the devas, Vissakamma. The palace is decorated quite lavishly, but the grounds have particularly interesting decorations. Surrounding the palace are silver nets of golden bells (and vice versa) as well as heavenly palm-trees, both of which, when the wind blows, produce such lovely sounds that "those who were libertines and drunkards [in the capital] had their desires assuaged by the sound of the bells/leaves in the wind" (17.1.29, 32). I have to wonder if this was added into the original myth as a "Buddhist" flourish, or if the Āryans of his time could appreciate such subtle pleasures as wind-chimes and leaves rustling. In any case, I see in these lines a similar to spirit to Jōchō's comments above about art (in this case, music) as a means of purification. While this case is more couched in magic and mythology, I have come to think that the Buddhist cosmology's emphasis on purity is actually a pretty sound basis for aesthetics, though that probably demands its own dedicated post.
The Way of the Samurai — Yukio Mishima
This is a commentary to the Hagakure written by one of Japan's most foremost 20th-century authors. I was already passingly familiar with Mishima from my days on /pol/ and /lit/, mostly through his appearance on reading lists (though almost always it was his Sun and Steel, a book about his experience with bodybuilding) and through his quotations being circulated on image macros. Unlike Evola, I never got the impression that there was anything more to Mishima, since he was primarily a novelist, so I passed him up for a while. However, I happened across this book while looking up additional information on the Hagakure, and since I already liked that book, I decided I would give Mishima a chance here.
In some ways, this book confirms some suspicions I already had about Mishima, foremost of which is that he was an aesthete. For all of his thunderous, macho quotations that got passed around by chuds on the aforementioned imageboards, he was preoccupied more than anything else with beauty, albeit in a more reactionary sense than most. In some ways, we may be able to connect this to the original spirit of the Hagakure:
Beauty is not beauty for the sake of being loved. It is a beauty of strength, for the sake of appearances and to avoid losing face. When one tries to be beautiful in order to be loved, effeminacy begins. That is spiritual cosmetics. (pp. 91-92)
Much of Jōchō's philosophy is concerned with keeping up appearances, however Jōchō himself rarely if ever invokes "beauty" in any of his musings. Contrast Mishima with this passage from the Hagakure itself:
Constantly check yourself in the mirror when learning how to groom your appearance. I was allowed to grow my forelocks until I was 13. I did not reappear for duties for almost a year until my hair had grown long enough to satisfy that hairstyle properly. Family members commented, "He looks excessively erudite, so he is bound to slip up someday. The lord especially despises men who look as though they are too clever." So, I decided to change the way my faced looked. I scrutinized my face in the mirror, and tried to adjust it. When I resumed my duties a year later, everyone said I looked feeble and sickly. I believe the extensive efforts I made to be the foundation for service. You will never be trusted with a face that looks too discerning. Without composure and resolve you will appear to lack grace. Ideally, one should be reverent, refined, and poised. (Hagakure 1.107)
Even here, where the subject is directly related to physical appearance (beauty in its coarsest sense), Jōchō's advice is more centered around effective performance in one's station. Even if "beauty" is instead taken to mean an inner dimension, I found that Jōchō prized virtue and uprightness above all, with beauty being ancillary at best in his thinking. Consider another line from Mishima:
I am convinced, however, that art kept snugly within the bounds of art alone shrivels and dies, and in this sense I am no believer in what is commonly called art for art's sake. If art is not constantly threatened, stimulated by things outside its domain, it exhausts itself. (p. 10)
Mishima saw art as an end in life, that for which man must live and die, and furthermore as something that must be stimulated and innovated. Jōchō, as we saw earlier, seemed to regard art (primarily poetry) as a means for cultivation, an exercise in nobility of the spirit. Whether art is stereotyped or not, whether it is "exhausted", seems to be of little account to Jōchō, who instead has a more definite rubric, which is whether art expresses purity, refinement, and the like—to the point that the traditional view of learning art by copying the old masters is probably more favorable than feverishly chasing new ideas. Perhaps I should not fault an artist for being an artist, but on this matter I could see a less informed reader coming away thinking of Jōchō as some kind of angsty existentialist—an image that is certainly not helped by Mishima's tendency to call Jōchō's philosophy "nihilistic".
I nonetheless found two points of interest from Mishima which deepened my appreciation for the original Hagakure as an anti-modern philosophy. In the first, he discusses the difference between the ancient ideal of samurai as a caste as opposed to the modern egalitarian ideal:
When a samurai prepares himself mentally to bear single-handedly the burden of the whole han [藩; fief], when he applies himself to his work with great self-confidence, he ceases to be a mere function. He is a samurai; he is the Way of the Samurai. There is no fear that such a human being will degenerate into a mere cog in the social machine. However, a man who lives for his technical proficiency cannot fulfill his total human role; all he can do is perform the single function, especially in a technology-oriented society such as ours. If a samurai who cherishes a total human ideal gives himself over to a particular talent or skill, his whole ideal will be eaten away by his specific function. This is what Jōchō fears. His image of the ideal human being is not a compromise product, one part function to one part total being. A total person does not need a skill. He represents spirit, he represents action, and he represents the ideal principles on which his realm is founded. (pp. 72-73)
Anyone who lives in the modern West (and, evidently, modern Japan) is doubtless familiar with the rigmarole of filling a résumé with "skills" and selling oneself as an "asset" to earn a living. The personality, rather than being cultivated and trained according to an ideal, is another cog in itself, tactically used to impress and flatter the right people. There is also the constant threat of disposal in the modern West, where a failure to meet or keep up with certain performance standards meets with abrupt termination; faulty cogs are tossed out and replaced. Nothing could be further from Jōchō's attitude of never giving up on bettering others for the good of the han. Today, that ethic is regarded as entirely outlandish, to the extent now that modern companies don't even want to provide training in the skills they demand (look around at all of the "entry-level" jobs that require 5-10 years of experience), let alone training in actual humanity. This also has a more specific application in the realm of politics:
The philosophy of Hagakure creates a standard of action which is the most effective means of escaping the limitations of self and becoming immersed in something greater. Nothing could be further removed from Machiavellian philosophies, in which an outsider arbitrarily combines element a and element b, or manipulates power a and power b. Jōchō's is exclusively a subjective philosophy, not an objective one. It is a philosophy of action, not of government. (pp. 39-40)
As I remarked earlier, there is only ever the rule of men, not of systems, so any approach to "politics" (Mishima seems to dispense with the concept entirely) should focus on cultivating virtuous men, not cooking up utopic systems. It is noteworthy that both government and corporations in the West have largely adopted bureaucracy, which in its impersonal, procedural formality stifles the possibility of any ethical ideal like that of the samurai.
In any case, aside from these two observations, I didn't think all that much of Mishima's commentary here. As I said, he is too concerned with things like beauty and love to appreciate the starkness and lucidity of Jōchō's aphorisms (Mishima's confessed homosexuality may have had something to do with that). Perhaps this would be more worthwhile to a fellow aesthete, but as I prefer coldness and clarity, there was little of interest to me here.
Essays in Idleness — Kenkō
This is a semi-famous collection of reflections by a monk of the late Kamakura period, covering as diverse topics as literature, manners, worship, etc. In many ways this is the antithesis to Hagakure, enough so that Jōchō called Kenkō "a lily-livered coward" (Hagakure 2.140), although he qualified that comment saying that such literature was appropriate to monks and retirees, not to samurai. Elsewhere he maintains that monks and samurai follow separate paths, and that while they may learn from each other, one man can only follow one path in life. So, I see no point in hashing out the differences. Where they disagree, it is simpler to say that Kenkō was a monk and Jōchō was a samurai, and for that matter that Kenkō was a Buddhist (of what sect, we don't know) and Jōchō, if not explicitly so, seemed more Confucian.
Further, while I found Jōchō a great source of harsh but practical wisdom, Kenkō I found more to be a kindred spirit sharing reflections that I (and apparently many Japanese literati) find quite congenial. Like many great men, he preferred solitude, silence, and simplicity above all.
I wonder what feelings inspire a man to complain of "having nothing to do". I am happiest when I have nothing to distract me and I am completely alone.
If a man conforms to society, his mind will be captured by the filth of the outside world, and he is easily led astray; if he mingles in society, he must be careful that his words do not offend others, and what he says will not at all be what he feels in his heart. He will joke with others only to quarrel with them, now resentful, now happy, his feelings in constant turmoil. Calculations of advantage will wantonly intrude, and not a moment will be free from considerations of profit and loss. Intoxication is added to delusion, and in a state of inebriation the man dreams. People are all alike: they spend their days running about frantically, oblivious to their insanity.Even if a man has not yet discovered the path of enlightenment, as long as he removes himself from his worldly ties, leads a quiet life, and maintains his peace of mind by avoiding entanglements, he may be said to be happy, at least for the time being.It is written in Maka Shinkan [lectures by Zhiyi], "Break your ties with your daily activities, with personal affairs, with your arts, and with learning". (§75, emphasis mine)
The time has come to abandon all ties. I shall not keep promises, nor consider decorum. Let anyone who cannot understand my feelings feel free to call me mad, let him think I am out of my senses, that I am devoid of human warmth. Abuse will not bother me; I shall not listen if praised. (§112, emphasis mine)
Some may lump this kind of lyrical misanthropy, especially in the second passage, in with the likes of Cioran or Nietzsche. However, whereas the Western existentialists break away from the masses only to fester in restless dread, Kenkō was nonetheless a good Buddhist monk with an actual τέλος.
When you go into retreat at a mountain temple and serve the Buddha, you are never at a loss how to spend your time, and you feel as though the impurities in your heart are being cleansed away. (§17)
It was also refreshing to see, from another Japanese Buddhist, a stern rebuttal to ideas like those of Tamura (see above) in regards to the issue of monasticism and lay life.
Some say, "As long as your mind is set on enlightenment, it does not make much difference where you live. Even if you live with your family and mingle in society, why should that interfere with your prayers for happiness in the future life?" Men who speak in such terms know nothing whatsoever about the meaning of prayers for the future life. Indeed, once a man realizes how fleeting this life is and resolves to escape at all costs from the cycle of birth and death, what pleasure can he take in daily attendance on some lord or in schemes to benefit his family? A man's mind is influenced by his environment, and unless he has peaceful surroundings he will have difficulty in carrying out his religious duties.
…
Despite everything, once a man has entered the Way of the Buddha and turned his back on the world, even supposing he has desires, they cannot possibly resemble the deep-seated cravings of men in power. How much expense to society are his paper bedclothes, his hempen robe, a bowl of food, and some millet broth? His wants are easily met, his heart quickly satisfied. Since, moreover, he is in some sense ashamed of his appearance, he obviously will most often stay away from evil and keep close to good. It is desirable somehow to make a break from this world so that one may benefit from having been born a man. The man who surrenders himself to his desires and neglects the path of enlightenment is hardly any different from the brute beasts. (§58, emphasis mine)
Some would think, after reading my screed against Tamura, that I am some kind of rabid anti-Mahāyāna fanatic. Yet it is not hard to find those like Kenkō here who, despite any formal differences of lineage and scripture, carry on the spirit of the Buddha's teachings, which is to say a committed renunciation of the world.
One consequence of his resolute detachment is that he is quite the misogynist, again treating that word seriously as "enemy of women". A few fiery comments in that regard:
In a world without women it would not make any difference what kind of clothes or hat a man wore; nobody would take the trouble to dress properly.
One might wonder, then, what exalted creatures women must be to inspire such fear in men. In fact, women are all perverse by nature. They are deeply self-centered, grasping in the extreme, devoid of all susceptibility to reason, quick to indulge in superstitious practices. They are clever talkers, but may refuse to utter a word when asked even some perfectly unobjectionable question. One might suppose this meant they were cautious, but they are equally apt to start discussing, quite unsolicited, matters better passed over in silence. Their ingenuity in embroidering their stories is too much for the wisdom of any man, but when, presently, their fictions are exposed, they never perceive it. Women are devious but stupid. How disagreeable it is to be forced to cater to their wishes in order to please them. What woman is worthy of such deference? Even if such a thing as an intelligent woman existed, she would surely prove to be aloof and unendearing. Only when a man enslaved by his infatuation in courting a woman does she seem charming and amusing. (§107)
Living day in and day out with a woman, no matter what she may be like, is bound to be frustrating and the source of irritation. The woman too is likely to feel insecure. The relationship, however, can last unbroken for many years if the couple lives apart, and the man only occasionally visits or stays with the woman. If the man casually visits the woman and remains with her just temporarily, a freshness will cling to their romance. (§190)
Here again, the careless reader might compare these remarks to the ramblings of a Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. Again too, it is important to remember that Kenkō was a solitary ascetic, so his cultivated disdain served at least a positive function, which was disenchantment. With the German aphorists, their acerbic wit tends to fall flat when we know that it arose primarily out of inner tension and frustration. We do not know what became of Kenkō, but at the very least, we know that he followed a time-honored program of training (bhāvana, ἄσκησις) towards full awakening. Even at a minimum, one who imitates Kenkō would develop virtue, composure, and dignity.
A man who fails even for a short time to keep in mind the preciousness of time is no different from a corpse. If you wish to know why each instant must be guarded so jealously, it is so that a man inwardly will have no confusing thoughts and outwardly no concern with worldly matters; that if he wishes to rest at that point, he may rest, but if he wishes to follow the Way, he may follow it. (§108)
In contrast, what is there to imitate in the existentialists? Suppose we joined them in their cafés and hotels, with their coffees and cigarettes, endlessly devouring books and crapping out new ones. Have even a single one of them been a good man, let alone more than a man? Have any of them even been happy? My point is that the misogyny (or misanthropy, etc.) of a mountain hermit is only superficially comparable to that of a bitter, academic urbanite. The former is part of a genuine aim, but the latter can hardly settle his mind on what it means to "aim".
While I have praised Kenkō's renunciant style and spirit, he also offers some comments on worldly manners. Already in the last quotation, he indicates that it is possible to be "at rest" in the world, without leaving the home life. Elsewhere, he gives us a few tastes of what kind of bearing such a man would have.
You can judge a person's breeding by whether he is quite impassive even when he tells an amusing story, or laughs a great deal even when relating a matter of no great interest.
It is most distressing, when the good and bad of somebody's appearance or the quality of a certain person's scholarship is being evaluated, for the speaker to refer to himself by way of comparison. (§56)
I find it insufferable too the way people spread word about the latest novelties and make a fuss over them. I am charmed by the man who remains unaware of such fashions until they have become quite an old story to everyone else. (§78)
The man of breeding never appears to abandon himself completely to his pleasures; even his manner of enjoyment is detached. It is the rustic boors who take all their pleasures grossly. (§137, emphasis mine)
We may here refer to a Pāli sutta:
Bhikkhus, there are these four kinds of persons found existing in the world. What four? One who has gone on retreat by body but not gone on retreat by mind; one who has not gone on retreat by body but has gone on retreat by mind; one who has not gone on retreat either by body or by mind; and one who has gone on retreat both by body and by mind. (Aṅguttara Nikāya 4.138)
If the fourth represents the pinnacle, the second stands as a guiding ideal for those still unprepared to undertake full renunciation. As with the best of Mahāyāna, Kenkō's writings sketch a style of living that supports (and is supported by) this kind of inner detachment.
The Bow and the Club — Julius Evola
This is a collection of essays on a variety of subjects by the great Italian philosopher, Julius Evola. Ever present on these yearly roundups it seems, Evola's piercing and thorough insights continue to draw me back to his writings. As this book contains 19 different essays, I will only comment on two of my favorites.
I've never discussed it on this blog, but I am an amateur polyglot and have a passing interest in historical linguistics. For that reason, I quite enjoyed the essay "The Decay of Words", in which Evola traces the change in connotation of many words in the transition from Classical Latin to modern Romance languages, particularly Italian. The example that stuck with me long after I finished the book was the decline from Latin otium, leisure, to the Italian ozioso, lazy or idle (cf. English otiose).
Otium is closely linked to the tranquility of mind of the sage, to the inner calm that allows one to attain the summits of contemplation. If understood in its correct, traditional sense, contemplation is not an escape from the world or a distraction, but an immersion within oneself and elevation to the perception of the metaphysical order that every true man must never cease to keep in sight when living and struggling in an earthly State. (Ch. 5)
The modern world is obsessed with the two extremes of work and vacation, like the peaks and troughs of a high-amplitude wave. Leisure, in the above sense, means resting at the mid-point between the two, so that one may undertake genuine cultivation. On this, the Buddha provided the simile of a lute string that only sounds when it is neither too tense nor too slack (Khandhaka 5.22). Now, however, the word has a more negative connotation, which Evola points to as a subtle sign of the times, on which he elaborates with another linguistic note:
Classical otium ... is foreign to modern man. No: all he knows is 'distraction' (the literal meaning of which is 'dispersion' [Latin distrāho = to pull apart]); he looks for sensations, for new tensions, and new stimuli—almost as psychic narcotics. Anything, as long as he can escape himself, as long as he can avoid finding himself alone with himself, isolated from the noise of the outside world and interaction with his 'neighbour'. Hence, the radio, television, cinema, cruises, the frenzy of sports or political rallies in a regime of the masses, the need to hear things, to chase after the latest or most sensational news, 'supporters' of all kinds, and so on. Every expedient seems to have been diabolically brought into play in order to destroy any kind of genuine inner life, to prevent any internal defence of one's personality, so that, almost like an artificially galvanised being, the individual will let himself be swept away by the collective current, which—naturally, according to the famous 'meaning of history'—moves forward according to an unlimited progress. (Ch. 5)
I can hardly add much to this, except to echo the Arktos editor's footnote, that this was all written well before the current age of smart phones, internet, and meme culture.
Then we have the tenth essay, "The Laughter of the Gods", which concerns the problem of Western humanism, though here he uses that term as a broad umbrella encompassing existentialism and "tragic" philosophies. In contrast to the modern ideal of human existence being the highest good in itself, Evola (drawing on Kerényi) refers to the Classical Weltanschauung that men and gods were of the same stock and that the gods were a genuine presence (leaving no room for debates about faith and doubt, as we see today). In the decline from the Classical world to the present, Evola identifies that the original feeling of divine identity gave way to a sort of flux between divinity and humanity, and finally to mere humanity, all as a result of what he calls the Titanic spirit:
Hesiod defines this spirit very clearly through the epithets he gives Prometheus: these are all designations of the active, inventive and cunning mind that seeks to deceive Zeus' νοῦς, which is to say the Olympian mind. But this mind can neither be deceived nor shaken. It is as firm and untroubled as a mirror; it discloses everything without searching for anything—everything is disclosed within it. By contrast, the titanic spirit is restless, inventive and always in search of something, by cunning and intuition. The object of the Olympian mind is what is real, being, that which is as it truly is. The object of the titanic spirit, instead, is invention, but this is only a well-construed lie. (Ch. 10)
Here the myth of Prometheus takes on a positive character, being a barometer for what is or is not the good life. In general, the prevalent philosophies of ancient times (both East and West) had the "Olympian" character, which is to say that of unassailable knowledge and stability. The modern civilization of the West has been uniquely Promethean, searching instead for the novel and the cunning. How telling, then, that the West has also been the only one to make such a cult out of tragedy and angst. In any case, Prometheus is vanquished by Zeus, and his idiot brother, Epimetheus, receives as a wife Pandora, the first woman and "the last inexhaustible source of misery for mankind" (Ch. 10). Knowing that men would enjoy Prometheus' gift of tragedy and Epimetheus' gift of women, Zeus is said to have laughed.
This laughter marks the ultimate defeat of the titan and usurper. ... Olympian laughter is lethal. Yet no one, strictly speaking, dies from it; nothing is changed in the human being, a being who is filled with contradictions, a being exemplified by both Prometheus and Epimetheus. So what is destroyed by this laughter? The very importance of titanic misery, its allegedly tragical quality. In the face of Zeus, a laughing spectator, the eternal race of men plays out its eternal human comedy. (Ch. 10)
After decades of hearing trite, humanist interpretations of this myth in public school and mass media, Evola's interpretation (again, borrowing from Kerényi) has finally shown me its greater significance. Parallel myths of devas and brahmās looking down on the witless escapades of men abound in the Buddhist canon; for example, the commentaries attribute this line to a deva of Tavatiṃsa, the Indian Olympus:
The Destroyer brings under his sway the person of distracted mind who, insatiate in sense desires, only plucks the flowers of pleasure. (Dhammapāda 48)
Of course, the ariyas and devas of Buddhist mythology aren't much given to laughter. Here we may even recall Sugrue's comment (see my discussion of Plato, above) about Socrates' laughter exemplifying the Greek spirit in contrast to others; in this case the emphasis seems much more appropriate, given that it may very well have been in imitation of Zeus. Whatever the case, both the Classical and Ancient Indian sages agreed on the foolishness of human "tragedy" and, moreover, that there is a way beyond this state:
In principle, the spirit always has the possibility of orienting itself according to one or the other of these two opposite conceptions, and of drawing from this a yard-stick as well as an underlying tone for its existence. The 'Olympian' orientation is just as possible as the Promethean one. Leaving ancient symbols and myths aside, it can translate into a way of being, a well-defined attitude to internal and external events, to the human and spiritual world, to history and thought. (Ch. 10)
He goes on to explain how this dichotomy manifests in history, in forms of government (Olympian aristocracy vs. Promethean democracy) as well as the world of ideas (Olympian theism vs. Promethean humanism). I would add that the anti-supernatural tendency latent within Christian dogma went a long way to fomenting the Promethean spirit in a unique way. Ancient religion acknowledges the path of Heracles, by which it is possible for man to recover his Olympian heritage and join the gods, or go still further as in the Buddha's teachings. Christianity, inheriting the Jewish myth of Adam's fall, bars the way and condemns spiritual aspirants as prideful or demonic. As I have commented elsewhere, it is not a far step from "you cannot save yourself" to "you cannot be saved at all"—the Olympian path goes from forbidden to forgotten.
History of Japanese Religion — Masaharu Anesaki
This is exactly what the title indicates, published in 1928. One thing worth commenting on briefly is that this book was published by Tuttle, a company which today has become much more focused on the unwashed masses. If you peruse any of their recent publications, you'll find them with quite gaudy, eye-catching cover designs with simple, introductory material. Not that I begrudge them for that, certainly they know their audience, just that it was surprising to find that they formerly published more voluminous books with polished contents. One other Tuttle book I read (and shortly disposed of) this year was Inazō Nitobe's Bushidō, also from the early 20th century. Amusingly, their edition features footnotes with definitions of "big" words, such as: braggart, quid pro quo, acme, faggot, dissipation, sluggard, prate, etc. Anesaki's book is unfortunately no longer on their catalogue, though I can only wonder how many words Tuttle would have to gloss like that for their current audience.
Regarding the author himself, I think Anesaki is a fine historian, though at a few points he seems to betray some modernist thinking. For instance, he describes the Buddhist view of karma as "slavish yielding to circumstances" (p. 74), and he takes a few pot-shots against the nationalists of his time in regards to the view of Shintō. Aside from those, I think Anesaki presents the history well. He had the right balance of being a born-and-raised Japanese man yet having been drawn out from his culture by exposure to Western developments. Thus he has the national consciousness to sympathize with and understand the history, without being so chauvinistic as to rewrite events into witless propaganda, nor so rationalistic as to slander and denounce the entire past.
The rest of my comments are on the history itself, which primarily revolves around Buddhism (though Shintō and Confucianism also get their due). Buddhism was famously introduced to Japan by Prince Shōtoku, whose life has opened my mind a little more to Mahāyāna.
We have seen the Buddhist idea of the triune relationship between the Buddha, the Truth, and the Community: statesmanship was to the prince nothing but an application of the truth of the Three Treasures to every phase of national and individual life. Thus, he further inculcated the virtues of propriety, justice, faithfulness, and the like, and added provisions for applying them to the management of State affairs. All this was meant to emphasize the foundation of life upon the Buddhist ideal of the oneness of being, and to work out the edification of national life by realizing the universal communion of faith and charity. (p. 61, emphasis mine)
The Prince also gave lectures that interpreted the sūtras as models for different aspects of civil life: the Lotus Sūtra presented the all-embracing unity of Dharma, the Vimālakīrti-nirdeśa provided a basis for model citizenship, and the Srīmālā-simhanānda Sūtra provided ideals for Buddhist womanhood. In this way, I can at least appreciate Mahāyāna as an attenuation of Dharma for worldly projects, in this case building the Japanese nation as a bona fide Buddhist culture. In contrast to the likes of Tamura and Hạnh, who present Mahāyāna as an impulse by and for the masses (to "satisfy the people's hearts"), Prince Shōtoku gave Mahāyāna a properly regal, imperial character that molded and disciplined the Japanese people. If I may indulge a little play on words, the former seems more like a "bigger" vehicle, i.e. for the masses, whereas the latter is a properly "great" vehicle.
Beyond the foundations laid by Prince Shōtoku, it was illuminating for me to get a grasp of which schools arose in which periods of history. Previously, I read about Japanese schools without considering their historical relationships, regarding them all as just happening to arise in the same country. Anesaki does a good job overviewing the historical circumstances that stimulated the rise of each school. For example, he discusses the transition from the Heian period to the Kamakura:
The Buddhist religion of the new age was not one of ceremonies and mysteries [as in the Heian] but a religion of simple piety or of spiritual exercise. Dogma gave way to personal experience, ritual and sacerdotalism to piety and intuition, and this new type of religion exerted its influence beyond class limits, exhibiting many democratic features. (p. 168)
The primary sects of the Heian were the Shingon and Tendai, both notably esoteric schools of thought. Going into the Kamakura, the main sects that came to prominence were Jōdo, Nichiren, and Zen. Personally I question the "democratic" label here, as all three movements were just as much movements of the nobility, i.e. samurai, but the point remains that the culture shifted away from priestly tendencies. This episode in history is also a strong rejoinder to certain critics of Buddhism in the West. It is common today to hear the criticism that Western Buddhists over-emphasize meditation and philosophy, when in fact "real" Buddhism is all about chanting mantras, making offerings, performing rituals, etc. I have seen this come from critics (particularly communists, like the notorious Žižek) and supporters of Buddhism alike, and I have long suspected that it comes from a sort of Third-Worldist fetish for what is ethnic and proletarian, against what they see as white and bourgeois (let alone aristocratic). In reality, this division over practice has played itself out in Japan, as well as the rest of pre-modern Asia, well before the West was even exposed to Buddhism. A cursory glance at the Heian-Kamakura transition would confute this fallacy of what is or isn't "real" Buddhism—but then, those who resort to that kind of argument are too shallow to bother with history anyway.
As an aside, Anesaki provides a funny parallel to the "Western Buddhist" phenomenon towards the end. During the Meiji period, Western culture came to be in vogue among the Japanese, in almost the same way that Eastern culture became trendy in the post-war West. Just as bourgeois Westerners took to imported spirituality in a shallow cultural rebellion, similarly in Japan:
Social reform meant nothing but Occidentalization, and Christianity was naturally regarded as one of the necessary conditions of civilization. Christian churches were crowded even with those who cared little for religion, and became a sort of fashionable place where the "enlightened" men and women met and listened to the sermons delivered by missionaries—preferably in English. (p. 356)
One wonders, then, if to this day there is a parallel group of impertinent critics who attack Japanese Christians and say things like "You're just a larper! Real Christians in America go square-dancing at megachurches!".
Returning, then, to the Kamakura period and its developments. Another common criticism, specifically aimed at Theravāda, is that it is functionally equivalent to the Protestant sects of Christianity, on the grounds that its dismissal of Mahāyāna sūtras is equivalent to the Protestant maxim, sola scriptura, meaning only the Bible is infallible. (I will leave aside the smuggled assumption that Protestantism, and anything like it, is automatically bad.) This, too, comes from a shallow understanding of history, though a precise refutation of that argument is a topic for another post. For now, I will share a few similarities with Protestantism that I encountered in reading about the Kamakura sects as they developed. First, there is the case of Shinran, student of Hōnen and founder of the Jōdo-shinshū:
... Shinran carried the idea of Buddha's grace to extreme conclusions. A saying of Hōnen runs—"Even a bad man will be received in Buddha's Land, how much more a good man!" Shinran turned this to—"Even a good man will be received in Buddha's Land, how much more a bad man!" In short "neither virtue nor wisdom but faith" was his fundamental tenet, and faith itself has nothing to do with our own intention or attainment but is solely Buddha's free gift. (pp. 182-183)
This is almost exactly the same as another of Martin Luther's maxims: sola fide, that is to say one is saved by faith alone, regardless of any good works by the believer. Further:
The foundation of salvation has been laid down in the vows or "primeval vows" [本願] taken by the Buddha Amita [sic], and the mystery of his "Name" is the sole key to salvation. Our destiny is entirely in Buddha's hands, is encompassed within his plan of saving all as expressed in his vows; nay, our salvation is predestined and well-nigh accomplished, because Buddha has already, millions of æons ago, perfected his scheme of taking all to his Realm of Bliss. "Calling Buddha's Name" in pious devotion and absolute trust in him, Shinran taught, is the way thereto, but no idea whatever of invocation or supplication is to be cherished; it should be uttered as the expression of trust and gratitude towards his grace. (pp. 183-184)
This is a close parallel to the Protestant doctrine of predestination, albeit some sects (most notably Calvinism) include a negative aspect, which is to say some are predestined for damnation. The Mahāyāna sūtras do mention icchantikas, people with no hope of enlightenment, though it seems that concept never struck much traction—if nothing else, such a concept would preclude the possibility of the bodhisattva vow to liberate all beings. Regardless, in both cases, predestined salvation figures prominently in the new sect, especially as a revolt against the old guard's doctrine of "works".
Besides the doctrines, these sects also feature charismatic reformer characters in the personages of Hōnen, Shinran, Eisai, Dōgen, and especially Nichiren who revolted against perceived corruption at Mount Hiei, distinctly parallel to the figures of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli revolting against the Papacy. This is not to assert the reverse, that Mahāyāna is the "real" Protestant analogue—those men split off from Tendai, after all. The point is that neither Mahāyāna nor Theravāda are so monolithic that we can call one or the other "Protestant". As with the previous point, the "Theravāda is Protestant Buddhism" argument is an egregious oversimplification of history that, once again, seems to come from a personal prejudice than a sincere investigation of the facts.
Turning to the Tokugawa period, Anesaki describes the transformation of the samurai under the new shogunate:
The Samurai were trained in civic arts and political sciences as well as in self-culture and personal morality. The feudal régime was strongly supported by the class discipline of the Samurai, and thanks to this the Tokugawa régime exhibited the rare instance of a long peace lasting more than two centuries, interrupted only by a few cases of riot or insurrection. Though the peace was partly due to the seclusion of the nation, it was also to be credited to Confucianism.
This whole scheme of training of the ruling class was called Bushidō, the Way of the Samurai, but here we have to note a significant transformation of that discipline, for the Samurai, the warrior of preceding ages, now became the preserver of peace, although girt with two swords. He had little prospect of fighting, and yet had always to be ready to die for his lord. As a ruler he had to be well versed in the theory and arts of administration, but no less essential was military discipline. These combined requirements produced some happy results but also some abnormal convention, which we shall see presently. (pp. 262-263)
As I have already hit upon a few times above, I have become more and more convinced that good politics can only be established by good men, and men are best trained in ethics and culture through the personalistic, tutorial relations in feudalism. The "abnormal convention" Anesaki refers to at the end seems to be the lack of social mobility, again betraying some modernist and individualist bias, though he tends mostly to praise the peace and order that prevailed under this paradigm. As for the dual ideal of both theoretical education and military discipline, I have seen this re-appear in more recent times among Western reactionaries, specifically as the "cultured thug", a concept touted by the late Johnathan Bowden. I admit I am not very well-versed in his work, but from what I've seen, Bowden's idea of the "culture" side is a little weak, focusing on things like fantasy novels and pulp cinema—a far cry from the samurai curriculum of Confucius, Sun Tzu, Sima Qian, etc., to say nothing of those who were students of Zen.
The last part I want to comment on is in regards to Christianity's prospects in modern Japan. It is worth remembering that Anesaki wrote this between the World Wars, so we have the benefit of hindsight. Nonetheless, his comments in 1928 were:
A defect much greater than [sectarian] division is that the problem of the Christian religion or church is at stake in the Occident, not less than in Japan. Many people call modern civilization Christian, but it is evident to every unbiased observer that Christianity is not taking the lead in civilization but is struggling to accommodate itself to it. Japan's problem lies partially in how to be a modern nation in contrast to her past, but it lies in a higher degree in her facing the problems arising out of the industrial régime introduced and nearly naturalized. It is, therefore, no wonder that Christianity is not a solution but a problem in Japan. ... Moreover, although the "conflict between science and theology" is regarded by liberal Christians as a matter of the past, these liberals have still to combat Fundamentalists, while the Catholic Church is condemning "modernism" as persistently as ever. How then can Christianity, of whatever coloring it be, offer a perfect solution to the Japanese people of the relations between science and religion? In addition to this most Japanese would gravely question the dogmas of creation by fiat, of original sin, of vicarious redemption, of apostolic succession, and so forth. It will take a long time, at least, for Christianity, by convincing the Japanese of the truth of these tenets, to carry the people across the whirlpools of human life and social problems. (p. 406, emphasis mine)
Since Anesaki's time, Christianity has continued to lose ground, both in the East and in the West, to secular modernity. It also seems to me that the Christian dogmas raised by Anesaki are now, more than ever, unacceptable to the Japanese mind, as much as they are to the modern Western mind. Missionaries then and now have had to twist the teachings accordingly, especially in regards to the problem of original sin:
It is to be specially noted that Christian missionaries in Japan emphasized the "optimistic" traits of their religion in contrast to Buddhist "pessimism." This circumstance combined with the ethos of the time produced an easy-going optimism among the converts, and the gospel of suffering like [Paul] Sawayama's was a very rare exception. As a whole, Japanese Christians, particularly Protestants, are far from understanding the meaning of the Cross. (p. 345f)
This has gone both ways. Even today, another common Western criticism is that Buddhism is "pessimistic", and that the Christian doctrine of salvation is more hopeful. I have come across one Christian evangelist's instructions (I can't find it at the moment) on converting Buddhists, and part of his advice went something like "Buddhists think that all life is suffering, but the Bible says God made everything and said it was good. Which world do you wanna live in?". On the other side, plenty of Western converts to Buddhism and other Eastern religions have cited original sin and similar dogmas as being too pessimistic and discouraging, and that the possibility of enlightenment through personal cultivation is more congenial. Once again, one starts with a particular bias and skews the facts to support it. Regardless, Anesaki's point remains, that it will be very difficult to persuade modern Japanese people of original sin and redemption through Christ's sacrifice. As original sin is a pathological concept, I suspect most new converts in Japan will be pathological people (depressed, addicted, etc.) as they are in the West. That, however, is only an outsider's perspective; I'll look into more recent writings if I ever feel like investigating this issue further.
Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future — Seraphim Rose
This book covers a number of contemporary spiritual phenomena (it was published in 1975), including the popularity of Hinduism and Buddhism among young Westerners, the Azusa Street Revival and speaking in tongues, and UFOlogy. Predictably, Rose denounces all of this as demonic, because none of it is Russian Orthodox. Some of these phenomena do suggest darker undercurrents, but the fact that Rose has virtually no criteria besides the one just mentioned makes it difficult to take his comments very seriously. The most egregious case is in his discussion of Zen in America, where he says:
Of all of today's Eastern religious currents, Zen is probably the most sophisticated intellectually and the most sober spiritually. With its teaching of compassion and a loving "Cosmic Buddha," it is perhaps as high a religious ideal as the human mind can attain—without Christ. Its tragedy is precisely that is has no Christ in it, and thus no salvation, and its very sophistication and sobriety effectively prevent its followers from seeking salvation in Christ. In its quiet, compassionate way it is perhaps the saddest of all the reminders of the "post-Christian" times in which we live. Non-Christian "spirituality" is no longer a foreign importation in the West; it has become a native American religion putting down deep roots into the consciousness of the West. Let us be warned from this: the religion of the future will not be a mere cult or sect, but a powerful and profound religious orientation which will be absolutely convincing to the mind and heart of modern man. (p. 94)
He has a very easy time with the low-hanging fruit of UFOs and Christian revivalist cults, but when he comes up against as refined and noble a tradition as Zen, he admits to quite literally having no criticism except that it's not Christian. Notice also, in the last sentence, how "convincing" appears with a negative connotation; the rest of his book is plagued with similar bald assertions that dogma is good and any amount of thinking or "convincing" is prideful and wicked (in Orthodox jargon: prelest). I refer to Evola again, as this seems to be a matter of "race of spirit":
If a being feels himself remote from metaphysical reality, then he will imagine any strength that he may acquire as a "grace," knowledge will appear as "revelation" in its accepted meaning in the West since the time of the Hebrew prophets, and the announcer of a law may assume for him "divine" proportions rather than be justly regarded as one who has destroyed ignorance and who has become "awakened." This separation from metaphysical reality masks the dignity and the spiritual level of a teaching and wraps the person of the teacher himself in an impenetrable fog. One thing is certain: ideas of "revelations" and of men-gods can only sound foreign to an Aryan spirit and to a "noble son" (kula-putta), particularly in periods when the mind of humanity had not yet entirely lost the memory of its own origins. (The Doctrine of Awakening, p. 20)
I suspect that Rose was a nervous misfit (he was apparently a homosexual) who himself felt "remote" from higher truths. Initially enticed by popular teachers like Guénon and Watts, he embarked on a spiritual quest that he was not cut out for, and so he made the leap of faith to avoid (or perhaps to treat) a nervous breakdown. Christianity probably attracts these sorts precisely because they feel kinship with the darker, more pathological aspects (Christ's suffering, the fallen nature of man, etc.). Unfortunately, Rose and his ilk tend to project their deficiencies onto the world, declaring that all humanity is helpless without the grace and revelation of Christ, and that any alternative must be some kind of demonic influence or "pride" or what-have-you.
There are many texts worth grappling with, even if one disagrees with them. Rose refuses to be grappled with, yet demands every match be forfeited to him. So, I think it is safe to pass over whatever else he has written.
The Lotus Sutra (Burton Watson tr.)
I've tried at least a few times to get into this, initially with the more mainstream Reeves translation you can find in Barnes & Noble. I was dissatisfied with his practice of "localizing" the way one treats a video game or an anime, for example in the lists of various listeners putting centaurs, dwarves, dragons, etc. I didn't delve deep enough to find genuine issues in the translation, but that alone put enough of a bad taste in my mouth to make me look for a more serious translation. Eventually I came across this in one of my many used-bookstore outings and decided to finally take a stab at the Lotus Sūtra properly.
What really astonishes me, ironically, is how little the text actually astonished me. I'd spent so much time reading about the Lotus Sūtra's immense impact on East Asian religion as well as the sectarian vitriol it inspired (primarily that of Nichiren), that I found the text itself to be mild and underwhelming. To be frank, by the time I finished the book, I felt as if I'd read a whole ream of blank printer paper. Perhaps this vindicates some of the polemics about Mahāyāna being too profound for other Buddhists, though I've had much better mileage with the prajñāpāramitā texts like the Diamond Sūtra and Heart Sūtra.
That said, I do have a few comments about the text in general. For one thing, there is a palpable difference in character between the parables found in the original discourses and those found in this sūtra. Those of the nikāyas and āgamas are usually very intuitive images one finds in the natural world or in normal society: crossing a river, guarding a gate, treating a wound, etc. All of this depicts the eightfold path as a perfectly natural undertaking, with nibbāna being the normal, good state and samsāra being a kind of corruption or faulty state. The natural imagery also comes across as a sincere attempt by enlightened beings to communicate their wisdom to deluded worldlings; it is for this among other reasons that Julius Evola rightly referred to early Buddhism as "anti-mystical" (Doctrine of Awakening, p. 83).
In contrast, the parables of the Lotus Sūtra come across as deliberately composed, requiring more setup and suspension of disbelief. There is, for example, the well-known parable of the burning house, with children inside who, for some reason, see no danger in the fire and are only coaxed out with the false promise of toys outside. Another tells of a group of treasure-hunters who, after many years of searching, wish to give up, but are induced to continue when their guide produces the illusion of a city as a rest stop for them. The unnatural and bizarre nature of these parables gives more the impression of a propagandist who has already decided on what he wants to believe, and must now cook up stories to back it up. It is the same sort of spirit we see in political novelists like Ayn Rand: someone who really wants the world to work a certain way and so resorts to merely inventing new worlds. In this regard, I'll repeat that some bona fide Mahāyānists (like the aforementioned Yoshiro Tamura and Thích Nhất Hạnh) agree that their sūtras had to be made up in order to function as propaganda.
Besides that, I have one other comment, which I admit I have inherited from Watson's own preface. In it, he quotes a Western commentator who remarked that the Lotus Sūtra is a "preface without a book". That is to say, the characters in this story spend a lot of time talking about the Lotus—how the Buddha is about to preach the Lotus, how past Buddhas taught the Lotus, how the Buddha is preaching the Lotus for the benefit of all beings, etc.—but there is never a concrete moment when the Buddha plainly says, "Okay, here's the Lotus Sūtra, it goes like this...". One interesting way to spin this is that the Lotus itself an endless recursion, like a big kōan: the Lotus Sūtra is about the Lotus Sūtra. Yet, apart from Watson's one-off quote in the preface, I have yet to come across this interpretation in the mainstream. Neither Anesaki's history nor Tamura's introduction, to my recollection, discuss such a view. Perhaps it would be overly simplistic, reducing the whole book to the same rank as "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" with so many more words.
Bronze Age Mindset — Bronze Age Pervert
This is an unstructured collection of thoughts by a rather notorious internet personality. I originally had no plans to read this book, as I knew it primarily as a meme and did not think especially highly (nor lowly) of the author. However, as with many books I read, I happened across it at the bookstore, and after flipping through a few pages, I decided it was worth at least the couple bucks it was available for.
The style and spirit of this book are recognizably Nietzschean. Thoughts are presented in a series of disjoint paragraphs and passages, which some might call "aphoristic", though I'm pretty sure aphorisms are supposed to be on the shorter side. The author (popularly known as BAP) also writes in a broken dialect of English, though it slowly disappears as the book went on, like he just forgot to keep the gag up. As for the spirit of the text, it is unabashedly "life-affirming", to a much more literal extent than I recall from even Nietzsche himself, as the author illustrates many of his points with examples from the animal kingdom and from physiology.
There is one crucial difference between Nietzsche and BAP that I think makes the latter at least a little more worthwhile. Nietzsche builds a lot of his work on a dichotomy of Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics, the former being orderly and contemplative and the latter being chaotic and frenzied (based on a rather idiosyncratic understanding of Hellenic theology). In contrast, BAP puts this forth:
Learn that there are two kinds of life, and yeast is different from higher life. Higher life means many fancy and mysterious things too of course but at its most basic it has to do with differentiation and structure. Yeast is an "amorphous blob" that expands, whereas a higher organism has different parts with different functions, different organs, different systems within itself. (p. 29)
This, I think, is a much more grounded and prescient dichotomy compared to Nietzsche's. It seems to me that both the Apollonian and the Dionysian have an inner law of sorts, granted the latter being rather anarchic, but nonetheless having some kind of rubric by which one could judge a life as well-lived or not. Yeast stands quite against both of these as unhampered reproduction for no real reason, just cruising down the path of least resistance. BAP uses this image of yeast to critique and otherwise mock the present liberal-democratic zeitgeist, something which had barely begun to form in Nietzsche's time:
The modern world exhausts and in doing so it makes everything rigid or turns it into a diffuse blob. Physiologically it promotes the stressors, estrogen, serotonin, hyperventilation, over-excitation, the hallmarks of energetic exhaustion. Loss of structure, form and differentiation follows, which was the intention. There follows on this also a spiritual and intellectual rigidity, the orientation of the ideologue, of the social activist, but also of all our intellectual class right and left, as of those who work in the corporate world and in most of the military. They're stiff and constrained because, in short, they live in utter fear, fear that they will lose something. They have very little to lose, but they live in this fear anyway and this is why when there is a question of potential gain or, worse for them, potential loss, they react with desperation, they freeze in terror and hyperventilate. (pp. 116-117, emphasis mine)
Like Mishima above, BAP is quite concerned with beauty and aesthetics, however here again I think BAP has a more grounded perspective, being that beauty is a sort of barometer of a civilization's quality. A good civilization prizes beauty, and a bad one rejects it. BAP elaborates, in somewhat rambling fashion:
Beauty is the very rare and precious preserve of tribes that have striven to promote child-making for something other than financial, social and political gain. No, the promotion of ugliness is nearly universal and the love of beauty is so rare: among the great civilizations, only the ancient Greeks, the French, the Japanese, and somewhat the Italians are true lovers of beauty and refinement, and have based their existence exclusively on the promotion of beauty. How many times in history have cultures become ugly and petty because financial interests overrode eugenics in marriage—and free love, though not perfect, is somewhat more eugenic than letting fathers trade daughters for personal gain. In their hatred and distrust of beauty one feels such societies live under a tremendous pressure of needs. Their true ruler is the god of gravity and they are dominated by fears of the future, unspeakable anxieties about money and matter, and importune, brutish behaviors all motivated by need, by the desire to grasp, by the feeling they all nourish that they're being taken advantage of. The desire for respect is the true mark of the forever-slighted. The distrust of beauty is sometimes sold as the high-minded rejection of material desire by the saintly or the kind or the contemplative. But that's just nonsense, and you can see it in this way. Beauty-hating cultures have one other peculiarity they all share, which is very revealing. They hate also privacy and personal space, they hate also beauty in good and refined manners. These societies are based on such popular solidarity that it's considered normal to barge in on other people, absurd to demand to knock; they make animal sounds when eating—or, the way such people are often said to smell in history whenever such societies are encountered—all of this tells you what the hatred of beauty is really about. (pp. 56-57; emphasis mine)
In the sense that BAP seems to treat beauty more as a heuristic or an indicator of inner characteristics, I hesitate to lump him under "aesthete" as I did with Mishima. I would almost liken him more to Jōchō, however it seems BAP is too smitten with Nietzsche's cult of affirmation and chaos to properly appreciate an ideal like that of the samurai. He is too quick to approve of barbarians and conquerors for helping to cull the herd and trim the spiritual fat, so to speak. Maybe it is true that the crises like those of the Bronze Age Collapse (for which the book is named) are important, maybe even unavoidable, for good civilizations to rise from the ashes. However, the rise that comes after destruction must have some positive points of reference, or else all you leave are ashes; look at Central Asia, razed by the Mongols and Russians, yet never again restored to its former glory. But again, BAP has a better head on his shoulders than his syphilitic predecessor, and at least seems to understand the value of creating order out of the ruins.
Cervantes completed Don Quixote while in jail, Spinoza was a lens-grinder, Diogenes was homeless, and many other great things were done by people who were poorer or in direr straits materially than people today. And yet one can't deny that the life of the average American is that of an overworked, over-stressed slave: but the rest that would come from relieving him of that would be just that, simple rest, if it doesn't also come with manliness and sovereignty. (pp. 124-125)
It's true that in the end, my aims here and those of someone like [Viktor] Orban have little or nothing in common. If they were successful, all they would be able to do is reestablish the same world of sheep that existed a hundred years ago, maybe inoculated against the latest degradations...but nothing very great. Still, I think it's better for nations to be well-tended happy sheep than to be reduced to teeming piles of starving rats. (pp. 171-172)
There are many other good nuggets I could throw out there, especially a few risqué remarks on race. On the whole, I found BAM much more gratifying than enlightening. Perhaps in that sense it is a good morale-booster against the pervasive rot of contemporary culture, but as I said, BAP is much more interested in destruction and criticism than any kind of positive program. In that respect, he comes up quite short compared to something like Jōchō's Hagakure or Evola's Ride the Tiger, which actually have some actionable guidance in them. In the absence of that, and especially without the power and resources to affect anything, the "Dionysian" schtick that BAP carries on from Nietzsche is blind, empty-headed lyricism.
(Some may be aware of BAP's approval of the Buddha's teachings. On that subject, I refer to Paññobhāsa's comments, as I have little to add myself. I would only say that, for all that BAP gets wrong on the surface level, I think it's easy to say that the discipline and freedom offered by Buddhism are quite opposed to the image of yeast that BAP invokes so much, so I think BAP finds his kinship with Buddhism more out of instinct than out of genuine understanding. But then, what else should we expect from a self-described pervert...)
The Theravāda Abhidhamma — Yakupitiyage Karunadasa
This is a fairly comprehensive introduction to the Abhidhamma-Piṭaka, including parallel ideas and controversies with the abhidharmas of other early Buddhist sects (primarily Sarvastivāda and Sautrantika). Abhidhamma seems to be a much underrated subject in Western Buddhism, and I must admit for a long time I inherited some reservations against it from listening to Paññobhāsa's rants. Ironically, through his own discussions with Ajahn Puṇṇadhammo, I started listening to the Ajahn's talks on YouTube and on his website, which provided a much more sympathetic perspective on the abhidhamma. For this reason, in one of my many bookstore excursions, I picked this (as well as Ñāṇaponika's Abhidhamma Studies) off the shelf to get more intimately acquainted with the subject.
What I have come to appreciate about abhidhamma is that, despite mostly (if not entirely) developing after the Buddha's time, it carries on the original anti-mystical spirit of yātha-bhūta-ñāṇa-dassana: knowledge and vision of things as they are. The basic unit of analysis, the dhamma, is defined by Buddhaghosa as
that which, for those who examine it with the eye of understanding, is not misleading like an illusion, deceptive like a mirage, or undiscoverable like the self of the sectarians, but is rather the domain of noble knowledge as the real unmisleading actual state. (Visuddhimagga p. 421, qtd in op cit. pp. 48-49)
Though the voluminous and verbose texts of the abhidhamma may give the impression that it's just another speculative philosophy like that of a Kant or a Hegel, in truth it is only a rigorous application of the analytic method originally contained in the suttas, somewhat akin to what computer scientists call "brute force" algorithms.
Of course, this methodological integrity did not hold for all of abhidhamma's history, as some of the points of disagreement between the different schools seem to hinge on theoretical formulations, rather than rigorous observations. This is where it seems correct to criticize the abhidhammikas for indulging in scholasticism. One such disagreement is on the nature of the deva realms and their inhabitants. In the suttas, there are a number of animal companions who live in Tavatiṃsa heaven, most notably Erāvaṇa, the polycephalous elephant steed of King Sakka. The disagreement is on how it could be that beings of an unfortunate rebirth (animals) could arise in realms that are themselves fortunate (deva realms). The Theravādins justify this by saying that Erāvaṇa and others are in fact devas who normally appear as humanoids, but just prefer to transform into animal forms for fun. The Andhakas, on the other hand, believed that the animals who appear in the deva realms are in fact magical illusions that merely appear as animals, as the fruition of the devas' very good kamma (Kathāvatthu 20.4). The fact that this was not settled by a monk visiting and asking the devas shows that this was almost certainly a case of scholars working out kinks in their intellectual systems, rather than investigating reality. All the more ironic is the fact that abhidhamma itself is held to have come from the Buddha's lectures to the devas in Tusita heaven—he could have settled the issue right from the get-go!
Another source of controversy is the nature of sound. This is an issue that actually evolves in the Theravāda canon itself, to say nothing of the other schools. In the original Sinhalese commentaries, it is said that sound travels in an elemental series and impinges on the ear-door. This is evinced by the fact that we can see things happen in the distance before we hear their sounds (Atthasalīni 313 gives the example of lumberjacks felling trees in the distance). This empirical evidence is, to my amusement, rejected by the Pāli subcommentaries:
Their main objection is that it cannot adequately account for our knowledge of the direction of sound. If sound comes slowly (gradually), having arisen at a distance, then it will be apprehended after some time. Coming in an elemental series and impinging on the sensitive portion of the ear, the direction it comes from might not be evident. For when one hears a sound one can (fairly accurately) say whether it is a distant sound, or a near sound, or whether it is a sound from the farther bank or from the hither bank. A subcommentary adds that if sound travels toward the ear, then there cannot be the determination of its locus. ... It is also observed that out ability to hear the sound of thunder that arises at a distance, and the sound produced within the body covered by the skin, shows that for its apprehension sound need not travel toward the ear and strike its sensitive portion. (p. 220)
It is bad enough that they attempt to debunk sound-waves by theorizing (very badly, I might add), but the empirical examples given at the end there are down-right hilarious. Any fool who's been caught in a storm knows that thunder is heard some time after lightning is seen to flash. The Pāli subcommentators undoubtedly knew this and still referred to it as some kind of proof against sound-waves. Karunadasa adds that the Sarvāstivādins had the same theory that sound did not travel ("nonoccurrence as a series", Abhidharmakośavyākhyā 69), so it seems every abhidharma school had its own share of intellectuals-yet-idiots.
One can understand, given the prevalence of such quasi-intellectual drivel, how anti-abhidhamma reactions would arise in forms such as the Mahāyāna madhyamaka movement and, much later, the Theravāda Thai Forest Tradition. While I acknowledge that these movements have been salutary against the scholastic tendency, they often swing too far in the other direction into mystical flights of fancy. Karunadasa points out (pp. 7-8) that the Theravādin abhidhammikas actually were aware of the madhyamaka development and rebuked it accordingly:
And some misinterpret the meaning of the dependent origination thus, 'Without arising, without cessation (anuppādaṃ anirodhaṃ)' instead of taking the unequivocal meaning in the way stated. (Visuddhimagga-mahāṭīkā 581)
I am willing to believe Nāgārjuna (undoubtedly the subject of the above quotation) wrote his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, not in reference to ultimate nor even conventional truth, but to induce a cathartic effect, like a proto-kōan. I have even heard the analogy that Nāgārjuna was a man who wanted silence, and wrote his verses as one big "Shh...". Be that as it may, the madhyamaka idea has unfortunately led to a number of Dunning-Krueger mystics (especially in the West) who take the paradoxes as dogmas that mean they are above the holy life, or worse yet take "non-dualism" to such foolish extremes as pantheism and perennialism. In such cases, I prefer the abhidhamma counter-reaction of re-affirming the actual teachings in precise, technical terms.
When it is not wrapped up in the weeds of argumentation, the abhidhamma actually contains some radically anti-speculative teachings in regards to paññattis, or designations (which I had recourse to in this response to a Platonist). Paññattis are those things which have no objective counterpart, or rather they are reducible to other things. For example, a lake is not an ultimately real thing, since it is reducible to its component water and mineral molecules, which themselves are reducible to still smaller particles (in the abhidhamma scheme these would be the four elements as well as things like temperature, color, etc.). Thus, "lake" is only a designation. Karunadasa highlights the importance of this distinction for abhidhammikas:
It is, in fact, not by resorting to paññattis but by transcending them at the higher reaches of the mind's unification that one should be able to go beyond the conceptual and establish one's own mind directly on the real (dhammas). This is what is called the transcendence of the conceptual level (paññatti-samatikkamana). The meditator should first go beyond such elements as "earthly element", "water element", and so on, and establish her mind directly on individuating characteristics that correspond to them, such as solidity, viscidity, and so on. It is when one is continuing to focus one's uninterrupted attention on them that the individuating characteristics become more and more evident, more and more clear, and one's whole material body appears in its true form as a mere mass of elementary material constituents, all empty (suñña) and impersonal (nisatta, nijjīva). (p. 62)
What we see here is an elaboration of the great Mūlapariyāya Sutta (MN 1) and its injunction against papañca, or conceptual proliferation, in the interest of understanding things directly, as they are. Drawing on Evola above, the Titanic spirit of innovating with new systems and terminologies is abandoned in favor of the Olympian ideal of the νοῦς, of clear and unadulterated knowing (on this note it is worth repeating that the abhidhamma is, in the mythos, what the Buddha taught to the devas).
The rest of Karunadasa's exposition contains a wealth of ethical and metaphysical insights from the abhidhamma, though I see no need to tediously copy out and comment on each one. Suffice to say that he does an excellent job providing a lucid, accessible introduction to a sorely overlooked subject for Western readers.
Phenomenology — Chad Engelland
Last year, I read an odd but interesting book called A Buddhist Philosophy of Religion by Bhikkhu Ñāṇajīvako. Among the sundry topics in that book, Ñāṇajīvako spends a lot of time comparing Buddhist philosophy with the phenomenology of 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl. I was vaguely familiar with Husserl from having listened to a few courses on the history of Western philosophy, however to my recollection all of the talks on him were either brief (giving his student Heidegger more time) or uninteresting. I was thus surprised by the parallels Ñāṇajīvako drew between Buddhism and this relatively enigmatic philosopher, and so I started looking into Husserl. I found this book among a few different introductions to phenomenology, however I selected it ultimately because, of course, I found it at the bookstore. Something about grabbing a book off a shelf just motivates me a lot more than downloading a PDF or waiting for a book to come in by mail-order.
One thing I find especially
heartening about phenomenology is its sharp rebuttal to materialist
reductivism, since that is after all the root of many other modern Western delusions such as scientism, historicism, etc.
For phenomenology does begin with a basic fact, and that is this one: there is truth, or, if you prefer, truth happens. This might seem to be so obvious, trivial in fact, that it hardly merits a particular focus. But the claim of phenomenology is that truth is the sort of the thing that must be sorted out first, on its own terms, to be what it is. If you try to make sense of it later, in terms of certain truths, say those of evolutionary biology or psychology, you end up generating problems of skepticism and relativism that undermine not just truth but all truths, including those of evolutionary biology and psychology. (p. 79, emphasis mine)
Here
we may see why the project of phenomenology arose at the end of the
19th and the beginning of the 20th century, a period marked by a strong
crisis in Western philosophy, that is the widespread concession to
materialism, relativism, and nihilism. Husserl, coming from a strict
logical-mathematical background, was able to see from the outside that
these biological and psychological reductivists trapped themselves in an
insoluble recursion: if it's true that all truths are psychologically
conditioned, then that truth in itself is psychologically conditioned.
Thus, rather than treating all truth as somehow downstream of itself,
phenomenology sets things in order:
If we are to access truths that are independent of us, these essences cannot be bound up with humans as a natural species or with the idiosyncrasies of our history. Instead, truth must be bound up with that aspect of us that transcends these categories. It must be bound up with that part of us that can do sociology, psychology, biology, or physiology, not the part that is studied by these sciences. Phenomenology accepts the happening of truth and thereby rejects any such account that would undermine its validity.
Phenomenology arises in just this refusal to embrace the absurdity that truth is rooted in certain facts of human biology or psychology. (p. 80, emphasis mine)
Interestingly, the same thing may
be said of postmodern philosophy and its fetish for deconstruction,
since after all this is really just more reductivism that resorts to
non-material explanations. At the end of the book, Engelland devotes a
few paragraphs to postmodernism as a rogue offshoot from phenomenology,
taking as his targets the luminaries Derrida and Foucault, particularly
the latter. Foucault is well-known for his works on the history of
madness, sexuality, punishment, etc., specifically how social norms
concerning these phenomena have changed, and concludes that they are
thus not absolute. Engelland comments:
[Foucault] says that it is a feature of the field of experience that what comes to light is bound to history. But this very claim, if it is true, transcends the idiosyncracies of history. And the phenomenological analysis of the structured field of experience, of terms such as world, flesh, speech, truth, life, love, and wonder, are not idiosyncratic. They are, rather, essential features of our having experience. We might not always fathom them but they are necessarily there in the background making experience possible. Foucault’s critique of phenomenology fails to distinguish everyday essences from the transcendental essence of experience, and this prevents him from realizing that attention to history does not undermine phenomenology’s principal concern.
Deconstruction and the postmodern philosophy it inspires preserve the fundamental openness that constitutes phenomenology, but they upend this openness surreptitiously insofar as they deny the orientation of this openness to the transformative, transfiguring, truth of things. (p. 209, emphasis mine)
On another note, I'm a little surprised at how effusive phenomenologists can be, as there is a whole chapter on love that proves rather essential to the remainder of the book. My impression is that the phenomenological understanding of love is closer to the Christian idea of ἀγάπη (interestingly, Pope John Paul II had a career as a phenomenologist prior to his clerical career; quotations from him even appear in the love chapter). Consider this passage:
In solitude we experience ourselves as selves by ourselves; in communion we experience ourselves as selves together with others. Communion cancels the absence characteristic of solitude by bringing about the presence of others. Only one who can be alone without being lonely can love another no longer incidentally—as an antidote to loneliness—but specifically as a welcome presence.
Loneliness turns to others as a distraction from self; authentic solitude enters into communion with others as a complement to oneself. (p. 130)
While this is from about the end of the love chapter, I think most would consider what Engelland is discussing here to be friendship. On the other hand, we have a more markedly sentimental line from Husserl himself:
Love—loving, loses itself in the other, lives in the other, unites itself with the other, is wholly and entirely not hedonistic, although it establishes joys, "high" joys. (On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, p. 406)
Engelland evidently considered this attitude so pivotal to the phenomenological project that he included this quotation as the final line in the book. As I'm sure many native-English speakers will agree, the use of the "L-bomb" in this way comes across a little strange in philosophy books. Love has come to be simultaneously too strong and too weak a word—in everyday parlance it has a very narrow range of meaning, to the point that the noun "lover" invariably connotes ἔρως, even though the verb by itself includes ἀγάπη. Even the latter meaning comes across as entirely too strong compared to Engelland's talk of "others as a complement to oneself". So, I cannot help but see this as a needlessly effusive tendency in an otherwise lucid philosophical movement.
Relatedly, Engelland also dedicates many lines to hyping up the "joy" of experiencing life through the phenomenological lens. This of course is not foreign to Buddhism. Leaving aside even the states of pīti and sukha experienced in higher jhāna, one finds a whole litany of testimony to the happiness felt by lay practitioners of mindfulness and sitting meditation. The world certainly feels much fresher when we suspend (in phenomenology, ἐποχή) our mental proliferations and experience things as they are. Phenomenologists call this returning to the things themselves, while Buddhists call this yatha-bhūtaṃ. But compared to the grand scheme of attainments in Buddhism, the aim of phenomenology seems rather paltry. Engelland frequently takes a pedestrian tone (he gives examples like walking the dog, going to the beach, watching a movie, etc.), which gives one the impression that the fruits of phenomenology are only so basic as finding new joy in the simple pleasures of life. That of course is a little uncharitable to the movement as a whole; as mentioned earlier, phenomenology itself combats the degenerate tendencies of relativism and deconstructionism. Husserl's own student, Heidegger, was also a well-known anti-modernist who criticized the dissolving, enslaving nature of modern society (see for example his Question Concerning Technology) from a firm phenomenological basis.
So while I am curious to study more of phenomenology, especially in comparison to Buddhist abhidhamma, I can already see that it really reaches no higher than the rest of Western philosophy, which is just discernment of worldly truths and how to live a decent life according to them. The good life is certainly an important part of philosophy, but we are still far short of even Socrates' and Plato's contemplative heights, "more than life".
Clearing the Empty Field — Hongzhi Zhengjue
This is a collection of prose and verse instructions on Chán meditation. I mentioned in my last roundup that I participated in a retreat centered on the Silent Illumination [默照] method (sometimes known by the Japanese name shikantaza, "just sitting"). As I expressed my enthusiasm to the lead nun, she recommended that I go and read Hongzhi, since he was the first to articulate this specific method. Though, I would maintain that precursors to this method can be found in the original texts, such as in the Bāhiya Sutta:
Herein, Bahiya, you should train yourself thus: 'In the seen will be merely what is seen; in the heard will be merely what is heard; in the sensed will be merely what is sensed; in the cognized will be merely what is cognized.' In this way you should train yourself, Bahiya. (Udāna 1.10.12)
That passage in particular parallels very nicely with Hongzhi here:
You accord and respond without laboring and accomplish without hindrance. Everywhere turn around freely, not following conditions, not falling into classifications. Facing everything, let go and attain stability. Stay with that just as that. Stay with this just as this. That and this are mixed together with no discriminations as to their places. So it is said that the earth lifts up the mountain without knowing the mountain's stark steepness. A rock contains jade without knowing the jade's flawlessness. This is how truly to leave home [出家 = pabbajjā], how home-leaving must be enacted. (p. 31, emphasis mine)
There is obviously some Daoist influence at work in Hongzhi as well (the similes seem to evoke wú wéi, 無爲), however the Buddhist ideal of yātha-bhūta-ñāṇa-dassana, knowing and seeing things as they are, is the guiding spirit. The teaching against relying on conditions and classifications is similarly reminiscent of instructions given in the Mūlapariyāya Sutta:
Bhikkhus, a bhikkhu who is in higher training, whose mind has not yet reached the goal, and who is still aspiring to the supreme security from bondage, directly knows earth as earth. Having directly known earth as earth, he should not conceive himself as earth, he should not conceive himself in earth, he should not conceive himself apart from earth, he should not conceive earth to be ‘mine,’ he should not delight in earth. Why is that? Because he must fully understand it, I say. (Majjhima Nikāya 1.27; the formula is repeated several more times, substituting 'earth' with a comprehensive list of other phenomena.)
More controversially, there are a few points where Hongzhi offers what appears to be criticism of the abhidharma, which I have already praised above. A few quotations should demonstrate:
Originally the people arrived at the truth themselves and affirmed it themselves. Then they began to discuss it only in order to straighten up and clean out forthrightly obsessive thinking and distraction. If such contamination is purified, then vast radiance without barriers has no middle or edge. Circling and spreading out, the light is glistening white, its illumination pervading the ten directions. Sit in meditation and entirely cut off causes and conditioning, and language of the three times. Reaching this you cannot attach to a single dust mote. (p. 56)
Oars pulled in, the solitary boat drifts past without difficulty. At this time please tell me, who would be anxious to display the eye of discrimination? (p. 50)
The phrase "language of the three times" is a specific reference to the Sarvāstivāda doctrine that past, present, and future are all real. In the latter quotation, "discrimination" may refer to Theravāda, or as it was sometimes known, Vibhajjavāda, "doctrine of discrimination", though I have to wonder how well Theravāda would have even been known in East Asia; in any case, it definitely refers to philosophical analysis. As I said in my comments on Karunadasa, I can appreciate an anti-scholastic reaction of this kind, albeit with reservations. Here I must say I appreciate Hongzhi more than the likes of Nāgārjuna or Huineng, as I see much less room for the uninitiated to come away misinterpreting the teachings. The intention to quiet the mind is much more overt, without resort to paradoxes and subversions. I see no need for butting heads though; there are those who do better with poetry like that of Hongzhi and those who do better with phenomenological analysis like that of Buddhaghosa. It ultimately comes down to one's inner orientation, and in any case both are contained in the Buddha's original teachings:
The principles of the abhi-dharma method were laid down by Buddho himself as an orientational basis for the integration of his teaching, while the śūnya-vāda was elicited from Buddho's initial statement by Nagarjuna. (Bhikkhu Ñāṇajīvako, A Buddhist Philosophy of Religion p. 236)
Notwithstanding a few more of his pot-shots at the abhidharma, I will close here with my favorite poem from the collection:
The essential function of all buddhas,
the functional essence of all ancestors,
is to know without touching things
and illuminate without encountering objects.
Knowing without touching things,
this knowledge is innately subtle.
Illuminating without encountering objects,
this illumination is innately miraculous.
The knowledge innately subtle
has never engaged in discriminative thinking.
The illumination innately miraculous
has never displayed the slightest identification.
Never engaging in discriminating thinking,
this knowledge is rare without match.
Never displaying the most minute identification,
this illumination is complete without grasping.
The water is clear right down to the bottom,
fish lazily swim on.
The sky is vast without end,
birds fly far into the distance. (p. 61)
Blossoms in the Wind — M. G. Sheftall
As mentioned above, this is the second kamikaze book I received last Christmas. This book is a good deal thicker, just over 450 pages (not counting endnotes and indices), however Sheftall's journalistic style makes it a breezy read, which I was able to finish comfortably in about a month's time.
Sheftall is an American Japanologist who set out to interview survivors of the Second World War to get a personal perspective on the kamikaze (properly referred to as tokkō) program, similar to Kuwahara's book from earlier in the year. However, while Kuwahara's book is ostensibly just Kuwahara's own narrative gussied up by Allred, this book is presented as Sheftall's own quite frank engagement and assessment of his interviewees. Sections are tied together by Sheftall's own little travelogue narratives as he makes his way to various tokkō memorial institutions, as well as personal sketches of his interviewees before he tells their stories properly. His subjects include pilots who were scheduled to fly tokkō missions but never did, as well as the family members of deceased tokkō pilots. In many cases we are given quite long autobiographies, which I think helps to ground these stories by showing what life was like in pre-war Japan (one of the interviewees even provided extensive information about her parents, stretching the story to before the First World War in her case).
Much of what I said about Kuwahara's book applies here, so I will instead comment on Sheftall's own analysis. I believe he is an extremely rare breed of historian, because he tackles a controversial topic like the Pacific Theater, especially the tokkō units, and keeps a level head throughout the entire book. He never allows himself to become a propagandist for either side. To the average Western reader, this measured neutrality might come across as pro-Japanese in many cases. Consider, for example, this passage:
An argument can perhaps be made for parallels between the pathological mind-set of a Bin Laden and that of the more fanatic policy makers in Japan circa 1944-1945 by replacing fire-and-brimstone Wahabbist pipe dreams of global theocracy with the Japanese militarists’ racial mysticism and revenge fantasies against Western hegemony. But none can be drawn—beyond the mere commonalities of flight training and willingness to die for a cause—between a Mohammed Atta [9/11 hijacker] and a Yukio Seki [first tokkō pilot]. What the Japanese tokkō personnel themselves did—at least at the rank-and-file level of the men at the control sticks of the aircraft—was done out of love of home and family, and not out of theological abstractions and hate. Taking the liberty of imagining the 9/11 metaphor through a World War II Japanese endgame perspective, the tokkō pilots were not the wild-eyed Koran thumpers at the controls of the 767s; they were the firefighters who knew the World Trade Center towers were doomed but ran up the stairways anyway. (pp. 117-118)
I think it speaks volumes that he would make such a daring comparison just under four years after 9/11. As I said with Kuwahara's book, when you read enough history, it becomes difficult to accept any simple narratives of heroes and villains. Sheftall makes a similar point elsewhere in the book (or perhaps it was said by one of his interviewees; I neglected to write it down) that, while Japanese servicemen were happy to risk their lives for their families and friends, they all hoped to come home and enjoy hard-won peace at the end of the day. The institution of tokkō missions in the last months of the war demanded not risking one's life, but throwing it away entirely—hence the quite apt comparison with the 9/11 emergency responders.
Sheftall's conclusion may also come as equally tough medicine to the average Westerner. He begins by quoting an interviewee who stated his belief that the American occupation contributed to the loss of virility and warrior-spirit in post-war Japan. Sheftall entertains this, but responds as follows:
But still, I am more tempted to pin the larger share of blame for this weakening of the Japanese spirit on domestic rather than foreign pathogens: weakening paternal roles in the modern Japanese family; the vapid, effeminate infantilism proselytized by Japanese popular culture; the failure of the education system to promote creative thinking and ambition in the nation’s young; a value system based on crass materialism for the last half century, now even further debased by more than a dozen years of seemingly terminal economic slump—all of these are factors contributing to the demise of Japanese pride and the once-vaunted and -feared Japanese fighting spirit. (p. 444)
This is the kind of point that I think the average Westerner would find basically inscrutable in the false dichotomy of evil Japanese imperialism and noble American democracy. Sheftall gives the pre-war and war-time Japanese their due, even referring to his tokkō interviewees as "the last samurai" a few lines after the above quotation. He also dedicates a few of the middle chapters to civilian women who aided the home front and provided both spiritual and material support to local servicemen. It's clear then that he's able to appreciate good warrior and citizen values, even if there are problems with the ideology and goals of a nation's elites. At the same time, he maintains a lucid perspective on the hopelessness of the war at the time the tokkō program began, the needless tragedy and hardship suffered by Japanese civilians, and indeed Japan's aforementioned responsibility for its post-occupation loss of spirit.
If the reader is familiar with the idea that "hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, etc.", Sheftall's conclusion is basically this: the hardship of World War II made strong men, especially in the tokkō units, but they were either destroyed by the very nature of their missions, or else were damned to remain silent by the post-war culture shift. The good times came in the form of post-war American aid and, later, global commerce, resulting in a special kind of weak men with a severe case of cultural amnesia. In normal historical cycles, the transitions between good and hard times were more gradual, so it was possible to carry on the traditions of strong men. In Japanese history, we see this in the Tokugawa culture—despite the great, long-lived peace, the traditions of samurai cultivation continued. This is the origin of iaidō: some samurai realized that the peace meant that they never had occasion to use their swords, and so they decided to at least practice drawing it with proper technique, so they would not do so clumsily when the time came. This kind of cultural continuity is missing from modern Japan; the sacrifices of former servicemen and civilian volunteers are largely forgotten. On this note, I will close with one of the last words Sheftall recorded from a former tokkō pilot:
Fukagawa-san—now with a bit of stridency in his voice—goes on to explain that he feels that the dead tokkō pilots also saved Japan in that they were able to preserve some of Japan’s pride in defeat.
“A race without pride will soon lose its nation,” he says.
He believes that the pilots were fighting for this at the end, when everyone knew the war was lost but flew their sorties anyway, and that in this sense, their missions were successful. The pilots were the epitome of integrity, purity of spirit, and courage—the finest young men the country has ever produced.
“Any great nation is made and sustained by such young men. This is a universal given.” (p. 242)
The End of History and the Last Man — Francis Fukuyama
This is a philosophical investigation of the historical causes leading up to liberal democracy, and the nature of that system as it stands today (or rather, as it stood in 1992). This work is usually reckoned as one of the keystones of American neoconservative thought, though the author has apparently since then tried to disassociate from that movement. As I have mentioned a few times elsewhere, I have largely left political theory behind, so I normally would not have read this book. I only came to own it when it was selected for my book club's next read. That club went on an indefinite hiatus shortly after I bought it. However, since I had already forced myself through the first few chapters, and since I really didn't want this book taking up space for longer than needed, I decided that I would finish it anyway.
The thesis of this work is that liberal democracy represents the stable equilibrium of institutional evolution in politics, and that history thereby "ends" in places where this equilibrium takes hold (even though, as Fukuyama admits, time still flows, other events still happen, etc.). The twin engines driving this evolution are eros, or more broadly "desire", and thumos, straight from the Platonic theory of the soul. Desire drives materialist developments like science, technology, and markets to improve quality of life, thus resulting in the "liberal" side of the equation, i.e. capitalism. Thumos, the desire for recognition, drives all of the more humanistic developments like ideology, rights, etc. and thereby results in the democracy side of the equation. Before I comment on the content of the book, I will say that reading this initial thesis in the first few chapters hit me with a good dose of saṃvega, as it reminded me that modern society really does thrive on overfeeding and letting loose the Platonic horses, at the expense of their charioteer, the nous. Realizing this, I was moved to get back into a more dedicated meditation regimen, as a kind of "revolt against the modern world", some might say.
One thing I have to give Fukuyama credit for is that he is fairly intellectually honest. In the first place, he makes it clear that his thesis is a soft determinism, that this and that historical factor favor liberal democracy, but it may not be the inevitable endpoint—in contrast to Marx's hard determinism, which predicted that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be the final stage of historical development. Moreover, Fukuyama assesses some of the modern democracies, particularly those in Asia (Singapore, South Korea, Japan, etc.), and admits that their significantly Confucian-influenced regimes pose a challenge to his thesis. He also dedicates the last part of the book to whether liberal democracy is philosophically desirable in the first place, entertaining both socialist-egalitarian and postmodern-existentialist critiques, the latter being the reason why "Last Man" appears in the title. So if nothing else, I can appreciate that Fukuyama makes the effort to reflect on his own ideological biases, most of the time anyway.
That all being said, I have my share of objections. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, spends too much time in the sphere of theoretical speculation, leading him to read quite presumptive conclusions into his subjects. In the preface, he baldly asserts: "Recognition is the central problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism, and the desire to dominate" (p. xxi). This claim borders on psychoanalysis, reducing all historical figures to mere recognition-seeking machines. Not only that, it fails to explain the rise of ordered civilization: indeed, if thumos is the primary engine of history, then it seems that the complex caste hierarchies, city schematics, religious systems, commerce regulations, and so forth constitute a whole lot of extraneous effort just for a ruler to enjoy "recognition". Thumos explains the rise of political power itself, of conquest and enslavement, but it does not adequately explain the stable forms that politics takes on when the dust settles. It was for this reason that Genghis Khan said "Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard".
Despite drawing on Plato's tripartite image of the soul, Fukuyama typically leaves out the most important part: the nous. This capacity for knowledge is what stands above mere erotic and thumotic satisfaction; it is the charioteer who can tame the horses. It is difficult to explain the workings of a Lycurgus, a Sejong the Great, a Prince Shōtoku, an Emperor Aśoka, a Marcus Aurelius, a Cincinnatus, and indeed the Founding Fathers whom Fukuyama so often refers to, in terms of mere "desire for recognition". At the extreme end, I doubt Fukuyama could even fathom Chandragupta Maurya, the Jain emperor who ended his reign to live as an ascetic and voluntarily starve himself to death. Parallel to him, one wonders how thumos alone would inspire Chandragupta's contemporary, Alexander the Great, to seek the tutelage of Aristotle or the ascetic Diogenes. In all of these cases, it seems more adequate to explain these great figures, not as Fukuyama's theoretical "masters" seeking only celebration and accolades, but as men centered in the nous, who sought to know what is fundamentally good and to execute this in their stations as rulers.
For Fukuyama, as for Freud, the nous is merely "reason", the tool by which one calculates a best course of action to serve eros and thumos (calling on Evola once more, it is more like the Titanic mind than the Olympian one). Fukuyama is trapped in the democratic worldview where the passions rule the intellect, and so he assumes that this has been the case for all of political history, that he can make sense of another man's mind by merely investigating his own mind. I found two striking moments where this method breaks down: he comes across an intellectual black box, something he simply cannot comprehend, and pointedly refuses to engage with it. The first, I have as little to say about as he did:
Though both works [Spengler's Decline of the West and Toynbee's Study of History] were widely read at the time, they both suffer from a similar organicist flaw by drawing a questionable analogy between a culture or society and a biological organism. Spengler remains popular because of his pessimism and seems to have had some influence on statesmen like Henry Kissinger, but neither writer achieved the degree of seriousness of their German predecessors. (p. 68)
Out of context, one would think that this serves as a transition into critiquing the cyclical non-progressive view of history in those works. This, however, is all Fukuyama has to say on the two works. One wonders why he even bothered to mention such serious rivals to Hegelian historicism when all he could muster was "they are wrong, I am right".
The second example is more interesting, if also much more galling. At the very end of the book, Fukuyama discusses how life as a democratic "last man" may still be worth living, primarily dealing with Nietzsche's critiques. Here, he borrows an example from Kojève, a Hegelian philosopher of the early 20th century:
...After the rise of the Shogun Hideyoshi in the fifteenth century, Japan experienced a state of internal and external peace for a period of several hundred years which very much resembled Hegel’s postulated end of history. Neither the upper nor lower classes struggled against each other, and did not have to work terribly hard. But rather than pursuing love or play instinctively like young animals—in other words, instead of turning into a society of last men—the Japanese demonstrated that it is possible to continue to be human through the invention of a series of perfectly contentless formal arts, like Noh theater, tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and the like. A tea ceremony does not serve any explicit political or economic purpose; even its symbolic significance has been lost over time. And yet, it is an arena for megalothymia in the form of pure snobbery: there are contending schools for tea ceremony and flower arrangement, with their own masters, novices, traditions, and canons of better and worse. It was the very formalism of this activity—the creation of new rules and values divorced from any utilitarian purposes, as in sports—that suggested to Kojève the possibility of specifically human activity even after the end of history.
…But the end of history will mean the end, among other things, of all art that could be considered socially useful, and hence the descent of artistic activity into the empty formalism of the traditional Japanese arts. (p. 320; emphasis mine)
It's hard to ignore the crushing irony of a man named Fukuyama commenting on the flowering of Japanese culture with the bitter, uncomprehending nihilism that is typical of a Westerner—one would expect this garbage from a Richard Dawkins or a Thomas Ligotti. Here too, Fukuyama is a prisoner to his own worldview, in this case to Nietzsche's famous line, "God is dead". In Tokugawa Japan, the triple "God" of the kami, the Dharma, and Confucian ethics did not die, and so when the thumotic struggles of Japanese unification were over, the light of nous could shine unhindered, ennobling even the most trivial aspects of peacetime existence. In this connection, we shall quote Evola on Zen & Everyday Life:
... The mastery attained [in the arts] is a degree of spirituality, or “Zen,” not as theory and philosophy but as actual experience, as a deeper mode of being.
... We know that in antiquity, and to some extent in the Middle Ages also, jealously guarded traditions, elements of religion, rites, and even mysteries were associated with the various arts. There were "goods" for each of these arts and rites of admission to practice them. The initiation to crafts and professions in certain guilds and "collegia" proceeded along parallel lines with spiritual initiation. Thus, to mention a later case, the symbolism proper to the mason’s art of the medieval builders served as the basis for the first Freemasonry, which drew from it the allegories for the proceedings of the "Great Work." It may therefore be that in all this the West once knew something of what has been preserved to this day in the Far East in such teachings as "the way of the bow" or "the art of the sword," held to be identical with the "way of Zen" in a singularly positive form of Buddhism.
But again, Fukuyama sees no such thing as a deeper mode of being, only the desires for pleasure and for recognition. Following Hegel (and probably Nietzsche as well), he believes that anything like Zen which puts the nous first is a "slave" ideology, a coping mechanism to deal with one's inability to satisfy those desires in the first place.
The slave, reflecting on his condition and the abstract idea of freedom, throws up several preliminary versions of freedom before he hits on the right one. The preliminary versions are for Hegel as for Marx ideologies, that is, intellectual constructs not true in themselves but reflective of the underlying substructure of reality, the reality of lordship and bondage. While containing the germ of the idea of freedom, they serve to reconcile the slave to the reality of his lack of freedom. Hegel in the Phenomenology identifies several of these slave ideologies, including philosophies like Stoicism and skepticism. (p. 196)
Here again, the Hegelian method falls flat because it relies so heavily on solipsistic, theoretical speculation. Both Stoicism and skepticism were philosophies for the élite, not the slaves. Other than the notable exception of Epictetus, the Stoics were wealthy and powerful: Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Zeno of Citium, Posidonius, etc. Skepticism, meanwhile, was founded by a warrior-turned-priest, Pyrrho, and continued to be championed by powerful politicians such as the Roman Cicero. Pyrrho himself learned from Indian śrāmaṇas (Buddhists, Jains, etc.), who tended to come from the warrior-noble caste, the kṣatriya. This is to say nothing of all the other great philosophies of the Classical world (Epicureanism, Platonism, etc.) which found their devotees and exponents in the upper classes. Slaves, historically, tended to follow ancestral tribal religions and were rarely if ever given to philosophy; hence the use of the word pagan, meaning rural or rustic, to refer to ancient polytheism. In later eras, we do find them embracing "ideologies" like Christianity, Bhaktic Hinduism, Pure Land Buddhism, etc., but even so, none of these arose from the reflecting and pondering of the slaves, and they hardly resemble the given examples of Stoicism and skepticism. This is a significant case where the historical data shows the woeful inadequacy of Enlightenment a priori speculation. Once again, it seems Fukuyama (and Hegel) merely projects his own psychology onto others, believing that, since he would rather have nice things and recognition, it must be that everyone else does too, and anyone who says otherwise is in denial.
Another considerable problem with Fukuyama's overall analysis is that he assumes, very often, that the masses of a given society are capable of organized political action, of reliably conceiving of and then achieving what they want. On this count, he seems entirely ignorant of élite theory. In truth, the masses are too large to organize and adequately accomplish anything. It can only be a small group, a ruling class, that can act in concert and accomplish political goals. In this theory, it is important to distinguish between the political formula, which is the publicly stated raison d'être of a regime (divine right, the will of the people, etc.), and the actual goals and characteristics of the élites who control the regime. The former only needs to be accepted by the ruled, but does not have to be (and indeed rarely ever is) strictly true. In assessing the rise of democracy, it is important to realize that democracy is itself a political formula, a "noble lie" to convince people to accept a certain set of élites. Fukuyama naïvely tends to conflate democracy as a formula with democracy as an actual system. Take, for example, his discussion of Japanese democracy:
In Japan … society as a whole tends to regard itself as a single, large group with a single, stable source of authority. The emphasis on group harmony tends to push open confrontation to the fringes of politics; there is no alternation of political parties in power based on clashes over "issues," but rather the decades-long dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). There is of course open contestation between the LDP and the socialist and communist opposition parties, but the latter have marginalized themselves by their extremism. Serious politics, generally speaking, takes place out of public view, in the central bureaucracies or in the back rooms of the LDP. Within the LDP, politics revolves around the constant maneuvering of factions that are based on personalistic patron-client relationships, that are largely devoid of what anyone in the West would understand as political content.
...There are respects in which one could say Japan is governed by a benevolent one-party dictatorship, not because that party has imposed itself upon society in the manner of the Soviet Communist party, but because the people of Japan choose to be ruled in that fashion. (pp. 240-241)
Were he not so absorbed in the Western democratic milieu, it seems he might have approached something like élite theory here. In politics, all oligarchies (in this case, parties) impose themselves on their subjects. The difference between Japan and the USSR is that the Japanese by and large believe their assigned political formula, whereas many Soviet citizens did not—which incidentally explains why Japan has been much more stable over the decades compared to the USSR and its descendants. It is not as if the post-war Japanese started over as "first men" (ever the great fiction of Enlightenment historical speculation) and agreed that they would form this institution called the LDP. The current system was quite directly imposed on Japan by the US occupation after World War II, and the post-war re-education was successful in getting Japanese citizens to like "the will of the people" better than the previous formula of the Emperor's divine right. The new élites who came into power after the occupation were simply able to wield this new formula to establish the order they wanted, and unlike in the United States, no competing oligarchy was able to oppose them, hence the one-party state.
As an aside, I might also add that Fukuyama regularly refers to "education" as a means of spreading democracy, which sneaks in the assumption that smart, well-read people with degrees will, ceteris paribus, naturally incline to democracy. Education is really only a tool of the élites for fostering their chosen formula. The Soviet Union boasted a highly educated population and some of the greatest minds in science and mathematics, and yet that regime remained communist for ages, precisely because the schools there echoed the official propaganda. China and Japan have also historically boasted strong educational apparatuses to school their citizens in the official, primarily Confucian dogmas (the kokugaku movement would later shift this in a more Shintō-influenced nationalist direction in Japan). In Fukuyama's analysis, then, education is only a byword for propaganda. To be sure, he is here correct in identifying thumos as a key part of this, as that's what educators, politicians, and other propagandists have to appeal to in order for their ideology to spread, but this means that thumos is led by the bridle, whereas Fukuyama seems to think it forges its own destiny.
On a broader level, Fukuyama takes the democratic formula ("there are no slaves or masters") as basically a refutation of élite theory. This leads him to make some quite laughable statements, such as:
The civil peace brought about by liberalism should logically have its counterpart in relations between states. Imperialism and war were historically the product of aristocratic societies. If liberal democracy abolished the class distinction between masters and slaves by making the slaves their own masters, then it too should eventually abolish imperialism. (p. 260)
But the slaves are not their own masters; they have only been fooled into thinking so. In context, this passage comes from his critique of realpolitik as endorsed by figures like Henry Kissinger. I actually found this critique fairly satisfactory, basically saying that this school treats all world powers as politically identical units all in a constant state of aggressive tension, failing to account for how internal affairs could affect how these actors behave with one another. The international is falsely given primacy over the intranational. Where Fukuyama goes wrong is, as I said, that he takes the democratic formula too seriously. Probably the biggest counterexample to his above claim is the War on Terror, something he himself went on to endorse and then distance himself from. This war was propped up by the élites using precisely the democratic formula: a campaign to destroy villains abroad and establish democracy in their steads. One of the most well-known slogans of that era was cooked up to explain why terrorists attack us: "They hate us for our freedoms". The American oligarchs thus skillfully wielded the democratic ideology to sell the dim-witted masses on the war, which was, in reality, for the sake of élite foreign policy goals. The masters still control their slaves, and they still very much engage in imperialism.
In short, while I think Fukuyama has discerned the correct historical trend (i.e. the increasing prominence of eros and thumos), he relies too much on the solipsistic speculative method of the Enlightenment to provide any deeper insights than that. At the very least, I can say that this was an interesting book to grapple with intellectually, and it at least helps one understand modern neoconservatism and neoliberalism, but on the whole, I cannot recommend Fukuyama as a philosopher.
Three Important Papers — S. N. Goenka
This is a collection of three articles originally published in 2003 by the renowned Vipassanā teacher, S. N. Goenka. The articles are Defence Against External Invasion, How to Defend the Republic, and Why was the Sakyan Republic Destroyed?; as the titles imply, these all generally have to do with military affairs. I found this booklet while browsing the Vipassanā Research Institute's catalogue, though unfortunately that site only ships to customers in India. With some difficulty, I was able to acquire a copy through a third party; for that reason it may actually be one of the rarest books I own, besides Bhikkhu Ñāṇajīvako's book.
This is my first time reading Goenka's writings, and I must report that I'm not terribly impressed with him. To begin with, he cites the Pāli commentaries without clarifying that they aren't buddhavācana; in fact, the first article in this collection quotes the commentaries at length, but gives only a citation of the Aṅguttara Nikāya. When I checked the cited suttas, I was bewildered to find none of the content he quoted in regards to military conduct; even searching the Pāli lines on SuttaCentral and Access to Insight turned up no results. I took a stab at checking the corresponding commentaries (available here, under "Aṭṭhakathā" and "Ṭīkā"), and sure enough found a match. In addition to saving readers like me the trouble of hunting around like that, citing the aṭṭhakathā as what they are would have been a good deal more honest. Oddly, the second and third articles don't seem to have this problem, but basic citations shouldn't be a problem at all.
A larger problem with Goenka is that he seems to have an agenda against caste. This is, no doubt, because he lived and taught in India, where today the caste system has long been a stereotyped, arbitary system. Indeed, it's probably very difficult for someone of that background to approach "caste" in the abstract, since the word has such a specific meaning to Indians. It may be that he is primarily speaking to his Indian audience in voicing his criticisms. However, Goenka's audience also includes many Westerners, who have the opposite problem: no hierarchy, no structure, no orientation. The last remnants of the European aristocracy became arrogant and decadent, producing a prolonged reaction from below (from about the French Revolution to the World Wars) that, rather than producing better nobles, eradicated nobility entirely. As I see it, there is simply no separating nobility as character and as privilege. It hardly needs to be said that high privileges should be kept from lowly people. The sadly oft-overlooked converse is that those same privileges should be accorded to the noble of spirit. To be fair, Goenka understood this from the Buddha's teachings:
The difference between high and low will persist in society and cannot be eliminated easily. But it is necessary to end the discrimination based on caste. One should not be considered high or low because of one's birth. If a person is immoral and commits unwholesome actions, he is a wicked person. He should have a low status in society and should not be respected. Similarly, if he is virtuous and commits wholesome actions, he is a good person, a saintly person. He should have a high status in society and should be respected. (p. 19)
This, however, is not the same as abolishing caste in its entirety, but ensuring that it has a sounder basis. To reiterate my comments on the Hagakure, the problem of politics is making sure good men are in charge, and as the transmission of wisdom and virtue is best served by a personalistic, tutelary system, the bonds of kinship, which naturally includes birth, would be foundational. Of course, birth alone is not enough to confer nobility—one must still actually learn wisdom, virtue, good governance, etc.—but that does not at all imply that birth has nothing to do with it; that's a false dichotomy. Again, I think Goenka was simply too immersed in the rot of modern India to view the word "caste" from a higher perspective.
This anti-caste agenda leads Goenka to read conclusions into the Pāli texts that seem to miss the point. In the third article, Goenka claims that the Sakyan Republic was destroyed because the Sakyans stubbornly clung to notions of high and low birth. King Pasenadi of Kosala held suzerainty over the Sakyan Republic and demanded a wife from their clan. The Sakyans reckoned themselves of solar descent (adiccabandhū) and thus of higher birth than the Kosalans, so they did not believe Pasenadi deserved their women. They decided to deceive him by sending a slave-girl, Vāsabhakhattiyā, instead. This conspiracy was discovered some time after this slave-girl bore Pasenadi his heir, Viṭaṭubha, and in anger Viṭaṭubha, once he became king, massacred all but a few escaping Sakyans. Goenka's assertion, then, is that the Sakyans could have avoided this problem by not believing in high and low castes, and by giving into Pasenadi's demand for a wife of... well, high caste. He then extends this to say that the contemporary caste system has led to the ruin of India and should be abolished straightaway.
It is worth noting that the Buddha appears in this story twice, but never expresses anything to support Goenka's beliefs. First, on discovering the Sakyans' deception, Pasenadi demoted Viṭaṭubha and his mother to slaves. The Buddha learned of this and came to Pasenadi's palace to correct him.
"Sire, whose daughter is Vasabha-Khattiya?" "Mahanama’s daughter, sir." "When she came away, to whom did she come as wife?" "To me, sir." "Sire, she is a king’s daughter; to a king she is wed; and to a king she bore her son. Wherefore is that son not in authority over the realm which owns his father’s sway? In bygone days, a monarch who had a son by a casual faggot-gatherer gave that son his sovereignty." (Jataka 7.4)
Your son am I, great monarch; rear me, Sire!
The king rears others, but much more his child.
If anything, this Jataka affirms patrilineal kingship; in the equivalent narrative from the Dhammapada commentary, Pasenadi comes to the conclusion "It is the family of the father that affords the only true measure of social position" (Dhp-a 47). In no way could one read this as the Buddha chiding Pasenadi for believing in birth-right casteism. If this were his true aim, he would not have interceded for just the Sakyan girl but persuaded the king to abolish castes as a whole in Kosala. What he does teach is very nearly the opposite: he affirms Vāsabhakhattiyā's and Viṭaṭubha's traditional rights as members of the royal family. In another sutta cited in Goenka's second article, the Buddha gives quite conservative, even reactionary, advice on politics:
As long as the Vajjians [another clan of that time] do not authorize what has not been authorized previously, do not abolish what has been authorized, and follow their ancient traditions and practices, they will remain invincible. (Aṅguttara Nikāya 7.21.6)
Goenka's own comments to this passage are in regards to fair taxation and fair trials, conveniently leaving out the institution of castes, arguably one of the most ancient traditions anywhere in the world, not just among the Aryans of Magadha.
The Buddha's other appearance in this story is his confrontation with Viṭaṭubha, while the latter is on his way to genocide the Sakyans. Viṭaṭubha advanced with his army, but was embarrassed on meeting the Buddha seated beneath a barren tree. He entreated the Buddha to sit under a shadier tree in Kosalan territory, but the Buddha answered "Be not concerned, great king. The shade of my kinsmen keeps me cool" (Dhp-a 47). Surmising the Buddha intended to protect his kinsmen, Viṭaṭubha left. This same encounter happened a second and third time. The Buddha surveyed the past deeds of his kinsmen, and concluded that there was no avoiding the fruition of their bad kamma, so on Viṭaṭubha's fourth expedition, he stayed out of the conflict. The issue of caste never even enters into his decisions here, only fidelity to his kinsmen the first three times and understanding of kamma the fourth time. (The authenticity of this account is doubtful, given that these stories appear only in the commentaries. Though, if one were to take that angle, it would be so much the worse for Goenka's argument, since he would have to abandon the entire narrative.)
Admittedly, this may have simply been a bad introduction to Goenka. He is better known for his exposition of satipaṭṭhāna, which has gone a long way to forming the modern Vipassanā movement, alongside Mahasi Sayadaw's work and a few others. I plan to look into his more mainstream works (hopefully they won't require as much hassle to track down), though I confess that I'll probably go into those with some skepticism of his sincerity.
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