Looking Back
Saturday July 31, 2010
So, as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of posts, thinkBuddha has now been around for five years. I don’t know how five blog years translates into human years, but I’m almost certain that if one could do the calculations, then the beard of this here blog would be flecked with grey.
I am writing this from Wuhan, China, whilst steeling myself for a night of hard-seat train travel to Jinan; so in the meantime I thought I’d take a brief tour of the last five years.
My first post, on July 29th 2005, was called Buddhism Without Buddhism. Back then, I wrote as follows:
Buddhism Without Buddhism: a resolutely irreligious Buddhism; a Buddhism that is rooted in human meanings rather than in fantasies of the sacred; a Buddhism that is pervaded by a thoroughgoing this-wordliness: it is, perhaps, an impossible thing to hope for. But at the same time, I find the idea extraordinarily attractive, it has become a touch-stone for how I think about Buddhism. But with a question mark at the end, just for good measure…
I started the blog, incidentally, not long after I turned down an invitation to be ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order, an organisation (formerly known as the FWBO) that has not been without its fair share of controversy, but which I always found to be made up of an enormous number of thoughtful, sincere and intelligent practitioners. In the end, what made me draw back from joining the Triratna Buddhist Order was that it was simply, well, too Buddhist… That is, it was too close to traditional Buddhism, and after ten or fifteen years of fairly serious practice, I began to be uncertain about at least some aspects of the edifice (or edifices) of Buddhism as a whole. So the blog was, in part I think, an attempt to think out loud and to work out where I stood on some of the questions that perplexed me.
When I was up and running – domain name bought, site set up and everything – I kicked off with a few book reviews, some of them republished from the now defunct Dharma Life magazine, which was edited by the estimable Vishvapani, and a piece that I still rather like on flying yogis. Back then I was still working on PhD in philosophy – which last year saw the light of day as my book Finding Our Sea-Legs
It is this, above all else, that has made writing the blog so rewarding. Quite a lot has changed in the past five years – I’ve published a couple of books, finished my PhD, and picked up a job working with the fine folks at De Montfort University – but even more recently, when time has been a bit more limited, it has remained a pleasure to write. Over the years, there have been a few recurring preoccupations: the idea of materialism (and also see here) or naturalism; the practice of writing blogs; meditation (see also here); free will ; the puzzling and far-from self-evident nature of experience ; various puzzles over traditional Buddhist teachings ; and science (also see here). There have also been various interesting moments, including a storm in a teacup over transhumanism, Marvin Minsky and the New Scientist, and a mention in 2009 in the Sunday Times’s list of one hundred best blogs of the year (a list that was by no means peer-reviewed or in any way systematic) thanks to a somewhat flippant post on Buddhist buses. And also, along the way, perhaps the blog has become less Buddhist and more Buddhish, but this is wholly in keeping with that first post.
When I started this blog, I did so without any clear plan; and I still have none. So I do not know what the next five years will bring. But for the time being, I’m planning to keep on writing when I get the time an when the right thoughts strike me. Thanks to all for your support over the past five years. And as for celebrations, later tonight I’ll be raising a glass of green tea in the hard seat carriage, somewhere between here and Jinan.
Scriptural protection?
Tuesday July 27, 2010
A long time ago now, I was travelling with a friend in India and Nepal, visiting the Buddhist sites. And one of the continual problems with travelling in India was the question of how best to deal with touts and rickshaw drivers and taxi drivers and all of the folks who – seeing a foreigner – wanted a little piece of you. Or, at least, of your cash. It was whilst we were being generously hosted by the Japanese Nichiren-shū Buddhists in Sarnath – they permitted us to stay as long as we got up at the crack of dawn to bang drums and chant, something that we were happy to do – that we hit upon the ideal solution. The problem was that ignoring touts just lead to greater insistence on their part, saying “no” seemed to be taken as the start of a conversation, and saying “yes”… well, we were not going to say yes. But one thing that worked wonders was something that we picked up from the Nichiren folks. We hit upon this whilst in Varanasi, I think, surrounded on all sides and generally harried. We solved the problem by turning to the touts, putting our palms together, bowing low with a measure of gravity, and intoning, “Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō” – literally, “I take refuge in the White Lotus Sutra”. The effect was (almost) magical: the poor souls, confused by this unexpected behaviour, fled in panic; and thenceforth we continued on our way unmolested. All of which was considerable fun, being one way of dealing with touts that was both entertaining and also that seemed to lead to better a more expansive, rather than narrower, states of mind.
This came back to me today as I had my n th encounter with a fake monk in the street here in China. The usual deal is this. You are walking down the street. The monk (or somebody looking very like one) approaches and presses something into your palm or attempts to put a bracelet around your wrist. An unseemly tussle ensues as you attempt to free your arm from his clutches. Meanwhile monk demands large sum of money. But on the principle I picked up in Sarnath, I have developed a nice method of dealing with these pesky fellows. I turn to them, I look at them gravely, I press my palms together, and I say, “Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsambuddhassa.”
At this, the fake monk invariably takes to his heels in alarm. Peace and harmony reign. Perfect.
Buddhist? Buddhish? Non-Buddhist?
Monday July 26, 2010
Today I visited the Yuelu Buddhist temple, here in Changsha, China (a place that proudly flies both the Chinese flag and the international Buddhist flag – a curious juxtaposition) and as I sat in the courtyard, I found myself reflecting on the question – once again – of my relationship to Buddhism. What started me thinking was how curious it was that my most immediate response to finding myself in the quiet courtyard was to want to pull up a cushion and sit down and meditate. If I didn’t do so, because something about this act would have seemed ostentatious – it seems that this isn’t really the done thing. Instead I sat quietly, just taking in the peaceful atmosphere, enjoying the cool of the shade. and reflecting
As long-term readers will know, in the five years since this blog was started (five years – can it really be that long?), I have tended to identify myself less and less as a Buddhist. My scepticism about many of the claims that are made within Buddhism, and my unease with the cultural worlds of Western (and Eastern) Buddhism have grown. But at the same time, my intellectual interest in the various worlds of Buddhism has tended to decrease as well. I don’t find myself turning to Candrakīrti, for example, or to Dōgen, for stimulation or for invigorating thoughts. This is not an argument against either of these thinkers, it is just that they don’t seem particularly urgent to me at the moment. I am having too much fun reading and thinking about Zhuangzi. Or reading about brain science. Or reading a hundred other things that are seem to be currently proving fruitful.
So… Buddhist, Buddhish, not-Buddhist…? (Here I’m tempted to play the Buddhist logic game, once again, but I’ll resist the temptation.) Which of these? I don’t really know. But perhaps what has changed most over the past five years is that I no longer really care that much. Back in the day, it mattered to me, and it mattered profoundly, that I was a Buddhist. These days, it doesn’t. When it comes to the elaboration of Buddhist ideas, the grand schemes, the subtle philosophical positions, I suspect that I simply haven’t the energy to engage with these ideas; similarly when it comes to the more rigorous practices, I can’t quite summon up the appropriate level of interest. Both philosophically or in terms of practice, I don’t really have the taste for extreme-sports Buddhism, and seeing those that do, I am not entirely convinced that it is the path to a form of life that I find particularly appealing.
Nevertheless, when I look more deeply, and when I look at thoughts that are, in a sense, more homely and everyday, there is a kind of ineradicable Buddhishness to the way I see the world, and for this I am grateful. I am grateful to be rid of the idea of the self as an enduring entity that must be protected and shored up; I am grateful for the knowledge that the world is supple, that it changes moment by moment; and I am grateful to be rid of the idea that it might be possible to transform the world so that it is entirely to my liking. Not only this, but I am grateful for the various practices that continue to allow me to poke and prod at my habitual assumptions about what I am, about what it means to perceive the world.
As I have come closer to the five year mark, I have sometimes thought about the name of this blog and whether it is still appropriate. One thing I have wondered is whether the name of the blog has itself tended to limit the kinds of things I talk about. I am listed in various places as a Buddhist blogger, but is this even accurate? In the end, it all depends on what you mean, although perhaps it might be good – from the point of view of that practice of writing this blog – to free myself a little from the sense of obligation to be “Buddhist” or even “Buddhish”, and to simply get on with the business of thinking out loud and writing.
And also, of course, much depends on what happens next, and that is something that one really can’t second-guess. This blog, like everything else, is changeable and without self-nature. Onwards. Let’s see what happens!
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Part Time Vegetarian
Monday July 19, 2010
Some fifteen years ago now, when I was in Indonesia, I was sitting on a tiny boat heading down the coast of a small island. The owner of the boat had thrown a line over the side which he was dragging behind the boat as it chugged southwards. Suddenly there was a tug on the line – a fish had bitten. It was a large fish, and it struggled like hell. And as I watched it struggle, I realised that I wanted to give up eating meat. It was as simple as that. When I wrote to my family to say I was coming home, I began with the words “Kill the fatted aubergine…” So began my life as a vegetarian.
My unease with the business of procuring flesh began much earlier. One summer, we went to stay with our relations in Scotland, and on one day – I must have been ten or eleven – we went fishing. I can remember sitting in a boat in the streaming rain as my cousin reeled in a fish and then killed it. I think I sobbed. This is not to say that I was an excessively sensitive child. I loved eating meat. But when brought face to face with the question of where the food I was eating came from, I was more uneasy.
More or less, since that time in Indonesia, I have been vegetarian. Not absolutely strict, but vegetarian all the same. But when I decided to come to China, I made the conscious choice that I would eat meat whilst I am here. Not, of course, all the time. In fact the way that it is more or less working out is that I am eating meat when I find myself a guest of other people, but when I order my own food, I try to avoid meat as much as possible. This is not quite as easy as back home. In the West, tofu and meat are like matter and anti-matter: it is as if, were they to be brought together on the same plate, they would automatically annihilate each other. In recognition of this fact, sensible restaurant owners and chefs avoid any mixing of the two in a single dish. But in China it is different. This evening, I ordered everyday home tofu (jiachang doufu 家常豆腐), but when it arrived it had strips of pork elegantly nestling amid the beany goodness.
How do I feel about this return to a meatier diet? From a lot of points of view, I simply prefer not to eat meat. But this is, as ever, a complex world in which there are all kinds of other things at stake. Given that I have neither the ability in Chinese nor the enthusiasm for enquiring about every last ingredient of what is placed before me, then it seems reasonable to order in good faith and to hope. Perhaps it could be said that I need more ethical rigour. But rigour is not the only thing in ethics, indeed I sometimes wonder if too much rigour is an unhelpful thing. Perhaps I need to be clearer about my principles, but my sense of ethics does not really work in terms of principles. I’m sure that when I return home at the end of the summer, I’ll revert to almost total vegetarianism. But for the time being, I have to say, that the jiachang doufu was pretty tasty…
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Mortification of the flesh, with some thoughts on Buddhist logic and the consumption of cake
Sunday July 11, 2010
If it’s been quiet around here lately, that’s partly because of my temporary relocation to China, where I am doing some research for a forthcoming novel. This has knocked almost everything else for six, what with organising everything for my departure, and then getting my head round life in a different part of the world and (oh, dear!) a different language.
Anyway, today I noticed that thinkBuddha is close to its fifth birthday, which is just over a couple of weeks away. If I have internet access at that time, I’ll have some modest festivities online. Without cake, of course, because a virtual cake is no cake at all. And talking about cake, or the absence of cake, brings me nicely to today’s topic.
Early today I wandered up the road from where I’m staying in Beijing to the Wanshou Temple (万寿寺) – the temple of longevity – which dates from the sixteenth century, and which was apparently much favoured by the Empress Dowager Cixi. Sunday was probably not the day to visit, as it was bustling with tour groups; but it’s a lovely place nonetheless – Empress Dowagers, I imagine, would settle for nothing less – with a good, if small, display of Buddhist art. The labelling in English was a little eccentric – although not as eccentric as it would be if I tried to label anything in Chinese – and it’s easy to take cheap pot-shots at these kind of things; but I was intrigued rather more philosophically by the caption on an image of the Buddha Shakyamuni. It said a Buddha was someone who has “woken up after practising mortification.” This got me thinking about the place of mortification in Buddhism. Because even if, as is well known, the Buddha explicitly rejected both mortification and excess, nevertheless the story of his austerities has a kind of dramatic role that is a bit odd. So even in the texts where the Buddha says, in short, that mortification is useless for developing any kind of insight into things, at the same time he says that when it came to mortification he was the top banana (by virtue of eating none, no doubt). And this carries on throughout the various Buddhist traditions, with the Buddha being admired for his austerities, whilst at the same time this mortification is doctrinally dismissed as being of no use. On the one hand the Buddha is claimed to be pretty damn great because he could mortify himself to the n th degree; on the other hand it is claimed that there is no value to this. There’s something a bit suspect here, methinks. The strong implication is that this mortification is, in fact, something to do with his eventual awakening; but this is at the same time rejected.
Of course, one could come to a kind of uneasy psychological resolution of the apparent paradox. Once could say that this story (if it is true) shows the Buddha’s determination, determination that, properly channelled, would be of benefit to him. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it is hard not to think that there is something here that is close to having your cake and eating it. Or, given the circumstances, of not having your cake and eating it. Or – hey, who can pass up the chance of indulging in a spot of Buddhist logic when it arises? – of both having your cake and eating it and also not having your cake and eating it. Or, to complete the tetralemma, of neither having your cake and eating it nor not having your cake and eating it.
Hard work, logic. I’m going for a slice of cake. They go great Portuguese custard tarts (葡式蛋挞) here in Beijing.
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Lowdham Book Festival
Thursday June 24, 2010
I don’t know how many regular thinkBuddha readers live in the Midlands, but if you do and you fancy a day out on Saturday, then I can highly recommend the Lowdham book festival, which takes place in Lowdham outside of Nottingham. There is a full day of events on Saturday 26th, and I’ll be rounding things off in the Lit and Phil tent at 4.15 giving a talk called A Good Story? A tour of ethics in five tall tales, during which I’ll be talking about the Buddha, Laozi, Epicurus, Socrates and Confucius, and also explaining why – if set upon by violent assailants – you shouldn’t take refuge in the houses of Kantian philosophers.
To be honest, there may be more than five tall tales. Or perhaps fewer. Who knows? But if you’d like to come along, by all means do so, and do hold back at the end and say hello. It would be great to meet any thinkBuddha readers who can make it on the day. I will, of course, try to flog you a copy of my book. But you are at liberty to refuse.
If you do want to come along, then come earlier in the day, as there’s some wonderfully rich and diverse stuff happening. And it’s free as well!
On the Move
Wednesday June 23, 2010
I’m now in the final stages of preparation for my forthcoming trip to China – not something I’ve blogged about here much, although those who have been following my Twitter feed (in the sidebar of this site) may have been keeping up with my varying successes and humiliations as I try to get to grips with the Chinese language. I’ll be in China for seven weeks or so, doing research for a novel which is still in the very early stages.
The last few weeks have been a whirl of sorting out funding applications, buying tickets, arranging visas, making contacts in China, practising my Chinese, and tying up loose ends here so I can have a fairly clear head over the summer; so there’s not been much time left over to blog. But yesterday I stumbled across the following passage written by Alison Gopnik in her book The Philosophical Baby
Travel and meditation lead to the same kind of experience by opposite means. When you travel you expose yourself to so much new and unexpected external information that you overwhelm the usual mechanisms of attentional selection and inhibition. Everything around you is more interesting than the things that you would normally attend to (like getting to a particular meeting). When you meditate, you starve the usual mechanisms of attention. You give them almost nothing to work with and you consciously try to avoid focus, inhibition, and planning. The result is similar: just as a lot of new information can overwhelm the inhibitory mechanisms, so shutting down the inhibitory mechanisms can make even everyday information seem new.
Meditation and travel seem to end up causing what philosophers call the same phenomenology – the same type of subjective experience. In fact, a lovely thing about meditation is that you can visit Beijing without leaving your room.
Of course, there are many kinds of meditation, leading to very different kinds of phenomenology; but there is something in what Gopnik is saying. Habits of thought – the kinds of habits that in meditation you try to circumvent – are contextual, because we are creatures who are not separated out from the world. We spin worlds around ourselves the way that spiders spin webs. And because these worlds are made up of things that, more or less, stay put – all those shelves of books, the pictures on the wall, the everyday furniture of our lives – we can easily find that this world-spinning can hamper our ability to move through the world with lightness (of course, on the other hand, too much lightness may not be ideal either – but that is for another post), or can lead to a diminishment of suppleness in our thinking and our living. You could perhaps put it like this – reversing Gopnik’s own line: the lovely thing about visiting Beijing is that you can meditate without even sitting on your cushions.
It is perhaps for this reason that I tend to write well when I am travelling. I see writing as a matter of discovery, and of then shaping these discoveries into something that captures something of what it is to be human. When I travel, ideas come easily. But it is only when I stay put that I find that I am able to start on the business of shaping, reshaping, cutting, developing and editing the material that I have gathered.
Anyway, I’ll still be blogging from China, as thinkBuddha.org seems to be unaffected by the Great Firewall, and I hope to take in a fair number of Buddhist sites whilst I am there. If any readers have any suggestions as to where I really shouldn’t miss whilst in China, do let me know either in the comments or through the contact form (accessible from the menu at the top of the screen). I’d be delighted to hear from you.
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