A Sudden Dawn: Book Review
The story of a simple Buddhist priest travelling from India to China in the 5th Century doesn’t sound like something that would make for an interesting novel, but the after effects of this solitary man’s journey still reverberate today. In all parts of the far east, the name Bodhidharma is still very well known. In Japan, for example, little girls have Bodhidharma key-chains and all sorts of other cultural influences and footprints can be found. And not only in the geek fringes or the religious halls, no his is a visage often seen in paintings; most of the time shown as an old priest with a particularly fierce expression of concentration, and it is for this ability that he was most highly prized. Bodhidharma didn’t bring Buddhism to China or Japan, but he started a school of Buddhist thought that spoke to something deep inside the Eastern people that heard it. Spoke to their marrow with a simple and unselfish message of compassion, dedication and submission.
This effect changed them forever.
Before we start, I should add a caveat to this article. I am a philosopher and a Daoist. As such, I suppose, I am not the best person to judge. I offer only my own understanding of the form, which is limited. I do not claim to have a “monopoly on the truth”, nor to be a teacher. Any mistakes are my own. But since, as we shall see, Daoism is mysterious — I can hardly be blamed for that!
Introduction
I am often asked, “Just what is Daoism?”
This is a natural enough question, as since I “came out” as a Daoist many people have been genuinely interested. What the question really asks is, “Please can you encapsulate the concepts of Daoism into a single sentence and communicate that to me?” The person then normally looks a little askance as I singularly fail in the attempt:
“Well,” I begin, “it’s, er…”
“Yes?” they ask, waiting on my answer, clearly forming the opinion that I cant be a very serious Daoist without being able to enunciate at least that.
“It’s complicated…” I manage after a ruminating struggle, made plain on my face.
These are not particularly comforting moments in my life. I once attempted to write an answer for a work colleague and accidentally sent him a blank email with the subject, “Daoism is…”
He wrote back, “Are you trying to make a point, or did you miss off the text?”
I wasn’t, but I wish I had thought to do so. I could then create an email that reads:
Subject: What is Daoism?
(THIS MESSAGE IS LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK)
You are in possession of the one of the universe’s most mysterious objects. Your personal copy of this object differs in function only slightly from all the other similar objects in our solar system. It is the part of you that feels pleasure and yet it is also the part of you that knows pain. It is a part of your body that you cannot see, but it is also that which you rely on to make sense of what you observe. It is built of more than 33 billion neurons, linked in a mesh up to 10 thousand times each, making a total number of connections greater than the observable stars in the sky. It is the true wonder of planet Earth; for it grew here in the same way apples grow on trees.
It is your brain.
And while we can explore the furthest reaches of light-enabled space, we cannot claim to have begun understanding this small lump of tissue we each possess. Our sciences regarding it are crude at best and mostly replying on mere observation. That sum of knowledge eventually comes down to this: which bits you should not poke. On the other hand, our mental science experts, doctors and scientists try to reduce the functions of the brain down to an increasingly morbid collection of faculties about which they then bicker and argue about endlessly.
And every single one of them has missed the point… Read More
The first line of Philip Pullman’s novel reads:
This is the story of Jesus and his brother Christ, of how they were born, how they lived and how one of them died.
Despite the use of the definite ‘the’ in the first line of Philip Pullman’s new novel, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, it is not actually claiming to be the real back-story of the influential spiritual leader. Rather it is a telling of a myth; a fable. And in doing so makes us face what the story of Jesus really means. All stories of the Gods are the subject of myth and they all have within them the patterns that stretch directly into the mind and subconscious. As with other tales of half remembered, but not forgotten, ancient wisdom, the story of Jesus has meaning beyond the telling. His is the hero’s story told again and again through the ages, and its lessons are to be read and dwelt upon over many tellings. So, as he steps though the doors of his life — the foretold stages of his journey — we step with him and arrive on the other side together.
The layers of understanding, which come with changing from child to man, are ones I remember clearly. At 10 I was always told that Jesus was also a God. Or was the Christian God himself in a certain form. This lesson led to my childlike wondering of, given the immense creative powers ascribed to this God, how it was that Jesus allowed himself to be nailed up in the first place. Why did he not use his godly power to save himself? Such are the practical thoughts of the child.
To an adult, the answer to this question is Gnostic and illuminates the spiritual level, understanding and beliefs of the speaker. The story sold to me at my Sunday school was that Jesus let himself be executed because he wanted to save us. This was something my young mind could not understand and, I presumed at the time, I would have to ‘grow up’ to realise. In the same sense that one finds an answer to Santa Claus’s apparent ability to travel around the world in one night, I did. In the sense of coming to an understanding of the churches’ view of Jesus, I did not. Growing up involved coming to terms with the world, my limited place within it and to walking some of the steps of the spiritual journey within myself. Together with the practical teachings of my schooling, the categorisation of reality scientifically defined in certain ways, this meant that the Christian God did not fit into my life.
In 2009 Cesca and I visited the amazing slopes of Wudang Mountain. The mountain is located roughly in northwestern part of Hubei Province of China. This peak is part of the larger Wudang Shan mountain range that runs through the area, but it is this particular peak that is the most famous. This is due to its very long and interesting history. The mountain is littered with Daoist temples and monasteries, including the famous Golden Hall, Nanyan Temple and the Purple Cloud Temple. The history of the area goes back over 2000 years, but it is the period of the Ming Dynasty (1388 — 1644 CE) that had the greatest impact.
During this time, the Mongol led precursors to the Ming had collapsed and China was about to enter its most fascinating historical age. It was an age of intellectual flowering, towering social and political achievements and immense scientific progress. During all of this, Chinese Daoism was again forming into something new. The almost shamanistic practices of external alchemy were giving ground to a new practice of internal alchemy. Internal alchemy was the search for “immortality” through the development of magic powers inside oneself. This is a syncretic idea heavily influenced by both Confucianism and indeed the movements of Buddhism, which after all is all about internal realisations, forming ideas that are readily recognisable for their influence on the west.
I am talking about internal kung fu.
One of the leading thinkers of Daoism at the time was the legendary Chang San-Feng, who wandered up Mount Wudang and made it the base of his Daoist sect. Legend has it that, in one of the temples up the mountain, he formed his magical exercises into Tai Chi after watching a snake and bird fighting. After the Yongle Emperor decreed Wudang to be “The Grand Mountain” its place in history was assured. Fast foward in time and the monasteries and buildings were made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The palaces and temples in Wudang contain Taoist art and icons from as early as the 7th century. It represents the highest standards of Chinese art and architecture over a period of nearly 1,000 years.
Of course, the true nature of Daoist history is as slippery as the core texts. I will have more to say about the veracity of this “history” later.
So what is it like to visit? Walking the 20,000 steps (!) up the mountain is one of the most spiritual things I have ever done, but not perhaps in the way that you might imagine. We came to Wudang half way through our journey in China and before our journey into Japan. Since we were basically on a spiritual journey around the world in general, and Buddhist journey in particular, the effect of Wudang took a long time to settle into my bones. However, my muscles ached like hell the very next day! Also, this was still China in 2009 and Daoism is a very strange and illusive beast to get a grasp on. So what the hell happened? This is something I will have to go into far more depth about at a later time, but essentially the contrast between this strange and very foreign way of life gave me the space to consider my own thrown into sharp relief. When you meet people and visit places that are so different to your experiences and your life, then you have two choices. You scoff. Or you stop and think. Mount Wudang is one of the best places I have ever visited for making time to stop and think. To, in fact, go beyond thinking and be able to sublime the nature of your existence. It is a fair thing to say that I walked down Wudang a different person than when I walked up, but that I didn’t realise it until much later.
So, here is the (small) film about that day. I hope that I managed to, at least a little, capture some of the feeling of the place and time.
Vimeo version:
Wudang Mountain, the Heart of China from Basho Matsuo on Vimeo.
You Tube version:
As with my first article expounding my political thoughts, philosophical views and religious methods, a reader has kindly taken the time to compose a question and view point long enough to require 3000 words to answer!
The question is this:
alexander hiboux. Further to your post of the 7th, and having taken some time to consider same, I agree that if someone were to act unlawfully in a moment of insanity, that persons temporary insanity should not absolve him of blame as to his actions, because, to return to a view expressed in my earlier post, a difference must be drawn between “temporary” and “permanent” insanity. If someone acts out of temporary insanity, then by definition, for the prior, and presumably post, act period, that person is in a state of sanity and as such they are aware of what is right and wrong, and thus must be aware of what could loosely be termed natural justice. Ergo, they have at sometime understood right and wrong, and presumably do so again. The fact that this was rejected for such period as to “allow” the act to happen should be no basis for a defence. However, if a person has always been “insane”, then that person may well have never understood the concept of right and wrong, and perhaps never will. Thus there has been no rejection of right and wrong, but rather a fundamental inability to understand the concept at any time, not just at the time of the act itself. The fact that the rest of society understands the concept should not be imposed upon the individual, otherwise we are moving towards a point where any deviation from popular and societal norms may be considered unacceptable, and in the extreme, criminal. Thus, whilst, for the safety of the rest of the population (the moral majority, if you will), the permanently insane should be kept from harming others, perhaps by effective imprisonment, (or hospitalised in a secure unit as the more p.r. conscious would term it), it is for the safety of others, and not for the permanently insanes inability to understand right from wrong, or his actions, that this should occur. Of course, if the “permanently” insane person were then to be medicated to a point where they were no longer deemed to be insane, and such that they no longer posed a threat to society, that would then open up a whole other argument…Here we go!
This post is a break from the normal schedule. It is a corollary to the “Philosophy Bites?” post a few days ago. I am going to try an answer one of the questions raised by readers of that post, in this case my old sparring partner Tom; who posted the following in the comments:
So, not to disagree with you, because I don’t, but merely to add to the argument, not so much in war, but in the scheme of moral judgements, where do you stand on killing for pleasure? and I don’t mean just for humans…
Note: Any complete answer could stretch to the length of a whole book. Ideas are not isolated but rather conjoined in a massive net of links comprised of concepts, indeed that is their purpose, and I am wary of giving a less than full account of an answer by the necessity to keep within a blog post length. Suffice to say, that this is a “clip notes” version. There may be much here that is lightly treated, but that is not (I hope) because it hasn’t been thought through.
Anyway, the short answer is this:
To kill purely for pleasure is to kill because one is grasping at desire.
