Cosmopolitanism
Tuesday June 30, 2009
A couple of years ago when I was travelling through Eastern Europe, I decided to learn German. This was something that I had – back in the days I was at school – resolved never, ever to do. After a few weeks of German classes at the age of thirteen or fourteen, horrified by those enormous words and that terrifying grammar (really, I remember thinking, how many definite articles do you need?), I gave up German, and vowed that this would be the end of it. But then, many years later, as I sat on the train heading from Bulgaria to London (not a direct service, I should add…), I found myself thinking that what I wanted to do when I got home was to start teaching myself German. There was no clear practical reason for this, but instead the sense that my lack of linguistic acumen was somehow limiting, the sense that learning another language – even learning to speak a little – would enable me to have a sense of myself as the inhabitant of a larger and richer world. Or, to put it another way, it was born out of the sense that my life and my outlook were a little too parochial, that a good dose of cosmopolitanism might do me some good. Not quite two years on, my German is still fairly ropey, but it is advancing slowly; and flushed by this minimal success, I’ve also decided to supplement my efforts to learn German with a serious assault at least on the basics of Mandarin Chinese. Progress, once again, is slow, but it’s all pretty exciting.
The idea of cosmopolitanism is, in fact, one that has always attracted me. As a writer, I find many of the books that I love come not from the traditions of English literature, but from beyond. And I might even be tempted to see my engagement with Buddhism over the years in this cosmopolitan light, as a kind of broadening of the possibilities of thinking and acting. As a philosophical notion, cosmopolitanism dates back to the time of the ancient cynics. When Diogenes was asked where he came from, he did not say that he was a citizen of Sinope, but he said instead “I am a citizen of the cosmos”, so scandalising the Athenians by refusing to identify first and foremost with the polis, with the city-state. I am not sure if Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism
One of the crucial claims that Appiah makes is that cosmopolitanism involves the recognition of both difference and universalism, and thus treads a kind of middle path between relativism on the one hand, and moral absolutism on the other. Making the case for universalism, we could say that we all have a shared biology, and that this shared biology sets many of the parameters for the kinds of beings that we are and the kings of things that we do. The folks who live over there (wherever “over there” happens to be) may seem to be pretty funny, but when you look more closely, they are pretty funny only within the bounds of this shared biology. They too, like us, get up to the same kinds of things: they are born, they raise their children, they fall in love, they talk about how best to do philosophy or how best to cook vegetables, they grow old, they die. Nevertheless, although there is much that is shared, the differences between us are not negligible. We live – depending on where we are, how we are brought up, and what influences have borne upon us – according to different modes of life. These two are not in contradiction: one of the human universals is that we creatures capable of living according to different modes of life. It may be that one frog (for example) goes about its life in much the same way as another frog. But human beings are not like this. The universal fact of human suppleness is something that leads to the fact of difference. It is not quite true, as Sartre claims, that our existence precedes our essence; but at the same time it is not quite false either. And so, it is also the case that that the people over there (from our perspective) are, in fact, pretty funny; although the corollary of this is that we (from their perspective) are pretty funny as well.
One of the crucial points that Appiah makes arises from the tension between universalism on the one hand and difference on the other. We can sometimes think that moral conversation is about securing agreement, and that only on the basis of agreement can we find ways of living together. If we could just exercise our reason with sufficient vigour, the argument goes, then we could see through all the different moral issues that afflict us, we could talk things through, and we could find a way of living harmoniously side-by-side. The bad news, however, is that this goal is one that is rarely reached, and that the differences that divide us are such that there is perhaps little chance of reaching this kind of moral agreement. But, on the other hand, the good news is that we do not need moral agreement to live with each other. Often, we get by, even when agreement is lacking.
That is to say, conversation about matters of right and wrong and so forth is not so much a way of getting to a final judgement; but instead it is – at its best – a means of helping us to find ways of putting up with each other. I might also add the reverse, and caution that conversations about matters of right and wrong are often dangerous precisely because – at their worst – they can lead us to believe that we cannot or must not put up with each other, leading as much to division as to harmony, as much to discord as to amity. In a world where differences will never be fully resolved, the dream of ultimate moral agreement is one that can cause untold damage. When we forget Diogenes’s challenge for us to remember that we are not just citizens of Sinope, or of wherever it is that we come from, or when we give in to the temptation to stake our identify upon one particular region out of the vast sea of conditions – the ten thousand things – out of which we have been born, it is then the problems start. And this is something that Appiah hints at, although he is not explicit on the point: we are, all of us, already citizens of the cosmos. I do not mean this in a vague and mystical sense. What I mean is that we are born out of an enormous range of conditions, that we are all of us multiple, and that to stake one’s identity, once and for all, upon a single flag, creed, nation or ideology is to close one’s eyes to the vastness and the complexity of this sea of conditions.
Yesterday, as I was walking down the street and seeing so many thousands of people all rubbing shoulders with each other, I was astonished that I didn’t see a single snarl. Thousands of people, putting up with each other. Perhaps it doesn’t seem a very elevated goal. Perhaps it seems ordinary. But such ordinariness is well worth preserving.
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Clamour, and the Love of the World
Monday June 22, 2009
So there I am, walking home late one evening after what has been a long and arduous day. For much of the day I have been sitting in meetings, talking over cups of coffee, and wrestling with ideas and thoughts and words and all the other things I spend my days wrestling with. But now, as I walk through the evening light – this is a couple of days ago, just before midsummer, and although it is late, the darkness has not yet fallen – I see a blackbird up in a tree, belting out a song, and I stop dead in my tracks. I don’t know enough about the politics of birds to know what it is singing about – whether it is yelling “Get off my land!” or whether it has (and this, I know, is more controversial) just had the thought, somewhere in it’s blackbird brain, “Oh, look, it’s a nice evening… What the hell, I’ll just have a little warble whilst I’m sitting here…” Either way, it is simply beautiful. And for a moment, as I listen to the bird, I find that I have no thought in my head about the comings and goings of the day. The bird is silhouetted against the evening sky; its song cuts through all of the clamour of the day. And the beauty of it all is breathtaking.
Biophilia, love of the world: this is not something spiritual or abstract or even particularly elevated. Instead, it is that sense that we can have, living beings that we are, of being alive, that immersion in the world of the senses where birds sing and light slants, and the path beneath the feet unfolds, the everyday, ordinariness of it all. And on that evening it was, for a few moments, so unutterably beautiful that the clamour of the various dramas in which I had been immersed for the day subsided. So I stood for a while admiring the blackbird, then I thanked it (it seemed the only polite thing to do) and made my way home.
It is remarkable how such a simple thing – an evening walk, a bird in a tree yelling its head off – can manage to cut through so much mental entanglement, can revive you when you are tired, can bring an almost immediate sense of well-being. And it occurred to me that evening that one of the things about the world is that it is largely indifferent to the human stories that we weave. We may be, as I have said before on this blog, storytellers by nature; but nature itself is not story-like. And because the stories that we weave can so often be limiting, can so often trap us, or can so often simply go over the same old ground, again and again, this attention to the world can loosen the bonds a little, can give us over to a kind of thinking that can help us find new paths and tracks through the world.
For me, there is a kind of Lucretian peace that can be found in attention paid to the world; and it is for this reason that frequently I find in scientific understanding a kind of stillness. On the other hand, I often find that religious dreams and ideas simply generate further clamour that adds to an already clamorous world. It is the tendency of projecting what are parochial human dramas onto the universe as a whole that depresses me most about a good deal of religious thought. This tendency seems to me to be both a discourtesy paid towards the universe, and also a denial of the true astonishment of living.
In these moments of astonishment at being alive, there on the road home, in these moments when the human dramas that we are caught up in find themselves in abeyance, there is a kind of bodily, living sense of being immersed in the world that breaks with all the dramas that we carry around in our heads. What I find most fearful about religion is this: that in its hunger to make everything conform to human stories, it might eliminate all those oases in which we can have respite from a kind of clamour that is entirely of our own making.
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Finding Our Sea Legs
Friday June 12, 2009
Just a quick post this one. I’m delighted to say that my philosophy book, Finding Our Sea Legs is currently in its final edits, and should be published by the shiny, new Kingston University Press towards the end of the year. The book is about ethics, experience and storytelling, and explores how stories might be capable of giving us a way of thinking through ethical experience without recourse to the language of certainty. It also features, amongst other things – more nautical metaphors than you could ever wish for; curious tales of talking fish; a contest between Immanuel Kant and a palmwine-stealing god from Maluku, East Indonesia; and a flock of philosophical woodpeckers.
Some of the ideas have been developed over the years here on thinkBuddha.org, so thanks for all of your help. I’ll post again here when the book is published.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
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thinkBuddha in Psychologies magazine
Friday June 5, 2009
It was nice to see thinkBuddha.org getting a mention in the July issue of Psychologies magazine. ‘Novelist and philosophy teacher Will Buckingham’s wayward reflections,’ the piece reads, ‘are all suffused with a wonderful sense of calm.’ This may be so, although in the interests of balance I should also add that there is also at times a fair bit of frenzied activity that goes on beneath the surface.
All of which makes me think of something that happens at times on silent meditation retreats. You are sitting in the meditation hall, and you see somebody across the way who has such an air of profound calm and poise that it is frankly intimidating. Ah, you think, if only I could be like them. Then, at the end of the retreat, you find yourself sitting next to them during the final meal, when the silence has come to an end. ‘How was your retreat?’ you ask tentatively.
‘Oh,’ they say, smiling ruefully through a mouthful of something wholesomely organic, ‘it was truly terrible. I was all over the place…’ Then they proceed to tell you about the dramas that were being played out beneath the cool, unruffled exterior. Which just goes to show, you never can tell.
Anyway, thanks to the folks at Psychologies magazine for the mention, which I greatly appreciate. And I’d like to welcome any Psychologies readers to the site. I hope you enjoy your visit.
Image of Nichiren calming a storm: Wikimedia Commons
Kluginess
Wednesday June 3, 2009
Professional philosophers are people who make a living from thinking about stuff, and given that they make their living from the activity of the mind, it is not surprising that many of them can tend to have a rather starry-eyed view of the virtues of what Woody Allen once called his “second most favourite organ”. Often, however, when I listen to philosophers talking about the mind, I find myself wondering precisely whose mind they are talking about. Certainly, I fear, not mine. For when philosophers talk about the mind, they often claim that the mind is a pretty spiffy thing. Indeed, the overwhelming impression that they frequently give is that the mind is about the spiffiest thing that there is. No doubt this is a gratifying belief, given that the same philosophers often go on to imply that their own minds are, as minds go, to be counted amongst the very spiffiest examples of this already spiffy organ.
But speaking personally at least, I’m pretty much convinced that my own mind is really not that spiffy at all. OK, so it can perform a trick or two when it needs to. It’s not without its uses. So far it has managed to get me by. But at the same time, when I take a cool and dispassionate look at it, it seems a fairly shoddy affair. Any mind that does not accurately file important information about where I last left my glasses, or that seems to so stubbornly resist the tidy logic of the word-order of German sentences, is clearly not as spiffy as all that.
So it is nice to know that it is not just me. Gary Marcus’s Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
In his book, Marcus draws on a large body of research in psychology to explore the various kluges that lie behind those everyday things that minds do – remembering, believing, choosing, generating language, experiencing pleasure, and (alas!) malfunctioning – and by the end of the book he has built up a picture of the actual workings of the mind that would be a useful corrective to any idealist philosopher. Or, for that matter, any idealist Buddhist.
My own interest in the kluginess of the mind is closely related to my Buddhish tendencies. When I started out meditating some fifteen or so years ago, I did so out of the vain (in both senses) hope that I might thereby manage to upgrade my mind to something a bit spiffier. I’d read all kinds of books about Buddhist sages who had minds perfected by the long practice of meditation, and I gave myself fifteen or so years to do the same. But from the very start, things didn’t seem to turn out quite as I had hoped. When I sat down on the cushions and directed my mind to simply following the coming and going of the breath, I found that I was even more feeble at performing this kind of simple task than I might have feared. My mind wandered off before I had even counted ten, or five or even two breaths. This was dispiriting stuff for a beginner, but I persevered out of the hope that one day I would triumph.
As the years went by, however, I began to realise that it doesn’t really work like this. Sometimes I managed to rein in my mind’s tendencies to wander a little, and sometimes I didn’t. But the more I got to know my own mind, the more I had a sense that it was both tricksy and fundamentally recalcitrant. And although certain approaches to Buddhism present the kluginess of the mind as a problem to be surmounted, I became increasingly sceptical of the possibility of the mind overcoming its own haphazard nature, and increasingly convinced that the mind – or my mind at least – was klugey through and through. Not only this, but the more I looked at what people in general were like, the more I came to the conclusion that it was not just me, but everybody was saddled – for better or worse – with a mind irredeemably afflicted by kluginess. Even the most accomplished Zen master may sometimes forget where they have left their glasses. A decade of meditating in a solitary cave in the Himalayas is no guarantee against fallacious beliefs.
Alongside this growing awareness of the fact that we are all irredeemably klugey has come a different attitude to meditation. These days, I no longer think of meditation as a kind of upgrade, replacing my gimcrack, shoddy, not-quite-fit-for-purpose mind with one that is sleek, shiny and new, one that functions with a cool, unruffled grace. Instead, it seems to me that the reason meditation is both useful and fascinating is that it is a way of exploring directly this kluginess of the mind, of recognising the slips and the fudges and the shortcuts, and of finding ways of living with them. It is not, that is to say, a means of perfecting the mind, but instead as a kind of empirical practice that acts as an antidote to the fantasy that there could ever be such a thing as a perfected mind, and that finds what could be called practical kluges for living as best we can with the klugey mind.
With this shift in attitude has come something else, as well: instead of finding meditation frustrating, I have found myself increasingly intrigued by the kinds of things that my mind does. Sitting there on my cushions, my mind does what it always has done and always will do: sometimes it remains with the breath, sometimes it gets tangled in obsessive thoughts about German word-order, sometimes it drifts off to wonder about what I should have for breakfast, sometimes it dozes, sometimes it rumbles away with irritation, sometimes it is as raucous as a cage of monkeys… And this, when it comes down to it, is the deal. But the way I see it now, this is not the occasion so much for self-recrimination as for curiosity. Perhaps it is only by recognising how deeply klugey the mind, and by giving up on the idea of perfection, that it is possible to be a little more understanding of ourselves and of others, a little more aware of the ways in which we can move and the possibilities that are open to us, a little less sure of ourselves, and a little wiser in how we respond to ourselves, to others and to the world.
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The Wisdom of the Ancients?
Friday May 29, 2009
The New Scientist dropped onto my doormat this morning, and – now that all my marking is done and I have a bit of free time – I settled down with the cat on my lap and a coffee in my hand, and decided to spend an hour or so reading. On the contents page, the following caught my eye: “Messages from the Dead: Recovering the Wisdom of the Ancients.”
The article, unfortunately, said nothing about wisdom, whether ancient or otherwise, and was instead an whirlwind tour of various undeciphered scripts: the Indus valley script, Linear A, and so on. It was an interesting enough article (I’ve been interested in the Indus Valley ever since, almost twenty years ago, I shared an evening meal in the Salt Range of Pakistan with a scholar who worked on the Indus Valley civilization), but what took my attention was something rather more peripheral: the question of why the copy writer for the New Scientist decided to talk about ancient wisdom. Why not ancient foolishness? Or – given that the content of all these various bits and pieces of texts is still unknown, and thus it is far too early to tell if what we are dealing with is wisdom or with foolishness – simply ancient writing.
Here there is something interesting. Why – almost without being able to help ourselves – do we locate wisdom in the past like this? Why do we assume that there is a connection between the deep past and deep wisdom?
The idea that we live in an age of decline is such a common complaint that we almost take it for granted. And the evidence seems to be that people have repeatedly succumbed to this idea in very different times and in very different places. Two and a half thousand years ago, over in China, Confucius looked back to the past and the great sage-kings Yao, Shun, and Yu, and – wondering what had gone wrong – thought “My, wouldn’t it be good if rulers today could be like them?” These days, now that Confucius is himself an ancient, we look back at him and think, “My, wouldn’t it be good if sages today could be like him.” Meanwhile, in India, certain early Buddhist texts make the same complaint: things aren’t what they used to be. The world is already in a state of decline. And today Buddhists look back and say to themselves, “Well, folks back then were really pretty splendid… We’re just not up to it.”
It appears that the ancients are much more magnificent figures than we ourselves are or ever could be. And such dreams of magnificent ages of wisdom located in the deep past are seductive. When we succumb to them, we might even allow ourselves to think (but perhaps not to admit too freely) that back then, if we had been around, we’d probably have been magnificent too. But then we shrug. What can we do? We are necessarily the children of our age.
Whilst I think that this tendency to overestimate our forebears is largely unhelpful, I do however think that there is a connection between wisdom and the past, although it is not necessarily the connection that we might think it is. Wisdom – or the kind of everyday wisdom that is worth wanting – may not have been any more prevalent in the past; but wisdom may turn out to depend upon some sense of the past. Here I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s definition of wisdom: counsel woven into the fabric of everyday life. Stories, accumulated experiences, attention to the world… these are the things that we weave together into the fabric of our lives to find counsel. The forgetting of the past does us no favours if we cherish wisdom (as philosophers claim they do); but this does not mean that folks in the past were in general any more or less wise than we are now. And if they seem so, the reason is probably that they are, in a very real sense, fictional characters. Failing to see this leads us into the trap of thinking that way back then, everything was somehow suffused in a holy and unworldly glow. This, in turn, can lead on the one hand to a kind of dismal perspective on the present, and on the other hand to unreasonable expectations of what the limits of human possibility might be.
Let me suggest a corrective to this nostalgia for the wisdom of the ancients. Whilst the stories are full of such starry-eyed stuff, if we turn to more mundane documents, we find that the picture looks rather different. In terms of the traditions of Buddhism, the Vinaya texts – texts that relate to the monastic code of conduct – act as an invigorating corrective to such dreams of golden ages long gone. Take, for example, the Vinaya’s accounts of sexual practices amongst the monastic community. Here we find that, far from being paragons of wisdom and virtue, some of the ancient Buddhist sangha were up to all kinds of things: from masturbation, to sex between monks and nuns, to sex between monks and monks and nuns and nuns, to rather more inventive behaviours, such as copulation with monkeys, corpses and decapitated heads.
“Now at that time, a certain bhikkhu living in the Great Wood at Vesālī, having befriended a monkey with food, engaged in sexual intercourse with it. Then, dressing early in the morning and carrying his bowl and outer robe, the bhikkhu went into Vesālī for alms. A number of bhikkhus wandering on a tour of the lodgings, went to the bhikkhu’s dwelling. The monkey saw them coming from afar and, on seeing them, went up to them and wiggled its rear and wiggled its tail and offered its rear and made a sign. The thought occurred to the bhikkhus, ‘Undoubtedly this bhikkhu is engaging in sexual intercourse with this monkey.’ So they hid off to one side.
“Then the bhikkhu, having gone for alms in Vesālī, returned bringing almsfood. The monkey went up to him. The bhikkhu, having eaten a portion of the almsfood, gave a portion to the monkey. The monkey, having eaten the almsfood, offered its rear to the bhikkhu, and the bhikkhu engaged in sexual intercourse with it.
For those with an interest in the full details, the admirable Access to Insight translation project, from which the extract above comes, has the relevant passages (complete with illustrative stories and forensically detailed semi-legalistic analyses).
The above, needless to say, is not one of the stories that is read out to inspire the faithful in Buddhist centres across the world. But texts such as this are important because they act against any tendencies we might have towards romanticism. If things were really that great in the old days, one has to wonder why the compilers of these texts went to such trouble to document things such as this. The pious might protest – unconvincingly, I think – that the compilers were making up hypothetical cases to simply cover all bases and all possibilities. But the texts certainly present themselves as accounts of actual happenings and responses within the monastic community to such happenings; and whilst it is always wise not to approach texts too naively (are monkeys really that knowing?), and to be aware that there may be many things going on here other than just reportage, such accounts of bawdy behaviour certainly take the shine off the idea of the wisdom of the ancients just a little.
This, I think, is no bad thing. If we allow ourselves to be seduced by stories of incense-perfumed ancients who drift around soft smiles, beaming out rays of light that reflect their perfect virtue, then we are at risk of finding ourselves aspiring to a kind of wisdom that is – and never has been – possible. In aspiring to something that is essentially make-believe, we might find that we overlook those things that may help us to attain to a degree of actual wisdom, here in the world, the kind of wisdom that may make us, for example, refrain from doing things with monkeys that we ought not be doing or that we might later regret. In realising that the ancients, as we ourselves, were as often as not stumbling around, trying and often failing to make sense of things, frequently baffled and confused, often misguided, sometimes downright cruel, we might be able to re-read the past and, in this endeavour, find ways of going about the real work of weaving what counsel we can find, both in the past and in the present, into the fabric of our lives.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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Knot
Saturday May 16, 2009
I wrote a few months back about the Heart Sutra, making that modest proposal that, if the Heart Sutra is a text that seems to be rife with negation – on a rough count, in the Chinese version, the negating characters 無 or “wu” and 不 or “bu” appear in total something like 30 times, making up somewhere around 12% of the whole text – then one faithful reading of the text might be to negate the sutra itself. Sadly, my wu-ing of the Heart Sutra (or, for that matter, my saying “bu” to the Heart Sutra) did not woo many of you. Some of you, indeed, wu’d my wu-ing and said “bu” to my bu-ing, moves that seem to me to be themselves very much in the spirit of things. And a couple of you were bold enough to say that, for all my bu-ing and wu-ing, the Heart Sutra had a very clear and unambiguous meaning, and that I had simply failed to understand it.
Perhaps. There are many things that I simply fail to understand. But I want to sidestep this charge, and ask what I think are some interesting questions about interpretation. Such questions are particularly pressing when it comes to classic texts such as the Heart Sutra. I am struck, on leafing through some of the commentaries written on the Heart Sutra, by two things. The first is the air of certainty that so many commentators have, the boldness with which they say: the sutra means this. The second is the curious fact that these various commentators do not seem to agree on those things about which they seem to be most certain. This raises the question of who has the right interpretation.
Of course, this in turn assumes that there is such a thing as the right interpretation, and I’m not sure that this is the case. There may, however, be wrong interpretations – or, at the very least, interpretations that don’t get us anywhere. To interpret the Heart Sutra as a manual for troubleshooting your broken computer, for example, will probably not do much either to help you fix your computer or to enhance your understanding of the Heart Sutra. But even when we have done away with these kinds of unhelpful or unenriching interpretations, it is hard to find our way to the interpretation that really nails the text. Could it be that the very thing that calls for interpretation is the fact that the text is uninterpretable, in the sense that whatever meanings may be found in the text are not there on the surface, but need to be drawn out?
It might be helpful to imagine a sliding scale of interpretation. At one end are relatively unambiguous things, for example the zookeeper’s cry of “Run! The lions have escaped!” Of course, this could be interpreted in various ways. It could, for example, be a piece of zookeeper performance art… But my bet is that most of us, when hearing this as we stroll through the zoo, would have the sense to run and hide in the café. The café is a good place to hide, because they have coffee there. And cakes. The doors closed, over a steaming mug of coffee and a slab of cake, it is possible to debate the finer points of interpretation in relative comfort. And, whilst discussing these points, it might happen that a lion strolls pass the window, or a doctor rushes to the aid of the zookeeper who has had his mind addled by workplace stress, so clarifying the situation a little. Often, that is to say, we have neither the need nor the leisure to indulge in long processes of interpretation and, when it comes to lions at least, it pays to err on the side of caution. This, then, is one end of the spectrum. At the other end are are rather more ambiguous and – it has to be said – rather less urgent utterances. For example – oh, you know – the claim that form is emptiness and that emptiness is form. You need more than one slice of cake, I feel, to untangle the interpretive knots in texts such as these.
Texts that are richly interpretable such as the Heart Sutra generate whole traditions of interpretation that seek to bring out the hidden meanings, to make the texts themselves utterly clear and lucid. And whilst these traditions are often interesting in their own right, they tend not to converge on single meanings, but to diverge. Various Buddhist commentators may agree that the Heart Sutra is saying something really important; but they may well disagree on what this really important thing is. This absence of convergence suggests that there is not, in fact, a single hidden meaning in there that – with sufficient thought, meditation, discussion, coffee, cake or whatever – can be drawn out. Not only this, but traditions of interpretation tend to also to deaden us to the sheer liveliness of texts like this. Sinologist Stephen H. West talks about the way that texts such as the Heart Sutra can easily become swallowed up by their own traditions
Here it might be possible to suggest an answer to the question of what it is that makes a classic text in the first place. My hunch is that successful classics are all, in a sense, uninterpretable, in that they do not give us a single, clear and unambiguous meaning. And it is for this very same reason that successful classics are texts that that give rise to interpretations, that ask of us that we interpret them nevertheless, that bug us, gadfly-like, into making some kind of sense of them. And this, I think, is why the Heart Sutra is worth reading. Not because it tells us unambiguous truths about deep sources of wisdom; but because – like many other classics besides – it is, in its refusal to be pinned down, richly generative of new thoughts and new possibilities.
(Image courtesy of AlohaOrchid )
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