Zen and Japanese Culture - Being Read 2009.10.08

Zen and Japanese Culture is turning out to be a fabulous read! And with near perfect synchronicity-petit timing! While writing a response to Tolstoy's essay berating Shakespeare as a hack writer — to understate Tolstoy as transcribed by Orwell — I came across in Zen language an amazing and colourful affirmation of my argument. And one that also affirmed George Orwell's chastisement of Tolstoy — even as Orwell with at best ambivalently praised Shakesepare. I came across Tolstoy's polemic via Orwell's response to it in Vol 2 of his collected short works. (I will be blogging this bit of doggeral when it's done.)

But even without it being a great supporting argument to my own perverse sense of things, it is a nice bit of writing to promote thoughtless thought.

4

There is a famous saying by one of the earlier masters of the T'ang dynasty, which declares that the Tao is no more than one's everyday life experience. When the master was asked what he meant by this, he replied, "When you are hungry you eat, when are are thirsty you drink, when you meet a friend you greet him'. This, some may think, is no more than animal instinct or social usage, and there is nothing that may be called moral, much less spiritual, in it. If we call it the Tao, some may think, what a cheap thing the Tao is after all!

Those who have not penetrated into the depths of our consciousness, including both the conscious and unconscious, are liable to hold such a mistaken notion as the one just cited. But we must remember that, if the Tao is something highly abstract transcending daily experiences, it will have nothing to do with the actualities of life. Life as we live it is not concerned with generalization. If ti were, the intellect would be everything, and the philosopher would be the wisest man. But, as Kierkegaard points out, the philosopher builds a fine palace, but he is doomed not to live in it — he has a shed for himself next door to what he constructed for others, including himself, to look at.

...

The Tao is really very much more than mere animal instinct and social usage, though those elements are also included in it. It is something deeply imbedded in every one of us, indeed in all beings sentient and non-sentient, and it requires something altogether different from so-called scientific analysis. It defies our intellectual pursuit because of being too concrete, too familiar, hence beyond definability. It is there confronting us, no doubt, but not obtrusively and threateningly, like Mount Everest to the mountain-climbers (11-2).

Zen and Japanese Culture - Begun 2009.09.30

What a great find!

Actually, I found this at the same time I found The Art of Living By Epictetus, A New Interpretation. The cover shown here is not of the edition I purchased.

Here is the book's publication details:

Daisetz T. Suzuki.

Zen and Japanese Culture.

New York: Princeton University Press Bollingen Series #64, 1973. ISBN 0-691-01770-0.

A previous owner, from the heartfelt inscription, gave it as a gift to a loved one:

To Lief

from my collection —

with Love, Joan, July 1990

This is a big book, beautifully filled with monochrome prints of Japanese art from the 8th to 18th century.

And it has some beautiful writing!

For example, in Suzuki's description of the Noh play 'Yama-Uba' he describes love:

... Yama-uba, literally 'the old woman of the mountains,' represents the principle of love secretly moving in every one of us. Usually we arre not conscious of it and are abusing it all of the time. Most of us imagine that love is something beautiful to look at, young, delicate, and charming. But in fact she is not, for she works hard, unnoticed by us and yet ungrudgingly; what we notice is the superficial result of her labour, and we think it beautiful — which is natural, for the work of love ought to be beautiful. But love, herself, like a hard-working peasant woman, looks rather worn out; from worrying about others her face is full of wrinkles, her hair is white. She has so many knotty problems presented for her solution. Her life is a series of pains, which, however, she gladly suffers. She travels from one end of the world to another, knowing no rest, no respite, no interruption ... (419-20).

And, to my great surprise and pleasure, he has included a couple of small extracts from Chuang-Tzu in a translation I haven't seen before, as well as many Zen stories. In particular I thoroughly enjoyed the 'Swordsman and the Cat' that a quick Google found transcribed on Menno Rubingh's website (that until now I did not know existed).

I am quite sure I won't be reading this book from cover to cover, but dipping into it, sipping it, allowing what ever synchronistic energies are extant on any particular moment in time guide my hand and eyes. And, oddly enough, I have already stumbled across an equivalency in Suzuki's description of Zen and the ideas of Constructive Living as presented by David K. Reynolds, and hence also The Dog Whisperer! Now that can't help but be an example of projecting into everything the idea that become fixated in the mind.

Zen is not necessarily against words, but it is well aware of the fact that they are always liable to detach themselves from realities and turn into conceptions. And this conceptualization is what Zen is against. ... Zen insists on handling the thing itself and not just empty abstractions. It is for this reason that Zen neglects reading or reciting Sūtras or engaging in discourse on abstract subjects. And this is a cause of Zen's appeal to men of action in the broadest sense of the term...(5).

Okay, the link might seem weak, but CL and TDW both advocate living in the moment, attending to what needs doing in the here and now without dw

elling on thoughts/remembrances of what was or fearing what might be.

And I also was pleased to see that Suzuki has included art

work by the famous Japanese swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi,

because I have delighted in his manual on the art of the

sword, called A Book of Five Rings, or, in Japanese script,

as calligraphed by Musashi,

Go Rin No Sho.

The Art of Living By Epictetus, A New Interpretation

by Sharon Lebell.

San Francisco: HarperCollins

ISBN 0-06-251346-X.

Stumbled into this this afternoon while on my way to see the closing show of Bard-on-Beach. Traffic was excellent, and so I had a few minutes to spare and spent them visiting an old friend I hadn't visited in a while, Characters Fine Used Books and Coffee Bar in the Marpole area of Vancouver.

Purchased Sept 26, 2009.

My first impression is that this is a nice light read, but worthwhile.

Modern Man in Search of a Soul - Begun 2009.09.19

As part of my hunt for Dog Whisperer equivalencies in philosophers, I more or less randomly picked-up, again,

by

C. G. Jung.

Modern Man in Search of Soul

Originally published by Harcourt, Brace, Jonavich in 1933. Tr. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes.

Began re-read Sept 19, 2009. although I am jumping into the book willy-nilly and not reading it front to back.

A quick Google search will reveal that this book is well received. And I think deservedly so. Although, now that I've been reading the RFC Hull translations, I find this translation not quite as strong. Nonetheless this is an excellent comprehensive introduction to Jung's ideas, by Jung himself, in very approachable language. In it, much like an excellent diary, he expresses his concerns about the validity of his ideas, how they may or may not stand against rigid scientific 'repeatable' truth because the nature of the individual is uniqueness and what will aid one's movement through life will cripple another's.

I am plastering it with sticky notes of equivalencies with Cesar Millan's approach to the lives of dogs and their pack leaders.

Rainbow Rising from a Stream: Finished 2009.09.10

Rainbow Rising from a Stream: The Natural Way to Well Being.

Finished 2009.09.12

Began 2009.08.13

☆☆☆☆☆

This is an extremely powerful read. It has a powerful and simple message. I have filled it with sticky notes on equivalences I see in Reynold's ideas and Cesar Millan's approach to dogs and people. Oh, and even more importantly, I am putting into practice some of the exercises given. (I will be transcribing extracts here, soon.)

Rainbow Rising from a Stream & Intro to Fushigi: Begun 2009.08.13

I have recently begun to watch The Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan. He has inspired me to look into the parallels I see between his philosophy of life and the spiritual/philosophical texts I enjoy reading. And while I found myself immediately thinking of Jung and Sheldon Kopp, the book I first picked up to begin my research is

David K. Reynolds

Rainbow Rising from a Stream: The Natural Way to Well-Being.

New York. Quill (William Morrow and Company),1992

ISBN 0-688-11967-0

Began 2009.08.15

Finished 2009.09.27

It seems to me that Reynolds may be relatively unknown, as I have never seen or heard him in our broadcast media. I stumbled across him in the time of independent book stores, and found his ideas to be the most commonsensical and immediately/experientially 'true.'

Reynolds keeps it real, and is easily the most direct advocate of living in the moment, which is one of Cesar's most repeated tenets in good dog behaviour. He argues that this is one of the most important attributes of owning a dog, that you need to be living in the here and now because they are absolutely immediate -- they live neither in the past nor the future and to relate to them healthily requires that immediacy. But isn't that immediacy, of being fully alive now, truly what is important to live the well-lived-life?

Anyway, the book is festooned with noted stickies, right now, as I begin the process of researching the parallels between 'The Dog Whisper' and great philosophical tracts.

I learned a great Japanese word, today, from the book.

"Fushigi."

This translates, per Reynolds, as 'marvelous' or 'wondrous'.

It is applied to the magical moments of synchronicity-petites, as I call them. Synchronicity-petites are the small confluences of life, which when attended to experientially refute the universe as being dead collection of dead matter. This term equates, roughly, to Cesar Millan's use of the term 'the ripple effect', in that events come together meaningfully to those open to them.

The examples Reynolds give are his having purchased as a gift a hair drier for a friend whose hair dryer broke that morning. I find this word most excellent because I keep a black book log of the fushigi events that I find barrage my experience of life, oft-times in ways that, while marvelous, are also distressing to some more or less extent.

Payback: Finished 2009.08.09

☆☆☆☆☆

Finished, 2009.08.09

Began 2009.08.03

Lots in this book to think about.

And some curious examples of how language points to the meaning society has placed and places in things. For example, did you know that a mortgage is a death pledge? ('Mort' death, 'gage' pledge.)

And did you know that there are two (at least!) distinctly different versions of the Lord's Prayer? Until this book I absolutely did not know this, and the difference is puzzling. Here's how Atwood writes it:

... Among the things we memorized [in school] was the Lord's Prayer, which contained the line, 'Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.' However, my brother sang in an Anglican boys' choir, and the Anglicans had a different way of saying the same line: 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.' The word 'debt — blunt and to the point — was well fitted to the plain, grape-juice-drinking United Church, and 'trespasses' was an Anglican word, rustling and frilly, that would go well with wine-sipping for Communion and more ornate theology. But did these two words mean the same thing, really? I didn't see how they could. 'Trespassing' was stepping on other people's property, especially if there was a No Trespassing, and 'debt' was when you owed money. But somebody must have thought they were interchangeable. One thing was clear even to my religiously addled child mind, however: neither debts nor trespasses were desirable things to have (44-5).

[The Wikipedia has a quite interesting discussion on the several versions of the Lord's Prayer, which includes a version that uses 'sin' in place of 'debt/trespass'.]

Perhaps most interesting is that she looks at history in a way that fully discloses how limited is the thinking of our society — if a society can think. In my reading between Atwood's lines, I see her having reaffirmed C.P. Snow's caution that societies do not learn from history, as they fixate on current practices as unswerving truths of what has always been. Atwood's link between what is acceptable social practices and sin is most remarkable, and erudite. And her link between language and these sin/truths is delightful and powerful. For example, at one time lending was far more sinful than borrowing, and now lending is perhaps the cornerstone of the modern economic/social truth, i.e. of capitalism's supreme ultimate authority of truth-in-proper-society, and bad debt-management a sin.

For me this book re-emphasizes the 'truth' that, in general, the people least capable of leading us are our formally educated graduates of business and leaders of industry. Because generally, they have no history beyond numbers, these forward thinking leaders take as meaningful today's numbers for tomorrow's quarterly report with no eye to the rise and fall of civilizations.

I did find the closing ghost of the re-told Scrooge story a bit ... I am tempted to say sappy and perhaps a bit preachy. I hesitate writing this, even as I write it, because I am not sure how it could not be written 'preachily', given the story-line it is emulating, and its purpose. But ... I don't know. Perhaps I am reacting against its glimmer of hope, given that I am not hopeful. And that brings up a curious emotional wrestling match — is it because I am not in my nature hopeful that I, like many who watch Alistair Sim's Scrooge transform against all odds, feel tears of joy/relief well up in my eyes? Hmmmm.

But even this irritation does not take from it any ☆s. On the other hand, perhaps because it has pricked at my beliefs irritatingly, it is more than worthy of the five stars I have given it.

Thank you Ruth T., for lending me the book. It looks like I will now be going to buy my own copy to re-examine and mark-up.