Author: Meng-hu

Noise is offensive sound — not offensive in just an aesthetic or ethical sense, but in the direct sense of being human in origin and, therefore, contrived.

Sound is natural, but noise is not. Sounds (which will include the subset of noises) must be filtered intelligently, distinguishing degrees of meaningfulness from deliberate and reprehensible offense.

Noise is made by people and machines, the latter being extensions of people. There are a few natural places left in the world of nature where human-generated sounds are not heard. Such places are rare — one may think of them cynically as the dwelling-places of indigenous peoples not yet conquered by civilization. To some people, silence is antiquarian, something to be hung in a gallery or boxed up in a museum. Noise rules the world. And like technology and globalization, noise cannot be rolled back.

Even in the apparent silence of one’s house or room there is noise: the clicking of a clock, the hum of a refrigerator or fan, even the “sound” of low and high frequencies and microwaves inaudible to our clumsy ears but affecting our health and well-being as we sit surrounded by them. In one’s relative silence, savoring the absence of a world’s presence, comes a deep sigh, the inkling of restfulness and independence, even a constructive meditation or musing. Then a klaxon blares in the street, a neighbor shouts, or an airplne passes overhead. Immediately we are shaken from our reverie and plunged again into the ubiquity of noise, of human sound.

City-dwellers, especially, tend to ignore noise because it is part of the normal soundscape of their daily lives. The modernist composer John Cage went so far as to celebrate city noises as the only form of spontaneous music. By this time, Cage was living in Manhattan as a retired celebrity, oblivious to the lives of the toiling masses in those same noisy streets. Perhaps it was the other way around: music is noise, not noise is music.

City-dwellers’ ears selectively identify certain audible ranges to pay attention to, like animals alert to meaningful sounds because they may signify danger. What used to cause stress to primitive humans was the roar of a lion or howling of a wolf. Today, vehicles rushing at us from everywhere in the street compound stress thousands of times over compared to our ancestors. We think we distinguish meaningful sounds, but these are the dregs of subjectivity. Every noise assaulting us is automatically “meaningful” in a neurological way. Still, we imagine that noises are not dangerous — unless we live in a country at war, where the whine of missiles, and the shouts of groups of men and vehicles in the street represent a perpetual danger.

Most city-dwellers distribute audible ranges into categories of utility, such as conversation, favorite music, cooking sounds, ringtones — versus aircraft, sirens, and shouts. And if urban noises are too distracting, there are always headphones to blot out noise — or to blot out undesirable noise for one’s own version. White noise is the last refuge of the harried urban soul. A whole industry of “nature sounds” exists, but soon to be found on the remainder rank along with other contrived sounds.

A recent study shows that in urbanites the amygdala — the most primitive of our brain structures — reacts to certain stresses that the same organ in rural residents does not. The sounds, in these experiments, were the badgering and disparaging remarks of the clinician testing the reaction of subjects and trying to provoke a pattern on a screen. Maybe other sounds could be tested, but the remarks of others are often all the stress one needs for a day, or a lifetime.

Once we consider all human-generated sound to be noise, we are challenged to defend our very words and our listened-to audio, be it talk or music. Does it stir us to anger, arrogance, passion, curiosity, wistfulness, amusement, resentment, numbness? How does this or that piece of sound contribute to right thinking and feeling, to the development of some virtue or skill? Does it address deep needs? Does talk represent words of discernment, presented in a way that does not bore us or miss the standard of good presentation skill? Is the music merely frustrating our biorhythms, artificially representing excesses of one sort of passion or another, leaving us with earworms for the next few days?

The challenge of only speaking and hearing what reflects our human needs and deepest spiritual aspirations sounds as if the social content of sound — communication — is usually bad, unworthy, useless. But communication of any kind should have not merely a utilitarian purpose, however humane, but a spiritual quality. That is the test of speaking and communicating, for these represent not merely sounds but feelings, beliefs, aspirations, deep sentiments. “Those who talk do not know, those who keep silence know,” to paraphrase Lao-tzu. Communication must have an ethical component, not merely an auditory one. Listening, in turn, should evoke tranquility, insight, perspicacity, harmony, introspection. This should be the touchstone applied to everything auditory.

The solitary is potentially far ahead in the tasks of right listening and hearing, in distinguishing noise and sound. The solitary has the potential to instinctively sense what sound does well or not for the spirit or mind. This sensibility cannot remain at an instinctual level if solitude is to be cultivated. Noise is a human enterprise blotting out nature. This is the first clue to what the solitary must cultivate.

Contrary to modern thinking, a world without noise would not be a cold, lifeless world but a clear and revelatory world, a world in which all natural sounds would be appreciated. Then the whispers of the natural world — already present but barely perceived by most — would become meaningful to us.

Why are we uneasy? What is the source of our nervousness? Even of our (Kierkegaard called it) “fear and trembling”? We may think our worry is on behalf of another’s well-being or the success of some long-term project dependent on a series of tenuous decisions. Ultimately, our anxiety is a matter of control, even of power.

We want to control outcomes — outcomes for others, outcomes of our decision-making, outcomes for our life goals. We tell ourselves that the good for all is at stake, that love is our motive, that from love springs our interventions, intentions, fears, prayers, wishes.

But seen from without, even ourselves looking from outside, we know that love and intentions cannot change anything, that our desire for control or power over outcomes is a vanity we entertain for ourselves, telling ourselves that the purity of our intentions justifies our concern. But concern hovers around outcomes which we desire. How will we measure control and success? How will hopes avoid wants and wants be reconciled to the natural course of events?

Or is there a “natural” course of events? The dilemma of predestination and free will is not resolved in our secular world anymore than in the past. We still don’t understand outcomes, what makes for given outcomes. We cannot know all of the contingencies, the panoply of what is called karma in the East or the mind of God in the West. Science maintains that evolution is mindless, random, and chaotic — while pointing to a universal body of physical laws, necessary mathematics, and behavioral explanations of mind. And while we witness the character of human beings over thousands of yers, or over the course of our lives in society and social circumstances. And into such an ontological swirl is to be put the petty insistences of one human being?

The better course is clearly not to insist, hope, desire, or demand. We guide our lives like slow craft, making micro adjustments as the terrain or lapping waves show ahead. Yet there are major adjustments demanded of us — not us demanding of life. These are of diet, disposition, discernment, peace of mind, security. We think that we can stop taking stock of our spiritual and mental resources, make a few amendments as needed — but then go back to the same dependent course.

We may object that such adjustments to the course of life may take a lifetime. And indeed they will. We may never leave our metaphoric port at such a rate. Or we may venture a bit and go back discouraged, afraid, or dejected. But if all the work of preparation is done, or even if we know that the right assembly is progressing, then we will arrive at our destination sufficient to our mind and spirit, sufficient for our self. We will arrive just in time, even as we are found to be in the midst of preparation.

From whence comes ethics? Society and culture assumes that morality is unnatural and external in origin, received by human sensibility reluctantly as a mysterious code or formula, however flawed and violated by those who have received it. From this point of view, the derived nature of morality, the truculence, the begrudging of strictures, reveals the tumultuous nature of evolutionary accretions in the human mind and heart.

That codes of conduct are intermingled with the social task of curbing evolutionary instincts is clear, but the sorry understanding of self in swinging between conformity and avoidance only justifies power. Aggrandized taskmasters seize advantage over the mass of humanity to lord over them, an historical feature of society and culture that suggests that an externally-imposed morality, while sufficient to maintain order and decorum, is not enough to attain wisdom.

But wisdom is not the object of most people’s lives, so ethics is a system of law, not justice, less wisdom. The capacities of individuals never evolving, neither does ethics or common human behaviors.

Codes of ethical thinking derived not from legalistic reason but from the heartfelt inspiration of experience and insight, are what is lacking in historical thinking. The best ethical system reveals itself gradually; it unfolds, evolves, with the capability of the individual. It can function as stern strictures or wisdom guides — though not at the same time and not for the same person. As a social code, strictures, prohibitions, taboos, and punishments are inevitable societal controls over evolutionary remnants suffered by society. But codes and laws have an affinity with their violation, breaking, flaunting, and avoidance. The lawgiver is fascinated by the lawbreaker, a symbiotic relationship.

Most moral or ethical system are circumstantial in application. Once satisfying a minimum, the individual is safely absconded within that minimum if their lives and thoughts are not very sophisticated, if their intellectual curiosity is dull, if they are insensitive to aesthetics and willingly follow whatever mass society pursues. This circumstantial nature is based on the degrees of control required in society. If there is little tolerance for wisdom because it challenges lawgivers and authorities, then a rudimentary morality equivalent to laws is all that is needed.

Buddhist ethics offers an example of how simple strictures and disciplines can evolve like a spiral, keeping the foundation of simplicity but ascending in complexity to be able to address the more sensitive and insightful individual. Thus, the foundation of Buddhism is not external to the most universal and yet most intimate human experience, that of suffering.

Yet all religious traditions confront suffering, usually much later in their history because the efficacy of their morals has not brought solace, comfort, or wisdom. Thus Job would not arise had not Greek thought challenged Jewish fatalism, and had not the luck of the people floundered against the growth of empires that extinguished the on-going militancy and arrogance of a primitive people. Social collapse always witnesses questioning, and questioning invariably asks, “Why do we suffer/”

There are two ways to answer the question of suffering. One is to ignore the suffering, or take it as an affront, a goad to action, usually action against others weaker than oneself. The other way to answer is to reflect upon the universality of suffering, to realize that while all human beings are connected through evolution and genetics, the most intimate connection is the universality of suffering.

The admission of suffering is not a cause, excuse, or pretext for aggression. Wounded or sick animals sense the profound challenge of pain to their survival, but they do not (at least most do not on an evolutionary scale) exhibit the self-awareness of suffering, distinct from pain. Certainly animals will not have a physical pain, yet suffer emotionally from grief or loss. But they are not able to make something of it, so to speak. Unfortunately, neither do most humans. What is to be made of suffering is, in fact, the first step in the crafting of ethics.

From a reflection on suffering can come a reflection on survival, death, and impermanence. This must stir the constructive desire to make of one’s life a revealing and insightful experience. Not an experience of the irrational mind that goes about devouring things, enjoying power over others and pleasures as they come. Such a reaction belies even animal instinct, for no animal with our equivalent understanding of suffering would react that way, it would seem. So we edge closer to nature by reacting, in this case, with animals in their suffering, rather than to many in society that only strengthen their biases, their aggression, their hatred, their penchant for violence. The instinct for survival quickly overrides the reasonable need to simply reflect on life, its vicissitudes, its sufferings.

Ethics then begins as a project in crafting a way of life that will best yield an understanding of self and of things around one. A blunt code of commandments is unnecessary for the sensitive individual, whose relations with the world are built on doing no harm, on not interfering, on avoiding power and its expression, avoiding power over others and over nature. What need to be told not to abuse that which one is seeking to understanding as is?

These are some foundational elements of ethics, but perceived not as dictum but in harmony with the evolved potential of human beings. Crafting ethics means developing a way that will provide optimal understanding of the most difficult challenges of life, especially suffering, the avoidance of suffering, and the resolution not to cultivate suffering, either in the self, in others, in nature, or the world.

An objection to J. Krishnamurti is his apparent reliance on an autonomous will, on an individual effort that transcends society, culture, and ideology. Such an effort is beyond average people, and others are content with their power and possessions that they would assume themselves to be in control of their environment. Can anyone really transcend socialization, experience, and the psychology of habit?

But Krishnamurti argues, in his 1958 talk, “The Individual and the Ideal”:

Though environment conditions the individual, he can always free himself, break away from his background. The individual is the maker of the very environment to which he becomes a slave; but he has also the power to break away from it and create an environment that will not dull his mind or spirit.

But a grand autonomy is not what Krishnamurti is arguing when he cites the necessities of the individual to liberate himself or herself from one’s environment. We cannot free ourselves from experiences, language, concepts, thoughts, or material conditions. Rather, Krishnamurti is focusing on the totality of the environment we cultivate by design or default, and the degree of our conscious awareness of what we are doing. Within this sensory realm, the individual can work towards a distinction, a refinement, of the mental state.

Krishnamurti insists that the mass of humanity and our relationship to people, property, ideas, and beliefs is a flowing phenomena, ever-changing. It regularly presents “new rulers, new phrases, new priests, new doctrines.” One may go further in identifying society and its activities as a spectacle, a spectacle of spectacles mesmerizing the masses, distracting them, placating their instincts, thus allowing the powerful to go on with their control unimpeded.

The question for the individual who senses the nature of society, then, is not how to make this societal phenomenon congenial to the individual but how to get out of its way, to avoid being mesmerized and absorbed.

To do this, Krishnamurti espouses a new morality, not ethics or ideals based on authority handed down (because that has clearly failed to bring sustainability, conviviality, justice) but to begin anew with a thorough examination of the mind, being a thorough examination of the present moment.

“Our present morality is based on the past or the future, on the traditional, or the what ought to be,” says Krishnamurti, here alluding both to the authority of established traditional morality and to an extrapolation of ideologies that present a plan towards which to work. A dialectic between exchanging the past with the future is the only method known to contemporaries. And it does not work. It does not work because the past is embedded in the present, and the future is a projection of the opposite of the past — which is, in fact, our present. Hence our projected future is merely the opposite of what is our present reality. As Krishnamurti puts it, “The ideal, the what should be, helps us to cover up and avoid what is.”

We must give up the ideal future as much as we give up the troubled past. We must focus the mind on the present and the present relationships of the mind to existence. This relationship may be to people, to land, to nature, to personal habits. Krishnamurti explains this approach simply, gently, and logically. The approach is not a new one, of course. Zen demands that we stop hating ourselves and others (the past) but also stop trying to enlighten ourselves (the ideal) — just pay attention to the present moment. Gautama Buddha advised that we stop chasing after teachings and doctrines and simply pay attention to the present moment, which entails attention to the mind and all its accretions, fears, sorrows, contentments, dullness, acuteness, weariness.

As is well known, Krishnamurti did not want any given sect or system to lay claim to method, but he sought to refine philosophical thinking so that it would be available to all.

What results from attention to the present moment, a form of contemplation or meditation, is an individual who is capable of pursuing self-sustaining thoughts, actions, and plans. What is done rightly in the moment naturally continues into the next moment, and onwards. This is what Krishnamurti would present as a requisite to a discussion of society and the world. Taken up fully, the actions of such a individual would ripple out from their life to those of others, like Gandhi’s saying of being the change we want to see in the world. Only thus would the fiction of “society” be transformed. As Krishnamurti says,

Whether you begin near or far, you are there. Without understanding yourself, whatever you do will inevitably bring about confusion and sorrow. The beginning is the ending.

Ethics begins not with a set of inherited commandments or established caste or class system, or even a set dependence on certain technologies and economics, but with the mind, and what the mind of an individual can do with the present moment.

The Buddhist skandhas or aggregates describe the basics of existence, the components of all that exists. However simple and primordial, the aggregates essentially comprise that which Western science has used to describe observable phenomena. Only the method of hypothesis and experimentation is missing. But these latter are not essential to a philosophical construct based firmly on observation, which is available to all of us.

The aggregates are:

• form or matter
• sensation or feeling
• perception or cognition
• mental formations, volition, will, karma
• consciousness

The skandhas or aggregates are usually considered important to Buddhist philosophy in presenting insights about the “self” and about impermanence. But an ethical angle ultimately emerges, and this becomes the whole point of understanding the aggregates, unlike science that does not draw out practical lessons

The placement of aggregates in a hierarchy of consciousness expresses this ethical component.

The aggregates do form a hierarchy: from matter to sentience, from sentience to cognition, from cognition to a certain level of mental interaction, and finally to consciousness. Science is interested in this hierarchy as an evolutionary phenomena, while natural philosophy posits these elements in a great chain of being. Yet historically, both science and metaphysics have missed the practical ethical implications of the aggregates and their hierarchy.

How can we formulate ethics about treatment of people, animals, and natural phenomena if we describe them as science has done historically since Descartes, and even with Darwin? Animals are machines and humans are no very far away, according to reason and science. The earth is a flexible wad of minerals to be infinitely exploited, inexhaustible, too big to fail. Only in these fading decades emerges — however judged to be sentimental and anti-technological — the Gaia theory and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Both are imaginative extrapolations of limited societal and institutional instruments, namely science and law. Science and law are limited instruments because they are subordinate to the expressions of powerful elites, not to a scientific method or to definitions of justice. This must be our first realization. But, further, these counter-theories are ethical expressions, not scientific or judicial. They attempt to recover some of the insight of a holistic philosophy of life based on the premises of the skandhas.

If matter is the common distribution of suchness, then the first principle is that all beings are interrelated. If the first stage of evolution is sensation or feeling, we can identify the structures of sensation, we can identify when a sentient being experiences pain. Thus animals are distinct from plants in that they evolved a nervous system capable of detecting pain. But plants re related to us. That is why we recognize them, find certain aesthetic value in them, even as we dismissively call them mere plants, flowers, trees. Our ancestors perceived beings within the trees, as within water and less animate matter. This was a primitive accounting for a range of sentience.

At the next level is perception and cognition. While almost all plants respond to sunlight, water, temperature, and physical forces like wind, plants did not evolve structures to be cognizant of these forces, while animals did. Indeed, animals evolved structures to become cognizant of forces that not only cause pain but cause responses to their forces.

At this point, the fourth skandha of mental perception brings a finer line between animals and humans, one blurred not so much by volition as human ability to design, intend, and carry through. Thus animal instinct for survival proposes only fight or flight as options to danger. Violence in the animal world is completely related to survival. Human beings use volition to survive also, but extend the instinct of fight or flight by willfully designing more complex and intentional forms of violence. While animals can be violent, based on their evolutionary instinct for survival, human beings cultivate primordial instincts into elaborate and willful forms of violence, including aggression, war, and torture.

The fifth skandha — consciousness — is reserved to human beings, a premature gift, or a wound, of evolution. Human consciousness is comprised of the ability to reflect, and the ability to reflect on reflection. We can watch our thoughts or listen to our conversation. We can watch ourselves expressing what we think, believe, deny, wonder about, lie about, express with heartfelt sentiment or shallow condemnation. The most odious commands and the most loving expressions come from the same consciousness, and the self can watch them, monitor them, be aware of them. This makes human sentience different from that of any other creature we know. The witness that watches the self, that is aware of what the self does or thinks, is uniquely overbearing.

Such is the hierarchy of being and sentience that also compels an ethics. That overbearingness of the witness is what we commonly call cconscience, that which impedes humanity by its silent acquiescent, beaten down by society and culture and that psychological product of society we call our self. It is identity but not self, at least not a mature self, a self identical with, merged with, in union wityh the so-called witness.

But self is inevitably overlooked in the mass of humanity. That all things are connected, that human consciousness obliges humans to hold this interconnectedness as the touchstone of all behavior, all action — this is the compelling conclusion that science increasingly shows, but which was known millennia ago. That peoples have conveniently overlooked the logic of observation with regard to ethics only debases the whole enterprise we call society and culture.

But to ancient Buddhists, the skandhas pointed much further. Not only to the preciousness, the rarity of being a human being, but to the ironic ephemerality of that pinnacle of the conscious animal. The skandhas point to the fact that no self inhabits this mortal frame, this delicate consciousness. For when the aggregates collapse in old age and death, where is the self? Where is that consciousness? Buddhism was reluctant to venture into metaphysics. It did not matter where that self, that consciousness, went. Even the reflection on such questions distracted from the core of living, from ethics, from the question of what we are to do now, today, tomorrow.

For religious Buddhism, the bardo and rebirth was a solution to a riddle. Their equivalent in all the religions of the world have similarly been proposed solutions to a great riddle. But the status of beyond was not relevant to the observer here and now. To the observer, the aggregates had dissolved, the self was gone, consciousness had dissipated. How the survivor felt, this gut feeling about death, was the beginning of philosophy, the not-turning-back from the existential reality of the dissolution of the aggregates. For if this dissolution occurs at every level of form and matter, every level of sentience, can it be argued that we should be exempt, that we should not share the fate of all other sentient beings, all of us brought together mysteriously, fortuitously, but destined to be dispersed who knows where?

In moments of solitude, we can rest in the flow of sentience, in the pattern of the observed. We can touch upon that which was before our birth and which remains after our death. And touching on this we can realize it in our consciousness. Our consciousness can rest in the process even as we experience sentience, even as we chase after this or that impermanence only to finally realize where everything is headed. A new ethics can emerge from this reflection on the aggregates of existence. Our shoddy tolerance of all that is contrived destructiveness in the human being can be seen to be nothing but frustrated evolution, broken and incomplete, no more than pointless failure to think deeply on the sensations we feel and entertain. If we can grasp the experience of solitude, we are that close to an ethics that can bring contentment.

One of the pitfalls of accepting dogma — or anything we might accept as a model for thought or behavior — is not so much the presumption of its authority but the transferring of that “authority” to ourselves.

Taking on this authority is not a matter of the authenticity of the body of doctrine but a matter of our own psychology of submission, acceptance, and consequent arrogance. We want to accept a teacher or guru or model because of their appearance of authority or piety, but in the process we have suspended a vital function. We ought to listen first, and test what we hear, using experience and expectation, using our deepest intuitive criterion.

Not that we must do anything. Rather, we must explore the logic, the motive, the genealogy, the affective ramifications of whatever is presented to us. Above all, we must not fill a psychological gap that our downtrodden ego may need. At that point, the content of the thought is not relevant; we are entertaining authority regardless of the body of thought. In turn, many people subsequently preempt the psychological needs of others, having violated their own need to pursue the process of self-discovery.

The Buddha himself asked his hearers not to accept what he said without testing it first. His saying is famous:

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is written in religious books. Do not believe in anything simply on the authority of teachers and elders. Only after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

How can we genuinely advocate for something or live it out in our lives if we really have not pursued its significance, its meaning, its import, its ramifications? And, after that, extrapolated it to others?

Even then, can we ever be sure? Shall we become skeptics of everything, doubters of motives, suspicious, even paranoid? The answer is that is that if we remain in skepticism and doubt it is because we have failed to bring an important component of experience to what we hear. We have failed to listen not only to what is presented to us but failed to listen to our own heart.

Listening to oneself, one’s conscience, one’s heart, is risky because it presumes that we know how and know what to look for. This seems circular. How can we listen if we don’t know what to listen for? Part of the problem is the modern dependence on externals for feedback, without a measured and careful self-examination of our own feelings, emotions, fears, comforts, and capabilities. In exploring ourselves honestly we do not need to judge. What we discover may be discouraging, unpleasant, unfortunate. We may find that we are not motivated as much as we thought, not as independent-minded as we thought, rather fearful and stretched in our construction of a social mask. Once we remove the mask, do we replace it with an equivalent one? The masks we construct are obstacles not so much to others, who can quickly dispose of them if they are clever, but to ourselves in wondering why we are what we are when we wish we might be otherwise. Time to stop wishing and to accept ourselves, foibles, false masks, aand all.

Hence the testing recommended by the Buddha has some prerequisites. We cannot test without some background — not in an academic or scientific sense but in a psychological way. We need to make the testing a complement to the process of self-discovery. We have to listen to how the testing is resonating within our minds and hearts. Of course, we need to be ready to do this even before we embark on listening. We need to nurture the seed within us before sprouting it, because once it sprouts it won’t withdraw into itself again.

We are none other than ourselves — trite and simple as it seems. Not the contrived self, the self full of thoughts and plans and illusions but the deep still pool that should govern, regulate, and listen. Our eagerness to fit into the social schema around us should not drown out the solitude within us, from which our selves emerge. In the process, we may realize that we are the sum of many factors over which we have had little control — or devoted little reflection. We may conclude that there is no “self” within, nothing that we actually worked on, shaped, molded.

Out of these diverse factors that comprise our “self” — these many causes and effects — we nevertheless represent our “self” as the center point of a circle around which everything sits. This is a necessary artifice of the mind to maintain cohesion and character. But not all of these factors are out of our control. We have assembled a cumulative deposit of ethical, experiential, and affective sensibilities (from the moment of birth) with which we must work before we can reach a point of progress, of integration, of spiritual well-being. That is the process of transcendence. Most people are simply trying to function, not transcend, are trying to keep the mass of thought swirling round the center, not letting it stop for fear of what they may find.

If we make progress, are we eager to share our insights with others? Share — or, rather, show it off? Those who don’t know speak, and those who do remain silent — goes the saying. It is for each one of us to make this effort to self-understanding, and the ability to allow others the space to make their own discoveries, errors, and assumptions is part of our own job of self-understanding. What we know or think we know is true may be bursting within us to tell, to shout, but all we are doing then is making noise in somebody’s ear, spreading self-serving, not self-understanding. Helping others often means silence, watching, and listening. Helping personalities — seldom solitaries, by the way — are exquisitely courteous, patient, reluctant to intervene, not loud or self-centered, and almost intuitive in their ability to read the other person’s unspoken thoughts and respect them.

There is a wonderful story in Dae Gak’s book Going Beyond Buddha that illustrates the pitfalls of paying attention to others to the point of overlooking of our sensibilities, our own pure nature receptive and constructive as it is. It is adapted from Tolstoy’s “three hermits” story and makes it more conveniently one. The story also illustrates the folly of free advice, of assuming that we are right, even when we “technically” may think we are — but fail to keep silence. For this story, the reader can substitute truth or integration or wholeness or Absolute for “God” as desired. Here is the story:

Once there was a man who was very devout. He had lived a life of confusion and abandon but changed his ways and found God. He became quite pious, and where there was once self-consciousness and inferiority, there was now a strength and belief that was apparent in every step he took. His religion had served him well, and he was generous in his willingness to share his beliefs.

One day he was rowing a boat and came near an island. A hermit who lived on the island was praying. He heard the prayers of the hermit, and knowing as he did the true way to call God’s name, he beached his boat and instructed the hermit in the correct way to pray. The hermit, grateful for the instruction, bowed, and the religious man was on his way. As he pulled away from the shore, he was joyous as he heard the hermit pray as he had instructed. But the boat was no more than a few feet off the shore when the prayers changed, and the hermit was back to his mistaken prayer forms. Disgusted, the religious man said to himself, “He is useless, he will never learn the right way to call God’s name.” As he looked up from his rowing, he saw, running across the water, the hermit yelling, “Sir, kind sir, how was it that I was supposed to pray God’s name?”

Two stories by 16th-century Korean Zen master So Sahn capture the compelling sense of ahimsa or nonviolence that ought to be the ground of the mind and heart.

Here is the first story:

A monk was traveling alone along a deserted highway when robbers fell upon him and stole his bowl, beads, and robe. They tied him up at the roadside with the thick grasses there and fled. The monk did not wish to harm the living grasses by struggling to unbind himself. He lay alone into the cold night and into the hot day that followed, when it happened that the king and his retinue passed on horseback on their way to a hunt. They stopped when they saw the monk, and understood what had happened. The king himself dismounted from his horse and unbound the monk. So impressed was the king (especially given that he was on his way to hunt) that at that very moment he declared himself a Buddhist.

Here is the second story:

A monk was traveling alone when he reached a village. He presented his begging bowl at each door, arriving at last at the door of a jewel-maker, who was in his workshop fashioning a jewel for a wealthy client. A goose wandered about the place. The jewel-maker went into the house to get some food for the monk. In his absence the goose came to the workshop table and swallowed the gem. When the jewel-maker returned and discovered the jewel gone, he screamed angrily at the monk, throttling him and beating him, all the more because the monk would say nothing. The monk knew that if he said what had happened, the jewel-maker would kill the goose. At last, the jewel-maker bound the monk and threw him into a corner, waiting for his confession. After a few hours, the monk noticed the goose excreting. Then he said to the jewel-maker that he could find his gem there in the pile of excrement.

Among other things, these stories are simple conveyances of the idea of nonviolence being not merely passive but even to the point of suffering while upholding the principle. The monks in the stories could well be Hindu sadhus or forest hermits, or Jains, or Buddhists. The concept of ahimsa was the common inheritance of these Eastern religions.

The continuity of this virtue shames the proponents of a lax or flexible, circumstantial attitude towards sentience. So Sahn notes the extreme character of the first monk, who did not even want to injury the grass — which technically is not sentient in the sense that it does not have the mechanism for sensing pain — as contemporary science can now confirm. The story-teller knows this but wants to emphasize a point, one which Jains especially, sensitive to the reality of interconnectedness — the grasses harbor insects, for example — would appreciate.

Extending non-violence to common objects, even inanimate ones, simply reflects an inner disposition towards the entire hierarchy of beings, a recognition of the mingling of life force in all matter of objects. Shinto also appreciates the life presence within rocks, trees, rivers. Whether literally or figuratively, what we do externally molds the inner heart, and our physical actions record a pattern that brings feedback to our vital selves, however subtly and unconsciously. As most people know, psychologists see a child’s abuse of insects as a danger sign. But they would probably also have to see a child pounding angrily on rocks or trees or even grasses as equally suggestive.

The first story is also about change in the human heart. Here the highest potentate of the land still regards himself as open to compassionate action, and can be brought to shame by the example of one of his subjects. The Buddhist King Asoka is suggested, whose short-lived reign attempted in naive fashion to institute virtues without force or violence. Asoka’s brief reign (and the brief reign of nonviolence as a public institution) was like the monk’s day and night, a voluntary witnessing to the effects of nonviolence on others.

In the second story, the jewel-maker is king of his household, and he binds the begging monk until he will confess, that is, until he will kill the goose. The king of this household is ignorant of the truth because he is ignorant of his actions, blindingly lashing out at the monk, imagining him to have “slain” the gem. The monk is willing to suffer not so much on behalf of the goose but on behalf of the truth of his principles. Such courage and stamina must accompany principles if they are to make their way to light — if the truth of the situation with the gem is to be revealed. Who can refrain from a knowing nod to the monk who points to the pile of excrement to identify the gem. What, indeed is the difference between them?

The Western world has never perceived the compelling nature of ahimsa, always viewing itself as privileged to dominate nature, environment, animals, trees, rivers, etc. Early in the history of religious consciousness in the West, Yahweh bids humans “fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth” (Genesis: 1,28). This ruling over and subduing commenced from that point on in animal sacrifice and war, culminating directly in our technological subordination of nature, animals, and peoples to systems of suffering and violence. These systems are always seen as necessary for human vitality, be it factory farms, war, or nuclear power. Ultimately, these systems project themselves into every capacity of human effort, a virtual civilization built on violence and suffering.

The genius of ahimsa is both philosophical and psychological. To practice is to be transformed, to confirm the rightness of its way, to feel more in harmony with nature — healthier, more tranquil, without the unconscious need to evoke a violent response if pushed too far becuse we are everywhere and nowhere. Ahimsa is without agenda, pretense, necessity, or emotion, without the need to do something to something or someone else in order to be at peace. Ahimsa is to not feel angry, resentful, passionate, or sad. It is simply to be as everything else is — the empty mind, the trees, the grasses, the sentient beings.

For most Westerners, the image of the hermit was established by the quintessential Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote, in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (mingling his description of hermits with that of monks):

These unhappy exiles from social life were impelled by the dark and implacable genius of superstition. Their mutual resolution was supported by the example of millions of either sex, of every age, and of every rank; and each proselyte, who entered the gates of a monastery was persuaded that he trod the steep and thorny path of eternal happiness.

But Gibbon’s essay lacked the choice details that his generation would have liked to confirm the degenerate character of the hermits. Indeed, that Gibbon himself did not supply such details suggets that he understood they were largely hagiography. Gibbon’s real concern was cultural, the rise of Christianity representing to him barbarism.

Gibbon did not abstract any particular virtues from the eremites, based on renunciation of the world or other self-discipline, for Gibbon, like his contemporaries — and not unlike modern audiences — were not abstemious in pursuing a convivial life of social networking and indulgence.

Late classical and early medieval accounts of hermits and recluses were largely hagiographical narratives of great ascetic deeds and miracles. They often failed to convey any moral quality. The genre of literature required that audiences first be convinced of a person’s holiness, and then respond by prayer to the saint and assent to the church authorities assigned to promote the social order represented by the saint. Thus the limits of spirituality in those early centuries.

An example of such literature is the description of a certain recluse named Hospicius by 6th century bishop and chronicler Gregory of Tours:

There was at this time in the city of Nice a recluse Hospicius who was very abstemious. He wore iron chains next to his body and over these a hair shirt and ate nothing but plain bread with a few dates. And during Lent he lived on the roots of Egyptian herbs such as the hermits use, which were brought to him by traders. First he would drink the soup in which they were cooked and eat the roots next day. The Lord did not disdain to work great miracles through him.

We need not pause over the character of this archetypal description. Dates and Egyptian herbs in Nice?

But audiences insist on stereotypes if not archetypes. Hence the popular image of the hermit as an artifact in occasional modern fiction, where hermits are often eccentric players in a carnival of madness. As a random example, Julia Blackburn describes a hermit character in her historical fiction The Leper’s Companions, set in the 15th century:

The hermit was filthy. His cloak was stiff with dirt and so was his long beard and his straggling hair. His skin was cracked and broken and he had rotten teeth. He was talking to himself in a nasal, high-pitched voice while scratching and twitching and searching his body for vermin. He smelt of excrement.

A priest happens by, asking for guidance, and the hermit assures him that he has it. The hermit pulls out a withered severed hand, the hand of St. Anthony himself. He avers that he shared the saint’s cave once. The hermit then boasts about his collection of bones:

I had a basket filled with the fingers of Holy Innocents but I lost them in a storm at sea. And I had all the teeth of John the Baptist, but they went as well. At least I got Saint Anselm’s thigh bone and brought it here. …

Then there is the castaway, the involuntary solitary, alone on a deserted island. The protagonist of the novel, a leper, now lost on this same island, comes across the castaway’s hut, and a loaf of bread made from herbs. The leper spots the man in the trees.

He was naked but partly covered by the length of his hair and his beard. Once he had been seen he began to laugh a shrill nervous laugh like the warning cry of some bird.

The leper sat down with his back to the stone wall of the house and waited. Slowly the laughing man drew closer and closer, until he sat crouched in front of him, shivering and staring and only occasionally breaking out into a spasm of high-pitched laughter. “I’m the only man in the world left alive!” he announced in a language the leper could understand easily. “I’m the only man in the world left alive!” repeating the words, and with no others to follow, as if he had forgotten everything else that could be said.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s character Benn Gunn (from Treasure Island) comes to mind, when the young narrator of the story, exploring the deserted island, discovers someone living there:

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Ben Gunn,” he answered, and his voice sounded hoarse and awkward, like a rusty lock. “I’m poor Ben Gunn, I am; and I haven’t spoke with a Christian these three years.”

I could now see that he was a white man like myself and that his features were even pleasing. His skin, wherever it was exposed, was burnt by the sun; even his lips were black, and his fair eyes looked quite startling in so dark a face. Of all the beggar-men that I had seen or fancied, he was the chief for raggedness. He was clothed with tatters of old ship’s canvas and old sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin. About his waist he wore an old brass-buckled leather belt, which was the one thing solid in his whole accoutrement.

“Three years!” I cried. “Were you shipwrecked?”

“Nay, mate,” said he; “marooned.”

Granted that Julia Blackburn’s work is not strictly historical but with a touch of impressionism, fantasy, magic realism. She is not horrified by her characters, any more than Stevenson, whose Ben Gunn is a bit more rational given the 19th century. Unlike Gibbon, we may imagine, who from the comfort of his Swiss chateau, could not countenance the vicissitudes of past era’s. For Gibbon, as for the neo-classicists of his day, everyone was either an aristocrat or an indecipherable.

A strong imagination is needed to recreate the past, and then a stronger one to extrapolate the universality of human experience into something tangible and humane. Within the maze of this history of human experience is the hermit.

In Zen, mujo is the concept of impermanence, a philosophical idea but perhaps expressed best in poetry and art. But impermanence is not philosophical nothingness, as perceived in the West, or even the emptiness of Buddhist thought, because mujoit refers to a sense of life, not a thought or fixed summation. “The tragic” comes closer in Western thinking, for nothingness is hard steel and jaw, merciless and unbending.

Mujo suggests an aesthetic (for lack of a better word) applied to the present object before us, to the ambiance and sentiment experienced by the presence of something before us now. This aesthetics enables one to comprehend the vitality of the moment, distinct from a philosophical insistence on abstraction. This vitality is the strength of Zen, incorporating a profound concept simply and imperceptibly within a poem, painting, calligraphy, photograph, etc.

Adherents of Eastern and Western religions can easily lapse into an air of triumphalism, what Buddhist writer Chögyam Trungpa calls spiritual materialism. Certainty of one’s path can be lack of gratitude to predecessors, but also self-deceiving in assuming that paths are blazed open by brute force or sheer will, namely one’s own.

Nothing is so original. Effects are the results of causes, but causes are the results of effects. This tumbling forth of nature, this permaculture of ideas, does not reveal absolutes but rather sentiments confirmed by experience and the human heart. We learn from a variety of sources, even contrary ones. The solitary is so solitary because of this debt, this sense of continuity and the inadequacy of others surrounding him or her, and not because of their own individuality or originality.

Mystics and masters seldom refer to enlightenment. Those who practice simplicity seldom refer to their simplicity. Those who speak do not know, and those who do not speak know better, to paraphrase the Buddhist adage. The world of ideas and concepts is not linear, not progressive, not even cyclical. It is not simply revealed, but leaks out of time, balances delicately in a moment’s revelation, captured by intuition.

Above all, insight comes with work. The Christian desert hermits emphasized physical labor — or, rather, physical engagement with the world about us — because it engaged the whole self, not just that cerebral faculty of mind. The Zen monk regularly weeded a dry garden so that not one green shoot showed among the white rocks. To be engaged thoroughly in physical labor had its domestic counterparts. Every moment meant full attention, “burning down to an ash.” As the body, so the mind.

Zen master Dogen only required two notions, as John Stevens, the translator of Japanese poetry, points out: 1) shikantaza and 2) shusho ichigyo.

Shikantaza means zazen, sitting in meditation without anything happening — no mantra, no focus, no following of breath, only emptiness and attention to the moment. Meditation styles vary widely. None is to be disparaged. Zen is the most rigorous, perhaps, in not bothering to build up to mental control of self or circumstances. The idea of shikantaza is that we do not sit with intention or expectation. We are not practicing in order to control thoughts, reduce stress, become a better person, or less to achieve enlightenment. One is just sitting. Things will happen if everything works out. Why just sitting? Well, why thinking, standing, rushing about? We have time for all these things. There is a theory behind all this, of course, but it is better not to elicit theory if we can simply get into zazen.

And that is because of shusho ichigyo, which means pithily: “Practice and enlightenment are one.” Nothing spectacular is necessarily going to happen in our lives. We are as much a part of everything as anything else. What spectacular happens to a tree, a rock, a bird? What seems to be spectacular in someone’s life is not much, really, in the long run. Aiming for sudden enlightenment, as the Rinzai Zen school sought to achieve — by using koans and expecting insights from moments or experiences — can sound hollow and contrived. Yes, sunsets and flowers and quirky juxtapositions of things and synchronicity can inspire a mood of enlightenment or insight, but after that — as Jack Kornfield’s popular book puts it — “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.”

Yet the spiritual path does not eschew beauty or aesthetics, only that it finds it in everyday natural objects, which contain an enormous mystery of being. Those sunsets and flowers dominate aesthetics for most people, but the favored experiences have always been unique to the self. The historical hermits deliberately (or perhaps unconsciously) sought out those aspects of nature that best reflected these unique feelings and sentiments. As a boy, Ramakrishna fell into a swoon when he saw great white birds flying up from a field against a pitch black sky preceding a storm. The unique and unexpected experiences, not the conventional sunset and flowers that everyone knows, are the open windows to mystery. There aren’t many. And they are reserved for special people, which we are not. We must lurk around the mundane to realize the mystery of everything else. Only the self knows what touches the inner chord.

Mujo is the panoply of objects played against sentiment, of nature laid out before us to the point of clarity, a clarity so momentary and unexpected that we suddenly realize that, despite our intrusive consciousness, despite our selfish monkey mind, we are nothing but a part of all this.

And that this “all” is rich and complex — and poor and simple. But our frail human consciousness strives on for more, more insight, more meaning, more satisfaction. We are doomed (some would say wired or blessed or destined) to plumb the sources of sentiment and feeling, of love and sorrow.

Mujo is at once contentment and melancholy, unity with nature and sadness at the folly of our humanness and separation. A representative expression of mujo is to be found in the poetry of Ryokan, the Zen monk and hermit, for one. Here is an example:

Sometimes I sit quietly.
Listening to the sound of falling leaves.
Peaceful indeed is the life of a monk.
Cut off from all worldly matters.
Then why do I shed these tears?

I am quite aware
That it is all unreal:
One by one, the things
Of this world pass on.
But why do I still grieve?

The distinction between truth and justice collapses when examined subjectively. Truth is every mind’s formal pursuit until the project becomes less defined, more vague, more mysterious and unfathomable — and when it is shattered by the circumstances of existence.

The notion of truth is not easily given up: the possibility, the tangible, tactile presence that eludes definition. It is the project of consciousness. According to one’s socialization and culture, truth varies in contour and detail, but seen from a universal perspective, emerges from the culturally dependent and seems to transcend any given society or set of seekers. And yet, it eludes even the generously open frame of mind.

Can this be because what the animal instinct embedded within the human psyche really wants is not the abstraction of truth but the concrete situational condition of justice? Not the institutional interpretation of justice today but the overarching virtue envisioned by philosophers — even when it is not seen in practice. Justice seems more tangible, more concrete, more susceptible to codification and reason, more quantitative, more accountable, more available for knowing and implementing. Justice ought to be a facet of truth. Indeed, if we suspend using the word truth but keep the connotations, we come closer to identifying facets and factors to take into account when defining justice. Justice in this classic sense of harmony is a relational concept that becomes more tangible than truth.

Justice sounds legal and political, dependent on society and circumstance — far more than “truth.” In psychological terms, justice is that balance sought by the mind between the deepest and the more practical aspects of the psyche. Justice is capable of extending the concept of balance and harmony beyond self, self-and-others, and to nature. Justice is practical and flexible, yet as robust a concept as if we are naming something inchoate in nature and not human self-discovery.

But the cry for justice is more fundamental than the need for truth.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes that “There is no built-in harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of humanity.” And this is so because both the pursuit of truth and the well-being of people is always bound by society’s norms, which in turn are defined by society’s elites, by those enjoying power and authority. The outward norms are relative to the culture — relative to those who have defined the culture.

And there is no naturally ordained harmony within these norms because human beings are not “natural.” Aggregate behavior and the pooling of power is never benign. To seek well-being, it is necessary to seek justice, not truth. To seek justice means to seek a harmony not granted by either society nor nature, not the later as “nature doing what we want it to.”

We do not create but discover harmony. We shape our consciousness to this harmony. Justice becomes a useful metaphor for harmony — though the former word is laden with political and social connotations. Legendary and historical presentations of human suffering and plight always point out that “justice” is more urgent, more pressing, than “truth.”

In the Buddhist Jataka tales of the Buddha’s past lives, with their distinctly Hindu social settings, are many representative stories, especially that of the “Gem Thief.” An attractive young couple are riding a horse-drawn cart into the city from the country. The king gets a glimpse of the young woman (her name is Sujata) and desires her at any cost. He orders one of his soldiers to hide a gem in the cart. Then the king announces that someone has stolen his gem, orders the gates closed and everyone searched. The gem is found in the cart. The husband is sentenced to death, while the distraught young woman is led to the palace. She cries out:

There are no gods! Surely they dwell afar!
Surely there are no world-warder here!
Those men who hurriedly work lawless deeds,
Are there none here to bid them stop?

This is a strongly expressed argument for such an ancient document, for it identifies the source of suffering squarely within human society and power. The logical conclusion is that not truth but justice saves, with justice being a maintenance of balance and harmony within any “system.” The story has a happy ending, as do all fairy tales that teach a moral, but we know that this sort of behavior has been universal in all societies, and continues today unrelentingly.

The “Gem Thief” is reminiscent of the Jewish scriptural recounting of King David’s similar actions (2 Samuel: 11). A woman is bathing, and from the rooftop of his palace, the king sees her and wants her at any cost. He arranges the death of her husband, a military officer, by having his forces abandon him to death from the enemy in the heat of battle. Nowhere are Bathsheba’s views recorded, but she too may have wondered if “there are no gods” to thwart the lawless deeds of the powerful.

Another example from Greco-Jewish tradition is the story of Job, about which Jung has elaborated in his essay, “Response to Job.” Here again a representative human being is struck down by authority and power — except that the nature of the crime springs from the conspiracy of God and Satan. The story of Job is probably the best exemplar of this genre of questioning tale, wherein even the happy ending is so unconvincing that it is hard to escape the critique of theology.

In the Christian Gospel’s presentation of Jesus on the cross, he laments: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Though the incident is often glossed over as interpolation or literary device, the Gospel compilers permit a genuine sentiment to appear without mitigation. The words of lament can apply to any number of existential circumstances. The obvious silence of God is ignored in unswerving acceptance of tenets, creeds, and beliefs. Only the attentiveness of conscience to the circumstances of humanity’s situation provides the insight into the contrast of justice and truth. Only the universalizing of moral vision prepares the self for the beginning of truth and the necessity of justice, here understood as not merely an ethical necessity but a metaphysical one.

Martin Buber wondered “whether it not be literally true that God formerly spoke to us and is now silent.” But perhaps silence is the expected response given the record of ethical silence all along in the scriptural narratives. This is the believer’s dilemma, poignantly expressed in Eli Wiesel’s allegorical play, “The Trial of God.” Jewish tradition has historically had to deal with the silence of God more literally because of its lack of power in the societies in which Jews found themselves. But individuals in all times, places, and circumstances have had to deal with what can be called the silence of truth.

Kierkegaard had a different solution to the same realization. He does not refocus on justice and balance but offers, in effect, a response to Job. But Kierkegaard, like the Job author, fails to resolve the dilemma and transfers it to the supposed inadequacy of the human heart:

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence! Bring men to silence. The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create silence.

If silence means shutting down power, authority and will in order to allow the voice of conscience and harmony to be heard, then Kierkegaard’s sentiment would inch closer to insight.

But in the end, the lament of the ages is bluntly understood not by the believers but by Nietzsche, no friend of piety, impatient both with nature and a tragic sense of life. The triumph of harmony can only come from within. Inner strength only works for one person at a time. Aspirations to harmony cannot change the “disease” of the world Kierkegaard refers to, nor can it assuage the pain of life.

No wonder Buddhism is dismissively seen by Westerners as a palliative to suffering. Some celebrate its abandoning the quest for metaphysical truth, others its counsel for shaping a mind that harmonizes with the mysterious flow of nature. But the West’s abandonment of the search for truth has not offered the modern world justice nor even pointed to it in abstract. In the West, neither advocates for or against truth have understood what people want.

Only silence is left, the silence of Sujata, Bathsheba, Job, Jesus. Yet they are not silent when we identify with their plight. Rather, the only silence is the silence heard in response to their questions.