Announcing the opening of a new Basho website!

www.buddhabooks.co.uk

I have been writing reviews of books on this site for something like 5 years, also I have – as I am sure you know – a passion for Eastern Philosophy. Finally I can bring them all together!

Buddha Books is an editorial review website specialising in books on Daoism, Buddhism, Philosophy and other Eastern Religions in both book form and also audiobooks.

Here is the deal:

• I will be posting a couple of new reviews per week.
• All the reviews will be of books I own and have paid money for (I have a simply enormous collection).
• They will all take into account my knowledge (degree in Philosophy), views (one who has travelled the East) and beliefs (Daoist) and those of Cesca.
• Every review will contain a link to somewhere where you can buy the book.
• 50% of all the referral commissions will be donated to the The New Cambodian Children’s Life Association (NCCLA), which is a charity set-up for orphaned Cambodian children.

Also – after the great success of Cesca’s Photo exhibition, we will be offering prints of her collection for sale in a variety of sizes and frames all set to be posted straight to you. Bonus!

I invite you all to take a look and let me know what you think. The site is new – as is the theme – so there will be changes in the coming weeks as well as a large amount of new entries. My hope is that some serious discussion can be had over the books. If you disagree with a review – don’t hesitate to post up a comment.

Regards,

Basho

www.buddhabooks.co.uk

P.S. This does not effect this site. OC will continue on a dual monthly posting rate until the new year where it will then go back to weekly (I am working on a Diploma in Preventing Financial Crime at the moment)

Introduction.

I am often asked, “Just what is Daoism?”

This is a natural enough question to ask, 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?” 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 can’t be a very serious Daoist without being able to enunciate at least that.

“It’s complicated…” I manage after a ruminating struggle, made all too 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)

Some people would perhaps even get it from that. It is possible a new Buddha would be created by the universal satori (enlightenment) brought about by reading my blank message. Stranger things have happened and there are documented examples of people having satori’s while gardening and doing the dishes. But if it were always that easy for everyone then we would all be Buddha’s by now. Indeed one of the ideas in Daoism and Buddhism is that you already are a Buddha, but have merely forgotten it.

NOTE: Daoism is the translation into English of a Chinese word. There are two ways of doing this. The old way invented by the English, translates it as Taoism. The newer way, invented by the Chinese themselves, gives us Daoism. Both mean the same thing. That is why the city of Peking is now known as Beijing. The city didn’t change its name, the way we translated it changed. I will always use the Chinese way.

Problems with defining Daoism.

When trying to define Daoism most people first get hold of the most famous book of Daoism “The Laozi”, more commonly known as the Dao De Jing, and start reading. Some of the poetry in that great work rubs off on the reader and like someone fumbling with a jigsaw puzzle formed of a million blank pieces they start to catch the edge… of something. At least the DDJ makes it very plain why naming Daoism is so hard. Right on page one, line one:

The Dao that can be named is not the true Dao.

Dao means “way” and it means “way” in every possible, er, way of saying “way”. So it means, “The way (to something)”. It means, “My way (of doing things)”. It also means “The way (of life)” and “The way (the universe works)”. But, as the line suggests, it is mysterious and you cannot simply name the Dao by containing it in a word or phrase. You can point to it by observing a tree, but you cannot extract its mysterious essence by chewing on the bark.  You can taste it in the air, but you cannot pick some up down the shops. You can suggest it in 10 thousand words, but you cannot write its definition in 1 sentence. It’s like the family quiz game Taboo in that you can talk about it, around it, but you can’t never simply grasp it “cleanly” using our limited language. That is not to say that language cant “evoke” the sense of it like poetry, stories (particularly stories as we shall see) or music. It’s why you nod your head to good music or dance when hoovering and no-one is watching, It is the blind spot, the blank space between the lines, you can no more nail it down than catch lightning in a bottle. It is the living meaning of the saying:

The map is not the territory.

It is all around you, in you, linking the universal heart beat and behind your eyes. If I am starting to sound like Master Yoda from Starwars, well now you know where they got the idea of The Force from.

But reading the DDJ raises more questions than answers. The DDJ is a very old collated-series of ancient sayings, it points to no deity and has no single author. It is attributed to Master Lao, but he almost certainly never existed and what remains was already ancient when it was collected into the current form and split into the two parts. The chinese did exhaustive research into trying to find Master Lao, but eventually gave up. Trying to force these sayings into some sort of fully sensible and coherent form is one of the major hurdles one has to come to terms with when reading the DDJ. Indeed, it has thousands of translations into English and all of them fail to capture the original perfectly. I have 20 copies in formats as diverse as podcasts, Penguin editions, master scholarly works, bowdlerised poetic rewrites and iBooks digital copies. All are different and all are, as the famous saying goes, “Fingers pointing at the moon. Concentrating on the finger means you miss the heavenly glory above”. You miss the point.

The same goes for the other major Daoist work in English, the Zhuangzi. Unlike Master Lao, Zhuangzi did exist (around 370 BCE), but he also only wrote part of his famous book. However, what a book! Zhuangzi’s work is a core text in the movement of scepticism and relativism. He is mostly concerned with wondering why people try so hard to split the world into dual notions, such as “Right and Wrong”, “Good and Evil”, “Smooth and Crunchy” and more importantly, “I and Thou”.

He criticises these things by telling funny stories.

In these he shows, gently, loftily, that trying to over analyse situations is almost always to commit a fundamental error. His stories tell of people who just “do” rather than think. people such as cooks, craftsmen, swimmers and butchers. People to whom reasoning is of little use in their activities, in the sense that a Cicada-catcher is attentive to his task and heedless of the doubt of “thinking too much”. He just catches the bug.

Master Zhuangzi is poking fun at people’s perceptions in order to show them that most of the things they over-think and rationalise are actually the arms holding them back from being happy and free. Zhuangzi would probably be labelled a “free spirit” today, but his work isn’t a dreamy loose fantasy, his mind is sharper than a razor. It is chock full of epistemology (How do we know “what is true”? How do we get knowledge?) mixed with an attractive humour missing from most Western religious texts. Zhuangzi was a detached master flowing with the world and not against it.

It asks some amazing questions:

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased.

He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi.

Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi.

But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.

Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction!

This is called the Transformation of Things.

(2, tr. Burton Watson 1968:49)

It is at this point that a lot of people give up; having fumbled with the subject, but found no clear answers, they leave it safely on the shelf. Only the stubborn continue to look further into it. However even those robust investigators may not like what they find. Reading into the history of Daoism brings no golden age of philosophical freedom, in fact it brings up many “types” of Daoist endeavors full of cults, crazy gods, Celestial Masters and drinking mercury to live forever.

To western eyes this part is a real turn off. So in their defense they simply ignore Daoism’s history and focus on the two books mentioned above. Thus you get the “break” between Religious Daoism and the so-called Philosophical Daoism. Let me assure you that break is not really there. It has been created by philosophers with limited access to the works of the subject and taking the small parts they see as something else from all the dress up and dancing. In fact the religious practice is an expression of the Dao. The strange Celestial Master Daoism found in China today is also an expression of the Dao.

Daoism is the embodiment of the phrase, “the correct answer to free speech you find offensive is more free speech!”

For Daoism is a religion and not a simply a philosophy. That it is a hard to understand and essentially mysterious religion does not change that it contains a religious experience at the heart of it. That is a necessary part and cannot be worked around by wishful secular longing for an Eastern path that doesn’t “get weird”. Without that you wont be able to stick at it long enough to “get it”.

So, I am going to take up the challenge of communicating “what is Daoism” in two parts. Firstly, I am going to give a brief history of Daoism. That’s the easy part. Secondly, we are going to, if not capture lightning in a bottle, at least be standing atop a hill during a thunderstorm with our fingers in the air.

Daoism: a short historical primer. 

Please note: While the following is a gentle line drawn through the history of Daoism, I am not suggesting that Daoism has a linear progression in the same way as the churches of Europe. Hence I have not written this history with many names and dates that would become “milestones” in the movement. Daoism is a very large and diverse subject and China is a very large country with space for all sort of “interpretations”. In fact Daoism encourages interpretations.

Daoism started as a shamanistic collection of cults and religious practices in ancient China (around 1000 BC). It mingled with the folk religion of nature worship and a few principles stuck. These are such ideas as personal transformation, which is the commonality in all Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. This principle first took the form of talismans, mysticism and external alchemy that was basically trying to find ways to produce potions and become immortal. That proved popular and many cults and sects were merrily trying all sorts of poisonous brews to become one with the gods in heaven. Around this time (4th Century BC) some written works appeared that would later become the most recognisable Daoist thoughts such as the DDJ and the Zhuangzi, while a man called Zhang Daoling codifyed Daoism into a religion with a canon and gods after a spectral visitation from Lao Tze. Eventually this transformed into the idea of internal alchemy (3rd century onwards). No longer searching for elixirs, the Daoists searched inside themselves through such practices as meditation, sexual magic and living in caves. This practice gave us the notion of “chi energy”.

Daoist priests, philosophies and practices were in the heart of the Chinese culture and even with the arrival of Buddhism it remained a driving influence in China even for hundreds of years. There were even Daoist states in China back then. But China’s history is one of various rulers and philosophies rising and falling and while all this was happening another great master was born whose influence on the Chinese is still felt today. He was called Master Kong, who is better known in the west as Confucius. His teachings were seemingly at odds with Daoism, but nothing could be further from the truth and all three practices spiralled around and through each other, in and out of the corridors of power for the next few hundred years. They influenced each other immensely as shown in this classic painting:

Song painting in the Litang style illustrating the theme “Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism are one”.

It depicts “Taoist Lu Xiujing (left), official Tao Hongjing (right) and buddhist monk Huiyuan (center, founder of Pure Land Buddhism) by the Tiger stream. The stream borders a zone infested by tigers that they just crossed without fear, engrossed as they were in their discussion. Realising what they just did, they laugh together, hence the name of the picture,Three laughing men by the Tiger stream.” Source: WIKIPEDIA

Also worth noting is that religions were not split by class in China with Daoism being the stuff of the country folk. Emperors were Daoist, Daoist priests were at court performing ceremonies to keep the country in harmony while farmers followed the paths of Confucian thought and family structure. Over these years Daoism gave rise to many of the things we take as Chinese, such as Tai Chi, the Ying Yang symbol and speaking like Master Yoda. Chan Buddhism (heavily influenced by Daoism) was practiced in such places as the famous Song monastry of Shaolin, but after much persecution moved on to Japan, and became Zen Buddhism.

Eventually, Daoism and Confucianism met with the unstoppable force of Maoism and were both sublimed and crushed in equal measure. The Maoist revolutionaries knew that they could never totally eradicate Daoism as it contains a large amount of “folk” belief that resides in the cultural psyche and so they selected a particular form of it and put the governmental stamp on it.

That is an incredibly short version of the history of Daoism. What I hope it highlights is that Daoism is a little strange for a religion:

• It has had gods and deities at some times and not at others.
• It has been an immortality cult for while and contained shamanistic magic at others.
• It has “borrowed” from Buddhism, but also given back to the middle path.
• It has had celibate priests in the heart of empire and yet has had sexual magic practiced in the mountains.
• It has two main books translated into English, but neither author knew about the other, neither would label themselves as Daoist and at least one of them is legendary.

I can appreciate the problems in trying to understand such a changing and seemingly constantly moving target! Western intellectuals have worked hard for hundreds of years to try to bring the wisdom in Daoism under their command. The traditional method of doing so is the finding of commonalities amongst the various beliefs. After all, no matter how many strange and diverse Christian sects exist; they all believe in Jesus as the Saviour; that is what makes them Christian. It is what gives them their religious comfort. Daoism is eventually just as comforting, but given the five contradicting points above this is not an easy exercise.

The trick is to realise that these actions are an attempt to “express” the Dao, but there is no “true way”, indeed anyone claiming to have one is always false. For this reason, Daoism has at its heart the understanding that everything is relative.

Relation to Buddhism.

Another method, and one expounded by such philosophers as Alan Watts, was to not only draw a line between the various “Daoisms” of antiquity, but to highlight by reference to the religion it most heavily influenced; Zen.

One of the main ways in teaching Zen is through the master ignoring his students. Often the master will reject a new applicant outright and in such a forthright way that the student will give up there and then. “I have nothing to teach you,” the master will say. The pupil will, if he is earnest, persevere with the master and many stories and legends abound regarding this strange situation and how various adherents have dealt with it. The most famous story is told of the Indian Zen Master Bodhidharma, who rejected a pupil again and again until finally the pupil cut off his arm and demanded an audience. The great master agreed to meet with the pupil and took him under his wing.

This story only makes sense to Western eyes in that we know that one must strive to understand and that one must show commitment and diligence. But actually there is a secret here:

The Master truly had nothing to teach.

Zen is about coming to your own realisation. It takes a lot of time and work and the master will help you, although not in a way you might appreciate. Should he accept you as a student then don’t expect to receive anything that could be construed as an “answer” to Zen. That is, don’t presume that Zen has esoteric knowledge and concerned only with moving through stages of learning. In fact, the most similar western experience to Zen training is probably Army Drill School. The army takes in “normal” people and turns them into killers; people with the will to kill. This is not easy. They do this by working you physically until you drop, regimenting your life and stripping you of your identity until you can be mentally reprogrammed. Zen is similar to this, but instead of forming you into a killing machine the Zen master strips you of your illusions, pares your personality down to its core and then makes you look at yourself. He does this by forcing you to answer impossible riddles, making you work in the fields, attend very very long ceremonies and hitting you with a stick if you are not meditating properly (or even if you are). This effort can take a lifetime, but finally you break the distinction between body and mind, between self and universe and wake up. You realise that the personality you hold so dear, that special “me” you think is yourself, it is a blank sheet of paper with no writing on it. It is not there at all. You are not apart from this Universe at all.

Zen is a form of psychoanalysis!

Daoism is similar to that, just without a Japanese guy hitting you around the head with a stick. In Daoism you have to hit yourself. Daoism is therefore like many religions from the East in that they all believe that you can transform yourself through training. This training involves mastering meditation and learning to live in the “now”. This means not allowing your mind to float into dreams of the future nor reminiscences of the past.

To the Daoist , the future doesn’t exist, the past doesn’t exist, there is only the present.

There is no set way to do this, no definite doctrine to follow and no master to teach you. There is only yourself, the books, other Daoists and a number of self then universal realisations on the road to understanding. Be they sudden or slow, they will come to you.

So, how does one become a Daoist if there are no “vows?”

Where is Daoism Practiced?

There are many Daoist mountains in China, but one of the most famous is a mountain called Wudang Shan.

It is famous for being the birth place of internal Kung Fu styles such as Tai Chi. Walking up it is quite an experience. There are 20 thousand steps up Wudang before getting to the top and it is an exhausting journey.

The endless stone steps tower above you, winding upwards seemingly into the heavens. Along the way there are many temples and the steps often lead you through the courtyards. Each of these temples has an increasingly strained mystic name which each subsequent temple tries very hard to trump.

So the harmony temple may be followed by the grand harmony temple, the majestic temple of great tranquillity and so on ad nausea, all the way up the steps. This naming convention seemed to me at the time to be a cute cultural translation and something quite un-purposely funny, but actually it had a definite point; the idea that you are rising to heaven and every time you think you have made it: you haven’t and there is more to go. Along the way you meet many people on the same journey. You see rich and poor alike. The rich are carried up in palanquins, totally breaking the point, and this is most discouraging. More encouraging, but not perhaps comforting, are the groups of little old Chinese ladies you meet that even at the tender ages of what looks to be 150 can hop up the steps like a heard of mountain goats.

After hours of climbing you arrive at a large temple and then upwards still more until you finally come to the top, which is above the clouds. You are here at the pinnacle of China’s attempts to reach heaven. Here sits a large golden temple and some very old Daoist priests.

Here is a film about my trip up that mountain:

After an age you have to walk back down and find some hot water for your strained leg muscles. For me, and I didn’t know this at the time, I was not the same guy walking down. My trip into the clouds had prompted me to leave something behind and to gain the courage to be what I wanted.

Experiences like that are something of a slow burn for most of us. It took another two months before I felt a change in myself and what I believed. I suppose that was simply how long it took me to “check” my beliefs inside. Most of the time people simply remember that they believe something, but they don’t check. Many religious practices are geared towards sustaining belief so you don’t have to check it.

So, what exactly are the beliefs of a Daoist?

Daoist Beliefs.

Many philosophers and religious teachers, not to mention a lot of Western Intellectuals, have found and labelled a common set of traditional Daoist thoughts. These do not stretch from all the way back to 1000 BC and I don’t think anyone will ever manage to capture that, but they at least enable you to have some conceptual framework around which you can talk. Often you hear people refer to historical Daoism becoming “recognisable” as we come closer to our age. So, let us start with the big one:

Dao.

The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name.
Non-existence is called the antecedent of heaven and earth; Existence is the mother of all things.
From eternal non-existence, therefore, we serenely observe the mysterious beginning of the Universe; From eternal existence we clearly see the apparent distinctions.
These two are the same in source and become different when manifested.
This sameness is called profundity. Infinite profundity is the gate whence comes the beginning of all parts of the Universe.

There is a reason that Western films and culture like to steal gently from the Daoists. It is because Daoism concerns itself with something that is all around us, that it the fundamental core of us and indeed the core of everything, but is hidden from view.

Consider this:

Scientists have worked out that the elements that make up the human body are the same as those found in the core of stars. In its beginning the Universe was not even. If it were, if matter was laid out in neat rows, then galaxies, stars and life would never happen. Instead the gaps in the lattice of matter mean that gravity acted to pull matter together. This process eventually collected enough matter that it underwent collapse and exploded, leaving behind a star. In this super-heated ball, more advanced elements formed up in layers inside the star. At the end of its life it no longer had enough energy to hold itself up and collapsed. Because of the layers of elements, energy was released in the form of an enormous explosion that we call nova (super-nova and hyper-nova).

This burst of energy, released by the star’s death, flung the more interesting and exotic elements into space. But, as before, these elements are uneven and some formed, through the attraction of matter to matter by gravity, into planets. On one particular planet the elements gave rise to life and. by forming complex molecules with strange chemical patterns, this life ate, reproduced and died. It also “evolved” under the same principles and eventually formed a creature; the first animal. This animal, our common ancestor, swam around the primordial soup until it too reproduced and died, but leaving behind generations of new creatures: faster, stronger, and more determined. One of these took the most important step on behalf of life on Earth. It took a step onto the land, giving rise to larger animals and eventually to us; humans.

But through all this the elements that make up those creatures haven’t changed. They are still the remnants, the sparks and debris, from those exploding stars. You, me and everything around you is formed of those elements.

You are made of stars.

Doesn’t that make you feel connected to the world, the sky and the Universe? It did for this man:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of piece of mind.

Albert Einstein

You may have imagined that you are apart, that you were born into the world without being asked. That you don’t belong to it. But, actually, you grew out of this Earth in exactly the same way that an apple grows out of a tree. You’re a fruit. You’re a cantaloupe. You are not separate from the world, you cannot be separated from it.

And you know what? Neither is anything else. Look out into the country and you will see the light play across the hillsides. Can you separate the valley and the hill? Just because one side is dark and the other light? The whole world, the whole Universe, is fundamentally connected. It is the nature of the Universe. It is the way the Universe works. It is the mysterious Starmaker, it is the spirit behind the beating life-energy of spacetime. You cannot grasp it, because it is chaos, it is formless, it appears passive because it works on such a grand scale that nothing you do bothers it. All life is sustained by it and would not exist but for it.

It is the Dao.

The great Tao pervades everywhere, both on the left and on the right.
By it all things came into being, and it does not reject them.
Merits accomplished, it does not possess them.
It loves and nourishes all things but does not dominate over them.
It is always non-existent; therefore it can be named as small.
All things return home to it, and it does not claim mastery over them; therefore it can be named as great.
Because it never assumes greatness, therefore it can accomplish greatness.

Taken in this way, one see’s that all creatures share this world with us, that all races are simply one and that compassion for others is the way of the Dao.

The Universe wants you to live with it. It is ready to catch you if you accept it. If you want to be happy then live in accordance with the Dao; the life energy of the Universe.

The question is How?

Ah, well, now you know why Daoism has changed so many times. How can one live in accordance with a mysterious spiritual nature that defies the understanding?

There are a number of ways, and the DDJ, Zhuangzi (among the other Daoist works of which these are but the central texts of a huge canon) have many things to say about how to live with the Dao and in accordance with it.

These principles are worthy of entire articles in themselves and indeed there is much you can read out there to assist. They are, like Dao, also endlessly translated, here is the outline of two:

De.

That which things get in order to live is called De.

De is the second core principle of Daoism along with Dao itself, its rough translation means “inner integrity” or “virtue”, but it basically can mean to grow, to ascend, graciousness and even heart as in “heart and mind.”

It is virtue in the sense that a medicine has the virtue of healing. For the Daoists, this virtue comes from living in accord with the Dao. So, if you act with wisdom and inner integrity then you are having a positive effect on your life and expressing De.  In other words if you wish to be a “good man”, do so. Don’t wish it, do it. If you can achieve the focus “on the now” required to be able to move from wishing for things to doing them, then you are expressing De.

When they clearly understand the Dao and De (Virtue), they then understand benevolence and righteousness.

Wu Wei.

A person like that could ride through the sky on the floating clouds, straddle the sun and moon, and travel beyond the four seas.
Neither death nor life can cause changes within her, and there’s little reason for her to even consider benefit or harm.

Wu Wei is “non action”. Acting without acting. This does not mean “doing nothing”! It is best thought of as “not forcing.” For me I bring my martial arts to the fore with this principle. In martial arts the most masterful skill is in getting maximum effect for minimum effort. Many martial arts are based around finding and mastering ways of achieving this. But, they basically follow the idea of a fulcrum. A fulcrum is a pivot point and the point at which other things can revolve with multiple times the effect. In the martial arts this is best seen in the soft styles that enable even the most gentile motions cause tremendous results.

I was once thrown by Don Bishop who is a 7th Dan in Shodokan (Tomiki) Akido. He asked me to attempt a stab at his stomach using a rubber knife. Now, Don is in his 70’s and a small frail looking old man. However, looks are deceptive for he is one of the powerful martial artist I have ever encountered. But, how does he generate so much power in such an old and small body? I, 6ft 2 and 18st, lunged at him as hard as I could. Don gently moved aside and using only one finger on each hand pulled me in such a way that I totally over balanced. Then, at the perfect moment, he changed the position of his fingers only by a few inches and suddenly I was thrown right over my own head. He had moved hardly at all, hardly used a jot of effort and yet had thrown me across the room. Was this magic? No, this was Wu Wei.

Another example I can give was with another martial arts master. This time it was Kendo sensei Jeff Humm of Hizen Dojo in London.

He was giving his normal end of lesson berating to the class and singling out a few choice lessons for black belts and beginners (like me) alike. He was explaining to a senior grade about a counter to a head strike technique. After a few puzzled looks he tutted and called for a training-sword.

“Hit me,” he said to the student. Now the sensei was not in armour and not wearing a helmet. He was also just standing there in his glasses. The pupil, naturally, performed the strike very slowly and gently. Sensei Humm waved his hand, “No no no, with effort.” The class slightly held its breath as the student drew back his hand and with a brilliant loud scream flashed his training-sword down at the sensei’s unarmoured head. But, the sensei was no longer there! In fact at the absolute precise moment he had moved very slightly so that not only did the students sword miss, but he had somehow cracked the student a clean ringing blow on the top of the head. I sat watching this dumfounded by the skill. Acting while not looking to act, that is what it means for me.

The essence of his life is perfect.
He can cry all the time without losing his voice.
His inner harmony is supreme.
To be aware of inner harmony is to abide with reality.

These principles, together with many others detailed in Daoism, help me try to live in harmony with the Dao. I am, of course, only human and not a master at it, but I persevere (without trying too hard to!) All the principles combine and complement each other and gives rise to the truly virtuous human being.

And eventually to becoming a sage.

The Sage.

A person who masters the principles and lessons of Daoism, who lives perfectly in harmony with the Dao. He/she is The Sage. The concept of the sage is key to Daoism. The sage is the master of life, but he is also a man who sees reality as it is.

What does that mean?

As I have said in my prior articles on philosophy: many of the things we cling to in the world are not actually real, they are figments and creations of the person thinking them and culture that they live in. Human judgement on “what is right” and “wrong” or “what is beautiful” or “ugly” are in the mind of the speaker, not the universe. Following the principle of Wu Wei, the sage realises that it is our clouded minds that create these distinctions and judgements and he refrains. Thus, Daoists do not see the world as a toy of man. This is why they are often said to be deep lovers of nature. They realise that man is a part of the animal kingdom and do not consider man to be other than an animal. However, Daoists also realise that life requires that one creature eats another so not so many will be vegetarians. A dead animal is a dead animal. It should be respected, loved, cared for but to eat one is no bad thing.

They realise that ethical judgments are fraud with peril and that there is no true man-made morality. Nature has a way. Not that Daoists suggest we all become troglodytes! Just realise that much of the intellectual and rational “truth” we take for granted is nothing more than “models” of the truth, tellings us only one perspective and not, perhaps, something that we should rely on. Daoism has no celestial monarchic view of the universe, it can accept what it likes. Many Daoists have great respect for religious masters, but most are not and cannot be “believers” in the Christian sense. Many Daoist are big fans of Buddha, but are not “Buddhist”. Other Daoist hero’s include Ghandi and other Indian masters.

In many ways the sage is similar to Plato’s theory of the Philosopher King.  A man of great natural wisdom: living within nature and strong in will, but able to see what must be done. When he acts it is gentile yet powerful. Such a sage has no fear of death, but more importantly he has no fear of life either.

So, that’s a little bit about Daoism, what it is for me. As I said at the top “It’s complicated” and yet simple. I always keep in mind the first lines of the DDJ and I always try to capture the humour of life found in the Zhuangzi. I don’t think I have a compete understanding of it, but I am trying all the time to learn and appreciate more about this most amazing of religions. Daoism is like a template on the nature of reality and the Universe. One can believe in a god and still be a Daoist, and indeed this is the form found today in China. One can certainly be a Buddhist and a Daoist. One can even follow many of the teachings of the Christ and be a Daoist.

Following the Dao, using De and Wu Wei brings the person naturally to gain the “Three Jewels” of Compassion, Moderation and Humility and these, I hope you agree, are some of the highest virtues of all.

A good soldier is free from violence.
A good fighter is free from rage.
A good winner is free from competition.
A good leader is humble before the people.
This is called the attainment of non-contention,
Or the application of the strength of others.
It is also called identity with the ultimate
Beyond space and time.

Regards,

Basho.

If you would like to know more about Daoism, please leave a comment.

Quotes: Various translations of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, most – if not all – of the translations are online here: http://home.pages.at/onkellotus/index.html

There follows a true story of a situation that took place in the street, but equally could have been straight out of a dojo training session. It is interesting because it highlights many things: the dangers of being “switched off”, the speed of the trained man’s reactions, the attitude of the police and the judgement of others. It also highlights a part of conflict that is often missed and shows that in the end the most harsh judge is in fact yourself.

This story is true and happened in late 2009, I repeat it here as it was told to me with permission of the person involved.

Raymond was walking through his local town of Brixton, London. As he walked down a quiet street near the park, three large men approached him from the front. Raymond didn’t totally ignore them and walk straight into the situation, but he was not instantly aware of the danger either. They closed on him and formed a semicircle that blocked the street ahead. Raymond looked up to see the man in the middle pull out what he later described as, “the biggest knife I have ever seen”. The knife came up threateningly and moved towards his midriff. It looked as though these guys were going to mug another helpless victim and escape into the park. However, this time they had made a huge mistake because Raymond is a professional martial arts instructor.

“As soon as I saw the knife, I just started moving. It was instinctive,” he told me. “It was like a sudden shock and my body took over, it was so fast.”

Indeed the entire episode was over seconds later. Raymond turned his body so the knife passed by his stomach. He then covered over the knife arm with his hands and slammed his hip against the man’s elbow. The move was textbook perfect and the knife man’s arm was dislocated instantly. The second man moved in to strike Raymond. Without letting go of the first man’s arm, Raymond kicked out with the classic downward sidekick to the knee. This missed its intended target and his heavy shoes crashed into the second man’s shins, breaking through his leg with a sound Raymond described as, “a sickening crunch”. As the second man fell down, Raymond pulled the first man’s arm around and disarmed the knife by pushing it towards the man’s face making him let go of the blade that passed into Raymond’s hand. Another textbook technique, except as Raymond was describing this to me I saw a look on his face; a look of self-reproach.

“You moved the knife towards his face?” I asked.

“Yes, it was the technique,” he replied to me, “when it is taught in class, the end of the technique is to have the knife against the opponents neck. I have taught it for years; take the knife and use it against them.” He shook his head and looked down.

“And did you?”

“I was about to. My body was just doing the technique automatically and the blade was moving towards this guys neck. I realised that this was going to kill him. I screamed at myself inside my head, trying to stop the action from completing. I was like, ‘what the hell are you doing?!’ to myself. At the last moment I turned the blade away.”

As the blade moved in front of the first man’s face the last man moved in to grab Raymond’s hands.

“What did you do then?”

“I stepped forwards into him and struck the last guy with an upper rising elbow to the collarbone. It broke and he went down.”

“A stepping upper rising elbow?” I asked, “that’s a strange technique choice.”

“With the knife in my hand I didn’t want to stab him, it was just instinct,” shrugged Raymond.

With the three men disabled and rolling around on the floor in pain, Raymond did what any good citizen would do in these circumstances; he called them an ambulance. Then the police arrived and promptly arrested Raymond.

“They arrested you?”

“Yes, they spoke to a bystander who had been on the other side of the street and he said I had been excessive and over the top,” he said.

“Really, there was three of them. Did the bystander not see the knife?”

“No, I showed him it on the ground and he said that I had still been too violent. I couldn’t believe it, I was like, ‘can you not see the size of this thing?’”

Raymond was telling me this story the next day along with some friends. To them, it was exciting and macho. They replayed it again and again amongst themselves, shouting and whooping and saying how they would have dealt with the situation. The only person not smiling was Raymond.

“What do you think the police will do?” he asked me. Luckily, one of the friends present was an off-duty Metropolitan police officer.

“What did you say at the station?” the policeman friend asked.

“The truth. That they pulled that knife and I was defending myself. That they were coming for me and I was in fear of my life.”

“Don’t worry,” the policeman friend said, “you appear to have acted correctly. You waited and phoned the ambulance too that shows a lot. They will probably give you a medal.”

Raymond looked across to me, “what do you think Basho?”

“How long have you been teaching Raymond?” I asked him.

“18 years.”

“Mate, you will have hundreds of students willing to give you a character statement. Don’t worry.”

“Yeah,” said the policeman friend, “I will give you one too, just get them to call me. You have my number.”

“Yeah,” broke in one of our other friends, laughing, “and if you need one from a bricklayer, let me know!”

We all laughed, except Raymond. The others went back to describing the event to each other excitedly. Raymond remained quiet.

“Look,” I said, “I know how you feel. Guilty, right?”

“I was so close to killing him. Maybe I was excessive.” He sounded unsure of himself.

“Take your time,” I said, “you just need to work through this.”

Raymond’s reaction to the event was not unusual. Where one might expect him to be happy, elated and empowered by single headedly defeating three muggers, in fact he was badly shaken by it. The huge amount of danger he had been exposed to had put his mind into shock. What if he had lost the fight? Would he have been stabbed to death? These things were running through his mind again and again, playing over different outcomes, a mental state the French call, L’esprit de l’escalier” or in English, “the spirit of the staircase.” Such feelings are very common after a violent situation. At the moment Raymond saw the knife, and his reactions took over, his brain ordered his glands to dump all sorts of chemicals into the blood. These chemicals made him stronger, faster and narrowed his vision. It also made his blood coagulate quicker and his mind process faster so that the entire event seemed to be happening in slow motion.

One side effect of such a body reaction is the feeling of either terror or rage. The ‘beast’ inside is unleashed and takes over the body. For martial artists, this is channelled through our training. By the endless repetition of techniques, basics and kata we have conditioned ourselves to act in a certain way under pressure. The downside is trying to control that rage with ‘the beast unleashed’. Our civilised brains, the part of us that doesn’t want to hurt anyone, fights for control. For some, like Raymond, it succeeds. For others, the beast wins and tragedy happens; someone gets killed.

Regardless of the outcome, the chemicals burn the event into the memory and what Raymond was feeling was essentially survivors guilt. Guilt for having lived through a traumatic experience, prevailed against the odds and having almost killed in the defence of his life.

The part of British law that covers self-defence has been clearly written to take this mental state into account. The police arrested Raymond and made him make a statement very quickly after the event. At this point he was either still pumped full of adrenaline (making him more talkative) or coming down off the chemicals in his blood stream (making him feel down and possibly needing to “offload”). The police are trained to take advantage of this situation to get the truth out and down on paper. Therefore, your statement is the most important thing to get right. People acting in self-defence have still gone to prison because of what they put in their statement. Knowing not ‘what to say’, rather ‘how to say it’ is going to be the second ordeal you face on a day this happens to you. The law is available in clear and understandable terms at the following government web address: www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/self_defence/

The question of how to translate the mental part of combat into training is the primary challenge for instructors. Most doctrines teach that building muscle memory is the way to go, and it is often said that a thousand repetitions of a technique will embed it into instinct. While this appears to be true, there is a large question left outstanding; if we are not teaching people how to cope mentally, then are we teaching them to freeze up and fail at the vital moment. On the other hand, it is important to avoid fully automatic instant responses and end up battering someone honestly asking for directions. It is a balance that forms the hardest part of training and teaching. How many instructors inadvertently teach techniques that kill, sometimes tacked onto a disarming technique as an afterthought? Instructors spend all their lives teaching how to deal with the physical outcomes of conflict, but is it not equally important to understand and teach the mental aspects?

While objective answers to these questions may be impossible, it is surely vital that the class and the instructor considers the questions.

The next week I met up with Raymond again. He told me that he had re-visited the police station and been told that all three men were still in hospital. However, he was also told that the police were not going to press any charges against him. He looked most relieved. He was free of the event legally, I only hope that he is able to free his mind as well.

Basho has been in the martial arts for 18 years and holds a 1st Dan instructor grade in Taekwondo. He recently returned from a year touring the far east.

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.

NEW You Tube version:

Vimeo version:

Wudang Mountain, the Heart of China from Basho Matsuo on Vimeo.

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.

This comes from not being able to “feel” anymore. The person is pushed into trying anything to feel again. To sate desire is the only modern way (or indeed requirement) to “feel” something. To kill because one desires seeing the pain of others is to dwell in extreme darkness. However, the new society; a society built around knowing itself, the society un-judging and filled full of people who know themselves will not produce people who kill for pleasure. This is because they would have too much understanding and natural respect for life.

Utopian?

Consider where the “pleasure” of these actions really comes from. Is it not from the illicit nature of the act? The illegality, the acting against the laws of the society brought without? The doing of “wrong” as a source of feeling something, anything? As the main character in “Natural Born Killers,” said, “…eventually you just become bad”.

Consider the school massacres in the US. Many people, many many people, have moralised as to why those guys killed their classmates. Some said it was the lack of prayer. Others claimed it was the access to firearms. Some even blamed the music and games they had. One guy claimed that they were “friendless” outsiders. As Chris Rock said, “I counted 4 of them, that’s more friends than many have. That’s enough for 2 on 2 in a half court!”

The truth is that these boys had lost themselves to such an extent that they couldn’t feel anything. Wrapped in a cotton wool ball of a society, a life with no meaning whatsoever, a culture of only saturating desire, where the highest virtue is to be on the top of a pile of people with, as Eddie Izzard says, “…enough money to grab it with both hands and jam it in your ears and go blarg!”

When satisfying desires are the only virtues, people lose touch with the sense of reality. They start to only define themselves as the “I” in contrast to the world of “not I”. They can only care about themselves, this I, this illusion they have identified themselves with.

They are essentially Super-Selfish.

Clearly, killing in this mentally degraded form is not going to follow the flow of natural justice. It is a symptom of a sickness in the mind and soul. Not in the way often imagined in court, which claims that they have lost the so called “moral self”, rather in the way that they have forgotten about anyone but the “I” that they imagine themselves to be.

But, you asked about the “animal world”.  As I said in the article, I strongly suggest that we are not apart from the animal world; rather we are in it in every way. I don’t differentiate between human and animal. Therefore it is the same. The Killer Whales throwing sea lions to each other may be acting in some way other than “pleasure killing” (in the way we say of a psycho killer), but they may also not be. They may be acting from a pure natural instinct or even a societal pressure. We have no idea. They may be, as Nietzsche said of eagles, acting from a noble principle. A principle he hoped we would develop. In fact, I am sure we have got it – we just repress it for its brutality. They may be suffering every false perspective that we are. I don’t contend that “the animal world” is any better or worse than ours. Basically, because there is only one world and we exist in it in the same way as any other animal.

If I ran a court of law and a case came before me, I would consider it differently from one might expect. In the courts of today, a man may claim to have been “deranged” at the time of the crime. They say this as an excuse. It is not. One who kills in the mind of derangement would be instantly guilty in my court. Being of “unsound mind” at the time of the crime would garner a harsher treatment and punishment than not being. Being out of touch with the natural flow of what is right would be no reason for leniency; it is a damning thing to say in defence.

This is essentially because in the new society freedom comes from a sound knowledge of reality. A person who is freed from the chains of desire would not kill unjustly. Freedom, of course, also means the freedom to commit crimes, but – importantly – it also means knowing the consequences. Killing would garner being killed. Stealing would mean being stolen from.

This, of course, sounds simplistic. Bourgeoisie. What about stealing to prevent starvation?

Ah, well, this is where the new society differs from our own. One would never have to steal to eat or to live. The very concept of the poor is completely tied up with the equally horrendous concept of the rich. They are like a valley and a mountain. In our current society is a necessity that some “have not”.

Digression: I was once told by a teacher that they “don’t want everyone to pass their exams; someone has to clean the roads”. What a horrible concept. In some countries, like for example Japan, they respect all professions and those cleaning roads do so with pride. It is a strange and humbling thing to see for someone brought up in England, but no doubt slowly being eroded.

It is in the heart of capitalism to segregate people into whether they possess “things”, “stuff”, money, “riches”, etc. Society needs to come to know itself. Coming to know that the “I” that we obsess about is by its very nature a tool of grasping desire. It forces us into patterned illusion. So, we look at the “culture of celebrity” rather than look within, we desire what “they” have. Be it better bodies, money or success. We are intensely jealous of their success (usually success in some shallow and worthless realm) because we have been conditioned to believe that financial success and fame is the source of happiness. Take Jordan, or Paris Hilton. Both are only famous because people either want to be them or sleep with them. In a similar way as this looking up and wishing, we look down on others too. We look at such things as the TV show “Eastenders” to tell ourselves that, no matter how bad it is, we do not “sin” as much as those poor petty fuckers!

It is like the old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch, where the three classes all look down on those below and up to those above. Indeed the entire “morality” inherited from Christianity is setup in this way. God sits at the top like a king, his half human son as a prince, the Pope, the Queens, the Lords, the Plebs. Such a structure from above is actually a reflection of our own society. Jesus’ real message was actually quite different and much more mystical.

“I am God’s Son…,” Jesus said. “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 10:36 & John 14:9).

This doesn’t make sense to us in the West if we don’t have a religious hierarchy and thereby make Jesus an immortal son of God. If he had been born in India, and said those things in Hinduism, he would have not garnered even a raised eyebrow. From their point of view we are all “God” and the world is an “act” (in the sense of a play or performance). The spirit of God is “playing” at being us. The comment, “I am God’s Son,” would have been met with congratulations for finally working that out, not a stoning!

Our structure of life in the West, that flows from Christian morals into its Capitalist/Humanist successor, is setup to say that “you are not special”. You are not Jesus. No, you are not even Jordan. You are nothing until you climb over the rest, until you get all that you desire – something you can never do, and become “rich” in stuff. It’s an almost worthless existence.

As Tyler Durden said, “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

All of this is to take our mind off the truth, which is that modern life sucks. It is fundamentally, insipidly and culturally bankrupt, puerile and meaningless under its own rules.

In the past we were told that we should become “rock stars” to be happy. In a very important way I “got this”, as at least “rock stars” create something; music. But, then this requires effort, talent and knowing oneself to be creative (try creating art while under illusion, you can’t (and before you mention drugs and music, consider that drugs often open reality not hide it)). In modern times you don’t even need to do anything creative. You just need to be rich. Richness is its own reward and access to fame. It is quite worse than pathetic.

So, while our society is ordered in this way and the world is lost in this way (the Capitalist way of doing things is truly taking over the world spiralling everything down the plughole) then killing can be performed for pleasure, but it is a form of mental sickness. A sickness of losing the connection with oneself and therefore the connection with the ultimate reality; the Dao.

In the new society killing would not and could not be performed for pleasure, but it might be performed for justice.

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.

Lao-tzu

Basho

Note: Of course, my personal philosophy is not pure Daoist. I am the product of my training and upbringing, not to mention my environment, genes and epi-genetics. In this vein, I make no claim to know the true Dao. Anyone who does hasn’t read the book. The very first line makes this clear. I don’t speak the Dao, but sometimes I feel it, and for me that is a source of great happiness.

This reminds me of my old philosophy professor, who would often fence with me on a subject by gently passing me back questions to naturally draw out my thoughts into a more coherent (ha!) mode of expression.

Clearly with no great success.

The fencing analogy is apt here, as this is exactly how fencing is taught: gently. The Maestro leads the pupil through a slow and safe sequence and at the moment of commitment points out, by gently prodding them, that they have overreached and should have covered quarte instead. However, I prefer being taught in the vein of the martial arts. In karate, any point of view is thrown mercilessly into the crucible of combat and tested to destruction. If it is right, then it works. There is no gentleness and no kindness. Only something that stands and something that falls. It is true that when you over-reach you are battered, but at least you learned something and your master has shown you some honesty.

Honesty is always refreshing. As John Lennon said, “Just give me the truth.”

So, while Nigel might want to consider renaming the podcast to “Philosophy Nibbles”, apart from that, it is by far one of the most intelligent and thought provoking downloads available anywhere on the web and one of the reasons I fell in love with podcasts in the first place (the other was MOG Army, which has unfortunately pod-faded).

So, what of it?

I am going to start writing some opinion on these podcasts, posting it here, and inviting a more stimulating debate that is possible in the show’s current format.

We will start with this episode, “Jeff McMahan on Killing in War,” from Sat, 21 November 2009.

When is it right to kill?

Often, when this question is raised, it is answered only in a negative sense. That is, “When isn’t it right to kill?” While this is a valid tactic in any argument, it does not cover the crux of the matter, mainly because the arguments put forward focus on the matter in hindsight. As in, “When wasn’t it right to have killed?” Such answers are always going to be easier to formulate because one can immediately refer to examples common between the members of the debate. People will use the Second World War, the Falklands Conflict and the Iraq Wars to draw lines in the sand that fit their point of view, with the benefit that the outcome of those conflicts is already settled.

Therefore, when discussing “necessary defence” and “righteous conflict,” they will refer to WWII. When talking about “empires rattling their sabres,” out will come the Falklands. When talking about “immoral” and possibly “illegal invasions,” they will mention the Bush years and the Iraq War.

Convenient. Very convenient to restrict yourself to judging decisions after the fact. Philosophy is not a justification of something that has passed; it is also necessarily a framework for going forwards. This, of course, runs the risk of being prophesy and therefore an argument that cannot be immediately proved (an anathema to most modern moralists), but it grasps the truth of the matter. It is actually saying something on the subject.

I want to depart from the larger pictures representing the mired discussion of international relations for a moment (we will come back to it – as it forms the conclusion of the argument I am going to advance), to discuss killing on a much more individual and personal level. For while we may, and often do, ascribe individual concepts (concepts designed for individuals and their actions) to larger concepts (concepts such as ‘a nation’), we are stretching outside our terms. I believe it is a mistake to start talking about a “nation’s will.” National will is fractious, and necessarily so in a democracy. Trying to claim there is such a thing existing for more than a short moment in history is anthropomorphising unnecessarily and incorrectly. Conclusive national will is not really like fish swimming all together, but rather like marbles falling down a stairs; gravity draws them in the same direction; it is directed chaos. Armies, nations and states do not have a moral consciousness, generals; soldiers; combatants do.

I believe that when it comes down to it, right down to it, killing is between people not peoples. It is individual direct action. Killing is in a human pushing buttons, a human pulling a trigger and – tragically often – a human coming Mano-a-mano with the enemy.

So, before discussing right actions in wars, and the possible justification of some of the actions we see around us, lets us consider an individual’s rights.

Of all the rights we enshrine in laws, morals and philosophies, the one that matters the most is the right to life. Every human was born with the right to live. What does that mean? It means the right to be. It seems almost too simple, since we are regularly surrounded with people being (and we are being ourselves) that we forget what it really means. It means, simply, that your life belongs to you. It is yours. It is the one thing that truly is yours. It is the last thing you would give away and usually the first thing you would save. It is short, perilous, exciting and yet sometimes incredibly boring.

It is all you really own.

You therefore have another right, the right to defend it. Nothing that anyone can do will take this away from you. But, what does this mean? If you have the right to defend yourself, can this right get cancelled?

No, it can never be cancelled.

You can fight until your last breath if you wish. You can be dragged to the gallows, to the opera, to the hospital. No one can take this right away. Rights cannot be cancelled.

Of course, a right needs something else. It needs the power to exercise it. Through exercising your fundamental rights you realise your ability to be free to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, this extent is always going to depend on the situation you find yourself in.

So, while a prisoner on the gallows may have lost the ability to exercise his right to life, he has not actually lost the right. He will, most probably in a moment, lose his life, but he never at any time lost his right to it. He cannot. A society may judge him and say, “We will take your life,” but there is never a point that he loses the right to try to defend it. That is why execution is a terrible thing, sometimes necessary, sometimes the least cruel option, but always something that pricks with guilt.

This may sound pedantic, but I am leading somewhere. So, let us put this another way. Let us start a little further back. A tiger stalks a boar in the fields of India. The tiger draws near. Near enough that the boar is about to die. She leaps. The boar is taken in the neck and in a moment of chaos his throat is crushed. Death follows this killing.

That is just nature we say. The tiger did not take the boar’s right to life away, she just killed him. The boar, if he could have, would have defended himself or run away to preserve and defend his right to life. On the other hand, the tiger also has a right to life. She has a need to eat to preserve it. She has cubs to feed. At no point does the rights of either get taken away, they only get expressed.

That’s nature sure enough. It is called by one group, “The survival of the fittest,” and by another, “The will of God.” Regardless, it is nature. A cycle repeated all the way back in the distant history of time. Since the first single cell organism ate the one next to it, it has been nature. That single cell organism took the other organism’s energy for itself. It took it away as a competitor for other food, for space and perhaps for a mate. By surviving, it preserved its life. This was not an immoral action, only an expression. The tiger is in the same situation. The boar is food – energy is in the form of other living things – and the tiger needs this energy to survive. The boar on the other hand is not gifted a moral high ground for being attacked and killed. It has been unable to express its right to life. If it could somehow turn the tables on the tiger and fight her off, even perhaps kill her, then he would not be expressing a moral victory. He would be expressing his right to defend his life, and expressing it well.

The tiger is not better than the boar.

The boar is not better than the tiger.

It is a simple matter of capability, the movement of energy, the weight of power. The expression of rights.

The animals are free.

The human is only an animal.

One of the greatest mistakes mankind makes is the thinking of themselves as separate from the animals in the world. It is a mistake as we are not that special. The reasons that we do this are not that special either. Tigers probably consider themselves better than boars and boars surely are better, they must grunt to each other, than those bloody tigers!

It is a matter of skewed perspective.

Perspective that is also not special to humans. There is a type of bird in Iran that lives in a recognisable “family”. They share the food, share the preening, fall asleep on each other, take turns standing guard, scare off snakes and such. To see such activity in birds, an animal we do not normally anthropomorphise, is to see ourselves in an unusual other. I am always amazed at humanity’s judgement in this regard. I often meet people who state that there are, “Humans and then animals like elephants, oh, and of course, the fish in the sea and the birds – don’t forget the birds.”

I used to think this attitude was one of ignorance. A simple misunderstanding that the term “animal” means fish, birds and mammals such as humans and elephants. An ignorance of our place in the tree of life. But, it isn’t. It is something else. It is the placing of our minds, our consciousness, and our view of the world above that of the other life on the planet. We have achieved this distinction, this pedestal’ing, through one thing only: the expression of power. We think this because we have the power to do so.

Power, in this sense, is expressed in every way we can measure it, we convince ourselves it is true. Intelligence and the ability to kill with impunity for two. We tell ourselves that it is only natural, and it is, to kill to eat. Even vegetarians kill something that lives; it is the essential nature of life on Earth. What is wrong, what blinds us, is our made up justifications.

Our made up morality.

We do it with more than the “dumb beasts” outside in the world. We do it with each other too. The vast majority of humans are suffering from a terrible skewing of perspective. Their own. Their own life is somehow more important that anyone else’s. This leads to the most amazing level of self-serving justification for many things. The human mind naturally, it seems, manages to smooth over their own mistakes and horrible actions, sweeping them under the carpet, while all the time taking great pains in pointing out each other’s. Therefore, we tell ourselves that we are not ‘rude’, only ‘outspoken’. When someone tells you what he or she would do in their place, “Oh, I would have just smacked him” they say gruffly, with the scowl of fantasying visualisation, as though they actually did do that, they are actually simply confirming their own view of their place in the world. It is a kind of “king of the hill” moment probably common to all animals.

All life has some level of societal structure. It is, in the very least, the method that they have to reproduce.

When there are 6 billion of you, this is naturally a mesh of complex relationships floating one atop another. How you talk to your wife, your boss, your friends. How you treat strangers, old people and different people. All these layers mesh into how others see you and, in being in one place or another within the mesh, how your mind sees itself.

Tigers do this too. Just at simpler level.

Therefore, if all life acts in this way, if it is a commonality to see yourself as special, it becomes – like in a top-heavy fraction – something you can cancel out of the final reduction. This leads to the truth. Refreshing, but cold.

Your life has no more meaning as anyone else’s. Your right to defend yourself is exactly the same as someone else’s.

If that is the case, then the morality (that natural-perspective-judgement on the situation) cannot and should not enter into the decision you find yourself faced with.

And so here we are. We have swum, albeit briefly, down into the water of the pool and touched the bottom, only to now turn and reach back for the surface and another breath. Sometime soon, a full and slow dive will be needed, so that we may explore this strange underwater world in more depth. Consider this a quick pre-se.

Take a so called, “moral dilemma” of two soldiers shooting at each other. They are both in a fight to defend their life; they both have an equal right to survive. Just because one shoots first, because one has the drop on the other or because one flanks and has an easy kill, matters not one jot. The same as for the tiger. Both have the right to defend themselves and both are expressing that right. Just because one has the power to express that right more effectively than another is irrelevant.

Now, let us not jump ahead here to my conclusion, because perhaps it is not as you imagine from the above. For while, this may sound like I am expressing the ancient creed of, “might makes moral right,” if you think about it, I am not. I may not like the truth of this argument, but that doesn’t mean I should not face it, or I fall into the trap that it highlights. So, I am actually saying that there is no “moral right.” There is only an animal’s right to its life and its ability to express that right. A tiger is not morally right. It is just capable. Reality is without morals. Reality is natural.

If you accept that the tiger is not “wrong” for hunting the boar, if you realise that all living things takes energy from other creatures, if you realise that we delude ourselves when we raise humanity above the other life of this planet, then this argument naturally follows.

“Morality,” is our limited invention, this we already know, and we waste a lot of time scrabbling around trying to universalise this. What is now hopefully clearer is that morality is necessarily an illusion. A framework based on a selfish perspective on the world, a misunderstanding of our place on the planet, in the Universe(s).

Someone might now say to me, “But what of that ‘right,’ you mentioned? The right to life. Is that not the basis for a morality? The keystone upon which it all rests?”

Well, no. It is not. As I said, rights mean little without the power to express them. The right to life and the right to defend your life are clearly not things that prevent nature affecting you. You may, almost certainly will, one day become ill enough to threaten your life. Does that make the virus killing you “wrong?” Our moral judgements predicate that we put ourselves on a pedestal that blinds us to the reality we find ourselves in.

What does this mean for morality?

It leads to a simple truth, that is: “morally right” does not exist. Actions cannot be correctly and objectively judged under the frameworks we have built ourselves, because the complications, the un-weaving of the web of morality, is impossible and eventually limited to our own selfish perspectives.

Here is an everyday practical example. Today, 16th December 2009, the workers of British Airways announced that they were going on strike for the 12 days over Christmas. From the point of view of the news media, my mother and almost anyone outside this strike, this is a reprehensible action of moral outrage. Think of all the people, “whose Christmas is going to be ruined” is what we are urged to do. However, for the staff of BA who are going on strike, some sort of behaviour, some sort of management ‘evil’ has led to such a situation that they must strike to stop it. To them, they are doing the right thing. It is a morally right action to strike.

How can one unravel this situation and judge moral rights? Are the strikers right? Is the news media right? What about those affected by the strike? Are they morally right to complain? They will miss Christmas, what if one of them is going to the sick bed of a dying relative? Does that make the strike wrong? What if one of them is going to the sick bed of a recovering relative that they plan to murder? Does that make the strike right?

This maze, this puzzle with no answer, is the essential dilemma that cannot be unravelled ahead of time. A group of expert Philosophers might be try to unravel it and after years pronounce that yes, or no, the strike was morally right or wrong, but what would be the point? Not only will have the strike passed, but clearly no one could have decided the correct action ahead of time. If morals can only look back, then they lose much of their worth.

Why?

Because, they rely on the illusion of perspective. Who is to judge? Who is impartial? No one.

There is no real “moral right” or “moral wrong” and certainly the attempt to judge as such using the common framework is fruitless. Countries that try to make moral decisions before attacking do so only in terms of their own perspectives. For example, take America. They are not interested in anyone else’s perspective in the slightest. Any attempt to arrive at a judgement outside the self-serving American one is met with incredible violence. That is why America lets no soldier face trial in the International Court. That is why America has passed a law legalising (to themselves) the potential invasion of Holland.

That is the height of illusion. The attempt to force your perspective onto the world through the strength of your country. Eventually it will necessarily fail. It cannot do anything else.

So, lets us take war.

War is neither right nor wrong. It is tragic, spiteful, unnecessary and – from the moral perspective of those attacked – “wrong.” It is however, not actually “morally wrong” since such a judgement is impossible to decode from the web that surrounds any action, let alone a country’s actions, or a President’s actions.

We can make up some rules, but then so can anyone. We can moralise, but we can only do this within the framework of the community we live in, and in the well of self-centred illusion we all wallow in.

What can be done?

That is a much more difficult question. I am a Daoist. My perspective is that of Daoism. Therefore, my answer is going to be one expressing Daoist values. To the Daoist, one should always live in tune with nature. Expressions made naturally and peacefully. Not beat oneself up about moral rights and wrongs and simply allow all to be. However, as a philosopher, I can use the tools and skills taught to me. But, I must recognise the futility of this. My tools are those of my society passed to me. My training is based in a Western model of understanding, stretching back all the way to Plato. I must sublime these two parts of myself.

To find an answer that is correct we must face the facts. It is the whole framework that is wrong. Our natural-perspective-judgement had built a collection of self-serving, selfish, cruel, and deluded societies based on a simple false predicate; morality can be judged. Well, I am sorry, it can’t.

This is also a moment of pause, for I am also not suggesting that the Hippies had it right either. I am not particularly a pacifist. I am a, if I may borrow a phrase, a “naturalist”.

For me, the answer is this: life is not about goals and wants. Life is not about desire. By stripping away the illusion surrounding us, we can realise a connection with life and nature that naturally leads to peace. Desire for things, for objects, for control, for domination, is a waste of everyone’s time and effort. A waste of life. Desire for stuff, for iPhones, Playstations, houses, for “owning”, is wasted life.

I spoke to someone the other day, who was unhappy about their life, and wishing it was more like so-and-so’s. “Why should they have all that? Why can’t I have some of that life, they are so lucky.” Really? I know the other party well. They are no happier than the first. No morally better off. No personally richer. They just have more “stuff”. This is not the path to happiness. This is not the path to peace. Peace comes from a realisation of reality, a realisation that leads to “letting go of grasping”, to contentment. In a society built upon the need for “stuff”, for consumption, for capitalism, one can never reach a level of peace. The society will always want more, the individual will always be unhappily grasping.

In a way the capitalist society already knows this. Consuming is life to most. The country is setup to drive this consumerism in a feedback mechanism that is considered the drive to growth. The idea is that this mechanism (called, “The Market”) is the natural order. It is really a way of growing wild and dangerous. Like the marbles bouncing down the stairs, we are unable to stop the momentum of this mechanism (after all I am writing this on the train to work!). Where does it lead? If wanting things is a way of existing – if it can be called that – It is actually a way to frustration, to desire driving action.

It leads to destruction.

Destruction of the people, the planet and the person. This is commonly expressed as war. For what is war than simply one nation trying to take the “stuff” of another? Sure, all sorts of excuses are made up for this, usually the argument of acting in self defence. An argument that tries to claim the “country” involved is only expressing the “right” I mentioned at the beginning of this article. But, as I also mentioned, countries don’t have rights. Only living things do. Countries, as we know them, are made up of people all lost in the two illusions, those of desire and the excuses of natural-perspective-judgements to explain those desires. To call them morals.

We say that life is like a journey, with a reward waiting at the end. But, really, life is like a dance, and one you will only dance once.

So, having – as my friend would say – “rooting around in the mud”, we come to the end. In the end the conclusion is one of practical advice ahead of the fact, advice most cannot give from the truth I expounded at the beginning, only from a huge framework of “moral laws”.

Here it is:

For the general expressing his countries “will”, the action cannot be judged to be wrong. Nor can it be judged to be right. Invading one city, bypassing another, killing in the name of, is what it is. It is a heck of a lot of dead people.

Remember that.

For the pilot pressing his bombing button, the tank commander ordering, “fire!” and the missileer targeting a city, you are not immoral, but neither are you moral. Don’t believe such a thing is necessary, it is not. No one can tell you that it is the “right” thing to do.

Act on your own conscience.

For the soldier trapped in the web of those who live in illusion about the nature of life (including himself), if he has the ability to express his right to life, then he is never wrong. Killing in war is not wrong. But, neither is it right. There is no moral right and wrong. Only the chaos of life, the disorder of perspective and the illusion of desires. Defending one’s right to life is never wrong, in the sense that this is not a waste of life to do so. While you can decide to sacrifice yourself, realise, understand, you are neither right nor wrong.

You are only dancing.

Basho.

Agree? Disagree?  Then step up to the plate my friend and join the debate! You can leave a comment here or email me through the form at the top.