Author: hermitary

In searching for a prototype modern hermit, one is confronted by the reality that after the Middle Ages, hermits in modernity were destined by authorities to disappear. In order to survive, eremitism transformed into solitude, and hermits transformed into solitaries.

Unlike historical hermits, however, who seem so similar regardless of geography, culture, or era, solitaries present more variable phenomena. Life styles of modern solitaries depend more on circumstance and personality. Solitaries were not necessarily more accesptible to society, but at least were more readily disassembled and concealed.

Today, the topic of solitude is standard fare in popular psychology. Even the most aloof bureaucrat to the most troubled artist is tolerated for solitary behavior, indeed, even redeemable and rewarded for eccentricity and showmanship. In offering solitude to their audiences, columnists bid us to cultivate solitude as a preliminary to big events: athletic, business, legal, artistic, or personal. Solitude is treated as a homeopathic remedy: not too much such as to appear strange, but just enough of a suggestive remedy to overcome a lack of confidence or mettle, a meditative moment before embarking on stress.

How far solitude has come in the modern mindset, stripped from its roots and mental character, far away from eremitism. Thus, pop psychology plays a contradictory theme. Solitude in small doses is good for a fighting spirit, but too much solitude is neurotic and dangerous habit. Too much solitude leads to loneliness, isolation, and depression — a chief malady of the old, we are told, who do not socialize enough. The goal of the populoar adviser is often mercenary and views solitude flippantly yet like a prescription. How can one approach solitude not as a temporary remedy but a “lfestyle” that does not undermine itself? Can its link to erenmitism be restored or reconstructed?

A useful model for beginning this project is found in psychologist Carl Jung’s 1931 essay on “The Stages of Life.” In this essay, Jung moves through the individual’s psychological stages, but within the context of the perennial factors of Nature versus Culture. Here the danger of oversimplification also obscures the real context of our lives and the stage of life. Nature is not merely heredity but the autonomy of the growing person to come into contact with Nature and its context of universals. This is where each life stage discovers not only its self-interests but its relationship to our universe. In contrast, Culture (what some writers call Nurture, a midsleading term) is society, relationships, institutions, ideologies,in short, all the binding contrivances that we encounter in the stages of life, their character and impact relevant to the moment, intertwining their contrived content with the capacities and vulnerabilities of the individuial in the given culture. This presentation by Jung gives full reckoning with the influences of stages or situations, so that we cannot think of stages outsideof the context of material and cultural contexts. We cannot make the stages mere abstrctions. We can never know the content of the psyche without understanding that Culture is not merely a context but is content, depending on the individual.

This is all prelude to understanding solitude. Solitude could come out of the individual will, but it also emerges in relation to Culture, so that we are obliged to ask why this phenomenon of solitude, why now at this stage, why in this social context what it is? Could it not have been different? In fact, is it different elsewhere? Resisting the temptation to dismiss solitude as subjective also means resisting the temptation to view solitude as social failure or unintention, society letting down its guard. Revisting Jung restores complexity, but also reinstates simplicity, addressing the inner and outer factors while inviting us to look at their conjunction, the conjunction of what the individual is made of and what society is really all about.

All of these factors were, ironically, visited by the Rousseau versus Hobbes debate about human nature. Jung refreshes the debate with a subtle presentation of the psyche that neither Enlightenment progenitor coulod have addressed. Rousseau, however, was quite willling to concretize the historical chasms; Jung merely goes back and illustrates them with logic from psychology. All that’s needed is to plug the hermit of history into the conversations.

Here are a few favorite random snippets from Zen resources:

from Iron Flute.
14. Pai-Yun’s poem:
Where others dwell,
I do not dwell.
Where others go, 
I do not go.
This does not mean to refuse association with others;

I only want to make 
black and white distinct.
*****
from Gateless Gate.
19. “Everyday Life is the Path.”
Joshu asked Nansen: “What is the path?'”
Nansen said: “Everyday life is the path.”
Joshu asked: “Can it be studied?'”
Nansen said: “If you try to study it, you will be far away from it.”
Joshu asked: “If I do not study it, how can I know it is the path?”
Nansen said: “The path does not belong to the perception world, neither does it belong to the nonperception world. Cognition is a delusion and noncognition is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as the sky. You name it neither good nor not-good.”
At these words Joshu was enlightened.
*****
[Added poem to 19. “Everyday Life is the Path.”]
In spring, hundreds of flowers;
in autumn, a harvest moon;
In the summer, a refreshing breeze;
in winter, snow will accompany you.
If useless things do not hang in your mind,
Any season is a good season for you.
*****
from Gateless Gate.
24. “Without Words, Without Silence.”
A monk asked Fuketsu: “Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?”
Fuketsu observed: “I always remember springtime in southern China. The birds sing among innumerable
kinds of fragrant flowers.”
*****
from Iron Flute.
67. Genro:
The whole world is my garden.

Birds sing my song;

Winds blow as my breath;

The dancing of the monkey is mine;

The swimming fish expresses freedom;
The evening moon is reflected
In one thousand lakes,

Yet when the mountain hides the moon,
All images will be gone

With no shadow remaining on the water.
I love each flower representing spring
And each colorful leaf of autumn.
Welcome the happy transmigration!
*****
88. Yüeh-shan’s Lake.
Nyogen: “Zen monks like to dwell intimately with nature.
Most Chinese monasteries were built in the mountains or by a lake. Zen records many dialogues between teacher and monks concerning natural beauty, but there must also be many monks who never asked questions, simply allowing themselves to merge with nature. They are the real supporters of Zen — better than the chatterboxes with all their noise in an empty box.
*****
89. Hsüeh-fêng’s Wooden Ball.
Nyogen: When Yüan-wu gave a lecture on Hsüeh-tou’s selected koans and poems, he criticized one phrase after another, then published them all in book form under the title, Pi- yen-chi, or Blue Rock Collection. After his death, his disciple, Ta-hui, gathered all the publications together in front of the temple and made a bonfire of them. What the teacher builds in shape must be destroyed by the disciples in order to keep the teachings from becoming an empty shell. Western philosophers create their own theory, then followers continue to repair the outer structure until it no longer resembles the original. In Zen we say, “Kill Buddha and the patriarchs; only then can you give them eternal life.”
*****

An acquaintance of an acquaintance indicates that a relation, a man nearly forty years old, has passed away. This man was scorned by family, rejecting of society, and clearly suffered much trauma. He was autistic, reclusive, anxious, depressed, obsessive-compulsive, suffered diabetes and cardiac issues, dying of heart failure. He eked out a life dependent on disability funds, and lived in a basement.

His life presents the involuntary solitude born of psychological trauma, brought low by illness, not at all conscious or deliberate solitude. The basement, an inexpensive hovel sufficient for his circumspect needs, was reflective of his entire self. Yet he had enlisted himself as an organ donor, perhaps because he despised his body, or because he played a final trick on the world, showing them that he was capable of “caring” wherein “they” were not. No one knows.

One cannot help but note an analogy to the famous basement dwellers of recent literature: Dostoyevsky’s anonymous denizen of Underground, and Ellison’s hapless Invisible Man. In literature, the subtleties of psychology are not over-analyzed. We are presented with a seamless lot of syndromes and maladies, to be accepted as a literary package, with the off-goal of entertainment, even as the authors hope for deeper appreciation of their protagonists and how they might reflect issues of the day.

But in the case of the afore-mentioned acquaintance, there is no reflecting or speculating. He is known-of and gone in the same instance. One might have imagined conversing with such a person (though it is said that he insulted anyone who came too close). How far away from the imagined cave-dwelling historical hermits, for example, Paul of Thebes, who would receive others and converse with them, if only to chide them about their tolerance of their worldly milieu. We have no right to inquire too much, but with our literary protagonists we can only nod and think that, yes, given their premises, they were bound to turn out the way that they did. Can we say as much to justify ourselves?

We often ascribe personality and character traits to animals: courage to lions, wisdom to owls, cheerfulness to beavers, for example. Simon & Garfunkel’s popular 1967 song “At the Zoo” offers a clever rendering: “The monkeys stand for honesty / giraffes are insincere / and the elephants are kindly but they’re dumb…”

Seldom are insects included among the popularized animals; their simplicity and lowliness ascribes no traits to them. But their lowliness has attracted pensive poets who respect the humility of insects and derive insight from the ways of these creatures. In the West, the Romantic poet Keats is usually cited for his poem “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket,” but the impact of the poem is probably based on its eccentricity. The Japanese poet Issa is an excellent representative of the poetic subject, often citing spiders, fleas, flies, cicadas, butterflies — and crickets – especially if we make cicadas the poetic equivalent of crickets. Another poet and observer is Mary Oliver, a closer contemporary looking at the cricket (more below).

For Issa, insects, like us, are subject to birth: “First cicada. life is cruel, cruel, cruel.”
Insects eke out a life: “Don’t kill the fly — it wrings its hands, its feet.” Sometimes insects are companionable: “Daybreak — working as one, two butterflies.” Sometimes they are even exuberant: “Moment of fierceness in the first butterfly.” But we know their fate, and ours: “Autumn cicada — flat on his back, chirps his last song.” The insects teach us quietly, humbly: “Weaving butterfly, I am no more than dust.” May they remain our companions always: “When I go, guard my tomb well, grasshopper.”

Mary Oliver perceives all that Issa does in her poem “Nothing is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About,” from her 2016 book Felicity.

The cricket doesn’t wonder if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.
It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.
He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.
This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.

A characteristic of institutional religions, east and west, is consolidation of scripture and doctrine into ritual.

This is especially conspicuous for Westerners seeing the evolution of Christianity into a set of founding narratives followed by evolution of doctrine and rote ritual, primary institutions of church and monasteries, and the providence of bishops, priests, abbots, and monks. In the same way, eastern instances show that the chief institution is the monastery, and the presentation and condification of scripture, doctrine, and ritual comes to dominate.

The institutions in either Buddhism or Christianity present a dilemma for the historical hermit who arises out of either tradition. In the Zen tradition of Japan, the dilemma is expressed by contrasting the eremitic tendency, which concentrates on self-awareness and methods such as meditation, with the monastic tendency concentrating on successfully handling koans promoting instant enlightenment. In Japan, Rinzai Zen masters dominated the monastic institutions and drilled their novice monks with koans. Whether the monastery was large or small, the methodology came to dominate, as did the authoritarianism of the masters, who saw violence in word and action as legitimate tools of instruction or fostering of cirrect answers.

Dissent from this approach harkened back to the Japanese master Dōgen (1200-1253), the founder of Soto Zen. An example of these contemporary tensions is found in the life of Zen master Bassui (1327-1387).

Bassui was born questioning the customs and beliefs of his time; as a four-year-old child at his father’s funeral, seeing the food offerings presented, he wondered how his father would eat the food. Told that his father’s soul would receive the offerings, young Bassui asked what is the soul. And when Bawsui became a monk at twenty, he refused to wear monk’s robes because — he said — he became a monk to understand the great issues of life and death, not to wear robes. Later, after an enlightenment experience, confirmed by multiple masters, Bassui built a hermitage in the mountains, the first of many for the next seventeen years!

As Bassui translator Arthur Braverman has noted: “Bassui was very critical of the Rinzai practice of studying koans, perhaps because they were becoming more and more formalized, hence losing their original spirit. He seems to have been attracted to the Soto sect for its stress on being attentive to all one’s everyday activities.”

And in a famous letter written toward the end of his life, Bassui writes: “The gurgle of the stream and the sigh of the wind are the voices of the master. The green of the pine, the white of the snow, these are the colors of the master, the very one who lifts the hands, moves the legs, sees, hears. One who grasps this directly without recourse to reason or intellection can be said to have some degree of inner enlightenment. But this is not yet full enlightenment.”

It is not full enlightenment, concludes Bassui, but may be sufficient to end rebirth in one’s successive lifetime (thus addressing a representative doctrine). But when one does attain this point, one will see “that all the sermons of the Buddhas are nothing more than metaphors that point to the minds of ordinary people.”

Bassui’s emphasis on the ordinariness of mind, of self-disipline, of insight, refreshingly transformed Zen into the tool it became for art, expression, simplicity, appreciation of nature, and enlightenment. His apprroach was the fruit of eremitism combined with the inspiration of the great master Dōgen.

URL: https://www.hermitary.com/articles/bassui.html