hermit's thatch

An acquaintance of an acquaintance indicates that a relation, a man nearly forty years old, has passed away. This man was scorned by family, rejecting of society, and clearly suffered much trauma. He was autistic, reclusive, anxious, depressed, obsessive-compulsive, suffered diabetes and cardiac issues, dying of heart failure. He eked out a life dependent on disability funds, and lived in a basement.

His life presents the involuntary solitude born of psychological trauma, brought low by illness, not at all conscious or deliberate solitude. The basement, an inexpensive hovel sufficient for his circumspect needs, was reflective of his entire self. Yet he had enlisted himself as an organ donor, perhaps because he despised his body, or because he played a final trick on the world, showing them that he was capable of “caring” wherein “they” were not. No one knows.

One cannot help but note an analogy to the famous basement dwellers of recent literature: Dostoyevsky’s anonymous denizen of Underground, and Ellison’s hapless Invisible Man. In literature, the subtleties of psychology are not over-analyzed. We are presented with a seamless lot of syndromes and maladies, to be accepted as a literary package, with the off-goal of entertainment, even as the authors hope for deeper appreciation of their protagonists and how they might reflect issues of the day.

But in the case of the afore-mentioned acquaintance, there is no reflecting or speculating. He is known-of and gone in the same instance. One might have imagined conversing with such a person (though it is said that he insulted anyone who came too close). How far away from the imagined cave-dwelling historical hermits, for example, Paul of Thebes, who would receive others and converse with them, if only to chide them about their tolerance of their worldly milieu. We have no right to inquire too much, but with our literary protagonists we can only nod and think that, yes, given their premises, they were bound to turn out the way that they did. Can we say as much to justify ourselves?

We often ascribe personality and character traits to animals: courage to lions, wisdom to owls, cheerfulness to beavers, for example. Simon & Garfunkel’s popular 1967 song “At the Zoo” offers a clever rendering: “The monkeys stand for honesty / giraffes are insincere / and the elephants are kindly but they’re dumb…”

Seldom are insects included among the popularized animals; their simplicity and lowliness ascribes no traits to them. But their lowliness has attracted pensive poets who respect the humility of insects and derive insight from the ways of these creatures. In the West, the Romantic poet Keats is usually cited for his poem “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket,” but the impact of the poem is probably based on its eccentricity. The Japanese poet Issa is an excellent representative of the poetic subject, often citing spiders, fleas, flies, cicadas, butterflies — and crickets – especially if we make cicadas the poetic equivalent of crickets. Another poet and observer is Mary Oliver, a closer contemporary looking at the cricket (more below).

For Issa, insects, like us, are subject to birth: “First cicada. life is cruel, cruel, cruel.”
Insects eke out a life: “Don’t kill the fly — it wrings its hands, its feet.” Sometimes insects are companionable: “Daybreak — working as one, two butterflies.” Sometimes they are even exuberant: “Moment of fierceness in the first butterfly.” But we know their fate, and ours: “Autumn cicada — flat on his back, chirps his last song.” The insects teach us quietly, humbly: “Weaving butterfly, I am no more than dust.” May they remain our companions always: “When I go, guard my tomb well, grasshopper.”

Mary Oliver perceives all that Issa does in her poem “Nothing is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About,” from her 2016 book Felicity.

The cricket doesn’t wonder if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.
It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.
He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.
This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.

A characteristic of institutional religions, east and west, is consolidation of scripture and doctrine into ritual.

This is especially conspicuous for Westerners seeing the evolution of Christianity into a set of founding narratives followed by evolution of doctrine and rote ritual, primary institutions of church and monasteries, and the providence of bishops, priests, abbots, and monks. In the same way, eastern instances show that the chief institution is the monastery, and the presentation and condification of scripture, doctrine, and ritual comes to dominate.

The institutions in either Buddhism or Christianity present a dilemma for the historical hermit who arises out of either tradition. In the Zen tradition of Japan, the dilemma is expressed by contrasting the eremitic tendency, which concentrates on self-awareness and methods such as meditation, with the monastic tendency concentrating on successfully handling koans promoting instant enlightenment. In Japan, Rinzai Zen masters dominated the monastic institutions and drilled their novice monks with koans. Whether the monastery was large or small, the methodology came to dominate, as did the authoritarianism of the masters, who saw violence in word and action as legitimate tools of instruction or fostering of cirrect answers.

Dissent from this approach harkened back to the Japanese master Dōgen (1200-1253), the founder of Soto Zen. An example of these contemporary tensions is found in the life of Zen master Bassui (1327-1387).

Bassui was born questioning the customs and beliefs of his time; as a four-year-old child at his father’s funeral, seeing the food offerings presented, he wondered how his father would eat the food. Told that his father’s soul would receive the offerings, young Bassui asked what is the soul. And when Bawsui became a monk at twenty, he refused to wear monk’s robes because — he said — he became a monk to understand the great issues of life and death, not to wear robes. Later, after an enlightenment experience, confirmed by multiple masters, Bassui built a hermitage in the mountains, the first of many for the next seventeen years!

As Bassui translator Arthur Braverman has noted: “Bassui was very critical of the Rinzai practice of studying koans, perhaps because they were becoming more and more formalized, hence losing their original spirit. He seems to have been attracted to the Soto sect for its stress on being attentive to all one’s everyday activities.”

And in a famous letter written toward the end of his life, Bassui writes: “The gurgle of the stream and the sigh of the wind are the voices of the master. The green of the pine, the white of the snow, these are the colors of the master, the very one who lifts the hands, moves the legs, sees, hears. One who grasps this directly without recourse to reason or intellection can be said to have some degree of inner enlightenment. But this is not yet full enlightenment.”

It is not full enlightenment, concludes Bassui, but may be sufficient to end rebirth in one’s successive lifetime (thus addressing a representative doctrine). But when one does attain this point, one will see “that all the sermons of the Buddhas are nothing more than metaphors that point to the minds of ordinary people.”

Bassui’s emphasis on the ordinariness of mind, of self-disipline, of insight, refreshingly transformed Zen into the tool it became for art, expression, simplicity, appreciation of nature, and enlightenment. His apprroach was the fruit of eremitism combined with the inspiration of the great master Dōgen.

URL: https://www.hermitary.com/articles/bassui.html

The ancient Chinese Taoists originated a singular form of non-communal life. As noted in the Encyclopedia of Taoism, “eremitism was rarely a permanent way of life for practicing Taoists, and that after completing a period of eremitic self-cultivation and descending from the mountaintop many Taoist men and women travelled the land, performed rituals, and converted others to Taoism.”

The closest analogy in the West is that of the Christian hermits of early Syria who after pursuing eremitism, spiritual practice, and training, lingered among the villages preaching, performing works of mercy, helping with harvesting, with village building projects, and joining in collective labor before moving on to resettle themselves in mountains and deserts.

This “moving on” is what the Taoists understood as “travel.” Travel is not pleasure, curiousity, or novelty-seeking. Travel is a project of self-awareness constantly testing and correcting itself as it observes nature and people.

Taoism in China was specifically opposed to Confucianism, the traditional social and political system of authority and morals. Confucians represented a classical authority for social behavior and conformity. The king or emperor was so ordained by the “mandate of heaven,” not unlike the notion of “divine right” of kings in the West, intending no challenge to the authority of the institution, which supposedly embodied the “Way.” Taoism challenged these assumptions, effectively dismissing them. The Way was not mandated by heaven, which was itself subordinate to the Way, and thus all of nature was the source of instruction. The Confucians acknowledged the shortcomings of their authorities, admitting that when the emperoris good, one must serve, but when evil, one could recluse — though not rebel or disturb the order of heaven but quit, withdraw, walk away, in short “travel.” Thus, those intelligent men who disliked service in a corrupt court reclused, disappearing into forest, mountain, or far-away farmland.

Taoism calls for abstention, withdrawal, renunciation, by extension not for the construction of ego, self, or success, not even as successful articulation and persuasiveness. In Taoism, this sense of withdrawal is called non-action. The distance between the court is equated with the difference between the corrup ethics of power and the shaking off of the red dust of the world, that is, of the wordly. This distancing is “travel,” in one sense physical but in the true sense psychological and spiritual. This is not the travel understood by moderns but the travel understood by Taoists.

In Section 47 of the traditional Tao the ching attributed to Lao-tzu is articulated the correct sense of travel. From the translation of Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English:

Without going outside, you may know the whole world.
Without looking through your window, you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.
Thus the sage knows without traveling;
He sees without looking;
He works without doing.

Red Pine (Bill Porter) translates the last lines slightly differently:,

“therefore the sage knows without moving,
names without seeing

succeeds without trying.”

Movement of any kind — towards a conclusion, away from evidence or reflection, arising from prejudice, delusion, greed, or lack of virtue and insight — becomes a form of travel, precisely what the sage (and potentially ourselves!) does not pursue.

In Chinese tradition, Taoism challenges Confucian conformity with society, with its institutions and inherent authority. The epistemology (criteria for knowledge) is profoundly overthrown, but further, the empowerment of the individual is emphasized, not as individual persona but as part of nature, both discrete and indivisible from nature. It is the Way, the Tao, that both Buddhism strives for when freed of the traditions of institutions. The structures of eremitism carry over as alternative to society (whether China or Japan) and yield deep thought about the perceiving self. China’s Taoism came to influence Zen Buddhism in Japan, the structures of eremitism and its social manifestations.

The notion of “travel” in the Taoism sense is copmplemented by the notion of self in Zen Buddhism. The hermits of Japan, most of whom are poets and not monks, freed of institutional attachment but not scornful of people and of social necessities, are a unique product of this conjoining of ideas. What is intriguing here is not only the emergence of the historical hermit standing distinct from institutions but the emergence of the hermit as wanderer — who travels in the spiritual sense without traveling in the worldly sense.

The traditional image of April as the source of seasonal renewal is enshrined in the opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

“When April’s gentle rains have pierced the drought
Of March right to the root, and bathed each sprout
Through every vein with liquid of such power
It brings forth the engendering of the flower;
When Zephyrus too with his sweet breath has blown
Through every field and forest, urging on
The tender shoots, and there’s a youthful sun ,,,”

But the familiar opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” address the month of April in the opposite way.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.”

Why is April cruel? The renewal represents the renewal of the cycle of death, repeating a cycle without escape or transcendence. Eliot presents the pessimism dominant in his era, coming just after the end of the violent and disastrous First World War (the poem was published in 1922). The destruction of Europe surprised and alarmed the West, the devastation of its youthful generation, of its economics, its resources, its agriculture and factories and cities, taking aback the comfortable confidences of the dominant classes and cultures. The old ways were gone; even the vacations and hideaways of the elites were despoiled: “There is not even solitude in the mountains.“ A comfortable civilization had become a “wasteland.”

The view is underscored in Eliot by the absence of the historical Christian identification of April with the resurrection of Jesus. As historians of the historical Jesus have noted, the Easter story of the Gospels is bare and uninspiring, virtually an embarrassing afterthought. No one is awaiting the resurrection. the remnant disciples are fearfully huddled in private quarters, having witnessed the unchecked execution of their leader. The narrative has Jesus exit the tomb without ceremony or expectation. No one is waiting, no one is anticipating anything. Few eventually learn of the event, puzzlingly leaving the remnant to fail to coalesce or plan for the future, which will be the work of outsiders like Paul.

But in the context of Eliot, the resurrection (of Europe) is unlikely, so cruel i the disaster of war. Indeed, the season itself only evokes the inevitability of death, of destruction, of pessimism.

Why should the war have engendered this frame of mind? Like the intelligentsia of this time, Eliot knew and channeled existentialism, which in relation to Europe had an element addressing Christianity directly in Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. The dissolution of Europe is the culmination of the dissolution of the spiritual power of Christianity over Europe.

Eliot clearly understood this phenomenon and its ramifications for the West, anticipated by the German writer Oswald Spengler’s 1918 book, Decline of the West. Where these writers may have suffered a nostalgia for an impossible past, given the savagery of technology, economics, nationalism, and war, we may project that they understood the new order, the new reality, the change of climate.

And this April, steeped in war and blind trajectories, the soil yet gives its flowers in the naturalness of earth’s cycles, ignoring the stubbornness of human beings. Eliot ends his poem evoking the evocation for the one grand necessity, in the chant of the Hindu Upanishad:

“Shantih, Shaktih, Shaktih” (translated “Peace, peace, peace!”)

I was fortunate enough to be in the precise path of the recent solar eclipse in northern North America on April 8, precisely enough within the path to view the eclipse event from a comfortable front yard chair at home over a thousand feet in elevation.

Post-event comments in media by observers confirmed the similarity of responses. And the responses, including these, were quite unexpected.

To witnesss the beginning of totality was startling,breath-catching, provoking quiet tears and a welling of the throat. Why? What was the significance of this moment? … A profound evidence of something unnameable? The absolute autonomy of nature, its perfect synchronicity, its separation from human existence, human pretensions, human confidence? Aesthetics, beauty, absolute originality, yes — but aloof, serene, conviction laid bare, the necessity of inevitable patterns, an assertion of absolute flow, the brevity of the moment, impermenance, the brevity of totality, the smallness of our thoughts and the deliverance of our being to the universe. And yet, in the next moment, will we understand, will we grasp some truth, some meaning?

Eclipse Doggerel:

Old man Sol
sprawled
on a park bench,
glare drenching terra firm, ah,
flaring out heat and sturm
und drang —
now comes lithe Lady Luna,
Moon apart and quiet dark.
In a moment blotting out arrogant Sol, all
darkening, from shadow to eclipse,
ipso facto gone!
Sol frowning angry
for a moment —
then released to light again,
limp and wan,
a moment’s humiliation,
unexpectedly restored to pre-eminence,
relieved, revived, rebuked, for now.
And Lady Luna, in the Tao,
smiling,
in quiet delight.