Author: Meng-hu

The solitary should be conscious of paradox at all times, in contrast to the many (ideologues, apologists, advocates, activists, the indifference, the powerful) who are not.

Paradox is already present in everything one does or says. We advocate a certain moral or ethical counsel to which we do not quite live up. We recommend practices based on the authority of sages but regularly fall short of pursuing them. The solitary begs a preference in use of time and the arrangement of space, of silence, disengagement — and then goes out into the world, to live, work, buy, encounter people — undermining the great goal of solitude, that secret desire.

The solitary intersects with people and those unconscious or deliberate human accretions springing from society and culture. We are born and grow in a household, we think in symbols and languages. We maintain subconscious assumptions and drives. We learn, imitate, interact, and have feelings about others. What distinguishes the desire for solitude?

The uncharitable observer of the pursuit of solitude dismisses the solitary as hypocritical, or worse, neurotic. The indifferent will call the solitary contradictory. The solitary’s desire for solitude feels like a fire, or a house on fire, as the Buddha put it. But then the flames sputter, burning low, not enough heat or inspiration in most aspiring solitaries to embrace solitude altogether.

Swami Abishiktananda feared embracing solitude altogether because he feared he would lose his psychological identity, which was his only self-identity, his very self. To lose this self was to lose even the structure of our solitary personality. Solitude, like mysticism, suggests a loss of self-identity akin to madness, to a plunge into the depths from which the self cannot emerge.

Solitude should be understood for the opposite of what the world understands as loneliness and alienation. The solitary is the psychological product of the same factors as anyone else: upbringing, environment, experience, heredity, personality, one or more of the multiple intelligences. But the solitary has need of a special insight to throw a sense of rightness and normalcy onto a path that differs radically from what most people define as correct.

Solitude must be normal and correct not because it justifies a predisposition but because it is a special and revelatory path. Solitude is more true than the engaged social path, more reflective of the potential for self-discovery. And the first discovery is the fundamental aloneness of the soul, of the self. The vicissitudes of solitude are the core experiences of this innate sense of self. Society’s refusal of solitude breaks in over and over to deny the individual the possibility of self-discovery. It treats solitude as antagonist to its collectivizing tendency, its innate tendency to prevent individual thought and reflection, instead keeping the self focused on contrived objects that merges the consciousness of individuals into a social and collective mass, pliable, indefinite, a substance from which all must consume. Soon the self and a path for the self are forgotten.

Solitude in this light seems a contradiction to society. But because everyone has a core of solitude within merely by the fact of consciousness, then the continuity of this consciousness from solitude to awareness to action is a threat to collective power. Power must brand solitude as unnatural, irrational, unreasonable, a denial of human duty and potential. So solitude (and the solitary) are branded as contradiction and hypocrisy. When an individual desires even a modicum of solitude, society blares out noise and distraction, scatters objects to consume and material things to demand attention. So few people ever reach solitude.

Those who desire solitude live in paradox, not contradiction. By distinguishing ourselves from the “them,” as Heidegger suggests, we can begin to distinguish within ourselves what is properly ours and what is properly speaking simply an inheritance, a nostalgia, a zone of comfort. This must be contrasted to what is properly ours.

A paradox maintains that two apparently contradictory things are nevertheless existent and therefore true — in their own spheres. The contradiction arises when the spheres touch or intersect or collide. Such is our consciousness of self versus society and culture, indeed, reality.

We fail to fully understand ourselves epistemologically since we are not all-knowing beings. Our closest proximity is in solitude and silence, where all that is not-self is hushed if not excluded altogether. At this point we sense solitude’s truth as a path, as an opening to knowledge and self-identity. And, when we return into the world, we understand the paradox.

The tension filling the atmosphere around us is full and vibrates, the place where we stand is always moving, shifting imperceptibly. But the solitary knows that as he or she goes on living, we are not living a contradiction. We know that there is no absolute chasm between solitude and the world. Nor between solitude and self, for in fact we do not know self without solitude. Solitude reveals more than anything society and culture can tell us about ourselves or even themselves.

Contradiction is the mathematics of logic and science, but it sets things in opposition when everything shares the sameness that makes contradiction a mere abstraction. We are, for example, dust, like the earth, and yet we are not — contradiction? No, paradox. We are dust and yet we are not. We are of this world of sorrow and tears — and of smiles and tendernesses. And yet we are not. Issa the Japanese poet, when his little daughter died, wrote simply:

This world
is a tear-drop world …
And yet, and yet.

Reading Andy Merrifield’s The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World. Merrifield is British, once a warehouse clerk, then a geography professor in New York City, and now a writer residing in Auvergne, in southern France, where he lives with wife and daughters.

He is on a walking tour of Auvergne. The setting of his travels is reminiscent of The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, as is the sense of quiet and solitude. Merrifield has his donkey Gribouille with whom to converse and think aloud. Merrifield readily conveys the experience of being with a donkey and the lessons that being with a donkey convey: patience, observation, reflection.

With a donkey, I’m compelled to go at their pace, to enter into their way of doing things. It’s stop-and-go all the while. That’s how it is with a donkey. I have to learn patience, to quell my impatience and frustration, my desire to hurtle along, to overtake … Things work differently with a donkey on a dirt trail: patience becomes a daydream that gently rocks from side to side, like a baby’s cradle, or like a sailboat out on a windless sea. It’s the gift of relishing the rhythm of precise steps, of treading slower yet going farther, of treasuring the present moment, making it endure longer, stretching it out in all its glorious fullness …

Merrifield frequently evokes the many donkeys of literature and lore, especially Sancho Panza’s Dapple and Juan Ramon Jimenez’s Plato. Now, Platero and I happens to be one of my favorite books, (Don Quixote is a close rival). Plato and I is dubbed a children’s book only because an adult conversing with a donkey would be considered of juvenile interest. It is no coincidence that both Cervantes and Jimenez are Spanish, for Spain has that celebrated tendency to turn out what the (Spanish) writer Azorín called el filosofo pequeno, the “little philosopher.” This contrasts to those “big” philosophers of Britain and Germany and ancient Greece with their mighty theories, abstractions, and constructs. But living with a donkey only evokes thoughts of nature, food, trees, sky, stars, and fresh air.

Along the way, Merrifield talks about Dostoevsky, Spinoza, Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Guy Debord, Anne Sexton, Greek myths — always in the context of donkeys. He tells us about other donkeys: the elderly Benjamin of Orwell’s Animal Farm, the all-suffering donkey of Robert Bresson’s classic film Au hasard Balthazar. This is a wonderful intellectual feast. To be able to relate it to something natural but a little unexpected like a donkey is both clever and insightful. We don’t want the journey to end, the book to finish. We want to get more insights from Gribouille, from Merrifield. We want the book to go slow, at the pace of a donkey, and to enjoy the quiet solitude of the ancient countryside.

The monks of New Skete in Cambridge (New York) are well known as dog trainers, having published books and created video and television versions of their methods. Their chief premise is that the spiritual bond of humans and animals reveals methods of coexistence and interaction that benefit both, that humans can work with dogs on the basis of friendship. Would that this premise, based neither on self-interested economics nor psychological assertiveness, would be applied universally by all cultures and societies.

A friend of Hermitary speculates that part of the good relations between the monks and the dogs they train, especially evident in their video presentations, is based on the Jungian identification of introversion in objects mixed with extroversion in feeling and sensitivity. This permits the monk — typically introverted and summoning spiritual qualities to his external work — to express affection not to other people but to animals and the natural world. This combination yields precise and ethical results that bind person and animal closely.

On a more extreme (but justifiable) continuum, we might experience a radical moral imperative identifying the rights of animals (humans included) as identical on the full scale of sentience. But that is material for a different reflection.

The monks of New Skete are refreshing, even startling, in their apprehension of both human and animal need for solitude. Solitude is the inner stability of self-identity that separates self but remains potentially latent for mutual understanding. The process for breaching this divide of species and natures is, they find, a concept borrowed from one of our favorite poets, Rilke.

The term is “inseeing,” which Rilke describes (coincidentally) in the context of dogs. He muses:

I love inseeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to insee, for example, a dog as one passes by. Insee (I don’t mean in-spect, which is only a kind of human gymnastic, by means of which one immediately comes out again on the other side of the dog, regarding it merely, so to speak, as a window upon the humanity lying behind it, not that) — but to let oneself precisely into the dog’s very center, the point from which it becomes a dog, the place in it where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished, in order to watch it under the influence of its first embarrassments and inspirations and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been better made.

If I am to tell you where my all-greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was to be found, I must confess to you: it was to be found time and again, here and there, in such timeless moments of this divine inseeing.

As the inspiration of their work with dogs, inseeing is the source of the monks’ gentle, tolerant and sympathetic relations to their dogs. Not only do they view animals as our earthly companions, in the fashion of St. Francis of Assisi, they view animals as spiritual counterparts, while at the same time conscious of the physical and psychological differences.

So it is fitting that what works for the monks at the profoundest spiritual level should work in training dogs, too, namely, silence. Thus Thomas Dobush, a founding monk of New Skete, writing in 1973, noted:

Learning the value of silence is knowing to listen to, instead of screaming at, opening your mind enough to find what the end of someone else’s sentence sounds like, or listening to a dog until you discover what is needed instead of imposing yourself in the name of training.

Silence as a quality in the life of dogs is a rational extension of what we come to understand in ourselves. In their book How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend, chapter 22 is titled “Silence and Your Dog.” The fallacy that training needs noise and stimuli ignores the efficacy of silent communication and the need in dogs to rationalize and accommodate an instinct for quiet, whether in observant scanning, in the reassuring presence of their human companion, or in that flowing meditative state in which dogs seem to revel.

More to the point is how we humans structure our lives: in bustle and noise or in quietude and tranquility. Surely if dogs negatively perceive our infectious nervousness and constant noise, we must admit the value of silence even as a practical tool for our own lives, let alone that of dogs. But there is a deeper philosophy to silence, and the monk-authors place a generous quotation from Max Picard’s The World of Silence at the lead of this chapter to announce it.

Animals are creatures that lead silence through the world of man and language and are always putting silence down in front of us. Many things that human words have upset are set at rest again in the silence of animals. Animals move through the world like a caravan of silence.

A whole world, that of nature and that of animals is filled with silence. Nature and animals seem like protuberances of silence. The silence of animals and the silence of nature would not be so great and noble if it were merely a failure of language to materialize. Silence has been entrusted to the animals and to nature as something created for its own sake.

Einstein purportedly said that the more one looked at quantum physics (and presumably his special theory of relativity) the sillier it looked. Whether that referred to the lay person’s ignorance or to the theories themselves, the indefiniteness and expansiveness of the twentieth-century astrophysical theory is all but impossible to prove, demonstrate, experience, or confirm. There is not existential significance to it.

The elasticity of time has always seemed inexorable: the image of a distant star’s twinkling light that reaches us today but set out millennia ago. More poignant is the image of a star that died millennia ago but the light of which reaches us now. Vastness, emptiness, and absence are the heart of this vast dark structure, though the scientist, ever optimistic, would have us see now not moribund matter but waves, light, and energy. It’s all the same. The cold reaches of time are heavy with a resonant melancholy, and the promises of far-away paradises leave us forlorn and rueful. Like Emily Bronte, one is tempted to renounce any heaven if it is not earth.

Science never discovers much that is helpful to society because everything is two-edged and courts disaster. We are deceived by convenience, speed, and pleasure, distracted from the alienation from self and nature that every invention brings. Not alienation from other people, as surveys want to insist. Television, video games, and the internet create cocoons of individualism, we are warned. But in fact as social phenomena they bring cultures and subcultures closer to one another in ways similar to religion, fashion, or language. Still, this process merely molds modernity into a homogeneous dependence.

Technologies are dominated by the powerful who profit and control them. Technology does not make new water, ancient foods, renewed species, or new forests. The proud products of technology do not feed, cloth, or nourish. Not because they are diverted from noble ends but because noble ends do not matter to the powerful. We borrow aspects of technology for old purposes: tools to communicate, to interact socially, to give ourselves the illusion of self-control and purpose. These entertain us, distract us from the structures that matter. Time is never recaptured, and space is physically destroyed by the progress of society and the necessities of fuel, consumption, and technology.

The chaos underlying the subatomic world as science describes it is epistemological but not relevant. The relativity of Einstein’s theory refers to the physical position of objects, not the intellectual decisions about ethics. Yet the subatomic world mirrors or defines our social world: looking vertically we see in society not the exercise of refined natural law but the artificiality of culture and structures implanted before us like totems. We can learn more from a few days’ observation of nature and simplicity than we can from a Bosch-like vision of subatomic particles confirming our greatest fear, that of fundamental chaos.

Not chaos specifically, we will be reminded. Laws govern the impossibly indeterminate character of the world we do not see or that does not matter to us. Except that the seething energy of that subatomic world, like the world discovered in the seething bowels of Hades, was harnessed by their metaphorical occupants risen to the surface of Earth to assume the role of the powerful.

Thus the old saying that a direct line exists from Galileo to the atomic bomb and that therefore we should remain ignorant of science and nature at first carries a certain ethical weight, persuading us to believe that human activity in technology is doomed to be antithetical to tranquility and peace. But of course that was not the motive for silencing Galileo. The same forces that would perceive the revolution in power that Galileo represented would want to hold that power firmly to themselves, and perhaps harness a similar weapon in the name of authority. And so it has. One can never win when power asserts itself by force, irregardless of the purported cause it champions.

Nor does it matter whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa because it hardly affects our daily lives. Our animal existence is obscurantism in regards to both curiosity and scientific knowledge. We sense more acutely the passage of time and the changes in space approximate to us. That very narrow-mindedness is what, unfortunately, allows the scientists and technologists and the powerful free reign to harness power against the individual, who is too busy earning a living or coping with the vicissitudes of subjective time and space to object to what unnatural devices are arising around him or her.

Why, indeed, should human consciousness, that grand fragmentation between ourselves and nature, not be pulled between benign uses of science and technology versus insidious uses? Technology projects our human nature as clearly and fatefully as anything we do. We do not participate as authorities and are mere spectators: like the lower members of a tribe of mammals watching the powerful tribal leaders from the perimeter. Technology and its products are more efficacious than the gods in this reverse-creation, this undoing of the planet.

Our commands and wishes as a subset of society are without voice or result. Technology is the handmaid of the powerful, and hardly of we who dabble in its amusing end-products, oblivious to the experiments in multiplying lethal equivalents. The communication technology we enjoy and find useful will one day be used against us. The medieval clergy’s desire to ban the crossbow in the Hundred Years War because it was too barbaric is like the modern clergy’s pleas for nuclear disarmament. The truly powerful have long put Galileo in the dungeon workshop — not because of his pronouncements of science but because the rest of the people may listen to him. Now he is in the dungeon cranking out the tools of earth’s destruction. The meek hopes of moralizers and poets need now to be tools of solitude, not dissent. The momentum of technology has long drowned out their voices.

Time and space are fragmented in our daily lives, though the rapid pace of modern life is calculated to make this oblivious, to hustle us along from pausing to ponder ultimate purpose. Memories become fragments of time, complete with textures and emotions, fragile and dependent upon the thin frail tissue of our cells. With age our cells deteriorate like old film and musty paper, those hallmark creations of technology. To hoard memories is as futile as stuffing a warehouse with clutter. Meaning and sentiment assigned to memories are as quickly lost and forgotten. If death is a dissipation, we are wise not to cling obsessively to what we will have to eventually give up.

A perennial human desire is to cling to memory like a piece of furniture or an old photograph. It is only natural and inevitable that we should do so, for we have learned to identify ourselves with material objects which seem to last as long as our corresponding sentiments about them. We devise mechanisms of continuity as feverishly as our bodies slough off old cells — so that we can remain, in time and space, a self.

Memory is consciousness and a mundane function of identity. The marvel of sleep, of unconsciousness without loss of identity upon awakening is like that subatomic world where nothing seems real or permanent until we look away from the electron microscope and feel the solidity of a table or chair, then sigh in relief. We ought to write paeans to sleep and to dreaming, both marvels of existence as much as are black holes, cosmic strings, and an expanding universe.

But we awaken to our mortality, like a prisoner or exile who dreams of freedom and security but awakens to his confines, his limbs still bound in chains. “We are all chained to Fortune,” Seneca wrote. “Some chains are gold and other base metals, but chains nevertheless.” Can we awaken to other than our mortality, or rather to the thought of it, the weight of it?

An “expanding” universe, suggests a mundane analogy. What “expands” more that the awakening self? And the expansion continues quantitatively through our waking day, but qualitatively only in meditation. In meditation, the field of mind reverberates with chaotic waves and particles just like the subatomic world, until we look away from the mind and its shooting thoughts and ignore what goes on in it. Like the subatomic world, motion and identification of particles (or thoughts) is relative and depends on the observer, on our perspective.

Or can we awaken as we dream, a pervading order within a seeming chaos, a continuity not of memory fixed in impermanence but in soil and wind and sunlight and stars, our selves identical with the seeming tranquility and solitude that these natural objects connote? Space and time are not outside of us, to return to Einstein, but perspectives. Space and time are not exceptions to or even the contexts of our existence but merely projections of what we desire.

In Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James describes the seedbed of what is today called New Age. He traces the thought of Emerson and Thoreau through the intellectual movements of the nineteenth century (the whole book could be titled “Varieties of American Religious Experience”). Transcendentalism flowers at the core of the late nineteenth century into New Thought, “mind-cure” movement, and what one writer at the time called “menticulture.”

This was the apex of what James calls “healthy-mindedness,” of optimism, the rejection of morbid sentiment and outdated religion. The discovery of nature was a sanguine tonic for morose religious dispositions.

One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkleyian idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of “law” and “progress” and “development”; another the optimistic popular science of evolutionism … and finally Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is … an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry and all nervously precautionary states of mind.

Something typical of American culture permeates these observations, resonant with historical experience, manifest destiny, the psychology of the conquered frontier. The heyday of the country’s imperial pursuits was an exhilaration of the new, untried, uninherited, and experimental. A sense of boastful pride that scoffs at suffering and tragedy as unmasculine, at discipline and practice as exaggeration. Only the right frame of mind is needed to affect wonders! Thus the New Thought of the era is but the new thought of the whole culture, on the brink of conquest and in search of a psychology to go along with it.

Reading William James today one senses an antiquarianism in both science (specifically psychology) and religion. The movement he describes and today seems to fit well the label of New Age never influenced the institutions and mores of the U.S. except as a useful palliative, an amusing sideline to the business of business.

Certainly the movement even from James’ day was morally too weak and narcissistic to assume social change or serve as a catalyst for social reform. That, of course, was not its purpose, veering away from the traditional interventionist roles of Church and State in the Old World. In that, New Thought, like New Age, is entirely a religious experience or surrogate for one. Religion is abstract and a subjective application of values if it has not the ability to change people, even if by force. That lesson New Thought and New Age learned. With their cheery optimism, they never forced or judged anyone, even to the point of a tolerance that is amoral and often irrelevant. It was an inevitable reaction to centuries of intolerance.

In turning away from the vicious wars of religion that had engulfed Europe and Britain for centuries, the U.S. rigorously subjugated the religious experience to the mind, relegating religious thought to the status of a social decoration. This reaction saved the culture from both sectarian conflict as much as ethical or moral conscience. The elective civil disobedience of Thoreau or the rabid abolitionism of his New England compatriots quickly ebbed with the new-found interest in the self that New Thought and its successors pursued. “Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power,” James quotes a typical mind-cure pamphlet of his day. Such was a national consciousness of power formed, and a view that power is always good simply because it exists.

William James makes the interesting distinction between “first-born” and “second-born” in the religious thought of his day. He makes his point, but not as might be expected. Not from a Christian but a psychological angle does he refine the religious experience. Among the positive, healthy-minded believers, he notes, there is no doubt or crisis (perhaps a modest or perfunctory and staged one). There is only faith, light, and trust. They are the first-born because they are reliable citizens of the Kingdom, born into inheritance, exactly as intended by their culture of belief, they are models of orthodox (if “new”) thinking.

Not so the second-born. James gives the example of Leo Tolstoy, who enjoyed all the wealth and plaudits of this world, including the respectability of establish religious belief. But there came to Tolstoy

absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery.

Tolstoy had seen through the veil of order, necessity and decorum at a vast moral disorder, paradox, and unrest in the universe. It was not a matter, like the “first-born,” of recovering a fundamental optimism or cheerful disposition that never questions the prescriptions of life and society. It was not a restoration or healthy-mindedness that reshaped Tolstoy’s values. It was a discovery or quest for order and meaning, to be “saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before,” writes James.

Such a topic would take James far afield from his interest in charting the psychological phenomena attending to the second-born. Tolstoy alone would be a significant case of outright rebellion that supersedes the modest subjective turns of thought of James’ anecdotal examples. The simplicity of Tolstoy’s later tales, their quiet and reflective wisdom, his insights into the absolute necessity to escape Church, State, military, and institutions in society and culture in order to recover the essence of Jesus and the true spirit of Christianity, leave the cheery optimism of mind-cureists and their contemporaries far behind. The solitary does not tolerate psychological sleights of hand but demands close study of sages like Tolstoy. The whole thrust of the desert hermits, for example, resound with this clarity and fierceness.

And William James himself sensed this well enough to conclude with helpful insight that

systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.

Or, one might add, less than the solitary who bravely launches forth to confront the universe with his or her questions.

We hover at the primitive evolutionary level of controlled drives, on the brink of social and moral vice: violence in our drive for survival, hatred in our instinct for security, pride in our triumphant optimism to force change on the world and others. Society functions at a level of deliberate ignorance, and expects the individual to similarly ignore the tenuousness of the enterprise we call culture and morals.

Virtues can only be exercised by turning back the instincts, by renouncing, suppressing, or ignoring our desires, refusing our propensity for vices, which is to say our propensity to revert to where evolution left us not so many thousand years ago.

This minimal control is not a learning of moral lessons from a punishing and unforgiving social world. Rather it is an exhausting of the will, of the instinct to fight, to get ahead, to succeed. The social motives are the dregs of the drive to preserve and extend our haunted bodies, their fragile cells and what underlies our mind and identity. Not much evolution of the human brain seems to have transpired after human beings became what Aristotle calls “social animals” — though he meant political and communitarian.

The practice of virtue is so difficult because society teaches us to sublimate and suppress rather than to renounce. We are then haunted by sin and guilt and desire, regardless of our experience and practice. We have not yet given up desire, for evolution wants us to believe that to give up desire is to give up altogether the instinct to live. We want to control desire, transform it, refine it into socially acceptable pleasures.

But we are at that tipping point where our will is poised to be transformed into more than instinct, more than a drive, more than a sophistication of baser instincts. We must reach a point where we can exercise virtue (vir>, the Latin for strength) because of our awareness of reality. We cannot exercise virtue because we are driven to it by biology on the one hand or human authority on the other.

Japanese Zen master Dogen (1200-1253) builds the eight awarenesses without the burden of moralizing — that is, of invoking authority. This method anticipates the best of psychology but, further, improves the possibility of success by couching virtues as phenomena to be conscious of, phenomena to monitor. Vice is the product of inattention and lack of awareness. Vice should not be empowered epistemologically, giving it undue corrupting and debilitating strengths.

The previous entry (“Four Virtues”) covered Dogen’s first four awarenesses. Here are the other four.

The fifth awareness is unfailing recollection, by which Dogen means right mindfulness. To focus the mind entirely on what is good and right does not entail an interrelation with the world or with any given thought but rather an emptiness that is filled only with the glow of equanimity and silence. A part of Buddhist psychology is to identify with no particular object, and so doing, to automatically relieve the mind of accretions. The process is like a stream of water gently but effectively washing soil from a rock — a complement to Dogen’s fourth awareness: diligence. During the “cleansing” process, the mind learns what to do and how to respond to noise, thoughts, and distractions.

Unfailing recollection is both a process and an inaction. The process involves strengthening the mind. The inaction involves no intervention in the process — a getting-rid-of that knows its own requirements and needs no help or intentionality from us. It is the discovery of that part of the self that can wriggle out of evolutionary patterns of instinct and desire. A practical analogy is fasting. Fasting is both a process and an inaction. It involves a volitional part and a part that the body understands at a cellular level that we cannot comprehend nor be aware of. Dogen provides us with his own apt image: desires are thieves who would steal our strength and virtue, and exploit the inaction that we would suffer in the role of helpless victims. But by coupling inaction to a process, we make progress.

The sixth awareness is to cultivate meditation-concentration. This virtue represents maturing of the fifth one, the secure exercise of right mindfulness. Here one arrives at a “state of stability,” says Dogen, “and you will be able to know the characteristics of the phenomena arising and persisting in the world.”

Perhaps this awareness suggests an unattainable mastery. It is for each individual, especially the solitary, to begin at the beginning and allow the process to unfold, without intervention. Hard work this non-action! But it grants the mind permission to concentrate, meditate, and persist. It signals the drives to halt from their need to fill our minds with “data” — data for monitoring our environment, watching for enemies, awareness for survival — all the dross of instincts not appropriate to the higher level of the mind.

The enormous reserves of energy in these instincts and drives can be harnessed, but counter-intuitively. Our desires are strong and compelling, like a runaway fire, and can be inverted and put to fuel a quiet and indefinite flame in the hearth of a winter’s hut, a marvelous transformation.

Dogen’s phrase in describing the sixth awareness, already quoted above, is a felicitous one: “You will be able to know the characteristics of the phenomena arising and perishing in the world.” This insight applies not only to the ebb and flow of our mind’s thoughts and emotions. It applies to the whole social and natural world, the inevitable environments of our daily lives. Our insight becomes virtue. Virtue ought to teach us about the world: about power, ambition, desire, justice, sufficiency, sustainability. Our daily habits take on a larger context for perspective, but also take on a smaller context for understanding and evaluating the priority and efficacy of our drives. We get a feedback from our practice, not from the world. We identify our minds and hearts with equanimity and contentment (Dogen’s second virtue). Our introspection does not mean ignorance of the world around us, indifference, or apathy.

This virtue must be nurtured, like the hearth that must be attended. This attentiveness is Dogen’s seventh virtue: cultivate wisdom. Dogen uses several analogies. Wisdom is a

secure ship to cross the sea of aging, sickness, and death. It is also a bright lamp in the darkness of ignorance, good medicine for all the ailing, a sharp ax to fell the trees of afflictions.

All of these images strike at the notion of security, strength, and illumination. They dissipate ignorance of self and stop deliverance over to instincts. How many people do not know themselves and live as a series of drives? What do they do to themselves psychologically or in terms of health and how do they treat other people? The dominance of drives is the engine of society, like a fatal lure to tease the social self out of the inner self and assure that it cannot return to its abode. But those who cultivate wisdom are now longer lured because their guide is not external anymore. They affirm a fearlessness while remaining open-handed, a menace to no one, a personality without enemies. The wise person is simply another person, not special but one “with clear eyes,” says Dogen, “even though it be the mortal eye.”

Can there by an eighth awareness? What can further safeguard this wisdom but silence. Not engaging in vain talk is Dogen’s eighth awareness. This is not presented earlier in his list because it requires an endpoint of commitment. One cannot refuse to talk as long as one must be in the world. We offend (unwittingly or otherwise) by silence those to whom we are bound in any way. Speech is a courtesy if not a necessity, when we are in society. Speech is charity and hypocrisy all at once, inaccurate as an indicator of the best or vilest intentions. All wisdoms recognize that less the better.

But we can gradually and deftly remove vain talk from our lives by becoming conscious or its content, motive, and object. If measured, then prioritizing would come naturally and fills the content of talk with self-control and accuracy. Talk would serve not only to inform but to edify, cutting out desire as wishfulness or vicarious gratification.

Vain talk is the product of vain thoughts. Vain talk is the mind pursuing phenomena, what Dogen earlier considered a monitoring of “characteristics of the phenomena arising and perishing in the world.” With right mindfulness, the lessons and patterns are learned as wisdom, and the phenomena themselves need no longer be monitored in the same way. What started out as mountains and rivers, says the famous Buddhist saying, become meaningful exemplars of enlightenment and wisdom, after which they become again just mountains and rivers, such that it is ourselves that have changed, not them. Similarly our talk will go from mere talk to an exemplar of virtue, and then back to mere talk, but thereafter always enlightened, illuminated by wisdom. Thus we “extinguish the affliction of vain talk,” as Dogen calls it, and return — if we must — to just talk.

Each virtue or awareness is intricately related to the other. “These are the eight awareness of great people,” concludes Dogen.

Each one contains the eight, so there are sixty-four. If you expand them, they must be infinite; if you summarize them, there are sixty-four.

Western tradition tends to emphasize vice, wrongs, and “capital sins,” reserving the counsel of virtue to professed religious. In part this is because the life of the layperson, caught up in the world and among people, invariably finds little time or space for reflection or contemplation, little time for fostering the positive inner life necessary for refinement of virtues, let alone skills.

But this separation from knowledge is also a social and cultural contrivance. The lot of the householder tradition in Hindu caste, for example, assigned the ksatriyas, vaisyas, and sudras castes — the bulwark of military, mercantile, and laboring classes — very specific religious boundaries, with the unbridgeable gap of necessity and birth to confirm its social structure. Virtue was neither expected nor efficacious. But to break away from this system was to leap across the gap of virtue to true spirituality. That breakthrough in the East was always the work of solitaries: sadhus and hermits, whether Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist.

Modern psychology has not improved insight into the practice of virtue except to ally itself to social forces that seek to uphold order and decorum. Like the castes of old, the powerful classes not only reserve the higher spiritual practices to themselves (while those among them who practice them are only a few professed) but they uphold social and economic systems that make the householder’s lot difficult to mend spiritually, even using the most common virtues. Modern psychology aims at restoring the wayward personality to an acceptance of and conformity with worldly values. The self must be reconciled to its lot in mass society, must remain “functional.”

Thus a reflection on the eight vices described by John Cassian is not without importance, but the solitary has made rejection of the values of the world and skepticism of societal ways a cornerstone of daily life. It remains for the solitary to dispose time and space for virtue, at all points viewing vice as a product of interrelations between self and world, or bad interrelations of self and nature. Or, as William James described the “divine” as that which the individual considers absolutely essential to an understanding of the universe, one may add that the solitary is working the path toward incorporating the “divine” into his or her life. The solitary is ready to discover the true self versus the social self or the contrived self in the world. At such a point does the path of virtue open before us.

This “opening-before-us” is what Eastern tradition calls awareness. The Japanese Zen philosopher Dogen offers a counterpart or compliment to John Cassian’s list of eight vices in the little essay titled “The Eight Awareness of Great People.” We may call them eight virtues.

The first awareness is to have few desires. There are two aspects to this practice, not only desire or craving but also not seeking out new objects. Usually the lack of desire means no seeking, but in the world a constant barrage of new objects flatters the self and argues their necessity to enhance and pleasure one’s daily life. We cannot do with them — whether objects or the plaudits of people seeking to arouse us through flattery or threat — nor, of course, can we live with them, like the gnawing thirst that is the regular metaphor of desire in Eastern imagery. “Those who act with few desires are calm, without worry or fear. Whatever the situation, there is more than enough,” says Dogen. Desire is not merely for material objects but for situations, security, resolution of human need.

The second awareness is to be content. Contentment is the state of accepting what is within one’s bounds, quite distinct from what the world seeks in pleasure or happiness or gratification, even when linked to our modest accomplishments and skills.

We must know when we must act and when we must lay back and observe and reflect more. The criteria of contentment is awareness — whether a cycle of desires is being set off that will have us enlarge the bounds of our craving. Thus every act must be scrutinized because once we act there is not an interval for “pre-thought” or reflection. Contentment means constantly checking the status of our minds. Only the boundaries of awareness should be enlarged. Dogen says: “Those who are content may sleep on the ground and still consider it comfortable; those who are not content would be dissatisfied even in heaven.”

The third awareness or virtue is to enjoy quietude, what we would call a mature solitude. “Leaving the clamor and staying alone in deserted places is called enjoying quietude,” writes Dogen. This advice may seem redundant to the solitary, but the clamor of the crowd is often carried with us like a sticky weight into the mind and heart, there to fester and grow into restlessness or worse. The ties to the world must be loosened, but naturally. One cannot flee the clamor unless one has disengaged from it, so that what goes into the deserted place is only the self, not the baggage, too.

“Worldly ties and clinging sink you into a multitude of pains.” Perhaps the first step to the virtue of enjoying quietude is eliminating what will dog the self and follow the self into its attempted quietude. This virtue need not, should not, be embraced prematurely.

The fourth virtue is diligence. The image of idleness projected by Taoist wu-wei or Hindu-Buddhist non-desiring is occasionally portrayed as indifference and lassitude. The forgotten premise of such criticism is that a great deal of spiritual or psychological work precedes an authentic awareness or monitoring of self and environs. It is far easier to accept the world and not appear indifferent or idle.

Put in terms of Western virtues, diligence is forbearance, patience, and fortitude. But more importantly, it is virtue without social engagement. Diligence is not worldly attentiveness in the sense of an idler on a park bench watching the world pass by. Rather, diligence is an awareness of the mind and its requirements, already prepared for by disengaging from desires and fostering contentment.

Diligence can be thought of as maintaining and moving the mind and heart towards the goal of equanimity. Diligence “is like the small stream being able to pierce rock if it continually flows,” to quote Dogen. Of course, we are not literally piercing rock. The world is not of the quality of rock. Moreover, we are not reforming others. In the end, the world is impenetrable, its reluctance to change is absolute, and with it the people and activities that swirl around them.

The rock is ultimately penetrable because it is the penetrable accumulation on the mind. Exercising diligence we can break through what is deposited like a layer on the mind. Finally, diligence is mental work, more delicate than piercing rock, but not any less delicate than the work of water on a rock. The favorite Taoist and Zen images suggest a process (physical but by analogy mental) most delicate over time and space: the image of the stream or trickle of water. To change the metaphor: “If the practitioner’s mind flags and gives up time and again,” says Dogen, “that is like drilling for fire but stopping before heat is produced; though you want to get fire, fire can hardly be gotten this way.”

Perhaps we will never “get fire” or even much heat. Perhaps we will never reach a point of diligent awareness wherein we are enjoying quietude or being perfectly content. But what matters is to recognize that these virtues are states of mind and body regardless of what we think we can manage in the world, regardless of our “caste,” for the world will always defeat half-measures. Virtues are as much products as practices, and the alchemy of practice works slowly, especially when our impatience undermines the effort.

Nor should the solitary fall to the temptation that somewhere a collective solution has been found and packaged, awaiting our discovery. This attitude borders on desire or craving in shirking our own necessary path of discovery and wanting to find — and pay for, if need be — someone else’s. Virtues and awarenesses can only be our own. Retreats are attractive packages, and we cannot judge them harshly because they are made for those who want and need help, anymore than we can criticize the sinners in the temple and wonder where the saints are. Well, the saints have long left the room. Try the retreat or the group or the guru — but the solitary may come back relaxed but disillusioned, with no more than a mental massage for comfort and an earful of someone else’s vision. “You should leave your own group as well as other groups, stay alone in a deserted place, and think about extirpating the root of suffering,” advises Dogen.

The previous post mentioned the first four of eight vices described by John Cassian, as summarized in the Philokalia: gluttony, lust, avarice, and anger. Here are the other four.

Because John addresses monks, he warns against solitude as a retreat from others, justified by the vices of others, especially when the product of anger. John prefers the monk to be in salutary company than alone and made hard-hearted by resentment and false motives. This is wise advice for the monk but leaves others seeking John’s counsel a lack of clear resolution on how to invoke solitude and when.

The focus on the vices of dejection and listlessness have a similar focus between self and others. Dejection has no regularized counterpart today. Dejection is half of the classic acedia. The symptoms are more psychological than malicious, less self-conscious than moral or ethical. Acedia is described today as depression, and a century or two ago as melancholia. John can only call it a demon, characteristically leaving the self “senseless and paralyzed, tied and bound by … despairing thoughts.”

Perhaps the solitary, by disposition and personality, is less a prey to acedia than the gregarious or extrovert who is attempting solitude as alien and unnatural. For John, acedia is a coenobitic bane that seems to engender a solitary but hostile attitude.

Just as moth devours clothing and a worm devours wood, so dejection devours a man’s soul. It persuades him to shun every helpful encounter and stops him accepting advice from his true friends or giving them a courteous and peaceful reply. Seizing the entire soul, dejection fills the soul with bitterness and listlessness. Then it suggests to the soul that we should go away from other people, since they are the cause of its agitation.

Here again John distinguishes acedia as cause of solitude rather than result. He addresses monks living in a community wherein advice from superiors is expected, where friendship is based on mutual goals and values, and externals are not the cause of acedia as much as is a faulty mind.

But who — even the monk, for that matter — enjoys such companionship and fellow-feeling? Who can depend on the wisdom or advice from elders or friends? Who can find soul-mates who understand the nuances of self and solitude?

Courtesy and cooperation are overt and social necessities in a community, workplace, neighborhood, or family. But the solitary is not hostile simply because he or she cannot accommodate to a setting where more than minimal external etiquette is expected. The solitary becomes dejected by pressures on the inner self, invasions and assaults to the inner vision, to the subjective identity. The delicate task of the solitary is to gracefully negotiate being in the world but avoiding its compromises and the “authority” and “advice” of the groups mentioned. To accomplish this, the solitary must thoroughly understand the self and carefully position it in a discrete and well-guarded place while donning a mask of sociability.

Our whole fight is against the passions within. Once these have been extirpated from our heart … we will readily be able to live not simply with others but even with wild beasts.

On dejection, John concludes that while some aspects come from outside the self (he ascribes them to demons, not to society and culture), others are our own responsibility. Besides spiritual practices, he counsels “living with godly people,” but, again, there is not much chance of pursuing the latter except vicariously.

Listlessness is called sloth in most translations, but is here the result of dejection or acedia, and is properly an extension of it. Again, John treats of it in a coenobitic setting we will have to interpret for the solitary.

Listlessness is a “harsh, terrible demon … who works hand in hand with the demon of dejection.” Listlessness encourages a monk to despair of his fellow monks and community, to wish to be elsewhere, to visit when he should be solitary, to be alone when he should be with others, to oversleep, to crave food and drink, to be unable to concentrate, focus, meditate, to waver between lethargy and nervous energy. All of this is symptomatic of acedia, not the cultivated vice of sloth.

From a contemporary perspective, one may wonder if acedia is largely physiology at work: a pollution or toxicity of the body that inevitably affects nerves and mind. The most compelling solution to acedia is full engagement of the body and disengagement of the mind. Evey tradition understands this. If not in a formal way — pursuing yoga or qigong or the outdoors, etc., some exercise is necessary, as well as a rigorously clean diet of living foods — then certainly the way of the ancients is to be prescribed: work, physical or manual labor. “Someone who works is attacked or affected by but a single demon, while someone who does not work is taken prisoner by a thousand evil spirits,” notes John.

Self-esteem is the paradox of self. Enough is essential to establish the continuity of identity with our values and goals, but too much is a vice that undermines the most virtuous activity. John gives the example of a monk who imagines himself a priest and so John ascribes a touch of madness to excessive self-esteem. When we celebrate ourselves for something well done, there is always an overestimation. When we imagine ourselves other than what we are, there is a clear danger. But knowing who we are — that is the challenge. John would have us regard ourselves as “nothing before God,” and that is a prerogative to be taken as needed, though it should not confuse our simple pleasure in a task well done or the silent appreciation of nature and its beauty.

How does self-esteem differ from pride? John sees pride as overwhelming the more targeted vices aforementioned. Pride is like a “harsh tyrant who has gained control of a great city and destroys it completely, razing it to its foundation.” To John, pride is simply equating the self with God or perfection.

But pride, unlike self-esteem, has a social dimension bound up with power, whether over others in one’s immediate sphere or over an empire that sways the world. In this context, self-esteem is a personal flaw but pride is an aggrandizement, an active and pernicious engagement with the world. Although John does not follow up the concept of pride as will to power over others, he intuits that pride is indeed the master vice that enables, fosters, extends, and justifies the others. The exercise of power is always the opposite of disengagement, humility, renunciation, and solitude.

The whole treatment of the “eight vices” in John Cassian’s Institutes, is efficiently reduced to a short summary by the compilers of the Philokalia. The first four are: gluttony, lust, avarice, and anger. The rest will be reflected upon in another post.

Though John Cassian is writing for monks, there is no reason to not reflect on the significance of his thoughts for a lay person, for after all, a monk or nun is a matter of degrees and circumstances. We must consider how these observations and their counterpart “anti-vices” benefit our solitude. Are not virtues (employing the old Roman sense of “strength” or vir) best cultivated with solitude? This is the import of classic texts like John Cassian, even when his particular theology seems so rooted in a distant time, vocabulary, and mindset.

John Cassian argues that control of gluttony or the appetite for food is as much a necessary spiritual practice as control of emotions and passions. Perhaps it is a prerequisite, in that spiritual practice cannot evolve if obstructed by desires rooted in physical mechanisms.

But with lust one encounters a passion so strong, says, John, that one despairs of resolving it by avoidance or distraction and must rely on the grace of God. This is in part because John places the origins of this vice in the work of the devil, which removes it from the sphere of human resistance. It is not a failure of his psychology of human nature, for no one has gotten round the advice of restraint and vigilance straight through to Freud and beyond. Though we can at least acknowledge the power of primitive drives, there is no antidote better than John’s advice of spiritual practice — and avoidance. Perhaps age and the displacement of the libido and hormones (slower in men), coupled with the physiological changes brought about by work, diet, and meditation, will encircle this vice.

Avarice or greed ought not to disturb the monk because poverty is built into the material circumstances of his life. But in fact it does. Avarice does not arise from bodily desires and stirrings but from a perversion of intellect and will. Unlike the poor who are driven to want to acquire what they do not have (whether out of justice, envy, or foolishness), the monk is struck by a more basic distrust of poverty and lack of confidence in God’s providence.

John Cassian notices that clergy and monks argue that they must retain and gather up wealth in order to better serve the poor through distribution. He refutes this argument with biblical passages and moral exhortations, at most recommending life in the monastery as a way of averting temptation.

These arguments do not extend to the heart of the issue of ecclesiastical property in late medieval debate extending into the Reform and beyond. So for John Cassian avarice remains a temptation, not a dramatic issue with a social or political context.

For the solitary, however, the larger context of institutional affiliation and material support may well rest on the larger social context. Our avoidance of avarice must today directly engage with the world of consumerism and desire. This is a third dimension — between socio-economic poverty and evangelical poverty on the one hand and enormous ecclesiastical and private wealth on the other — that John Cassian could not foresee but which we in the modern world must take into account. Because avarice is a matter of intellect, it becomes a matter of social and cultural debate and not just abstract ethics.

Anger is a blinding passion obliterating any other comportment or vice. But anger is usually ascribed to the provocations of others, to their morally outrageous actions or attitudes, thus justifying anger as righteous or excusable. This view of anger only sinks the angry person into a trough of resentment. Solitude becomes an escape from those who provoke our patience. Says John:

When we try to escape the struggle for long-suffering by retreating into solitude, those unhealed passions we take there with us are merely hidden, not erased; for unless our passions are first purged, solitude and withdrawal from the world not only foster them but also keep them concealed, no longer allowing us to perceive what passion it is that enslaves us.

This motive for solitude is what John Cassian calls “an illusion of virtue” that assumes the mantle of long-suffering and humility. If this is our case, solitude only festers this illusion. “Our passions grow fiercer when left idle through lack of contact with other people,” he notes. This clearly cannot to be the solitary’s motive. Ironically, such a motive provides a criteria for distinguishing genuine solitude from mere aloneness and misanthropy.

John Cassian puts the issue of anger into perspective with a candid anecdote about himself:

I can remember how, when I lived in the desert, I became angry with the rushes because they were either too thick or too thin; or with a piece of wood, when I wished to cut it quickly and could not; or with a flint, when I was in a hurry to light a fire and the spark would not come. So all-embracing was my anger that it was aroused even against inanimate objects.

There is no cure for anger except to eliminate all rationale for it. To stoke ourselves into righteousness invites anger at those who are evil as much as creating a vice in ourselves. Engaging evil passionately we are ensnared by it. We cannot respond to anything with anger. “The final cure for this sickness,” John says, “is to realize that we must not become angry for any reason whatsoever, whether just or unjust.” We must disengage from the inevitable flux around us so that our passions will be controllable.

Not analysis or criticism, nor have I (deliberately) read any reviews: here are a few impressions about two popular films concerning hermits and eremitism: Into Great Silence and Amongst White Clouds. I don’t know if the prepositional phrasing of the titles is a coincidence or natural to the openness that both films project.

Although both documentaries seem to center around the quest of the producer, Philip Groening of Into Great Silence spent 16 years waiting for the opportunity to film, and when he does so he reveals a studied patience, an attention to detail that is observant but reflective. Time expands with this film, and the use of the seasons turning over their entire course, with the monastery in different natural light, is subtle yet compellingly beautiful. Groening also makes us last through the silence even when a viewer may grow impatient or wonder when it will break. The silence does break occasionally: the sound of a shovel or of chanting or the faraway animated conversations of the monks on their weekly walk. The poignant words of the simple blind monk are also a foray from silence into articulation. The presence of the old is in both films to great effect.

Lasting through the silence viewers of Groening’s film eventually find themselves within the monastery in a way that is more than a spectator’s. Once past the reality of silence the viewer can fall into the rhythm of the routines and within the spirituality that animates the setting. Thus the human routines from eating to working to studying to chanting, etc., are caught up in the cycle of nature and the entire film moves with deliberate but patient progress.

Technically, the monks are not hermits insofar as they live and work within regular proximity, a proximity that must grow psychologically in their lives, especially when one realizes the solemnity of their vows. Tradition and convention are so strong that no one breaks the silence to utter a word and violate the silence. The silence comes to represent more than the absence of sound or the desire to maintain decorum and atmosphere. The silence is the context, the tissue of existence, the true meaning of things. Silence absorbs and nurtures their commitment, shows them that each place on this earth is the same, but that this place, this sacred place where each hermit is consciously aware of his goal, is special. Silence gives support by reminding the monk of the infinite, while being flexible enough to allow sounds like those mentioned above to gently renew the texture of ongoing mundane reality.

One note of interest is the presence of a black man, and in the additional feature on the DVD, the recording of his daily routines on a spring morning. Who could not think of Abba Moses in the desert? It was a pleasing touch that gently forces the sense of universality in these eremitical values.

Edward Burger’s quest in Amongst White Clouds is not so self-effacing, as he has structured the entire film around it, from some initial autobiographical notes to his physical presence among the hermits of the Zhongnan Mountains, the fabled Chung-nan Mountains medieval Chinese lore. Although inspired by Bill Porter’s book Road to Heaven, Burger’s film is confessionally Buddhist (no Taoists, as in Porter’s book). The viewer is placed chiefly within a Pure Land context with its temple and ceremonies. Burger owns that he is a disciple of one of the monks.

The silence of the mountains would be broken only by the bell and chant of the monks, much as it would have centuries ago, much as at the Grande Chartreuse near the Alps filmed by Groening. Burger wants to show how an individual quest by the hermits is valid and fruitful, for his audience does not have the weight of tradition and the familiarity of the cenobitic setting that Groening’s would have. So Burger asks questions in order to elicit responses, sometimes with amusing results, as when one monk asked about methods and systems simply replies, “There is nothing to say.” Or another monk says that “the texts” are all one needs. The hermits understand the ineffability of their quest, the futility of summing up in a few sentences. Unlike Into Great Silence, the producer’s unenviable task in Amongst White Clouds is to elicit from the great silence.

But there are no set rules to the quest of the Chinese hermits, so Burger’s questioning and impromptu filming is within the style of the effort — and the genre. The introductory audience for whom Burger targets the film will find the entire adventure a piquant effort, inspiring them, hopefully, to “read the texts,” especially the texts of the hermits-poets.

The counterpart of the black man in Into Great Silence, is the woman in Amongst White Clouds. Porter had encountered women hermits, too. Her reflections on having to prove herself capable among the men hermits is well placed in the film. She demonstrates the hazardous trek to a mountainside spring to fetch water. Add to these the sequences of an old hermit planting seeds or another chopping or hoeing and we have a microcosm of material life on the mountainside.

One wonders at the winters here. The hermit-poets of the past have described them, and again Han-shan (whose name means “Cold Mountain”) has described it. A hermit in the film explains that meditation keeps the body warm enough in winter. Thus Burger compensates fairly for the full seasonal cycle presented by Groening (we can imagine the restrictions on Burger’s time).

The two films are pleasant counterparts. Groening’s scale is grander to accommodate the grandeur of an established history and tradition. His methodology reflects his mature resolution. Burger’s ambitions are more limited in the role of student or disciple, and his film techniques are simpler. Too, the eremitic tradition in China’s mountains was deliberately never institutionalized or circumscribed by place, while the Grande Chartreuse, like a medieval cathedral, is a significant institution.

Together these films are complementary and enduring testaments.