Author: Meng-hu

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.

The divergence of Eastern and Western philosophy came to be expressed in the relationship of individual and state. This relationship is a more reliable measure than the words and dictums of representative thinkers.

Thus in ancient China the saying attributed to Confucius identifies the ethical foundation of Chinese philosophy. Because educated males were expected to use their knowledge and writing skills on behalf of the state, the dictum advised: “Serve when the emperor is good, recluse when the emperor is corrupt (or evil, etc.).” This moral principle gave psychological latitude to dissenters, nonconformists, and the morally sensitive. Because China was a large country geographically, wilderness was available to whomever might dissent, willing to live in remote and distant lands.

During the age of the philosophers in ancient Greek Athens, no parallel political option of reclusion was available to the dissenter or nonconformist. Additionally, enthusiasm for democracy and social participation called for service in one form or another, and the relation of individual was to the citizenry of the immediate geographical or civic unit. Civic engagement, if not conviviality, was considered a hallmark achievement of the city-state. The city of Athens reserved a punitive sentence not only imposing verdicts against tried criminals (such as Socrates) but reserved the decreeing of ostracism against alleged or libeled individuals for whom no specific or described crime was brought. Such was the measure called banishment or ostracism.

Anybody, any citizen, any peer, could allege offenses against another citizen and vote on banishment, with the length of exile up to ten years. Such a measure was considered an option of pure democracy. The place of banishment or ostracism was eremos, translated as “desert” or “wilderness.”

Not many ancient Athenians actually suffered ostracism. However, the idea and practice inj itself suggests an extreme measure reserved to the majority. Thus, while the few historical figures punished with ostracism were military figures, the punishment had no defined limit of potential crimes or victims.

The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus was apparently intensely disliked by his fellows, at least according to his biographer Diogenes Laertius. Heraclitus opposed the traditional Greek philosophical premise popular from Parmenides to Plato to Aristotle, the notion of absolutes, forms, or monads. These intangible Absolutes were the real basis of phenomenon, the real and abiding objects in the universe. Against this metaphysics, Heraclitus is famous for advocating a philosophy of flux, or change. Thus his contrary statement that no one steps into the same river twice. The river is not the same. Nor are we. The river that flows before us will never be seen again, is not the river you will see tomorrow.

But the other source of resentment against Heraclitus may be his simplicity of living. He lived alone in a hut, with meager belongings, in contrast to the probable scene in the Athenian marketplace and living districts, the conversations about money, politics, property, status. One day, a delegation of citizens called upon Heraclitus. Discovering the simplicity of his home, the visitors were offended and showed it in their expressions. Heraclitus noticed. He said quietly, “But here, too, the daimons dwell.” Meaning that not in luxurious temples and at household shrines but in humble places like his rude hut, the gods or spirits come and dwell, finding its dweller compatible.

Heraclitus was not ostracized. He could not be accused of military or political crimes or of corrupting the youth, as Socrates was re the latter. Urban and social life must have been overwhelming enough that Heraclitus finally ostracized himself. It is said that Heraclitus spent his last years on an island, the equivalent of eremos, where he pursued vegetarianism and solitude. His biographer called him the “dark” philosopher.

Green kale is an attractive and nutritious vegetable, growing to a couple feet tall, useful in every kitchen garden. Towards the end of fall, the gardener should monitor overnight temperatures, although kale reputely is cold hardy and can tolerate occasional frost. This recent autumn, however, an overnight rainfall froze to heavy snow in the morning, and the cold of hours was too much, freezing the kale in layers of snow. Too late to salvage the kale, hard in the frozen soil, the gardener left the kale as a memento mori.

*****

A Japanese death poem reads thus: “I only regret that I did not plant more flowers.” This line can be taken literally, but a perkier interpretation is that one should cultivate more friends along the way. The hermit will prefer flowers, though.

*****

The Tang-era Chinese poet Po Chü-i is representative of the old Confucian dilemma to serve the bureaucracy when it does good, and to recluse when it does not. Being outspoken,Po Chü-i frequently offended supervisors and rivals, suffering banishment to outlying regions to serve petty or important but nominal positions. However, he always took advantage of the quiet and isolation of wherever he lived, visitig hills and mountains, old temples, and found hermits. One place where he was supposed to represent the government he found the populace so aloof, unperceptive, and obtuse, that he concluded that they were not unlike the pes that inhabited the nearby mountains. When, at an advanced age, he finally retired, Po Chü-i, qn avid poet (writing for himself and a few trusted friends) retired to a hut. Here he was quiet, occasionally ill, but relishing simplicity and nature. He had long forgotten about court life, though twinges of painful memories would surface once in a while. One winter day, he wrote a poem reflecting on his present days:

“Lined coat, warm cap and easy felt slippers.
In the little tower, at the low window, sitting over the sunken brazier.
Body at rest, heart at peace; no need to rise early.
I wonder if the courtiers at the Western Capital know of these things, or not?”

Yuan-wu (Yuanwu Keqin, 1063–1135) was an early Chinese Zen (Chan) master credited with constructing The Blue Cliff Record, probably the most representative compilation and discussion of Zen koans. The later Japanese Rinzai Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), whose students and disciples organized his lectures into essays, acknowledged the important influence of Yuan-wu in Hakuin’s first essay. There, Hakuin indicates that when Yuan-wu first delivered lectures he was reproached by other masters for doing so. Yuan-wu acknowledged their criticism. Chan was understood to be transmitted (as Bhodhidarma had said) not by outward teaching but in example and meditation. Here, too, Yuan-wu alludes to the Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak, as will be seen.

Thus when Hakuin’s students and disciples announced to him their interest in publishing Hakuin’s key lectures, Hakuin demurred, but eventually gave in, as long as the publication did not come to be associated with intentions to be admired. Indeed, Hakuin writes, in his first essay:

“Yuan-wu said:
After the ancients had once achieved awakening, they went off and lived in thatched huts or caves, boiling wild vegetable roots in broken-legged pots to sustain themselves. They were not interested in making names for themselves or in rising to positions of power. Being perfectly free from all ties whatever, they left turning words to their descendants because they wanted to repay their profound debt to the Buddha-patriarchs.”

Hakuin thus had intended to follow the eremitic path in at least the sense of living obscurely and quietly in the world, following Yuan-wu’s example, “on achieving awakening.” He would pursue lecturing and teaching and permit his disciples and descendents to transcribe his works as repayment to the patriarches. The decision to remain in the world through works could, however, only be the result of enlightenment, or satori, which was not the case for most Zen practitioners or teachers.

Yuan-wu himself concluded as much, realizing that he was teaching but was not himself enlightened. He models life after the hermit whom he calls the “Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak,” for like direct prajñā (wisdom) conveyed to the Buddha’s disciple Mahākāśyapa, Yuan-wu acknowledgred that a master receives the Buddha’s wisdom and insight directly, without or in spite ofinterventional reading, scripture, or teaching. This direct transmission is the teaching of Bodhidharma himself regarding what is Zen (or Chan):

“A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not depending on words and letters;
Directly pointing to the mind,
Seeing into one’s true nature and attaining buddhahood.”

This process does not preclue or exclude study and meditation, which can, however, only confirm it later. Thus the hermit in Yuan-wu has the opportunity to receive enlightenment directly. Enlightenment later redeems use of written and oral teaching but only if that service to humanity is geniune and truth-telling, not simply an ego spreading poison, what Hakuin called “fox-slobber.”

In the late poet Louise Gluck’s poem ”Celestial Music” are presented two friends reflecting on fundamental sensibilities about nature, death, and reality.

The friends are walking on a country road. One friend senses the indifference of nature toward suffering and violence, even in the cruelty of battling insects encountered on the roadside. The friend is the poet herself, by nature pessimistic. This friend sees that the meaning or import of things is understood or identified by the self (however that is construed) and not by something higher. Or perhaps not so much understood as simply experienced. What is about us receives its identity from what we see.

The other friend sees reality as harmony, speaks of the beauty of nature, celebrates sky and clouds and color and grandeur, hears “celestial music.”

In a previous entry we quoted a line in Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah: “You don’t really care for music, do you?” Is this music the frivolous pop music of convention, or is this the celestial music of Gluck’s poem? The former is negligible and its classical counterpart is intense but historically pretensious. What Oliver Sacks could have labelled potential earworms. But are not both contrived? Are not they and celestial music illusory imaginings of peace and harmony in the universe?

This may have been the realization that came to the young Nietzsche when at first he became enamored of the sweeping mythological grandeur of Wagner’s music. Then he confronted its reality by attending a performance at Bayreuth. The audience was entirely aristocrats and bourgeoisie with their arrogance and opulence in full display. At that moment, Nietzsche walked away from music in disgust and never returned.

In Gluck’s poem is the telling line of the optimistic friend: “when you love the world you hear celestial music.” The original friend — the poet — would object that one need not love the world, be reconciled to the universe, to its suffering and death, but merely acknowledge its reality.

Here is Gluck’s poem:

Celestial Music

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she’s unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I’m always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains
my aversion to reality. She says I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness –
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person –

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We’re walking
on the same road, except it’s winter now;
she’s telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height –
Then I’m afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth –

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It’s this moment we’re both trying to explain, the fact
that we’re at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn’t move.
She’s always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We’re very quiet. It’s peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering–
it’s this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.

Louise Gluck, Poems 1962-2012. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, p. 240.