Happiness and Misery

Simple, but difficult.  Now I'm going for a walk to make myself happy.

 

Chinese Buddhism: Journey to the West

I'm not a Buddhist but I am quite fond of the hermetic poetry tradition of China, which was a blend of many different spiritual approaches -- Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist.

Although Buddhism had been extant in China from about the beginning of the Common Era, there were only a limited amount of Buddhist texts available to Chinese practitioners.  In 628, (curiously, while the Prophet Muhammad was still on the earth) a young monk named Xuanzang decided to (illegally) leave the country and travel West -- that is, to the homeland of Buddhism -- India.

Braving highwaymen, the robbers and bandits of the day, some of whom were so impressed by his fearlessness and character that they joined him, Xuanzang made it to India, where he lived for 17 years.  He settled at the great Buddhist university known as Nalanda, which was located in what is now Bihar, east of Varanasi (nee: Benares) in northeastern India.  There he studied for many years before returning home with over 600 Buddhist texts, which greatly influenced the further development of Buddhism in China.

Why should that matter to me if I'm not a Buddhist practitioner?  Well, I am interested in the various spiritual developments that have taken place in different places on earth, in different ages.  I've never seen them as competing with one another; instead, I view them as the (im)perfect, particular, and peculiar blends that were just right for the time and place in which they arose.  

Buddhism has a deep knowledge of different states of consciousness and their relative merits because of the emphasis upon meditation within the faith.  It's really an inquiry into the nature of consciousness itself, as opposed to the more dogmatic faiths in the West, which evinced a more pronounced dichotomy between the exterior, exoteric aspect of the faith and the more interior, esoteric dimensions of those particular expressions.  

It's a little like climbing up a mountain via different and various routes.  It's the same mountain.  Rather than argue about the best method or route, just start climbing right where you are.  You will create your own path as you go.  

Anyway, this young fellow is a fairly astute student and it's a fun and informative video.  Give it a watch, you might learn something.

Autumn, Thoreau, and Walking

We each have a kind of mythos about our own lives, a story we tell ourselves or others which may depict important moments or themes in our lives.  In August of 1970, when I was a callow, 17 year old football-playing lad, a few unexpected things happened.  One I'll save for another day as it's the genesis of a life-long inquiry.  The other was my encounter with Henry Thoreau.

I remember the previous spring when my English class was focused upon American literature, reading a one-page condensed version of Emerson's essay, "Self Reliance."  It was my first encounter with the Transcendentalists of New England in 19th century America.  For some unknown reason, I really tried to grasp what Emerson had to say, and it was a little like kicking over an engine that had never been turned on before.  Fits and starts, gears moving rustily back and forth for the first time.  I'd never engaged my brain on anything philosophical prior to that.  I remember feeling like there was something there for me.

A girl in my class had an older brother in college who had loaned her a copy of Walden by Thoreau.  She loaned it to me.  And it was as if the scales fell from my eyes.  Maybe it's the fact that Thoreau began that book as an in-your-face smart-aleck.  I've met many a person my age who fell in love with Thoreau in their teens.  He was just contrary enough to appeal to us.  He wasn't merely a critic of society, he was a woodsman of some note, a naturalist, and a philosopher to boot, all the while being a handy fellow who could build a cabin or improve the process at his family's pencil making factory.  He was a lecturer of note in the day.  Was one of the first to recognize Walt Whitman's genius; they met and came to admire one another's shared perspicacity.  He was a life-long friend of Emerson's, being the protege who outgrew that role.

Some of my favorite 20th century writers admired and were influenced by Thoreau.  E.B. White, for one.  Aldo Leopold.  Wendell Berry.  To a lesser extent, Gary Snyder.  Even Jack Kerouac read him.

When autumn comes around each year, with that first crisp, chill bite to the air, my mind turns to Thoreau and I usually break out something of his and spend all of September and most of October reading Henry once again.

So yesterday I cracked out a famous essay of Thoreau's, Walking.  It's considered by most scholars to be one of his finest pieces of writing, a little along the lines of Emerson's essay, Nature, but much more down to earth, which was the essential difference between Emerson and Thoreau anyway.

As I opened up my copy of Thoreau's essay, I saw that I had already highlighted much of it, so I was kind of scanning it to see what had caught my eye earlier.  About midway through the essay, though, I noticed something that had escaped me before.  Much to my surprise, I saw that even Thoreau had fallen prey to the ideology of human progress by moving west.

This was a long-standing historical conception of the day.  Philosophers and historians of the West all saw the evolution of human culture as a steady march towards more progress, the moderns -- themselves -- standing on the backs of all previous -- and presumedly lesser, more primitive cultures.

Thoreau began by stating that when he stepped out of his house to go for a walk, it sometimes took him 15 minutes to decide -- by feel -- which direction he was to walk that day.  I quite understand this.  The entire time I was a runner, I experienced just this: I would step outside, and then stop to feel which direction I wanted to go on my run.  Same process with walks; in fact, to this day, I do this.  If I'm going for a walk, I step outside and at some moment, stop to consider which direction to go.  And it's always a decision that is made by a distinct but completely irrational mode:  by feel.

Thoreau happened to state that he almost always chose the direction southwest or west.  His family home was on the west side of Concord so of course the woods and the wilds tended in that direction.  But Thoreau noticed a resistance in himself to walk east and he realized that underlying this tendency of his was the feeling that heading east was walking back towards the past while heading west felt like moving into the wide open future.

That observation stopped me in my tracks.  Thoreau followed this observation of his own inclination by stating, "I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen.  I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.  And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west."

He continues: "We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure."  He says the sun itself moves from east to west and tempts us to follow him.

Thereafter follow several pages of Thoreau quoting different European traveler's impressions of America, and dare I say it, the Manifest Destiny of these peoples who had left Europe for the New World and whatever it was that drove them across the entire continent, impassively unconscious of the fact that it was actually a peopled place.  They didn't see it as such; they saw it as their divine right to occupy this land.   

Thoreau himself says, in this essay:

"To Americans I hardly need to say -- Westward the star of empire takes its way.  As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman of this county.  Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England: we sympathize with the West.  There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance."

Trust me, I could scarcely believe what I was reading.  Whitman constantly extolled America, its people, and its future.  Here Thoreau was doing the same.

What are we to make of this?  Thoreau was a sharp, constant, and astute critic of the culture of his day, and indeed, for all his life.  How to account for this lapse into a set of patriotic blinders?  He was a natural historian who greatly admired the Indian, especially for his perfect adaptation and relation to nature, and often contrasted it with the orientation of his contemporaries, the stuck in the mud farmers of New England.

It's true, there was a gradual move from east to west across the European continent, extending over a period of at least 40,000 years, and continually recurring with people of various and different ethnicities.  Always moving, always looking for something better, ever and always restless, apparently.

There are a few ways to approach this temporary lapse of Thoreau's.  One of which is to say, there are ideas which seize people, entire large groups of people, nations in fact, and which seem self-evident to the people who are so affected, the Manifest Destiny of 19th century white Americans being a case in point.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, made the tongue in cheek observation that in Europe and America, the most conservative people stayed in the east, the most stable settled in the center of the continent, and the most unstable just kept going until there was no more land and ended perched upon the sea.  In Europe, he said, it was the Irish.  In America, the Californians.

But the truth is, we have circumambulated the globe and there is nowhere else to go, no "new world" to discover, plunder, and inhabit.  There is no more escape from ourselves.  So now new age and esoteric believers speak of a "new earth" that you'll just transition into, once you've transformed yourself out of your gross humanity.  A modern variation upon a continuous human theme?

Who am I to say?  Or perhaps a contemporary version of "Manifest Destiny."  

That someone as seemingly independent and archly critical as Thoreau would fall under its spell, if only for the few pages of an essay late in his life, means that we had all better keep our wits about us in a day and age like the one in which we live, where mass indentification with this or that mindset/ideology appears to sway millions of people.  

Well, I won't condemn Henry, and I'll continue to read him.  But with a more critical eye, methinks.