Author: Meng-hu

Reigen Eto (1721-1785) was a student of the renowned Zen Master Hakuin. At one point, Reigen left Hakuin’s temple to pursue the solitude of the mountains as a hermit. He remained in mountain solitude for ten years, pursuing the teaching and practice of his master. One day, he learned that Hakuin was giving a lecture at a nearby retreat. Reigen Eto left the mountains to attend, and was so inspired by the talk that he resumed his studies with Hakuin. Eventually, Hakuin declared Reigen’s enlightenment. Reigen eventually became head of a Kyoto temple, where he introduced Hakuin’s teaching, the popularity of which spread.

Hakuin was also a painter, and Reigen Eto became one, too. Painting was a precise art suited to Zen single-mindedness of expression. Reigen pursued standard themes, depicting Bodhidharma, Hotei, Mount Fuji, and natural objects like crows and pine trees. A lesser known work and its object, however, may be his most persuasive.

In 1543, the Western world intruded upon Japan. A Portuguese warship landed on the island of Tanegashima, and two sailors armed with guns alighted. Eventually, the island became the chief stopoff for Portuguese trade — the Westerners concept of trade being extortion, violence, and force then visited on hapless Japan. The Japanese remembered the metal objcect that was the source of the intruders’ power: the gun. Having no knowledge or experience with this weapon, the name of the island — the word “tanegashima” — became synonymous with “gun.” And this is the topic of Reigen Eto’s painting titled “The Gun,” a work strangely obscure among his own works and among historical Zen paintings.

The work, which is not reprinted on the Web at this writing — was painted in stylized form, with a haiku at the top and an object (in this case a gun) at the bottom. The gun is painted in swift brushstrokes, quick enough to represent the streaks of faded black ink callled “flying white.” The haiku reads: “The sound of the gun / is the entrance / to hell.”

The late John Daido Loori, co-editor of The Zen Art Book, remarks in that text on Reigen Eto’s painting: “Here we stand over two and a half centuries later and the only difference is that our instruments of destruction have become more sophisticated and efficient while our way of perceiving the universe and ourselves has remained virtually static.”

“Blindness is not darkness; it is a form of solitude.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, “August 25, 1983” in his Shakespeare’s Memory

The unsentimental view from earliest history judges blindness to be a curse or punishment. The view is represented in an anecdote related in the Gospel of John (9, 1-23), wherein Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man, born into the condition of blindness, a man “born blind.” The disciples ask Jesus: “Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus replies: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned… but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

This reply is designed to set the scene for a miracle showcasing the divinity of Jesus, but,in fact, exemplifies an essential biblical notion of God. The passage suggests the arbitrariness and capriciousness of Yahweh that Kierkegaard observes in the command to Abraham to kill his son, as much as in the divine attitude toward the treatment of the suffering Job. Accursedness is arbitrary punishment.

In the biblical Book of Tobit, the protagonist Tobit is blinded even while performing a good deed, burying the dead – but the dead man was proscribed by the authorities. For this God punishes Tobit, blinding him. After winding moral lessons, Tobit’s eyesight is restored – not by God but by a sympathetic angel.

When the French-born explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) visited the Himalaya Mountains in an early twentieth-century search for hermits, she encountered one old hermit who revealed that his vision was nearly gone. The explorer asked what he would do. When I am blind, he replied matter-of-factly, then I will die. No sense that blindness was exceptional, a curse, or a punishment.

Blind characters in literature have often been presented as a foil to and contrast with the sighted, conjuring contrasting images of wisdom preserved (in the sighted) and wisdom lost (in the blind). In the Oedipus plays of Sophocles, the hapless Oedipus blinds himself in tortuous guilt over his twin crimes of murder and incest. The blinding of the Earl of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear is presented as a metaphor, blindness considered to be a lack of discernment, a lack of insight, literslly a lack of sight. Even today one can speak of a foolish blunderer as “blind.” The English novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902) cound writein his Hudibras that: “A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog, but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.”

Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear merely completes the presentation of the man lacking judgment, therefore “blind.” Butler uses physical blindness as a foil to psychological or spiritual incapacity. Later, Kierkegaard’s notion of faith would be summed up as “blind faith,” or a leap, avoiding the real ramifications of physical blindness or the ubiquitously pernicious metaphor.

The famous author of the ancient Greek epic ballads The Iliad and The Odyssey is the well-known blind bard Homer. While even his existence can be questioned, why is “Homer” presented as blind at all? Perhaps an allusion in The Odyssey to a blind poet Demodokus suggests the identity of the anonymous Homer, but as likely it is the assumed fulsome character of the blind, attuned to voices and moods, assigned by fate to a secret insight, makes blindness here an attractive literary device, adding to the skill of the author Homer’s talent for lyric song and prodigious memory. Here blindness is an ironic gift, salvaging, even redeeming, the blind from curse.

We know less of the reaction of early and familiar historical figures to being left blind. We know the famous for their redeeming intelligence, less for their curse or what they thought of their blindness. Galileo (1564-1642) suffered from a mucocoele in one eye and progressive glaucoma leading to blindness. The fate of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is tragic, based on the era’s wide-spread practice of “cataract couching.” Bach underwent the surgery on both eyes by a traveling surgeon. The surgeon destroyed not only the presumed cataracts and the lenses, but inevitably much of the eye structure, provoking copious bleeding, and blindness. Bach was left in agonizing pain for days before he died.

The notion of blindness as punishment, reverberating through the centuries, is addressed by the English poet John Milton(1608-1674), who was blind by his fifties from glaucoma or cataracts. In “Sonnet 19,” the poet laments the loss of his eyesight more for the loss of the creativity that would have led to composing so many more literary works. In the poem Patience replies:

“God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Nor was blindness a complete solitude for Milton. He was not isolated from his work nor from his circle of colleagues. Indeed, Milton wrote his masterful Paradise Lost after losing his sight. He happily enjoyed the attentiveness of many amanuenses.

In our time, similarly, the blind Argentinian short story writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) enjoyed the company of many literati, functioning as a public intellectual. He was even named director of the National Library of Argentina in 1955, the very year of his definitive blindness. His mother, who lived to the age of 91, dutifully transcribed her son’s stories and essays for publication throughout her life. Like Milton, Borges thrived as a creative figure.

Borges is perhaps the most articulate describer of blindness. He sympathized with those who lost their sight suddenly, without a transition. He tells us that he knew he would one day lose his sight, as had his father, his paternal grandmother, and his great-grandfather, all of whom suffered cataracts. After multiple eye surgeries in youth, Borges had lost vision in one eye and the vision in his other eye continued to deteriorate. In 1955, while walking with friends in Buenos Aires, he tripped and fell, rising to discover himself blind, due to retinal detachment. But Borges never rued his blindness, writing once that “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument, everything has been given for an end.” He adds that “If a blind man thinks this way, he is saved. Blindness is a gift.” And Borges was accommodating, recognizing all who had helped him along the way. “Blindness has made me feel surrounded by the kindness of others. People always feel good will toward the blind.” Borges, like Milton, left a poem of benign sentiment concerning blindness, titled “On His Blindness.”

In the fullness of the years, like it or not,
a luminous mist surrounds me, unvarying,
that breaks things down into a single thing,
colorless, formless. Almost into a thought.
The elemental, vast night and the day
teeming with people have become that fog
of constant, tentative light that does not flag,
and lies in wait at dawn. I longed to see
just once a human face. Unknown to me
the closed encyclopedia, the sweet play
in volumes I can do no more than hold,
the tiny soaring birds, the moons of gold.
Others have the world, for better or worse;
I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse.

Those born blind are seldom remembered, unless, like Milton or Borges, they overcome their blindness to excel in another venture. Yet there are wuch exemplars. The social reformer and activist Helen Keller (1880-1968), became blind before two years of age, and deaf as well, due to diphtheria. The famous Spanish classical composer Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) suffered the same fate of diphtheria at age three. Rodrigo also surmounted his incapacity to enjoy a career in composition, among his works the popularly-received “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Like Milton, Rodrigo enjoyed the strong support of family and creative colleagues. Another well-received musical figure is the contemporary opera and pop singer Andrea Bocelli (b. 1958), who lost much of his eyesight from congenital cataracts, and become blind in youth from a sport accident.

Controvertialist and artist-writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was afflicted by a pituitary tumor that incapacitated his optic nerve. The artist lost his command of color in 1937, and was completely blind in 1951. He acknowledged the event in the short story “The Sea Mists of Winter,” the title describing his eyesight. Like Borges, his blindness culminated in misty greens and blues, not blackness or profound darkness. Lewis completed several additional books with the help of transcribers and editors.

Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is famous for his original diction, invented vocabulary, made-up sound words, and run-on phrases. His characters and subplots were often pursuing dead-end and tortuous self-reflections. Joyce is the character Stephen Dedalus, suggestively called the “blind stripling” in his novels Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By age thirty Joyce was blind. He had from youth undergone multiple surgeries for eye inflammation (leading to anterior uveitis), for iridectomies for closed-angle glaucoma, and for removal of cataracts. Today, these and many of Joyce’s other non-ocular medical symptoms such as abscesses, partial paralysis, and psychological instabilities — plus Joyce’s use of prescription Galyl, an arsenic-phosphorus drug with debilitating eye effects — point to syphilis as the cause of his blindness. Joyce himself acknowledged an understanding of his blindness (and all his other maladies) as curse or punishment.

American cartoonist and humorist James Thurber (1894-1961) was popularized by his contributions to The New Yorker magazine. As a child of seven he was playing with an older brother who had just acquired a bow and arrow set — and shot an arrow towards James, blinding his right eye. Inflammation spread to the left eye, leading to significant loss of vision. As an adult plagued by diminishing vision, Thurber consulted a New York eye surgeon who diagnosed cataracts and iritis (uveitus), pursuing both failed surgeries successively, reducing Thurber’s vision to about seven percent. Perhaps Thurber’s vivid imagination was due in part to the visual hallucinations experienced by victims of Charles Bonnet syndrome. Towards the end of his life Thurber expressed to friends the notion that his blindness was perhaps after all a punishment for mocking other with his humor and sarcasm.

Erasmus wrote that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In a short story with a similar title, H. G.Wells (1866-1946) extrapolated the saying to try to reproduce in fiction the logic in a “real” setting. Wells only deepened the paradox. For among the blind, no one is king. And among the half-blind and among kings, none has sight. Nor can a pretender share the curse or fate – nor dare to empathize with a curse. Blindness remains a solitude.

Following World War II, liberal Catholic thinkers embarked on a grand intellectual project of convergence — or at least dialogue — with religious thought East and West. This effort was circumscribed by more conventional Catholic authorities as ecumenism, wherein the effort of convergence was restricted to other Christian sects, with the tone of accommodating other sects sufficiently to reabsorb them. The more ambitious style was reflected in a 1963 book titled Matter & Spirit: Their Convergence in Eastern Religions, Marx and Teilhard de Chardin. Within the ambitiously-titled project, religion and science could be reconciled, for wasn’t Teilhard a scientist and anthropologist to boot? And political reconciliation with a new post-war democratic impetus would reconsider socialism.

A convergence project of an intellect sort only was undertaken by Aldous Huxley in his book The Perennial Philosophy, first published in 1945. Huxley presented passages from classics of world religion with a minimum of his own commentary. He gathered passages under various headings: God, Charity, Good and Evil, Suffering, Faith, Grace, Will, and the like. The premise was not convergence but appreciation, the presentation of cultural traditions, similar and yet the reader senses, not reconcilable.

But the project was too ambitious, too abstract. As Harvey Cox observed in his 1955 classic The Secular City, the shadows of ideology and material progress, specifically in the United States in this period, was promoting secularism wherein Christianity, long associated with Western tradition, became pragmatic, increasingly diluted by material life, and a passive expression of convenience and conformity. The American masses had little appetite for universalism when exceptionalism was sufficient to propelled society’s values.

Another factor at this time in Catholic circles is the absence of critical studies, either textual or historical. The era of udolf Bultmann’s demythologizing had not yet taken hold, let alone the later quest for the historical Jesus. The voaculary of theology was still reflective of scholasticism and medieval mustiness.

One outstanding Catholic commentator on the times was Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk with wide religious interests, especially in Zen Buddhism. The glow of convergence-thinking was wspecially compelling to Merton. Merton had met T. D. Suzuki, foremost expositor on Buddhism, and Suzuki’s influence on Merton was deep. Merton was a prolific writer, and began shifting his interest from Catholic theology to convergence projects when he published Mystics and Zen Masters in 1967, drawing on the work of Christian mystics, especially Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, to make analogies with the writings and expressions of Zen. Merton was interested in not only pursuing analogies only but also explaining Zen to his readers, with an understanding that both traditions are comparable in their trajectories, their vocabularies complete with analogous terms.

But Merton was still obliged to oxthodox theology, and the biggest obstacle when dialoging with D. T. Suzuki was, perhaps, the topic of human nature. For example, where Buddhism presented no tradition-laden metaphysics, Merton was confined to the Genesis myth of Paradise, wherein human suffering derives from fallen nature, from the knowledge of good and evil. Whatever Merton’s philosophy or knowlede of Catholic doctrine, he could not explainmind and consciousness without this origins myth, whereas Suzuki could discuss more appropriately the Buddhist concept of innocence,

Many passages of Mystics and Zen Masters reflect Merton’s enthusiastic discoveries about Buddhism and Zen, always finding Christian equivalents of Zen expressions, as if they justified his effort to the censor. For example: “The Zen of Hui Neng comes rather close to the Gospels and St. Paul …” and “Suzuki loves to repeat the formula that for Zen ‘zero equals infinity,’ and in this case he is close to the formula todo y nada of St. John of the Cross.” And Merton concludes with a passage (essentially summing up his approach) dismissing “the cultural accretions and trappings of Zen [that]… no longer have the living power they had in the Middle Ages.” But there is no context to the trappings, the power, or the Middle Ages here. Like the Catholic liturgy, Merton tells us, “Zen practice calls for an aggiornamento.” The Italian term for “updating,” refers to the Second Vatican Council’s updating of the Mass but updating little more. And who would undertake this updating of Zen? No mention by Merton that the mystics of his title – and therefore of his analogies for future rapprochement – may not have had the living power he imagines they had, since they dismissed in their day as heretics and thwarted from future influence.

What is characteristic of Merton’s treatment is ahistoricism. All of the theology and attempted analogies are presented without reference to history, either of Japan (except as Catholic missionaries defined Japan) or of the history of Christianity and the Catholic Church. Granted, the mystics of Catholicism were a minority whose influence was being rescued by Merton, but without a context, it is difficult to recommend them as mainstream within Christian thought. Similarly, Merton acknowledges that the Zen masters of his book title were not mystics. There was no mysticism in Zen. But their approach to metaphysics is very compelling, hence Merton’s pursuit.

As with Mystics and Zen Masters, Merton’s last book was a compilation of previously published essays. The posthumous book Zen and the Birds of Appetite appeared in 1968. Here a more cogent pursuit of Zen is presented. The curious title and prefatory note suggests a dampened enthisiasm for convergence. Is the interest in Zen due in part to the exhaustion and death of the West, to be beseiged by birds of appetite?

Merton wonders if Zen reveals more of itself with a structuralist approach, and that suggests a social science perspective missing from his previous book. But this approach is soon dropped as Merton hones in on his previous project of building analogies, doing so even more readily in this book. There is a lot of Eckhart. “Whatever Zen may be, however you define it, it is somehow there in Eckhart.” In the end, Merton offers a detailed apologia for the Catholic doctrines circling God and Christ and Genesis, seeing Zen as a piquant intellectual exercise, as did a contemporary Alred Graham, author of the 1963 book titled Zen Christianity. Merton concludes, defensively, with an eye on his superiors, and perhaps despairing of Zen’s insistence on not defining metaphysics, that Zen can be “used to clear the air of ascetic irrelevancies … [that it is] still worth while [being] exposed to its brisk and heady atmosphere.”

October is the time to revisit Thoreau’s October 1862 essay “Autumnal Tints,” even for readers not living in Thoreau’s New England. The essay is representative of Thoreau’s skill in merging observation of nature with a philosophical aesthetics, yielding insights into both nature and thought. Thoreau describes the variety and beauty of the autumnal foliage of his Massachusetts region both as a lay scientist and a phiosophical popularizer.
A central analogy in the essay is of autumnal leaves with fruit. Both are fruit, Thoreau notes, both responding to the peak of their ripeness, signaling separation from the tree that bears them:

“Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So do leaves.”

Further, the colors of ripeness in fruit attract our eye and confirm the readiness to take the fruit to ourselves. So, too, the colors of the changing foliage at autumn signal by their magnificent colors the leaves’ ripeness, their maturation and age, their readiness to fall, expiring to attain this natural circle.

“How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.”

Thoreau contrasts such a treę (maple, elm, chestnut, birch, which he mentions specifically) with its green arboreal neighbors about it green deciduous trees, which do not lose their leaves). But as the multitudinous hardwood leaves fall, nothing is wasted. Nature carefully husbands this abundance.

“Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s thickness to the depth of the soil. This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our home stead in good heart.”

But Thoreau wants to present this autumnal phenomenan as not only natural but necessary, for do we. too, not age and quit the threaded source of our vitality. We must admire nature’s methodology, leaving us a brilliant show of aesthetic value, and to boot a lesson of natural philosophy and science, a tutorial in agriculture, sustainability, and wise instruction for a metaphysics. Simply by pointing to what is before us.

“How many flutterings before the leaves rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe, with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.”

“When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs. … Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves,—this is your true Greenwood Cemetery.”

Thus the aesthetics of autumnal tints harbor a deeper lesson and a melancholy which may check the aesthetics of the colors, pointing us to the reality of finality. But nature is never final. We must observe and reflect on every season to capture the whole lesson. The molding leaves will feed the soil around the forest, and spring will return to build the leafy armor of the trees again, fortify them in summer, usher them through livelihood until the return of autumn and the completion of another cyclical journey, pointing to still another. There is melancholy, but perhaps of the Eatern expression, evoking poignance in the scene before us. At such moments, we ought not tofail to observe the heartfelt lessons Thoreau suggests.

One of the strengths of historical Buddhism, as reflected in the Pali canon, is its suspension (formal and real) of metaphysics and speculation. To Western thinking, metaphysics and speculation about meaning and intention is core to philosophy. So, too, is its opposite. When it doesn’t get its way, that is, discovers and judges inadequate or unproductive metaphysics, the western reaction is swift, hostile, and dismissive (early Wittgenstein and his succession, logical positivism, etc.). Accordingly, the philosophy project is abandoned, withered, banished in overreaction.

Can there be a calmer, less passionate or emotive approach? That, perhaps, is the Buddha’s approach, not dismissive and hostile about the “wrong answer,” but attempting to understand the root of the desire for metaphysics, for speculation. Not that Buddhist thought lingers with these historical investigations. Rather, it moves directly to the more pressing issues versus the war between metaphysics versus anti-metaphysics.

The teaching method of the historical Buddha meant that priority could be given to the people, to their concerns, to humble listeners as much as to any wealthy critics. The emphasis of philosophical questions could be turned away from abstract quest for presumed meaning to questions arising from daily life. A virtual checklist of the Buddha’s method is provided in a snippet of dialogue between the Buddha and visiting Kalamas called the Kalamas Sutta or Aṅguttura Nikāyaṅ.

The dialog opens with the remark by the visitors that they have heard the teaching of certain “ascetics and brahmins” that ended by vilifying all who disagree with them. This had happened more than once. Being “ascetics and brahmins” the visitors naturally gave these teachers some deference but were clearly uncomfortable. They had come to the Buddha for advice. And that advice is clear, resonating over the centuries:

Do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of texts, by logic or inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the competence of the speaker, or because you think, “the ascetic is our teacher.” But when you know for yourselves, “These things are wise, these things are blameless; theses things are praised by the wise, these things if undertaken and practiced, lead to welfare and happiness,” then you should engage in them.

These points can be broken down for clarity.

1. oral tradition ­–– received, repeated, familiar, original, memory
2. lineage of teaching ­–– the authority of the precept, commandment, injunction, argument
3. hearsay –– enough people say so, it is said that, majority opinion holds that …
4. collection of texts –– venerable scriptures from authorities of the distant past
5. logic or inferential reasoning –– collected accounts reflecting sound minds suggest that…
6. reasoned cogitation –– applied thought of disciplined, clear-minded insightful reflection
7. acceptance of a view after pondering it –– enough deep thinking suggests favorable weight
8. competence of the speaker –– clever and insightful expostulation persuades of the truth
9. deference to the teacher –– sincerity of heart carries the argument better than mere reason

If all of these approaches are inadequate to why metaphysics is our chief concern, then the opposite is that metaphysics is not our chief concern, is an abstraction, a distraction. The Buddha’s visitors are concerned about the essentials: why do we suffer, why do we get sick, grow old, and die. The question is not why these things but how we should test these essential factors in our lives, as a matter of time. The various observations of the Buddha constitute summaries of what his interlocutors distressfully say among themselves. The Buddha gives them the method: if these arguments or ideas bring contentment, then folllow them. If not, regardless of the nine points, don’t follow them.

The displacement of metaphysics with ethics is no subtle shift of attention but a focus on what matters here and now. Addressing everything in terms of ethical response guages what the interlocutors themselves want or note or value. Does this or that path or response lead to well-being and happiness? What is elicited by this behavior or mind-set versus that one? What happens when we universalize a particular frame of mind or emotion?

This Socratic-like discussion frees us from many strictures, of language, personality, authority, cultural society… at least as necessary or obligatory, if not inevitable. It teases out the true nature of behaviors and points to ethics as a psychological and social balance that is independent both of the enumerated points of view of reason and metaphysics and also independent of the degree of satisfactoriness of answers emerging from metaphysics and similar abstractions

The short version of the Buddha’s advice: test everything. Not to play science, which is itself a kind of metaphysics, but to drain all the accretions that clog the mind. Test everything. Does it bring insight, happiness, mental well-being? As the sutra says: “When you know for yourselves, ‘These things are wise, these things are blameless; theses things are praised by the wise, these things if undertaken and practiced, lead to welfare and happiness,’ then you should engage in them.”

The transition between winter and spring is especially erratic in a northern climate and elevation. One day the temperature reaches sixty degrees F. with a brilliant, cheerful sun. Surely spring has arrived!

The last of the snow melts. The timorous appearance of green in the garden emerges, from perennial chives and thyme, to the clueless garlic blinking through the straw and looking a blanched yellow from the lack of sunlight. After moving the straw, the garlic, too, is a vigorous green the next day.

But a few days later, several inches of snow fall. Dark clouds reign. A distinct chill returns, as do the additional layers of garments just put away for the arrival of spring. But the plants are hardy, patiently waiting as the snow quickly melts in the next day’s moderation, and the garden’s spots of bright green persist, a sign of resilience awaiting true spring.

One spot is, perhaps, not so fortunate. Down the road, concealed behind clumps of trees, a vernal pond has formed, arisen by recent rains and melted snow. Wood frogs and spring peepers have discovered the pool and vocalize loudly. Wood frogs hold their fascinatiopn — they survive the winter by allowing their bodies to freeze! Less dramatically, peepers join the wood frogs in raucous noise-making, celebrating reproduction, and survival until summer, or whenever the pool dries up. Another cold, dark day comes. The pool is silent. Are its denizens still alive? Who can know, until next spring, perhaps.

T. S. Eliot famously wrote, in The Wasteland, that:

April is the cruellest 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.

Lilacs appear in the hint of warmth that is the transition to spring, but the unexpected return of snow and cold cruelly strikes down their effort. Or is this not the way it always is, only the foolish or the hardy braving the possibility of the cold returning, of the spring wavering in its intent, too tentative to emerge without fear. What psychological type best survives: the extrovert venturing into the world with the possibility of getting struck down, or the introvert watching critically and skeptically, waiting not for one sign or two but for an abundance that will confirm confidence in the world?

Or can the object of our venturing and watching ever be truly understood, ever be fathomed enough to discern a path, a way, a reliable truth?

The Japanese hermit-monk Ryokan (1758-1831) is a favorite figure in Zen circles as a poet and monk — unexpectedly he is a favorite figure among Japanese schoolchildren. As a hermit, Ryokan regularly played with village children when he came to town to beg alms. Ryokan had stitched several balls of cotton for various games, enthralling the kids and often taking up much of a summer day, the absent-minded Ryokan occasionally forgetting to make his round of alms until late afternoon.

This generous gesture toward innocent children characterized all of Ryokan’s thinking. Someone called him a fool–it was his older brother–but Ryokan embraced the label, himself adding the label of dunce as well. He was certainly forgetful, as many anecdotes show: he would go off on an errand and get distracted by flowers or a vista, and forget his purpose. Once he left a guest in his hut to go off to get something from a neighbor and hours later was found by his guest gazing at the moon.

Ryokan was sentimental about birds, flowers, insects, trees, even his begging bowl. His poems show him teary about old friends not visiting, old friends passed, the lonely sounds of animals in the mountains,the drip of rain at his window reminding him of youth, or when he measures the passing years as each season changes. All of these sentiments he committed to poems, regularly taking up brush and paper when prompted by rain, snow, darkness, cold, memory, cheer, or any other provocation.

His eremitism is that of Stonehouse and Hanshan — mentioning that he has the poems of the latter. This eremitism is a pure and simple Zen. Ryokan studied in a monastery and knows the sutras, for example, but he seldom invokes them. He conjures no doctrines or particular points of view. He only takes to scrupulous sitting meditation — plus the right attitude or frame of mind. He quietly dismisses all worldliness, the red dust of society’s commerce and interactions, and enters the stream of the Way. Ryokan acutely feels his solitude, his outright loneliness at times, and is more open about these sentiments than most hermits, but he would not have life any other way because where he is this way represents the totality of this moment, of the season, of the vista from his window, the necessity of the present, undeciphered, unfathomed, that which must be embraced in quietude, even resignation.

A death poem could be Ryokan’s purest sentiment, a brilliant summary in one poem — except that Ryokan did not intend this poem to be a death poem, just another poem:

What will be my legacy?
Flowers in spring,
the cuckoo in summer,
the crimson leaves of autumn.

Ryokan was sensitive to the significance of weather patterns, the shifts from summer to autumn, the shifts from autumn to winter, the return of spring. He interpreted them as a poet, and lived them as a solitary. But he applied Zen insight to everything, and is remembered for his expression of mushin, of “no-mind,” which is exactly how he lived. For Ryokan everyone should live going about with kindness toward others in a state of no-mind thus entering the Way.

Another notable theme, not contrived by Ryokan but certainly observable to his reader, is his profound sense of mujo, impermanence. As mentioned, Ryokan identified himself completely with the Way, but in what does that consist? It is to identify the patterns of the seasons that in turn reveal the cycles of reality, necessity, impermanence and of letting go. Ryokan did not devise a life-style to pursue the Way, only to sit and observe, to take in the lessons, and to accept this process as enlightenment itself.

We do well to do likewise … plus, we have his poetry.

About a hundred years ago, psychologist Carl Jung issued his seminal essays on psychological types, introducing the now common concepts of “extroversion” and “introversion.” Jung considered the two types not original to himself, suggested, for example, by Goethe’s “systole” and “diastole” observed scientifically in the heartbeat, but also in the seasons, biology, music — what one Goethe editor calls the “interplay of polarities.” Jung applied this familiar idea to human behavior. Though popular audiences reduce extroversion and introversion to personalities, only about 20 percent of the population -— 10 percent on each pole — is exclusively one or the other type. Eighty percent of the population is relatively balanced, able to summon either disposition as needed.

Jung explains that the two types of behavior are not whims or deliberations but very specifically define our relationship to objects in our environment. Such an object may be a person, a landscape, a gathering, even an idea. The extravert defines a group of people as an objet and defines his relationship to it positively, an allure, an attraction, an opportunity, a source of energy, stimulation, and uplift. The extrovert will want to take in the object, make it part of self, merge or immerse with it as a desired part of self. Indeed, the object becomes the self through a subjective or introvert medium deeper than the external display of behavior.

In contrast, the introvert will see the same object, for example, a group of people, as a burden at best, a threat at worse. It is not that the group is objectively menacing, critical, or boring. The object is unnerving, unsettling, threatens the balance and inner tranquility that the introvert prizes, is always seeking to maintain. The object is foreign and inexplicable to the introvert, not intellectually or even socially but at a deep emotional level representing disquiet, uncertainty, threat to integrity, in the sense of wholeness. The object is not recognized as parallel or positive to any of the introvert’s psychological values or disposition. The relationship to the object, in short, is not a relationship, for the introvert rejects any relation, even when “trapped” into being in the presence of the object.

The important point for Jung is the object, yes, but the relationship to the object. The object has an objective status to the 80 percent, and it defines the object by its own characteristics, which is the goal of objectivity. To the extravert, the object is a delight, a lure, a pleasure, a stimuli. The object enters the psyche of the extrovert and is assembled among positive experiences. The object for the extravert, if very highly valued, becomes internalized, part of the self. Thus, while the majority looking at the object will judge its importance by a variety of criteria, the introvert may decide quickly on the positive value of the object, even to the point of wanting to embrace the object as essential. At this point the object becomes part of the self of the extravert, and is treated the way an introvert treats those treasured parts of the self.

How does the introvert treat its preferred objects? When the introvert encounters an object, the introvert can compare and contrast it with objects already within self. For the introvert will intrinsically have subjective preferences, and this subjective ambiance of inner self will apply the same behavioral criterion as does the extrovert. Does this object resonate with my emotional values? Does this object nourish or debilitate my energy. Is the object so multi-faceted that it cannot be judged instinctively? Is this object so complex that deciphering its impact is too much effort, too ambiguous, too elusive? Or is the object a stimulating challenge, an intrigue worth puruit?

Where the extrovert looks for stimulus, the introvert looks for compatibility with measure and restraint. Where the introvert looks for excitement, opportunity, novelty, creativity, the introvert looks for stasis, predictability, innocuousness, inconspicuousness. Experience with objects and emotional states provoked or maintained by objects becomes an automatic response with introverts and extroverts. They alreay know what they like. They are not objective any more. In both cases, objects are elevated to positives or negatives, not considered neutral or passive objects. Objects are quickly forced too be useful or not, to be compatible or not.

Jung’s notion of types is not, therefore, that of the popular view.The popular view wants to push the relationship to objects to an extreme, in order to reveal the inner workings of the introvert or extrovert. This push by popular observers of the types is frustrated by the fact that everyone and not just the types deal with relationships to objects. Inevitably, these objects often confound the average person. Based on a person’s response to an object, the person may have a well-established set of criteria or values but not know how to decide about the object, fear judging it, unable to decide in the definitive way that the introvert or extravert can decide.

Jung’s close study of historical personalities and how their relationships to objects works is both logical and startling. We tend to think of ideas and beliefs as larger than one person, but Jung shows how cultural tendencies that are taken as universals, embraced by common consensus, can change suddenly when the ideas are seen as objects and are elevated by s strong and extrovert personality to the status of real and necessary, an “introvert” function. This application to real historical examples is the subject for a future entry.

Jung identified other spectra besides the extroversion/introversion that is the most familiar “type.” Ultimately, there is no “type,” only our response to objects. Taking a knock-off test like Myers-Briggs will not reveal deep psychology, the unconscious, or even the superficial personality. Reality will consist of managing the subjective and objective, in assigning the environment of each person to social, cultural, and psychological factors, before we can adequately judge the impact of any given object in any given life.