the Tao of Chance

Some days back, I rented "Being There," a 1979 film starring Peter Sellers and directed by Hal Ashby. I had seen bits and pieces of "Being There" before, but had never sat down to watch the entire movie. The story centers on Chance the gardener, who tends the Washington, DC estate of the Old Man, an unnamed character who dies at the beginning of the film. Chance looks upon the old man's corpse without registering much understanding or deep feeling, and the housekeeper, Louise, initially yells at Chance for not recognizing the significance of the Old Man's death. Louise quickly repents of her anger, though, for she recognizes that Chance has the mind of a child, and that he is absorbed by only two things in life: gardening and TV. She tells Chance that she and he will both have to leave the home, and bids Chance farewell. Chance soon finds himself on the street, and the rest of the movie portrays Chance's misadventures as, like his cinematic descendant Forrest Gump, he finds himself inadvertently walking the halls of power and prestige, with-- eventually-- thousands of people hanging on to his every word. Chance's encounters with people (business magnates, Russian diplomats, and even the US president) are characterized by how charmed his interlocutors are at his simplicity and honesty. Time after time, people mistake Chance for someone more profound than he actually is, not realizing that Chance's constant retreats to the metaphor of the garden are a function of the fact that gardening, and TV, are all that Chance knows.*

A few days before I saw the movie, I read my friend Steve Honeywell's review of it. Steve understood why people thought this was Peter Sellers's greatest performance, but Steve was frustrated, I think, by most viewers' reactions to Chance: like the characters that Chance encounters in the film, many viewers also take Chance to be a profound being, one perhaps touched by the divine-- a Christ-figure, or in Steve's language, a "Zen Buddhist saint, a person who is purely and totally in 'the now' because he has no effective mental past and no real conception of the future." Steve then asks a crucial question in which he summons me, djinn-like, to provide an answer:

But how saintly is [Chance] if he got that way through no design of his own? How much wisdom really falls from his lips if he doesn’t understand the wisdom himself (Kevin, I expect an answer on this)[?] The final (and I admit, truly wonderful) shot of the film only emphasizes this impression.

So Steve has very kindly given me a metaphysical mission. I see this mission as having two phases, each answering a different question. The first question is: is Chance, as portrayed in the movie, really a Christ-figure or a Buddhist saint? The second question is Steve's own question: how much of a saint/divinity can Chance be if he doesn't understand what "wisdom" he utters, and if his wisdom, far from being earned, comes through "no design of his own"?

1. Christ-figure? Buddhist saint?

Christ-figures are fascinating subjects. They appear often in stories and movies: Melville's Billy Budd has been interpreted as such a figure; more recently, JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Wachowski Brothers' Neo (from "The Matrix") have been viewed through a christic lens. Some Christ-figures have, arguably, appeared before the Christ himself: the Suffering Servant image in the book of Isaiah ("by his stripes are we healed") has been retroactively interpreted by Christians as a prophetic reference to the coming of Jesus.

I think, though, that we need to set some ground rules when talking about Christ-figures. What does it take to be classified as one? I'd say that it takes more than the ability to perform miracles: a Christ-figure must walk a sort of via dolorosa, and must do so for the sake of all humanity. Strangely enough, just such a figure is visible in Charlton Heston's movie "The Omega Man," a zombie-apocalypse film based on the novel I Am Legend (and later remade into the movie "I Am Legend," starring Will Smith in the Heston role). In "The Omega Man," Heston's character, Dr. Robert Neville, is one of the few people to survive the zombie-virus outbreak. Because he is a scientist, Neville, who is immune to the virus, uses his own blood to create a serum that can counteract the effects of the virus and restore the infected zombies to normalcy. In this version of the story, however, the zombies are sentient and are led by Mathias (Anthony Zerbe in fine, evil, B-movie form), who rallies the infected against Neville. The zombies eventually kill Neville by casting a spear at him while Neville, having just given his serum to a group of uninfected people for replication, is standing in a public fountain. The spear strikes Neville's side; Neville slumps into the crystal-clear water and dies, arms spread wide in a beatific gesture reminiscent of Christ on the cross. Blood and water flow.

Robert Neville is a true Christ-figure. He hits all the right notes: if "zombiism" symbolizes human sinfulness, then Neville, with his immunity, is inherently pure and naturally free from the shackles of sin. His solution to the problem of sin comes through the redeeming effects of his own blood, thus making his serum a kind of sacrament. Neville's gift of blood is for all of humanity, which now stands awash in sinfulness. Some among the sinful will accept the serum/chrism; many won't. Neville, standing in that fountain, also makes the ultimate sacrifice in a spirit of imitatio christi. His dying posture seals the deal, reaffirming the Neville/Christ analogy. (Note, too, that "Neville" comes from the French neuve ville, or "new city," itself perhaps a biblical reference to a new phase in human/cosmic history.)

Resurrection imagery may also be a factor for Christ-figures. Harry Potter was killed by the Avada Kedavra curse: as the celestial Dumbledore tells Harry in Heaven's anteroom (a sort of cleaned-up version of London's King's Cross station-- "King's Cross" itself being a significant hint at Harry's Christlike nature), the young man is free to move "on"-- i.e., heavenward-- if he so desires. This means Harry is definitively dead, although he has the power to, like a bodhisattva, turn back from Heaven's gate to complete his unfinished work. Dumbledore has also told Harry over the course of Rowling's seven books that Harry is a being filled with love, and this self-sacrificial love is what makes him powerful. Christ's life is characterized by universal love; this, it seems, is an essential component of a Christ-figure. Harry is also carried forward by a sense of mission that is crystallized in the fifth book (Order of the Phoenix) when he hears the prophecy about himself and realizes that he will be-- must be-- the one to take down Voldemort.

Meanwhile, Neo's path in "The Matrix" cleaves to a christic death-resurrection-ascension paradigm. Neo's character, as conceived by the Wachowski Brothers, follows something of an intertwined, double-helical path, simultaneously tracking both the Buddha's enlightenment and Christ's fulfillment. But Neo qualifies as a Christ-figure not only because of the resurrection moment after Trinity(!) revives him, but also because he can perform miracles, and because he operates in a spirit of liberating love for all enslaved humanity. Once Neo realizes who he is and what he's about, he moves forward with a sense of deep purpose. As a being who confounds the rule-bound nature of the computer-generated Matrix (perhaps symbolizing the sin-shackled nature of the world), Neo is Christlike because he is a death-transcending, messianic figure of promise.**

So I would contend that, to qualify as a Christ-figure, a character in a story or a movie should possess most of the following qualities:

•ability to perform miracles
•self-sacrificing courage
•all-encompassing love for humanity
•messianic (i.e., revolutionary/paradigm-changing/leadership) potential
•a character arc that follows a via dolorosa
•a sense of mission
•resurrection/resuscitation and other prominent tropes (crucifixion/sacrifice, etc.)

The three characters mentioned above, Robert Neville, Harry Potter, and Neo, all possess at least five out of seven of the above traits. I've charted everything out below:

	Robert Neville	Harry Potter	Neo	Chance
miracles	?	✓	✓	✓
courage	✓	✓	✓	?
love for humanity	✓	✓	✓	?
messianic potential	✓	✓	✓	?
via dolorosa	✓	✓	✓	X
sense of mission	✓	✓	✓	X
resurrection/resuscitation	X	✓	✓	X

But by the above standards, Chance is not a Christ-figure. A Christ-figure tends to be proactive and purpose-driven, whereas Chance is more of a benevolent witness to, and sometimes inadvertent participant in, the events occurring around him. Chance, being of simple mind and heart, cannot be said to be possessed of a sense of mission: he has no agenda. He is a compassionate being, true, but the film provides little evidence that Chance's compassion is synonymous with a conscious, all-embracing love of humanity. As I noted earlier, Chance's two foci in life are gardening and TV. Chance does have one distinctly Christlike trait, of course: he performs miracles-- two, in fact. The first and more obvious miracle is his walking on water, as seen in the final moments of the film. The second miracle, somewhat less obvious but present all the same, is the heart-healing that Chance brings to most of those whom he meets. Almost no one is immune to Chance's charms. But unlike Neo, Harry Potter, and Robert Neville, Chance undergoes no via dolorosa, and he certainly doesn't die a self-sacrificing death, nor does he harbor much, if any, messianic potential (although it may be that the millions of TV viewers who saw his on-camera interview might be willing to follow him to the ends of the earth). In all, Chance violates the christic paradigm in too many ways to be considered a Christ-figure. His concerns and his compassion are too parochial in scope to make him christic. It may be that Chance, taken purely on his own terms, qualifies as some sort of divine figure-- one miraculously untouched by the restrictive laws and doleful vicissitudes of nature-- but Chance's character defies any obviously Christian interpretation.

Is Chance, then, more of a Buddhist saint? There are two primary paradigms when considering Buddhist sainthood: the Theravada notion of the arhat, and the Mahayana notion of the bodhisattva. Buddhism arose as a response to the empirical fact of human suffering in all its forms, great and small. It acknowledges that being is both process and interrelationship, which immediately implies that there is no permanence or inherent self-being (aseity, to use the proper term) to be found anywhere. Even the apodictic realm of 2 + 2 = 4 is subject to the unalterable laws of interdependence: there can be no 2 without 1 or 3, and each number immediately implies the rest of the number line, just as a single flower implies the entire universe.

The arhat is nothing more or less than a person. He is not a deity. At best, we might consider him a teacher or a guide, leading us across the world to the one-person bark that we must row ourselves to cross the great river of ignorance. In Theravada thinking, this sort of person represents a saintly ideal, incarnating within himself the Buddhist virtues laid out in the Eightfold Path: right views, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. There is a "self-propulsive" aspect to Theravada Buddhism: you don't get where you need to go unless you yourself are willing to make the effort. As with the christic paradigm discussed above, then, we see that proactivity is a crucial component of this form of Buddhist sainthood.

How does Chance measure up to this ideal? Can Chance truly be described as mindful, for example? In a sense, yes: he is very attentive to the lives of plants, and seems, on some pre-intellectual level, to radiate a tranquil, compassionate bonhomie that relaxes his interlocutors and keeps him more or less in tune with his social surroundings. Without a doubt, Chance is calm and centered and kind. But at the same time, Chance's limited intellect keeps him both naive and unaware. Early in the movie, a newly homeless Chance walks into a group of street toughs who threaten him. His response to this threat is to bring out his remote controller, taken from the Old Man's house, and to click it in an attempt to "change the channel," so to speak-- that is, to make the toughs go away. Chance seems blandly surprised when the boys don't disappear, and this surprise indicates the extent to which our protagonist has divorced himself from reality. That's as far from Buddhist virtue as one can get.

How does Chance fare when viewed through a more Mahayana Buddhist lens? Before we tackle that question, we should stop and do a bit of background work on Buddhism. Although Theravada is arguably the older form of Buddhism, "closer to the Buddha's original teachings," as some Theravadins proudly claim, Mahayana is without a doubt the more popular, widespread form. In this form of Buddhism, the saintly ideal is represented by the bodhisattva, a being that stands at the threshold of nirvana but, instead of stepping across that boundary into bliss, turns around in favor of compassionately helping others across. This form of Buddhism is less about "self-propulsion" and more about emphasizing the compassionate connections that bind all sentient beings together. Why does a Mahayana monk do what he does? "I do it for you," is the monk's answer. In the West, one of the most famous expressions of Mahayana thought is Zen Buddhism (about which I've written here, and about which style of meditation I've written here). Zen is the Japanese designation for Ch'an; this style of Buddhism has its origin in China, a country and culture in which Buddhism underwent a rather fundamental makeover. As Noss and Noss write in the 1984 edition of Man's Religions:

The general religious attitude in East Asia differs from that of India in important respects. While India tends to give the value of an illusion to nature, or at least yearns to triumph over it in thought, the Chinese and Japanese do not do this easily. They have cultivated an aesthetic appreciation of nature, which, even apart from Buddhist and Taoist influences, has reached such heights of satisfaction as to make the East Asian want to prolong life in this world as long as possible. Nature is a real and not deceptive structure of forms and forces, and it displays sublime order and beauty in both action and being. Some Chinese (like Chuang Tzu) might qualify this, seeing nature as pointing beyond itself and signifying the operational presence of the only wholly real entity in the universe-- the mysterious Tao. But even this view has had the effect of intensifying appreciation of nature.

Noss, John B. and David S. Noss. Man's Religions, 7th Edition. New York: Macmillan, 1984. (p. 232)

Some scholars refer to the India/China contrast in terms of world-denying or other-worldly (Indian) versus world-affirming or this-worldly (Chinese) religious perspectives. Zen Buddhism takes a decidedly Taoist route in its advocacy of present-orientation (to which Steve Honeywell alluded in his review), naturalness, spontaneity, and harmonious flow. Where does Chance fall on this spectrum? Is he a world-denier or a world-affirmer? From what I observed above, it seems Chance is a combination of both: blissfully unaware, yet simultaneously (paradoxically?) in harmony with his circumstances.

My own encounters with Zen monks, however, lead me to believe that Chance is nothing like them. Monks are the products of hard work and study-- of deliberate action. They may labor to attain a state of non-attainment, but their lives are always, always characterized by disciplined striving, notions of wu-wei notwithstanding. Chance, by contrast, simply is. He has attained nothing because, as the housekeeper Louise points out in the middle of "Being There," when she sees Chance on TV, Chance was simply born to be the way he is. If anything, I take Louise and her sharp awareness to epitomize the Zen ideal: like many Zen monks I've met, Louise is blunt, perceptive, and unflaggingly truthful.

Could it nevertheless be that Chance is still, somehow, a bodhisattva? One characteristic of a bodhisattva is that he radiates compassion wherever he goes. This radiation is automatic, not necessarily willed. Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is a perfect example of this. As my old Buddhism prof humorously explained, such cosmic beings are like dispensers, doling out doses of compassion automatically, volitionlessly. Chance certainly qualifies as a bodhisattva in that respect, and it's also obvious that his compassion, though perhaps unwilled, is nonetheless genuine: significantly, Chance cries when his rich benefactor, Benjamin Rand, dies in his bed. (This stands in contrast to Chance's numb, affectless reaction to the Old Man's death at the beginning of the film, and indicates that Chance's character has evolved, even if only a little.) But if a bodhisattva's job, like that of Christ, is to provide compassion for all sentient beings, then we again run into the problem that Chance's concerns are parochial and rather mundane-- not cosmic in the least.

I conclude, then, that Chance can be classified neither as a Christ-figure nor as a Buddhist saint of any type. Although he possesses some Christlike and Buddhalike traits in tantalizing quantities, Chance cannot be summed up in either Christian or Buddhist terms. His character doesn't map well onto either religious template.

But if we insist on mapping Chance onto some religious template, then I would suggest out-and-out Taoism. As I mentioned above in talking about Zen Buddhism, Taoism emphasizes such aspects of the world as naturalness, harmonious flow, spontaneity, and present-orientation. Taoism's deepest insights are of the wordless, nondiscursive, yet painfully ordinary sort: "The Tao that can be talked about is not the eternal Tao." Simple, plainspoken Chance clearly demonstrates his oneness with the Tao in true magico-religious Taoist form at the end of the movie: by walking on water, like the legendary Taoist sages of old who rode the clouds, hopscotched along mountaintops, and survived pounding waterfalls unscathed, he shows that his non-mastery of the world is itself a sort of mastery. Like Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch of Zen Buddhism (and an Indian saint reimagined the Chinese way) who famously crossed the Yangtze River on a reed, Chance has no argument with the still water of the lake on which he stands, so the lake doesn't complain when he stands on it.

Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu are both concerned with how a sage should act; they see the sage as the embodiment of certain Taoist virtues. From Chapter 33 of the Tao Te Ching:

Knowing others is wisdom;
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force;
Mastering the self requires strength;
He who knows he has enough is rich.
Perseverance is a sign of will power.
He who stays where he is endures.
To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.

Taoism may not be a perfect fit for Chance, but it comes close. Look how the above verses end: "...eternally present." Is this not the core meaning of being there? Whether Chance is even capable of making the effort to know himself and others, whether he is able or unable to master himself, whether he even knows-- consciously-- that he has enough is impossible to determine. But as my friend Nathan notes in his magnificent review of "Being There":

For one thing, the aptly-named film is a testament to a tremendous human need: the need for others to “be there” for us. All of the silliness that gets in the way of this and that hurts us, personally and collectively, could be pared away, the movie is suggesting. All Chance does, apart from speak in the language of the garden, is to “be there” for others; this fills some of them with an intense loyalty to him that overrides on more than one occasion even sexual jealousy. At the same time, the scoundrels of the movie–not so much the street gangsters in the opening scene as the suspicious journalist, the philanderer attorney who wants to enter politics, and the back-room politicians themselves–come off looking very bad indeed in comparison.

Chance is, if nothing else, present to the people around him. Like the Taoist notion of the Uncarved Block, or Chuang Tzu's tales of the Stinky Tree and the Great Yak, Chance simply is, and maybe that's enough.

2. "No design of his own"

Can one be a true saint if one has done no deliberate work to attain sainthood?

Chance epitomizes the Taoist ideal of wu-wei (non-doing, non-action): there's a sort of deliberate non-deliberateness about him. Chance can carefully examine a tree in front of the White House and conclude that it's sick and in need of care; at the same time, his lack of intellectual complexity means that he faces every human encounter with a fresh, open, and happy mind. Chance is untroubled by the world, but not through any effort of his own. His "enlightenment," such as it is, comes without exertion on his part. He was simply born that way. As Louise bitterly observes while watching Chance become a celebrity on TV:

It's for sure a white man's world in America. Look here: I raised that boy since he was the size of a piss-ant. And I'll say right now, he never learned to read and write. No, sir. Had no brains at all. Was stuffed with rice pudding between th' ears. Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass. Look at him now! Yes, sir, all you've gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want. Gobbledy-gook!

This is by far the most accurate perception of Chance in the entire film, which is why I consider Louise the movie's resident Zen master. She cuts to the heart of the matter, which is that Chance is as stupid as a box of rocks. "Being There" is a comedy, and one of the movie's fundamental jokes is that people ascribe to Chance virtues that they read into him. Again consistent with Taoism, Chance is an empty vessel, a protean field of potential: he can be anything to anyone. And that is, perhaps, the film's central irony: if Chance is, in reality, an "absent presence" wherever he may be... is he truly being there for anybody? Pluck Chance out of Benjamin Rand's posh residence and plunk him down in the midst of urban blight, and Chance will produce the same effects on the downtrodden citizenry as he does on the rich and privileged. Why? Because Chance is a mirror, not an actual presence.

This may fit the idea that we shouldn't consider Chance human. Perhaps Chance is more of an angel, an uncomplicated being with an immutable nature that emanates spiritual warmth-- a being at once there (visible and audible) and not there (ethereal and intangible). Nathan, in his review, hints at this possibility when he writes:

In the movie’s events, God plays no role, but Chance effects more change than anyone, and so Chance is in effect a character foil for divine interference in human affairs–a role that is part of a tradition going all the way back to the ancient Greek playwright Menander, who personified Chance in a position formerly reserved for Olympian deities.

Whatever Chance's ontological status, we need to separate the moral worth of Chance from the moral worth of Chance's words. We commit the genetic fallacy when we dismiss a claim or argument because of its provenance, i.e., its genesis. If a crazy or stupid person says that the sun is shining outside, and the sun is indeed shining at that moment, then that person is right no matter how stupid or crazy he or she might be. It would be wrong to deny the claim by saying, "You can't trust what that person says; he's crazy!" So: can a simple gardener dispense saintly wisdom? Of course he can. But is Chance himself a saint, despite the fact that he has done nothing to attain his beatific state? This is a harder question, to which Taoism may provide an answer.

We'll start by noting, again, that Zen Buddhism takes its cue from Taoism. It uses the simple, often discourse-subverting language of Taoism to express truth, which means that Zen Buddhists frequently utter perfectly obvious inanities. As blog-friend Lorianne wrote in 2004 in reminiscing about an exchange between her and Zen Master Dae Kwang during her precepts-taking ceremony:

ZMDK: Your new name is Won Jin, which means Original Truth. So, Lori, what is this Original Truth?
L: (claps hands)
ZMDK: Is that all?
L: Your robe is gray!

And a moment later:

ZMDK: Yeah, my robe is gray: that’s plain old ordinary truth... but is it Original Truth?
L: Of course it is!

The above exchange echoes the simplicity of Chance's gardening metaphors. When the US president asks Chance for his opinion on the nation's economic future, Chance offers conditional optimism ("As long as the roots are not severed... all will be well in the garden"), refers to the progression of seasons, and ends with an allusion to the assured return of spring. Is Chance speaking truth-- even Original Truth? I should think so: Chance is responding to the demands of the present moment in the only way he knows how. By the Zen reckoning (which is a close cousin to Taoist reckoning), Chance is a Buddha. But then... we all are. So this is nothing special.

Because Taoism lifts up naturalness as a virtue, it is enough, in the Taoist way of thinking, for something simply to be what it is to express its harmony with the Tao. There's no need to overthink things, no need to bring ego into the mix. Happiness comes not from recognizing that we are all part of a great flow: it comes merely from flowing. From the Taoist perspective, then, a figure like Chance, who placidly yields to all circumstances, embodies harmony with the Tao. Chance may not fit the template of a Buddhist saint or a Christ-figure, but his words of wisdom (holy wisdom? foolish wisdom?) spring from the present moment and are consistent with his inner nature, and that's a dynamic one finds in Taoism.

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.

Therefore the Master remains
serene in the midst of sorrow.
Evil cannot enter his heart.
Because he has given up helping,
he is people's greatest help.

True words seem paradoxical.

—Tao Te Ching, Chapter 78

Like the characters Chance meets, we viewers are at liberty to perceive Chance however we wish. He is a blank slate, an Uncarved Block, a mirror reflecting his surroundings. He could be an earthbound divinity, or merely a person favored of God, because as we all know, God protects the insane and the simple.*** "Being There" would never have worked as a comedy had it taken a more "Mr. Bean"-like approach. If Chance had fallen victim to a soul-crushing series of mishaps-- attacked by a gang, smashed by a car, spurned and mocked by the rich and powerful-- we wouldn't have had the same movie. Not at all. Can Chance be considered a saint? From an explicitly Christian or Buddhist standpoint, I'd say no. But from a Taoist perspective, Chance simply is who he is: a being at one with the Tao. And as a mark of sainthood, maybe that's enough.

---

*This makes it strange that Chance so often relies on gardening imagery to express himself, but almost never quotes anything from television.

**Both Robert Neville and Neo have been subject to critique as Christ-figures, however, because of their gun-toting, violent ways. How Christlike can these characters be, after all, if they personally participate in the annihilation of their fellow sentient beings? There are several ways to answer this critique. One is to shift the messianic paradigm slightly so that Neville and Neo are viewed through a more apocalyptic filter: the Christ we meet in the Book of Revelation is far less meek and mild than the Christ of the gospels, and is more in tune with ancient currents in Jewish messianism, in which the mashiach was seen as more of a powerful political leader who promised an upheaval of the temporal/terrestrial order; any reference to a "new heaven and new earth" was meant politically, not metaphysically. Another way to answer the critique is to take all the weaponry symbolically, the way academics do when considering a symbol like the sword in Indian thought and tradition. In India, the sword represents that which cuts away ignorance and unwisdom, leaving only unburdened, unfettered enlightenment. Sword-brandishing deities are not inciting violence; to the contrary, they are holy threshers, cultivating wisdom. There may thus be a symbolic sense in which Neo's and Neville's guns serve the same purpose: they can be viewed as releasing the foolish from their bonds of foolishness. All the same, it is perhaps because of this tendency toward cinematic violence (even Harry Potter has employed magic in a violent, combative manner, including two of the three Unforgivable Curses, and not against his arch-enemy Voldemort) that I did not include moral purity as one of the christic criteria.

***In fact, a theistic reading of "Being There" would note the invisible divine hand at work, lovingly and protectively smoothing out every path before Chance treads on it.


_

agree and disagree

I've been a faithful reader of the writings of Dr. William Vallicella for years. He and I have some fundamental disagreements, but I admire the clarity of his writing and can appreciate the reasonableness of his positions. His recent post on Daniel Dennett, anthropomorphism, and the "deformation" of the God-concept offers a good example of how I can read a "Vallicellian" essay and come away both agreeing and disagreeing with its various claims.

A bit of background: Vallicella is a theist, i.e., he believes that ultimate reality is personal. Regarding the status of human beings, he advocates a point of view that he styles ontotheological personalism. The onto- comes from the Greek on/ontos, which means "being/existence." (The terms ontology and ontological are central to most Western philosophy.) The personalism in question is, roughly, the idea that there is something about human beings that is irreducibly personal, i.e., people cannot be explained fully by scientific/empirical examination and analysis; their personhood can't be broken down into smaller parts. This personalism has its being (ontos) grounded in God (theos): hence ontotheological personalism.

This puts Vallicella in conflict with scientific atheists who believe, like philosopher Daniel Dennett, that the human mind can be explained in purely physical terms (i.e., brain activity). On his blog, Vallicella routinely critiques physicalism, the philosophy of mind that says The mind is what the brain does. Lately, he has also been writing on the spectrum of possible God-concepts, ranging from a God that is utterly physical and totally anthropomorphic to a God that is so depersonalized as to be no more than an abstract concept. Vallicella wishes to avoid these two extremes.

My own theological orientation is far different from Vallicella's. While I consider myself Christian, this is more of a sociological designation than a theological one: I've been too steeped in Asian philosophy to be a theological Christian. There's very little, in terms of Christian doctrine, that I literally believe; my own sympathies, at this point, are mostly with scientific skeptics and philosophically inclined Taoists and Buddhists; I haven't been a classical theist for a long time (I'd call myself a nontheist, i.e., someone for whom the question "Does God exist?" has no rational, discursive answer). I see reality as an intercausal being-in-process and take a very dim view of most shows of religious piety. My own philosophy of mind is probably much closer to Dennett's than it is to Vallicella's: I see the mind as something that arises from the brain; it is, in fact, utterly dependent on the brain for its existence. At the same time, I'm not so naïve as to think that the brain's activity is totally predictable: cogitation, being a supervenient phenomenon (i.e., something that arises from a lower stratum of being), follows its own rules. As author Robert Pirsig analogized it in his book Lila (I'm taking some liberties, here): it's like the difference between computer hardware and software-- each follows its own rules, but software depends on the hardware for its functioning.

With that background in place, let's turn to Vallicella's post on Dennett, anthropomorphism, and the "deformation" of the God-concept. He writes:

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement?

I think Vallicella has a point, here. Atheists, especially these days as the so-called New Atheism gains in popularity, seem unable to acknowledge that modern folk might actually conceptualize ultimate reality in ways that are philosophically and morally sophisticated. This is unfortunate, because it does indeed mean the atheists are furiously attacking straw men as opposed to real targets. There can't be any real dialogue when people insist on talking past each other. I'd add that this problem isn't confined to the atheists: religious folk too often attack science before they've made the effort to understand it. One example might be the Christian fundamentalist's dismissal of evolutionary theory because "the probability that development X or Y could have occurred is infinitesimally small." This sort of argument shows great ignorance about the massive timescales on which biologists have to think when pondering the phenomenon of evolution. No legitimate scientist believes evolution is a theory: there are theories of evolution, but evolution itself is a fact. (To his credit, Vallicella has no problem with the idea that humans evolved. He's a philosophical theist, not a religious fundamentalist.)

Later on, Vallicella writes:

Dennett's view is that the "original monotheists" thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the "original monotheists" thought of God as a physical being: "The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful." (206, emphasis in original). The suggestion here is that monotheism in its original form, prior to deformation, posited a Big Guy in the Sky, a human being Writ Large, something most definitely made in the image of man, and to that extent an anthropomorphic projection.

What Dennett is implying is that the original monotheistic conception of God had a definite content, but that this conception was deformed and rendered abstract to the point of being emptied of all content. Dennett is of course assuming that the only way the concept of God could have content is for it to have a materialistic, anthropomorphic content. Thus it is not possible on Dennett's scheme to interpret the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament in a figurative way as pointing to a purely spiritual reality which, as purely spiritual, is neither physical nor human. Dennett thereby simply begs the question against every sophisticated version of theism.

Dennett seems in effect to be confronting the theist with a dilemma. Either your God is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection or it is is so devoid of recognizable attributes as to be meaningless. Either way, your God does not exist. Surely there is no Big Guy in the Sky, and if your God is just some Higher Power, some unknowable X, about which nothing can be said, then what exactly are you affirming when you affirm that this X exists? Theism is either the crude positing of something as unbelievable as Santa Claus or Wonder Woman, or else it says nothing at all.

Either crude anthropomorphism or utter vacuity. Compare the extremes of the spectrum of positions I set forth in Anthropomorphism in Religion.

Here, too, I agree with Vallicella's analysis of Dennett. This is indeed a popular form of attack on theism. Dennett might be accused, here, of committing the fallacy of the excluded middle: he's offering two stark alternatives on the (false) assumption that no middle-ground option is available.

Thus far, I've been in agreement with Vallicella, not because I'm a theist as he is, but because his accusations against Dennett strike me as reasonable. Dennett could have strengthened his own arguments by targeting a more philosophically sophisticated concept of God. Attacking the God of scriptural literalists is far too easy. (Dennett might shoot back that the world is full of scriptural literalists, which would be a fair point!) But Vallicella also makes some claims with which I disagree. To wit:

Dennett's Dilemma -- to give it a name -- is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific) assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I will surely agree on this point.

But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-consciousness, intentionality, and the rest.

This is where Vallicella and I part ways. First, I find his dismissal of Tillich's theology to be overly hasty. Tillich was, in my opinion, saying something quite meaningful in defining God as "ultimate concern." The phrase was never intended to mean, the way his detractors argued, that "If golf is my ultimate concern, because I think about it all the time, then golf is effectively my God." The word "ultimate," as used by Tillich, still refers to that which lies at the utterest edge of reality. Golf, while entertaining, doesn't fit that criterion. The term "concern," too, was well chosen, for this is what human beings, at their best, are supposed to embody: concern for others, for the world, for all of existence. Concern involves an outward turn-- what theologian John Hick might call a shift from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness. Ultimate concern, then, is concern about the ultimate. How is this so different from what other philosophers and mystics have said and written?

I also disagree completely with Vallicella's characterization of neuroscience. For him, neuroscience will never "teach us anything about consciousness." The reality, though, is that neuroscientific theories are paving the way for us to make machines-- robots-- whose behaviors are becoming increasingly complex. If one definition of "intelligence" is "problem-solving ability," then by that standard we have been building increasingly intelligent machines for years. Soon, intelligence will come to mean more than the ability to win at chess or participate in a Jeopardy! competition: it will mean the advent of machines that react without confusion in fluid social or physical situations. While true machine consciousness is probably a long way off, I don't see its realization as an impossible goal. Intelligence isn't consciousness, but it's a vital component of consciousness. One day, a machine is going to stare at us with the same speculative curiosity we train on it.

My point is that the increasing complexity of machine behaviors is the result of scientific theories that are grounded in a naturalistic (or, more precisely, physicalist) philosophy of mind. If mind is indeed utterly dependent on matter, as I believe it is, then we will one day be able to arrange matter in such a way as to form minds. This won't convince the diehard substance dualists,* of course; they'll go on believing that mind is somehow independent of matter without ever being able to explain how a particular mind is connected to a particular body. Unfortunately, their philosophy of mind can promise no progress: you can't strive to create artificial intelligence if you believe it's inherently unachievable.

As I wrote in Water from a Skull, the problem for people in Vallicella's camp is that they are participating in willful ignorance about the nature of mind. They spend their time critiquing the constructive efforts being made by scientists, while offering no new insights of their own. Their stance is little more than a case against physicalism; there's no real case for substance dualism. In fact, for their stance to hold water, they have to deny that mind, consciousness, has a knowable nature. The so-called "zombie" problem in philosophy of mind makes this clear.

Imagine a being that looks and acts perfectly human, yet has no actual consciousness-- no real feelings, no true sense of selfhood, nothing that comes with possessing an ego. It might cry, but that act is merely an observable behavior, indicating nothing about the being's inner reality. It might laugh at jokes, but that's also no indication that it's experiencing the humor behind the joke. That hypothetical being is called a zombie by philosophers, and there's a big debate over whether zombies can possibly exist. The TV series Battlestar Galactica (and, before it, the movie Blade Runner) dealt with the zombie problem. Are the Cylons, who were created by humans and who look and act just like them, actual persons? Or are they "toasters"-- lifeless robots that merely simulate humans? The TV show ends up promoting the idea that Cylons are people, too: they have thoughts, feelings, inner lives. They're capable of love and hate; they have dreams and ambitions.

Let's snap back to our own reality. Imagine an AI (artificial intelligence) expert talking with a substance dualist about the possibility of creating Cylon-like artificial life. "All you'll end up creating is a zombie!" declares the substance dualist. "It won't have sentience! No feelings, no real self-awareness, no interiority!" "And you know this how?" asks the AI expert. "Can we ever design a test to detect consciousness?" "No!" blusters the dualist. You see, the substance dualist is trying argue two things at once: (1) that we'll never know whether we've created a true machine consciousness, and (2) that whatever we create will be a zombie. Obviously, these two prongs are contradictory, but let's concentrate on the first prong.

Dualists can't argue that "we'll never know whether the being's really conscious" unless they're convinced that the nature of mind is essentially unknowable, i.e., that we'll always be ignorant about mind. If you want to make a test to determine whether someone has a disease, you have to know the markers for the disease in question: you have to know something about the disease's nature. The more you know, the more accurate the test. By the same token, if you want to know whether something has a mind, you have to know something about the nature of consciousness. It's a lame cop-out to argue that we can never know what mind is, but that's basically what substance dualists have been doing for years, and it's the only argument they've got. All the other arguments they make against physicalism are in support of this basic thesis.

Vallicella's positions are always well thought-out and reasonable, but there are some areas in which he and I are doomed, I think, to eternal disagreement. Philosophy of mind is one of those areas; theism is another. He thinks the physicalists are blinded by their scientistic ideology; physicalists see him (and substance dualists in general) as deliberately ignoring the evidence of science. I'm willing to grant that the mind remains a mystery, but I believe the mystery isn't indissoluble.

It's possible to respect people with whom one disagrees, and even to learn from them. To any students who might have taken the time to read this meditation: I hope you find yourselves challenged and invigorated by the different points of view that you'll run across in your high school and college readings. I hope you encounter thinkers who make you angry, who challenge your assumptions, who shock you into looking at the world from a different perspective. I hope you enrich your own lives by incorporating those perspectives into your own. Life is all about growth and constructive change, but sometimes the best change involves the tearing-down of old mental paradigms so that new, more robust paradigms can replace them. I hope your perspective matures as you wrestle with various authors, and that you never dismiss the entirety of a thinker's argument simply because you dislike parts of it. A mature viewpoint involves an appreciation of the world's complexity. Beware black-and-white solutions to complicated problems.

As process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said: "Seek simplicity, and distrust it."

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*Substance dualism, a perspective most famously laid out by philosopher René Descartes (he of cogito ergo sum fame), is the belief that mind and matter are substantially different from each other. Thoughts are mental phenomena, not physical. Substance dualists come in different shapes and sizes; many of them would argue that there is some sort of mind-brain connection, but even the dualists who acknowledge this connection would say that there remains a fundamental difference between, as Descartes called them, res cogitans (mental phenomena) and res extensa (physical phenomena). Vallicella has never overtly called himself a substance dualist, but he repeatedly expresses sympathy with their point of view.


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monkey mind and quiet mind

Chuang Tzu Story - Three in the Morning

What is this three in the morning?

It is about a monkey trainer
Who went to his monkeys and told them:
“As regards your chestnuts,
you are going to have three measures in the morning,
and four in the afternoon.”

On hearing this, all the monkeys became angry.
So the keeper said:
“All right, then--
I will change it
To four measures in the morning
and three in the afternoon.”
The animals were satisfied with this arrangement.

The two arrangements were the same--
The number of chestnuts did not change,
But in one case the monkeys were displeased,
and in the other case they were satisfied.

The keeper was willing
To change his personal arrangement
In order to meet objective conditions.
He lost nothing by it.

The truly wise man,
Considers both sides of the question
Without partiality,
Sees them both in the light of Tao.
This is called following two courses at once.

(this version of the story found here, and edited for style)


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"a beast in a gilded cage:that's all some people ever wanna be"

A passage from Patt Morrison's L.A. Times book review of Sally Bedell's Elizabeth the Queen:

Sure, why not. Let's have yet another biography of Elizabeth II, this one as she's about to mark 60 years on the throne.

So what is new to justify Sally Bedell Smith's massive "Elizabeth the Queen"? What is left to uncover, and what should be left uncovered and unknown in the life of this exemplary lady whose predetermined existence of regal obligation is yawningly unenviable, however bejeweled the box it comes in?

And this classic passage from the Chuang Tzu:

Once, when Chuang Tzu was fishing in the P'u River, the king of Ch'u sent two officials to go and announce to him: "I would like to trouble you with the administration of my realm."

Chuang Tzu held on to the fishing pole and, without turning his head, said, "I have heard that there is a sacred tortoise in Ch'u that has been dead for three thousand years. The king keeps it wrapped in cloth and boxed, and stores it in the ancestral temple. Now would this tortoise rather be dead and have its bones left behind and honored? Or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud?

"It would rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud," said the two officials.

Chuang Tzu said, "Go away! I'll drag my tail in the mud!"

from The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, Burton Watson, trans.

I wonder what Queen Elizabeth would say to Chuang Tzu.


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gi-il (忌日, 기일)

My mother died of brain cancer two years ago today. I chronicled much of this ordeal at my blog, Kevin's Walk. Since today is Friday, a day I've designated for religion-related discussion, I thought I'd pass along a famous story about the Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu, who is said to have acted strangely when his wife died:

When Chuang Tzu’s wife died, his friend Hui Tzu came to offer his condolences and found Chuang Tzu hunkered down, drumming on a potter pan and singing.

Hui Tzu said, “You lived with her, raised children with her, and grew old together. Even weeping is not enough, but now you are drumming and singing. Is it a bit too much?”

Chuang Tzu said, “That is not how it is. When she just died, how could I not feel grief? But I looked deeply into it and saw that she was lifeless before she was born. She was also formless and there was not any energy. Somewhere in the vast imperceptible universe there was a change, an infusion of energy, and then she was born into form, and into life. Now the form has changed again, and she is dead. Such death and life are like the natural cycle of the four seasons. My dead wife is now resting between heaven and earth. If I wail at the top of my voice to express my grief, it would certainly show a failure to understand what is fated. Therefore I stopped.” (Chapter 18)

This version of the story is taken from here.

Different cultures develop different ways of dealing with death and mourning. In Korea, which carries on the old Chinese tradition of venerating one's ancestors, people typically have a jaesa (제사), a ceremony for previous generations. While it may sound morbid, I suppose this day could be described as a "death day," the closed-parenthesis counterpart of a birthday. But is it really all that morbid to celebrate the transition from life to death? Far from being morbid, the day could be seen as a kind of ritualized symmetry.

Today, then, I and my family commemorate my mother's death. While it pains me that I can no longer hug her or hold her hand, I'm grateful for the care and wisdom she imparted.

I love you and miss you, Mom.










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my talk with a Zen master

NB: This is a repost from my blog Kevin's Walk. The original post can be found here.

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The following is a transcript of a talk I had with Genjo Marinello, who heads up Choboji, a Rinzai Zen temple in Seattle, Washington. I was at Choboji in mid-June [2008], and felt very welcome at the temple, even though I was a mess during meditation the following morning (as I've written before, the Japanese way of handling zazen is markedly different from the Korean way of approaching ch'am-seon). The transcript has been edited for style and content. The original recording is not currently available online.

KEVIN: I think we're go.

GENJO: All right!

KEVIN: OK. Well, first off, I'm acquainted with the Korean pronunciation of a lot of Chinese characters, but "Genjo" means what?

GENJO: It could mean several things. The two characters in my name, given to me by my ordination teacher quite some time ago now, back in 1979, are the characters gen and jo. Gen, in this case, is the character sometimes translated as "heavenly silence"; it could be translated as "essential mystery"; the most literal translation is "the black before black before black."

KEVIN: Huh. Interesting.

GENJO: And gen-cha, in Japanese, is very black tea. And jo is the character for "realize." So: "realizing the black before black before black" is my name.

KEVIN: So then, having put those two characters together, "realizing the black before black before black," what does that mean?

GENJO: A dharma name is something you aspire to, and in this case, I aspire to the realization of what is the mystery of the universe, and he [i.e., the ordination teacher] saw some potential in me back then, that I would be able to experience in an intuitive way and relate with the mystery of the universe. So that was his dharma name for me-- that I would be someone who not only could intuit what the black before black before black was, but share it with others.

KEVIN: OK. How does one share something like that?

GENJO: We're doing it right now. You know, it doesn't have to be through words; just through the presence of one's ordinary activity would be best. But certainly, and also in dharma talks, trying to explain the ancient dialogues between masters and disciples, and making, say, ancient Chinese poetry accessible to modern American idiom.

KEVIN: Is that part of what happens here at your community?

GENJO: [nods]

KEVIN: I notice you're wearing an aikido shirt. [NB: I don't want to give the impression that Genjo was sitting on his front porch while wearing a full-dress aikido uniform, which might be a breach of aikidoka etiquette; he was, instead, wearing a shirt with some sort of aikido logo on it, and this had caught my eye.] When I was walking up here, I saw there was an aikido--

GENJO: Dojo.

KEVIN: Dojo. And when I was in Bellingham, there was an aikido dojo very close to the Red Cedar Zen Center. It's just a random connection, but it makes me wonder: do you have any connections with those communities?

GENJO: I do. Morihei Ueshiba O Sensei was the founder of aikido in Japan, of that particular martial art form, which [essentially] blends judo and kendo, which is sword. And he very much was taken with Zen, and didn't insist, but invited his senior students to also practice Zen. And most of the major art forms in Japan, anyway, turned to Zen as an augmentation of that art form, so whether it's martial arts or the high arts of calligraphy or painting or pottery-making or flower-arranging or whisking tea, they all turned to Zen as a way to augment or nurture their art form, and this was no exception when it came to O-Sensei [and] aikido; some of his senior students in the West have followed that, and I'm sort of the aikido-- I'm the Zen master that the aikidoists use, at least with a particular branch. There are many branches of aikido, in the same way that there are many branches of Zen. But there's something called the Birankai International branch of aikido, and I'm their Zen teacher.

KEVIN: Oh, OK. So does that mean that you visit the dojo and do your teaching there, or do they come here?

GENJO: Both. Our most intensive retreat is in the winter, and at our winter retreat, very often, senior students and instructors from Birinkai International will travel from all over the world to come to our retreat here in Seattle. It's also true that I go to Michigan, Pennsylvania, San Diego, Birmingham, England, and Strasbourg, France, and teach Zen to aikidoists in those locations.

KEVIN: Oh, wow! Fantastic! In France... you speak French?

GENJO: No, but I have good translators.

KEVIN: Oh, that's good. I was reading a book that came out in [French] first, and then it came out in English maybe a year or so later. It's called The Monk and the Philosopher. It was a dialogue between father and son: Jean-François Revel, the French humanist philosopher, and Mathieu Ricard, his son, who became a monk in the Tibetan tradition, and is the Dalai Lama's French interpreter whenever the Dalai Lama goes to France.

GENJO: Oh, how interesting!

KEVIN: I think the dialogue was mainly about how the father couldn't really understand why his son, who had been on a path toward science, suddenly switched gears and went into Buddhism. For you, what-- are you a cradle Buddhist, or--

GENJO: I'm a cradle nothing. My parents were both fallen-away Catholics, as they were married to other people when I was born, so that didn't sit too well with the Catholic Church on either side of that family, and my mother was afraid that if she let me too close to the Church, I would've been a priest, so the standard joke in my family, from my mother, is: "I shoulda' let you become a priest. At least then, you'd have hair!" And--

KEVIN: So in your strain of Zen here, you can't have hair.

GENJO: We shave our heads.

KEVIN: You do that, like, every two weeks or so, or--

GENJO: Oh, no; every few days.

KEVIN: Every few days. [At] many Korean temples, they do it every two weeks, like a big shaving event.

GENJO: Yeah, in Japan, it's on any day that has a 4 or a 7. I don't know why, but any day-- so the 4th, the 7th--

KEVIN: The 24th--

GENJO: Right. The 14th, the 17th...

KEVIN: Interesting. So, here, what-- would I call this building that we're sitting at now... would you consider this a temple, or what should I call this?

GENJO: We call it a temple. It's really more like a city center. It's not formally a temple, it doesn't look like a temple, it doesn't act formally like a temple would in Japan or Korea or Vietnam, but it's a little bit more on the temple side than it is on the center side. Basically, this is the Zen house, where my wife and I and the two dogs live, and there's one student who lives here, too, and then the group comes every day to sit, and four times a year, we do a week-long retreat.

KEVIN: This group is the one I'll be meeting tomorrow?

GENJO: Correct.

KEVIN: OK. How big is the group?

GENJO: Our mailing list is a hundred; our active paying membership is about forty; the number of people who will be here tomorrow morning, on any given morning-- about a dozen.

KEVIN: You told me about your aikido affiliation, but your strain, uh... how would you describe that affiliation?

GENJO: My sect of Buddhism?

KEVIN: Well, yeah, I guess that, and any specific organizations you belong to.

GENJO: Well, this temple, as I am, [is] in the Rinzai form, which would be Lin Chi in Chinese--

KEVIN: Im-jae in Korean.

GENJO: Right. So we're in that sect of Buddhism. And then within the Japanese stream, we're subsection Hakuin, so we're a Rinzai-Hakuin line. We're loosely affiliated-- we're definitely associated and loosely affiliated, though there isn't a direct financial link or directorial link, but we're associated with one of two Hakuin-Rinzai monasteries in the United States. There's an active one in Los Angeles and another active one in New York. And there is one on Whidbey Island that's also Rinzai Zen, but the teacher comes only twice a year. There are residential teachers in New York and Los Angeles: Joshu Sasaki-roshi in Los Angeles and Eido Shimano-roshi in New York. And of those two mother temples here in the United States of the Japanese Hakuin-Rinzai line, I'm most closely associated with the New York Zendo.

KEVIN: OK. So "Genjo" is how I should address you? You say it's your dharma name--

GENJO: The complete title would be "Genjo Osho"; "Genjo Osho-san" would be the most formal.

KEVIN: (repeating) Genjo Osho-san.

GENJO: Hai.

KEVIN: You speak Japanese? You trained in Japan?

GENJO: I was trained in Japan, briefly, and I speak a little Japanese. (speaks in Japanese)-- which means, "I humbly beseech you, I really don't speak much Japanese at all."

KEVIN: I caught the "ma-sen"-- "don't," "not," negation.

GENJO: That's right.

KEVIN: And "nihongo"-- I caught that part, too. I don't speak any Japanese at all. When I went to Japan [once], I had to stay for a day. I was in Fukuoka because I was changing my visa status. I don't know very many kanji, and I don't speak a lick of Japanese, so it was the first time I'd ever felt totally lost. I'd been in Korea, and so, going to Japan, I saw a lot of things that looked similar, but it was really a cool feeling to just kind of realize: "I can't say anything to anybody!"

GENJO: Of course, they looked at you and probably thought that you might be able to say something.

KEVIN: That's-- that's possible. Well, actually, in Korea, though, they don't look at me and see a Korean. They usually just see an American.* Whereas when I was in France, they saw: "Vous avez l'air asiatique," you know-- "You look Asian." That was the first thing they caught on [to].

GENJO: Clearly, you speak French.

KEVIN: Yeah, I was a French teacher.

GENJO: Ah.

KEVIN: So, all right, let's turn a little bit to interreligious issues, because I have a feeling tomorrow, in a half-hour, I'm not gonna be able to get much substance in that [time]. Your background is very interesting.

GENJO: Pretty unchurched.

KEVIN: "A cradle nothing," as you said. "Pretty unchurched"... oh, so you're familiar with that term! I thought that only Christians tossed that around.

GENJO: Well, I still grew up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, so I understand the things, and about the same time I found Zen, or a few years after, I found Quakers. So I'm also a Quaker.

KEVIN: OK.

GENJO: And I'm a member of the University Friends Meeting here in town.

KEVIN: You do self-identify as a Quaker--

GENJO: Correct--

KEVIN: As well as a Zen master?

GENJO: Correct. And there are a number of Quakers from the University Friends Meeting who sit here at the temple. So there's definitely a crosscurrent there. There's also a UCC minister, who'll probably be here tomorrow morning; an Episcopal priest, a woman, who comes here to sit; there's people who have a Jewish background who come here to sit...

KEVIN: What do you think these people are doing this for? These people coming from very specific traditions, they sit zazen here. Why are they doing that?

GENJO: You know, meditation, whether it's called "centering prayer," or it's called "contemplation," or it's called "meditation"... my attitude is that it all gets to the same place.

In many Christian traditions, prayer or contemplation or centering prayer is not terribly strong-- not nearly as strong as it's been handed off in the Buddhist tradition. And even Quakers, who are used to having an hour in silence, sort of once or twice a week... you know, we do an hour of silence every single day. So even for Quakers, who are a contemplative branch of Christianity, it's not as sharply honed.

So I think a number of people who want a contemplative part of their religious spiritual life can turn to Zen, and either identify as Buddhists or not, but use the tools that have been handed off from the Zen tradition as a way to deepen their spirituality, period. And whether that spirituality is Christian-based or Buddhist-based doesn't much matter to the people who come. It's deepening their sense of touching the divine, however they define it-- spirit, Ground of Being, however they define it.

And we're not so tightly wound up in words or definitions, especially in the Zen tradition; we're much more interested in the experience, and the commonality of the experience, at least from my reading and my cross-religious endeavors. The genuineness and universality of the experience seems to be anywhere and everywhere. Zen just happens to have the tools that appeal most to me, that help me, speaking for myself, go the deepest quickest, or more solidly, in a rooted way. I obviously am a Buddhist in the sense that I'm a Zen Buddhist priest, but I don't really cling to definitions of what "-ist" I am-- Christian or Buddhist or... that seems so, to me, superficial, and I think [that's true for] many others who come here.

I think the point, at least for the people who come to this temple, is that it [i.e., Zen practice] provides a kind of-- for them-- a direct route to their own sense of the divine and spirituality, and they take that and put it into their ordinary lives, hopefully, and it augments, hopefully, whatever religious tradition they're from, if they're from any. There are many who aren't from any.

KEVIN: I've been talking with other people about that. In Korean, the label for such people is mu-gyo, mu meaning, you know, "not" or "no"--

GENJO: Yes!

KEVIN: --and gyo meaning "-ism," tradition, or whatever. You don't belong in any particular... you don't fit into one of those squares.

GENJO: So even though we do very definitely fit into a certain square in terms of tradition, we understand that the tradition is handing off tools, and the tools bring us to a place of no-religion or non-religion. So I like that character mu a lot, of course. In Zen, we use that quite a lot--

KEVIN: The very first koan, right?

GENJO: Yes, indeed. One of your questions on your essay was "What metaphor do you use for the differences between religions?", and I want to give you mine.

KEVIN: Oh, good! Yes! Please! That's a religious pluralism question. I'd love to talk about that all day.

GENJO: To me, the great religious traditions are like trees. They may be entirely different species of trees, but they've all got great trunks, great roots, and beautiful canopies. They may be very different species of tree, but they're still trees. They reach towards the same source, in terms of the water table, and they reach towards the same light. So they stretch in both directions, and they're both trees; they've got a lot more in common than what separates them, and yet they're distinctly and uniquely different. You wouldn't want to say, "Well, because I've got this tree, I don't wanna have that tree." Why can't we have an olive tree and a pine tree and a eucalyptus tree, all right here in the yard? Yeah, that makes better variety! But they do still reach toward the same water table, exactly the same water table, and exactly the same light, and to me, that's how I see different religions.

In terms of Zen and Quakerism, for me again, just speaking for myself, if you thought of two trees of different species, great trees, reaching down to the same water table and the same light, and they're on different banks of the same river-- pretty different, and yet, where their branches intermingle and just gently blend-- for me, [that's] Quakerism and Zen.

Also, people have asked me, "Well, how can you do two traditions at once?" And I say, "Well, I have two legs! I get by just fine with two legs. In fact, I walk better with two legs. You don't have to have one leg; it's perfectly fine to have two legs."

KEVIN: Um... where did I wanna go with that... The question of the same source and the same light: would you apply that to just the major religious traditions that are out there, or would you apply [that] to even some of the wackier stuff that's around? I'm being a little bit difficult on purpose, here.

GENJO: I really can't say and I don't want to venture, because there's only two traditions that I've explored. I mean, I've done reading in Taoism and Islam and Judaism, and from what I can see-- very superficially, because I haven't delved into them greatly-- the great religious traditions do all do that [i.e., reach toward the same water and light], but I haven't explored sufficiently the others to say. I have no right to say. The only ones I have experience with to some degree are Zen and Quakerism. On those two fronts, I can say, because I'm practicing both traditions.

KEVIN: So there are at least two trees in this forest.

GENJO: There are at least two; I think I see many more. And whether it's a relatively new tree, or trunk of a tree, time will tell. But unless I investigated more directly, how could I say?

KEVIN: Right. I think one of my questions, probably not a very good question for you and for this community, was about marrying outside of the community and so on...

GENJO: (chuckling) Uh, yeah; probably moot. People want me to marry them, and they're from two different traditions, I'm happy-- I've done several ceremonies where we've had a priest from both traditions, or as the priest, I've mixed in elements from two traditions. I've had many people who would normally identify as agnostic, but have some sense that there's some unifying reality, turn to Zen and to Zen priests because they want something more than just a secular union, but they don't want something with too many trappings of the religions that they grew up in, and yet they do sense some kind of unifying reality that they want to speak to in the course of this ceremony. And I'm happy to do [it] that way, too. I say, "You can have anything on the altar you want." It can be a rock, it can be a tree... I ask that there be flowers, representing compassion, and a candle, representing wisdom. But anything else they want to put on there is fine.

KEVIN: Do you do some counseling for people, whether it's couples or one-on-one?

GENJO: Mm-hm. I do.

KEVIN: How does that work, usually, I mean, you don't have to go into specific cases, but just in general...

GENJO: Well, first of all, since I am a Zen Buddhist priest, I'm not gonna marry somebody that wants an entirely secular ceremony. I say, "Hey, look: here are some kinds of ceremonies that I've done, and can you pick and choose with what I've done to make something that works for you?" And if it doesn't [work out], then it's not a good fit, and, you know, you may need to go someplace else to find someone to help you celebrate a "spiritual" ceremony. I don't care if they call it "religious." There's a place on the marriage license that says, "Is it secular or religious?" and I always check "religious" if I'm doing the marriage. But in terms of counseling, mainly I'm looking at whether or not-- I don't care what traditions they're coming from, or whether they promise to bring up their kids in the Buddhist tradition or some other tradition. I'm trying to find out whether or not, as a couple, they have some common ground when it comes to their ideas of spirituality. And also, whether or not they have common ground as a couple: are they missing something that I might be able to help them see? And is this gonna be a couple that I feel [has a] sufficient bond to celebrate? If I don't feel like there's a sufficient bond, then I wanna work with them a bit to discover whether or not there is, then [if there's no such bond] I don't wanna get involved, either.

KEVIN: You're talking mainly about up to the marriage, right? I think my question was more along the lines of, uh, afterward-- you know: conflict arises or something... have you engaged in that--

GENJO: I've done that, too, from the Buddhist perspective, but I'm also certified as a spiritual director, and I'm also a licensed mental health counselor, so I've got quite a bit of background in that way. I have a private[?]** practice, but I also see people wearing either my Zen Buddhist hat or my therapist hat or my spiritual director hat. So yes, I do do that kind of counseling.

KEVIN: I'm curious as to how that works in Korea. I know it [i.e., counseling by Buddhist clergy] happens. I've seen ads for that sort of thing-- some smiling monk, a little phone number, but I don't know how that differs or how it's similar to psychotherapy as traditionally imagined in the West...

GENJO: I suspect it's very different, but I don't know, because I haven't been to Korea, or recently to Japan, even, to know. Here's another thing: I think Buddhism-- as it's moved from its original source, India, and has moved across the Asian continent to the US-- has picked up things, especially the branch of Zen Buddhism. When it moved to China, it picked up a lot of Taoism, and when it moved to Japan, it also picked up quite a bit of the Shinto sort of animistic ancestral component. I don't know whether it [i.e., Buddhism] did that in Korea, too. And as it moves here to the West, I think it's picking up a lot of psychology. And I think that's a wonderful blending, and it says a lot for the tradition that it's kind of, "Oh! That can be added to this! We can see how that can blend." It's a big jump to blend with whatever is indigenous to that location. I really like that about Buddhism.

KEVIN: I think a lot of religions, when they move from place to place, culture to culture, whatever, they do begin to pick up some trappings from the local--

GENJO: Sure.

KEVIN: I mean, if you go to Tibet, you see a lot of shamanism inside Tibetan Buddhism--

[Editor's note: I said the above so glibly that you might get the impression I've been to Tibet. Full disclosure: the only Asian country I've visited or lived in is South Korea. I've spent a day in Fukuoka, Japan, and several hours in Osaka and the Namba shopping district, but none of that really counts; in all cases, I was merely waiting for a new visa from the Korean Consulate or on layover as I waited for a connecting flight to Seoul/Incheon. So, no: I've never been to Tibet, or to any Asian country other than South Korea.]

GENJO: Exactly. And even Christianity, when it moved to South America or Central America, picked up a lot of indigenous components--

KEVIN: Right, right. Absolutely. The question of conflict spurred by religion: what's your diagnosis? I mean, if I take something like, say, Nigeria-- Christian-Muslim [conflict]-- how would you analyze that situation?

GENJO: As Buddhism in general would: that it's ego. Ego can corrupt anything. Whether it's individualistic ego or nationalistic ego or cultural ego, ego corrupts everything. Ego's all about having enough or having more, or being better, or being best. It can take the highest teaching and easily corrupt it to its cause of being better or best or more. And whether it appears in an individualistic way, or a more sophisticated or complex social, cultural, or nationalistic way, it's still ego. From the Buddhist perspective, it is the root of all so-called evil. It's where we get most corrupted. In Zen we would also say ego is nothing but no-ego; it's just one end of a continuum, but we so often get isolated in just that end of the continuum that we become quite corrupted and can do quite a lot of harm, nationalistically or even environmentally: raping the planet, our own mother. So whether it's conflict between natural resources, or conflict between nations, or conflict between cultures, or conflict between religions, from a Buddhist perspective, it all comes back to ego.

KEVIN: That sounds a little bit similar to a dharma talk I heard in Korea. There's an American monk there named Hyeon Gak [NB: romanized spellings vary: Hyun Gak, Hyon Gak, Hyungak, Hyeongak, etc.; credit to The Marmot's Hole, where I first saw this video]-- I don't know if you've heard of him. He's got some videos on-- some people put them up on YouTube and so on. He speaks fluent Korean; he's been living there for years and years now. He was talking about flipping channels-- watching the news on one channel, and he saw the people [on TV] were really angry and holding up their holy book and-- [mimics a demonstrator screaming in anger while holding up a holy book]-- like that, neck cords out and everything... and then he flipped the channel over to a conflict in America, and it was about the Ten Commandments being put into a courtroom, and the people were standing outside, demonstrating, and they had their holy book, and they were doing this [mimics angry demonstrator again] and he was like, "You know... it's the same thing." Pretty much the same thing. So I see where you're coming from.

OK, so, uh, I don't wanna hold you much longer, but one more question: What is God?

GENJO: The lovely thing about Zen is that we can say, "No-knowing." Beyond any kind of packaging. Even to use the word "God" or "Buddha-nature" or "Tao" or "dharma" or "sunyata" or "Ground of Being"-- anytime you put a name on something, you're already conceptualizing something that can't be conceptualized, that is inconceivable. And if it's not inconceivable, you've missed it, and if it's inconceivable, it cannot be grasped. So we're quite comfortable saying, "No-knowing," and there's actually a great relief in being able to say, "Can't be known. Cannot be said." But that doesn't mean it can't be experienced. It can definitely be experienced.

KEVIN: It should be, probably, the most ordinary thing, right?

GENJO: It is the most ordinary thing, if we have the eyes to see it or ears to hear it.*** It's the most ordinary thing, clanging at us in the wind chime or the motion of the leaves or the falling rain. It's shouting at us all the time, but usually we don't see it. However, the good news is there are ways to nurture our capacity to see what we think of as the divine in the ordinary, and that's exactly what Zen is all about. And when you have that experience, that realization of the divine in the ordinary, it's not only a relief, it's a blessing. It certainly generates a great deal of compassionate open-heartedness and peace of mind at the same time. If you're feeling that, you don't need to know.

KEVIN: Again, that's very similar to what I heard from Zen Master Seung Sahn, who was the teacher of the American monk I talked about before. He [Seung Sahn] wrote a book called Only Don't Know. "You have to keep that don't-know mind!" That's how he put it.

Well, I have a thousand more questions I could ask you, but I think I'll stop here and let you go.

GENJO: I'll let you get a good rest. I think your quest and your trek are really quite admirable. Happy to host you. See you tomorrow morning.



That marks the end of the recorded exchange between Genjo and me. I hope you've enjoyed reading it. I wish I had recorded the subsequent conversation with Genjo's meditation group; I didn't take notes and can no longer rely upon my shaky memory to relay who said what during that fascinating exchange (which, unlike my prediction, did turn out to be substantive).

I'll be writing some commentaries about this exchange as time goes on; in the meantime, I'll continue to prep the transcript of the hour-long dialogue between Brother Luke and me at St. Martin's University. Can't say when that will appear, but it'll appear. Sit tight.

Oh, by the way... this post is Number 500! We're at the half-millennium mark.

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*This was one of those regrettable racial slips that comes from hanging around Koreans, especially older-generation Korean-Americans or Koreans in Korea (i.e., Koreans who haven't been fully assimilated into American culture). The word "American" is often a substitute for "Caucasian" or "white" in the Korean mind. All other races are swept under the rug. If you find yourself hanging around Koreans, you might find yourself sucked into this same linguistic vortex... unless, of course, you're a non-white American! If you hear a 50-year-old ajumma in Annandale, Virginia say, "Yeah, my daughter's dating an American guy," that probably means, "My daughter's dating a white guy."

**I wasn't clear, in listening to the audio, on whether the word was "private" or "prior." I think "private" makes more sense in this context. Genjo...?

***Compare what Genjo says here with Hyeon Gak's Jesus quotation (I'll need to dig up a scriptural reference, but quick online research reveals one possibility to be Mark 8:18, in which Jesus seems to phrase the eyes/ears matter as a question, not a declaration) from the above-linked video of the Hyeon Gak interview.


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two of my favorite Taoist passages

If someone were to ask me who my favorite philosopher was, I'd say it was Chuang-tzu (known as Jang-ja in Korean). Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching may be more well-known than the Chuang-tzu, but both works should be taken together as complementary: the dead-seriousness of Lao-tzu needs the lively playfulness of Chuang-tzu.

From each work I have a favorite quote. Let's start with the Tao Te Ching, which contains one of the most powerful summations of the religious outlook I've ever encountered. From Chapter 29:

Try to make this sacred world
into more than what it is,
and you ruin it.

Try to grasp it,
and you lose it.

It's a concise statement of reality's dynamism, and of how useless it is to hold on to things or people. Like trying to grasp water by tightening one's fist, such an attempt is doomed to fail. You can't grasp reality and force it to stop: you're part of reality, and you're moving, too!

The Chuang-tzu, though, it more humorous in its approach to the question of how we relate to ultimate reality. Through words and concepts, the classic demonstrates the uselessness of words and concepts when you're attempting to integrate yourself with the Absolute. In that spirit, then, my favorite passage from the Chuang-tzu:

Now I am going to tell you something...

There is a beginning. There is no beginning of that beginning. There is no beginning of that no beginning of beginning. There is something before the beginning of something and nothing, and something before that. Suddenly there is something and nothing. But between something and nothing, I still don't really know which is something and which is nothing. Now, I've just said something, but I don't really know whether I've said anything or not.

--Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters, translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, 1974, p. 35

Zen Buddhism, which often takes its cue from philosophical Taoism, speaks of the nondualistic, nondiscursive "don't-know mind," or "beginner's mind," that makes life worth living. In the Christian Bible, the Sermon on the Mount alludes to this non-discriminatory state when Jesus says, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:14, Matthew 19:14) Jesus isn't speaking of the childish mindset, but of the childlike mindset-- one that doesn't waste time and energy drawing boundaries and creating separation.

A recent Korean Seon (Zen) proverb that can be seen on the wall of Hwagye-sa, a temple in Seoul, says, "All 24 hours of the day, don't make anything." The making, in this case, means the manufacturing of dualistic boundaries: this and that, yes and no, you and me, etc. Such boundaries may have their uses on a practical level, but they obscure the fundamental nonduality of reality.

We're all part of Something Bigger. Whatever that Something is, it's moving. We can't hold on to it, and it's folly to try to explain it. Sure, we can try-- but that Something will elude our grasping minds every time. Better to go with the flow, no?


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