Author: Meng-hu

Soyen Shaku (1859-1919) was an influencial Zen teacher who ended his career supporting Japanese imperialism as an extention of his unfortunate nationalist beliefs. But his intellectual contributions were great and cannot be denied. One of his best insights was packaged in a maxim intended to characterize himself, a maxim that certainly applies beyond his own experience: “My heart burns like fire but my eyes are as cold as dead ashes.”

Whatever the degree of solitude or disengagement from society we may experience, we must extinguish not our feelings and emotions (“heart”) but rather our senses (“eyes”). The “heart” propels our progress on a spiritual path, while our senses tend to see life and objects as temporary sources of diversions from the spiritual path.

Working on what feelings and emotions really ought to consist of is a great challenge for anyone, but especially for the solitary, who naturally can lapse into misanthropy and cynicism towards fellow human beings. The concept of love, much trivialized, much misunderstood, transcends the senses and approaches the very harmony of the universe, the very core of being — and does so without attachment, without diversion, without corruption. Perhaps the spiritual path is nothing but this pursuit of harmony and being after all. In which case the true concept of love will resonate within us because we can perceive progress on our path as no mere intellectual or emotional stage but a uniform momentum.

Father/Doctor Louis Fair sufffered a fatal heart attack on Wednesday, Oct. 26th. He was a member of the Hermit’s Slate forum and was an early correspondent to Hermitary. Louis was a true controversialist, unorthodox, feisty, but above all passionate about all things “hermit.”

Louis seemed to fit a Chinese model of the hermit (he was married, concerned about his natural setting in the Hawaiian rainforest) but who would dare tell him that? He was irascible on Hermit’s Slate (the forum) and his last communication to Hermitary nearly a year ago was to let me know about a script error preventing posting — or, as he put it simply, “Slate is all screwed up!” But he was clearly well-read, having been a seminary teacher, and we discussed some religious and other topics along the way, but only briefly.

His web site (http://geocities.com/hermit3712) is a lot of fun, starting with his anecdote that he tried to take on some interns but they turned out to be psychos. I knew from the picture of himself and his caption (“I just LOOK grumpy – well …”) that he had a sense of humor.

May he rest in peace.
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Father Louis is survived by Sister Gabriella, his wife of sixteen years; the State of Hawaii does not recognize survivor benefits for “religious only” marriage. Sister Gabriella will continue to oversee their co-founded “No Kill” Cat Sanctuary of Hermitage-Hawaii.

To Democritus it was euthymia, to Seneca tranquility, to the Buddhists equanimity. All of these concepts point to the same state of mind. The Greek original of “well-being of soul” describes the deft avoidance of extremes for peace of mind. Like Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, we navigate our lives between pride and envy, between elation and melancholy, between riches and poverty, between anger and gloating, between cynicism and piety.

The solitary is not immune to any of these extremes of passion. We readily exchange the excesses of the crowd for those of the cell if not vigilant. The key to the middle way is to realize that it is not the mean or mediocre but truly a way with its own distinction, values, vision, and parameters to life. Not an Aristotlean avoidance of extremes but a conscious crafting of the self to capture what is lost and to renounced what is exceeded. As in any creative act, it is no mere middle way to sculpt away excess from a block of wood or marble, or to add or lighten shadow in painting or poetry, or to know when to attend or amend a planted tree. This is the art of living: attentive to when all is changing, in flux, and impermanent — as well as when it is apparently not.

The battle between religion and science (or at least some religions or sects) has always seemed to be rather a struggle between technology and ethics. To turn-of-the-20th-century physicists like Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, science and its discoveries revealed a mysticism in their writings to rival the most spiritually-minded writers. Likewise, Albert Einstein’s statements about technology in the guise of atonmic weapons are unmatched by clergy in moral strength. The abstractions of science, like the abstractions of religion, are never as compelling in daily life and culture as are the prevailing technology (and its effects on environment and society), or the ethics of a people, government, or culture.

The instinct of “fight or flight” is basic in wilderness animals, but society has changed this instinct in humans from a purely physical mechanism involving confrontation and survival to a psychological one that involves our entire environment. Situations require decisions as to whether to involve oneself or whether to avoid or ignore situations.

In modern consumer society, “fight” is largely driven by pleasure, for even common needs like food and shelter are “market” decisions full of marketed options. Most people let a minimal sensual level be their guide to likes and dislikes. No deeper analysis is called upon. Economic debt is a kind of “fight” instinct engaging and consuming the object of desire.

On the other hand, “flight” is apathy, boredom, lack of compassion, irresponsibility — not a true flight from danger but a flight from simplicity, nature, and the self that is revealed by the emptying of social contrivance. Thus to “fight or flight” might be added an intermediate state of contentment. To flee the grand porject of remaking oneself versus conforming to social contrivance and calling it contentment eliminates the need to stir moral passions.

Animals at rest, confident in the security of their surroundings, may experience the equivalent of this state, but it can be a bane to humans, a false reconciliation with society and society’s values. We might call this a false contentment. A positive form of contentment would be a harmony with larger patterns of reality, but society and civilization is so overwhelming that most people cannot imagine a set of values outside of this vast configuration of power, structure, and authority.

Only the hermit has, irregardless of era or culture, been able to show the way past fighting, fleeing, or the hazy ennui of contentment with the world.

We appeal to logic, reason, and argument to overcome what we judge to be lower instincts: emotions and feelings. But rationality devoid of emotions and feelings has created political and technological horrors throughout history. We can no longer tolerate a separation of the two.

Embedded in our feelings of joy, pain, and grief is our capacity to appreciate what is good and wise. From those deepest emotions we can glimpse (if we can see ourselves from afar) a groping for value. Despite its tools for analysis and dispassionate assessment, rationality cannot secure this good. Its description of what is good and right for us is often a flawed argument for power and control over our better intuition.

Reason can provide the detail for enriching our experience of nature and everyday life, just as details can be spiritualized and serve creative ends. But wisdom comes from the intersection of knowledge with our deepest intuitions. Our lives are best when we can enrich our feelings with order, and we can order our feelings with enrichment.

I like the Zen saying “Can you be a hermit in the crowd?” but, of course, the sentiment is not exclusive to Zen. Here is a version attributed to Amma Syncretica, one of the women desert hermits (Desert Mothers) of early Christianity:

Many who live in the mountains behave as if they were in the city; they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living amidst a crowd as it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.

An orange-brown butterfly flits about in the darkening twilight. There are no flowers hereabouts, but perhaps the butterfly has followed me or is looking for moisture from the rapidly-falling dew before retiring (I don’t know where) for the night. I follow its zagging path a moment before walking away. My eye catches a single orange-brown leaf on the ground. For a rueful moment I think it is the butterfly, fallen. I pick up the leaf and stare at it. Perhaps, once, it was a butterfly.

Autumn foretells the end of leaves, and insects; the two, perhaps, are not so far apart in space or time. Any more than we are from them. The Chinese and Japanese poets considered the cry of the cicadas a telling sign of autumn’s progress, for the unknowing creatures did not realize the looming fate before them as they sang in cheerful ignorance. Do we not do likewise, wondering how fruitful (or failing) was our most recent occupation or business?

To think in terms of what occupies us and how worthwhile or short-fallen were our lastest efforts is vain and futile. Perhaps our last moments will be preoccupied with an unpaid bill, an unsent message, a remorseful memory, an unresolved doubt, a piece of music. It will probably not be the emptiness of the cicada’s mind, or that of the butterfly or the leaf, not the “no mind” that we spent our busy lives trying to attain.

I picked up a local newspaper the other day — I seldom do — and my eye fell on the obituary page, where pathos emboldens survivors of loved ones to make public their most private sentiments. I have never understood why a notice bought from a newspaper and for the consumption of unknown and unworthy eyes should bring solace to the survivors. Remembrance is a strong emotion and worthy, but dissipated and scattered by publicity.

I read a poignant item that reported the departed one as having no survivors or kin but many friends. The item went on to enumerate them, some twenty in number, faceless names further effacing the departed one.

This whole business reminded me of Seneca’s little essay, “On Old Age,” wherein he breates a servant for the sad condition of a certain tree but is told to his chagrin that the tree is very well cared for but very old.

At any time, on any day, we have potentially reached the end of our course, says Seneca, and if God adds the morrow, well, then, we shall accept it gladly, enjoying a windfall. But instead of an obituary notice, the solitary ought to consider the resolution of Alexander Pope’s concluding lines on publicity in his inestimable poem, “Ode to Solitude”:

Thus let me live, unheard, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

In his The Ego and Its Own, Max Stirner (1806-1856) proposed “egoism” as a model for society and individuals. His rejection of state and religion in favor of property and the will strikes a familiar chord in his successor Nietzsche. But egoism is a model for ruthless hedonism, not watchful solitude.

Stirner does make an interesting point when he wonders why Jesus and Socrates, after denouncing the authorities and courting arrest and execution, did not flee to live another day, feeling themselves obligatory citizens of Jerusalem and Athens, subject to the moral authority of its corrupt powerbrokers. Why should they feel subordinate to worldly powers, wonders Stirner.

One might argue about the content of integrity, I suppose, or just plain logistics in small and populated areas. But it is true that flight or reclusion was the Eastern model — though it has little to do with Stirner’s “egoism.” “When the king is good, serve,” advised Confucius. “When the king is evil, recluse.” And Lao-tzu went one step further, retreating for the mountains like many a Taoist and Zen successor. As did, in effect, the Buddha in renouncing the world and eschewing martyrdom. A difference in the case of the Buddha, perhaps, was in not inciting or even vocalizing a prophetic denunciation of authorities as evil, evil being as much a cultural as an individual phenomenon.

The catch for Stirner, of course, is that a desire for freedom as he conceives of it requires absolute autonomy of will and ego. The ability to satisfy the caprices of desire become the measure of freedom. The necessity of defining this capacity in a busy social world or even in what Stirner would create — a “union of egoists” — will always be his undoing. This undoing results because of the essential disharmony represented by Stirner’s model of human nature and psychology. Stirner and his like-minded egoists will forever suffer what the Buddha called “thirst.”