A Sudden Dawn: Book Review

July 30, 2010  |  Featured, General, Philosophy, Review  |  View Comments

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.

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What is Daoism?

What is Daoism?

June 27, 2010  |  Featured, General, Personal, Philosophy  |  View Comments

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)

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What is consciousness? Is it the

What is consciousness? Is it the “self”? Is it “me”? Basho argues no!

April 21, 2010  |  Featured, General, Personal, Philosophy  |  View Comments

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 Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ : Book Review

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ : Book Review

April 6, 2010  |  Featured, Philosophy, Review  |  View Comments

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.

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Wudang Mountain: A Basho Film

Wudang Mountain: A Basho Film

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:

Is the Insanity Defence Itself Insane?

Is the Insanity Defence Itself Insane?

January 27, 2010  |  Featured, Philosophy  |  View Comments

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!

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Killing for Pleasure?

Killing for Pleasure?

January 7, 2010  |  Featured, General, Philosophy  |  View Comments

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.

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