Letter from China: "spiritual?"

I've often skirmished with this word "spiritual;" it gets used easily and frequently. I was told, in another working life, that someone I worked with was "a spiritual man." (I thought he was devious and unreliable, just like most of us.) Bookshop shelves are sometimes labelled "mind, body, spirit." Which means you'll get astrology books next to bibles next to Dawkins. Anyway:-

There's a huge Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing called Yonghegong. It's full of people doing this stuff:

which under Chairman Mao would have got them locked up or worse. (It's also full of tourists like me, c.f. St Paul's in London.) It's great to see them doing what they want. I guess it's a spiritual observance, or is it simply a religious act, which may or may not have a deeper, "spiritual" significance?

Maybe it's an example of "this is what we do around here," by which I mean religion as a cultural habit, something that feels right and homely, not usefully to be seen as a matter of belief distinctions, more as a matter of something that works for a particular group of people.

Maybe the observances at the Temple are symbolic, by which I mean the people may not believe there is a non-material being, a BuddhaGod or spirit, to whom they pray; perhaps  they are simply expressing their wonder and admiration at what the historical Buddha did for them. 

After all, Buddhist thinkers in the Chan/Zen tradition will tell you that Buddhism is not a religion; it has no God, in the Judeo/Christian mould. So maybe these people at the Lama Temple are not worshipping, in any way comparable with Christian worship.

Or maybe they are worshipping, in the hope that a nonmaterial entity, a god, a spirit, will interecede for them and make things better.

I mean, presumably they don't think he's actually going to eat this stuff, do they? The monks take it away when it gets rotten, surely...

All very colourful, fascinating and puzzling.  

But one answer to my questions might simply be that the people with the incense sticks, and the monks, are engaged in practices which have a spiritual significance for them.

It seems to me that we use "spiritual" (in contexts where we do not relate the term to a god, a non-material power) to mean an experience that seems much more significant than our usual states of mind; something that creates in us deep meanings, connections and perceptions beyond those that we are used to. 

I am certain that such experiences happen to atheists, in-betweens, and followers of a religion. I am certain that we need such experiences, and the vehicle we ride on to get there matters much less than experiencing the destination itself.

We tend to over-value belief as a definer of spiritual practices. Does it matter what someone believes, as long as what they do provides a spiritual experience for them? And provided it doesn't hurt others.

Einstein and Buddha - and Alan Watts too.

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description...if there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism."

Er, but - it appears Albert never said this, or at least not in this tidy form. He is usually described as a theist, or a pantheist, rather than an atheist, and he certainly didn't go for the personal God who is directly involved in human affairs, the "Lord please smite our enemies because we don't like them" sort of God. It would seem he approached Buddhism via Schopenhauer, and he does mention it favourably.

I think MythoAlbert, as quoted above, is right, in that the experience of a sense of unity above/below individual forms and processes, the "mystical" experience Alan Watts tried to describe (in my last posting here) sits better with Big Science than the Judeo-Christian family of faiths.

So Gautama Buddha* still gets top marks from me (and one or two others) for:

• not claiming divine origins or a pre-ordained mission
• telling his followers to find their own light, their own way
• giving them the astonishing** insight that the ego, the self, is transitory and not a consistent entity
• getting people to meditate their way to a better, calmer, more compassionate state of being

So well done GB, and AE!

* Many Buddhists believe in Buddhas before Gautama, and that there will be Buddhas in the future, e.g. the overweight cheerful bloke you see in China, represented in lots of little easy-to-purchase statues. See below.

** astonishing, because it seems to be confirmed, or at least supported, by psychologists and neuroscientists; they tell us that we continually recreate our sense of who we are, and that the feeling that "I," my sense of self, is a consistent thing- that's simply a sort of working assumption we need for social interaction etc etc. And GB had no psychologists or brain scanners to help him discover this insight. Just meditation.

The future Buddha, Maitreya; I have to say as an aesthetic experience I prefer Gautama....

but no doubt he'll be welcome, if/when he arrives!

Letter from China - Alan Watts and presentmomentness

In China recently to see family members, there was some down time and I got some reading done. (No funerals to work on.)

This man,

Alan Watts, is one of a rare breed who, by their learning and their eloquence, help the West to understand the East, in terms of religions and philosophies. In Beijing, I  read his autobiography, "In My Own Way." It's a curious mix of intimate and fascinating memoir, and writings about key beliefs and experiences. He also has an odd habit of listing people he knows; nice for them, but tedious perhaps for those of us in different and later circles! But he did know and meet some fascinating people.

Watts studied and interpreted Chinese Buddhism and Taoism, and Japanese Zen. His book "The Way of Zen" way back in the 1960s, was for many of us our first contact with something that seemed, and seems, very important; a particular experience that is ultimately beyond verbal concepts and dualistic distinctions.  In an essay, "This Is It," he writes thus about it:

"There is really no satisfactory name for this type of experience. To call it mystical is to confuse it with visions of another world, or of gods and angels. To call it spiritual or metaphysical is to suggest that it is not also extremely concrete and physical, whilst the term "cosmic consciousness" itself has the unpoetic flavour of occultist jargon."

He does his best:

"To the individual thus enlightened it appears as a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is."

and "the central core of the experience seems to be the conviction, or insight, that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfilment of all living."

This was written long before Jon Kabat-Zinn developed mindfulness meditation techniques from Zen methods, to help Westerners not from a meditative religious culture to live in "the immediate now."

"The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way," but Watts does his best to lead us to it, and for that I thank his memory. He helps us past the limitations of dualism.

The book in which he writes most fully and most successfully of the illusory nature of the self is "The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are." Its perhaps his masterwork, and worth catching, if you want to help yourself towards presentmomentness and the calming of the ego into something.... ah, these words!

Mu

Letter from China - introduction: the past and the present

The title is a bit of a cheat really - I'm back at Mundi Mansions, happy watching the moon rise through the trees, 

but I want to jot down a few thoughts arising from three weeks in Beijing. I'll get to matters of meditation and enlightenment in future instalments, but this one is about the past and the present. I didn't already know this stuff; you may do, in which case, catch you later.

I found China: a history by Robert Keay to be exceptionally good, and from it I learned, I think, these things amongst others:

1. The whole "dynasties" thing is a little over-played in the culture's view of its own history. The arrival of a dynasty was usually a time of huge dislocation and strife , i.e. they were overthrown by violent rebellion, or finally collapsed underneath warring factions. The end of a dynasty could therefore also be a time of lengthy strife. And the periods between major dynasties, such as the "Warring States" time, add up to something approaching the sum of years of stable dynasties.  

The times between dynasties could be times of great cultural and intellectual development, as much as the times of dynastic peace. Confucius himself came out of such a betwixt and between time, as did the Tao Te Ching. The idea of a cycle of dynastic establishment, peace and prosperity, and then decline and collapse, came to be seen as inevitable. In his famous "their finest hour" speech Winston Churchill said "if the British Empire lasts a thousand years..." One can imagine a Chinese mandarin smiling a little and muttering "Xia, Shang, Zhou, Chin, Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Ching, Mao..."

2. Such things matter, because the culture has a tremendously powerful sense of its own history, going back thousands of years. It is, as "they" will be quick to tell you, the oldest continuous culture on the planet. This: 

is a piece of animal bone which has been thrown in a fire, and the corresponding cracks interpreted as marks of divination. You can also see carved pictograms, which are notes of  the answer the process was believed to have yielded to an important question. eg "When's it going to rain?" Apparently, these marks are recognisable as the origins of Chinese written ideograms as they are today. 

The bone dates from the bronze age Shang dynasty, c. 2000 BC, maybe 1600 BC. Chinese is the oldest continuous written language on the planet. Sure, there are Egyptian hieroglyphs, but the daily paper in Cairo doesn't use a script that developed from heiroglyphics. Ditto Bagdhad and the cuneiform writing on Sumerian clay tablets. (This cracking and divination process evolved into the yin- and-yang-based divination system of the Book of Changes, I Ching, beloved of the 60s counterculture and of Jung.)

2. So what? Well, the powerful sense of its history presumably works like a mulch out of which grow policies and attitudes of China today. eg:

1. Modern China has no or very little truly democratic heritage (that's not a value judgement, it's a fact) and no heritage of liberal argument. Good government is not based on the fruits of conflicting arguments, except in a specifically limited way within the Communist Party. It was based on the Emperor having the Mandate of Heaven, or in Mao's case, of Marx. A faction is likely seen not as a source of fruitful possibilities but as a threat to the "dynasty." That's how dynasties are overthrown. Look what happened to the Sung Dynasty. So: Tiananman Square...?? And any proposal to genuinely strengthen regional autonomy, for Tibet or XinJiang, is regarded as "splittist." Both regions are the subject of big Han (i.e. Ethnically "Chinese" as opposed to Tibetan or Uighur) immigration. Hong Kong is course very different. Money talks....
2. Past figures have always been used to buttress present actions. Mao specifically compared himself to the first Emperor, Qin - in fact he said he outdid Qin in necessary ruthlessness. Qin burned the classic texts and persecuted Confucian scholars. so: the Cultural Revolution?

3. The ethnic Han peoples, the largest group in China by a huge %, tend to see themselves as the "Chinese," the the others as "minorities." Historically, this is a dubious idea, it seems to me. Two dynasties were non-Han (Yuan, the Mongols, Kubilai Khan etc, and the last dynasty, the Ching from Manchuria - and this of course means not just the rulers but the ruling and senior adminstrative classes.) 

Also, the interplay of the cultures of the Mogolian steppes and the Central Asian peoples, and the Han of the more settled agricultural "heart of China" area seems hugely important. (One simple example: Tang Chinese depended on Mongolian bloodstock for their cavalry horses. Another: the development of Chinese Buddhism, once again of importance post-Mao, owed a huge amount to Tibetan scholarship and practice, just as Japanese Buddhism does to China.) Alternating patterns of trade and hostility rumbled on round the edge of heartland China for thousands of years.

Heartland China was highly successful in assimilating outside influence, and convincing the outsiders that theirs was a superior civilization. (Naturally, the Tatar horse warriors regarded them as effete and feeble; but they did have an awful lot soldiers!) That is I guess why Western trade and diplomacy missions ran into trouble and embarrassment at the Ching court; they wouldn't kowtow to the Emperor, he who had the Mandate of Heaven, he whose annual rituals secured good harvests and prosperity. They didn't seem to understand that this ancient and sophisticated civilisation was in fact THE civilisation. Eventually, the West's answer was cordite, war and economic oppression.

4. Modern China included vast areas that are, or at least weren't, "Chinese." Not just Tibet, but also areas of Gansu and Qinghai. XinJiang, the largest province of all. Inner Mongolia. The southern border areas such as Yunnan. China's history shows patterns of conquest and withdrawal, rebellion and aceptance, of the borderlands, for centuries. Controlling the North could be the huge economic and military effort that finally broke a dynasty apart. China is not one place or one ethnic group, and the government's nerves about all this are - tense. Just ask the Tibetans and the Uighurs. No wonder they are hostile to "splittist" arguments. No wonder they urge Han Chinese to emigrate and settle in such regions.

5. China has, mostly, a harsh climate and it's geographically difficult for farming and settlement. Huge floods, earthquakes, famines and transport difficulties, all mark Chinese history. It's not like the settled and relatively benign river valleys of other ancient civilisations. The sufferings recorded in their history, not least that of the last 150 years (hang your heads, Europe, Japan and the USA) have been mind-numblingly appalling. Little wonder that they can  sometimes seem to us tough, pragmatic and materialistic (vide Kowloon Saturday nights) and maybe a little impassive in public. Individually, I found them far from impassive. But a Brit who worked in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia for years once said to me that it seemed to be a pretty full-time job just being Chinese. There's a lot of history in there.

And also much beauty, joy and expressive power. The horrid cult of the powerful dead represented by the Terracotta Warriors is not the only remarkable thing to be seen in the National Museum. If I remember my chronologies aright, just a few hundred years after the First Emperor was buried along with hundreds of sacrifical victims, comes this lovely semi-abstract sculpture of a dancer: