Category: Buddhism

Still Alive

Okay, okay: Quick update.

School is coming to a close. Not winding down, as the expression goes, not yet — but it’s getting close to being over. I have a ten- to twelve-page research paper I’m working on, I have two or three major essay-based tests to study for, a ten-minute presentation to do, but then I’m fucking done.

At least until next semester. (The last one, finally.)

After that? Well, okay. Here’s the official announcement: I’m writing my first novel. I’ve got a couple of short story ideas brewing in the back of my mind, science fiction stories, but I’m saving those for afterward. I don’t want to get in the way of what has the potential to become a really, really interesting dark fantasy novel. Or horror novel. Or weird transgressive satire. I don’t give a shit what people end up calling it, because chances are that no one will want to read it. It’s a first novel — maybe you didn’t catch that part.

I’m calling it DOOMSTER, but you can call it whatever you want. Don’t call it crap, ’cause that’s rude as hell. Just ignore it, if you think it’s crap. Please.

I’ve got a lot of brainstorming notes and a very broad outline written, with some truly inspiring characters and ideas, but I honestly have no idea what it will end up being. It may prove to be a trunk novel. It may end up self-published. It may sell to a small press publisher like Raw Dog Screaming Press, who I think are doing some fantastic work in the field of horror and the weird right now, or somebody bigger. I dunno.

I just want to write a novel, and have some fun with it.

To write the book — here comes that advice bubbling up again — that I would want to read.

(Meanwhile, I’ll also be filling out applications to Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey. Fingers crossed.)

So what have I been reading? That’s relevant.

First: Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s earth-shattering debut novel from 1996. My favorite book, well, ever. Must’ve read it a hundred times. It’s been instrumental in motivating my lazy, stressed-out ass to hunker down and get a novel done. Finally. Before that: things like Horns by Joe Hill, and Palahniuk’s Damned. More recently, Jeremy C. Shipp’s Cursed, George Carlin’s posthumous memoir, Last Words, and The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy. I’ve been watching my favorite childhood anime series, Robotech.

This is where my head has been, when it’s not at school. Doing schoolwork.

By the time I get around to diving headlong into the novel draft next week, my head is still going to be here. I think that’s okay, even a great thing. These are books I love. The myths I’ve built my life around, to put it boldly.

They’re the reason I’m managing to make my homework fun in this last, final stretch.

Here’s the block quote that opens my final Buddhism term paper, for fun:

I would put forward that the next thing is going to be a story, because right now, people really don’t have a big story, a big software… They don’t have a big meta-narrative story; they don’t have a big story like Christianity was a big story. So right now, we need a really big story… And that story doesn’t have to be in conflict or in reaction to the current story, because I would say, right now, you don’t change anything by protesting anything… You give people a more effective way of living their lives, they won’t give a shit about foreign oil, you know? You give them the right story, and you make their cars obsolete, it’s gonna be like, “We are just swimming in oil. What are we going to do with all this oil?” And you can do that within the culture without reacting to the government, the war, whatever. Because in a way, by reacting to it, you’re wasting energy…you are making it stronger by giving it this token little resistance, keeping it in place. So your job, I would say, is to come up with a story like that, that makes all of the things we worry about so much right now completely beside the point… We won’t even think about them, because your story will be so incredible. I don’t know what that story is, but that’s why…if I can make my case, somebody’s gonna come up with that story.

–Chuck Palahniuk (Postcards from the Future)

The paper is called Karmic Demons and the Power of Compassion: Buddhist Philosophy as a Basis for Modern Myth, and I’m hoping to craft it into a kind of short fiction-writer’s manifesto. A foundation for the rest of my literary career, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, or even pretentious.

Because I’ve come to love the ideas that lie at the heart of Buddhist thought (even though I’m not, nor will I ever be, a Buddhist), I seek to imbue my stories with them — but only if I can achieve that without growing deliberately didactic. In this essay, I’m going to explore Buddhist ideas in existing stories and the larger philosophical truths they represent, and then explain the utility of such ideas from a contemporary storyteller’s perspective.

To give you an idea of the paper’s meat-and-potatoes content, the preexisting basis for my argument, here’s my works cited bibliography:

  • Bacigalupi, Paolo. “Pocketful of Dharma.” Pump Six and Other Stories. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2010. 1-24. Print.
  • Dick, Philip K. “Beyond Lies the Wub.” Paycheck and Other Classic Stories. New York: Citadel, 1990. 27-33. Print.
  • Hill, Joe. Heart-Shaped Box. New York: Harper, 2010. Print.
  • Hill, Joe. Horns. New York: William Morrow, 2010. Print.
  • Loy, David, and Linda Goodhew. The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Print.
  • Mitchell, Donald W. Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
  • Okorafor, Nnedi. Who Fears Death. New York: Daw, 2010. Print.
  • Palahniuk, Chuck. Damned. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Print.
  • Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Print.
  • Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary. Dir. Dennis Widmyer, Kevin Kölsch, and Josh Chaplinsky. Perf. Chuck Palahniuk. Kinky Mule Films, 2003. DVD.

Interesting Theological Discussion Over at LitReactor

…In which I reveal a lot of the rationale behind my own beliefs, and why I think everyone else is equally entitled to their own without question, ridicule, or animosity. Go check it out, if you’re thinking about gettin’ religion, or losing it like REM.

Excerpts from my own posts:

I’m exactly where Phil stands: I’m an atheist, but not not a militant atheist like the other handful of guys at my college, who like to host events along the lines of “Ask an Atheist Day,” etc. I see no use in ridiculing believers or trying to plant doubt in people. I never had faith to begin with, so I would never tell a religious individual that her beliefs aren’t valid — I’ve got no agenda, no theological message to spread.

In regard to Mormonism, there are some extremely intelligent people that belong to that religion, as with any faith, and I don’t believe it’s any less worthy of its followers than any other world religion. Joseph Smith certainly isn’t the only religious leader in history to have incited mass bloodshed.

If I ever wanted to lead a religious life, I’d go with Buddhism; I’ve found there’s a lot of truth to its teachings, even if some of the cosmology and rituals are pretty hokey.

[...]

Kirk, I agree with you 100%. Perhaps I wasn’t very clear, but militant atheism is certainly not the same thing as various atheist campaigns like “Ask an Atheist,” et cetera. I apologize for not elaborating on that well.

Militant atheism, at minimum, is the sort of thing I see on Twitter and other places constantly: Folks go out of their way to find religious folk, ridicule them in a Conversation-Stopper sort of manner, and then fly out the door without further discussion. It’s hostile, it’s not constructive, and moreover, it paints atheists in the unnecessarily negative light that many assume all atheists belong in.

Believers need not see atheism as the enemy, and vice versa. One liberal Presbyterian reverend I know claims that even atheists are “People of Faith” in his worldview.

[...]

It’s hard to pin down, I think, because people always assume that there’s some sort of hidden sociopolitical agenda behind everything. For me, it’s always been a matter of intellectual and theological integrity. I don’t see atheism as a dogma, which my political philosophy professor argues that it is, but rather my individual admission that I don’t believe in any form of supernatural deity. I’m not dogmatically asserting that there cannot possibly be a god of any kind in this universe or any other; I’m merely saying that I see no evidence, and feel no inherent knowledge, to support that conclusion. An atheist doesn’t know that there’s no God, he’s just pretty damn sure of it, given the scope of our limited world. After all, there are a lot of stars out there, winking across the night, and we’ve been to visit…none of them.

Reflections on Buddhism, Chapter 3

In a short passage from the sutra titled “The Perfection of Wisdom,” from Buddhist Scriptures, translated by Gregory Schopen, the Buddha engages in an instructional dialogue with the wise arhat Subhuti. The teaching, estimated to have been written in the eleventh or twelfth century, is clearly meant to illustrate the method by which wisdom is gained through the elimination of a conception of the self. Its audience would have been Mahayana monks, or even arhats, who like Subhuti himself have already achieved nirvana. Since there is some inquiry about the role of the bodhisattva, and since it is a Mahayana sutra, one can see many distinctly Mahayana characteristics of the passage, but pages 435-6 seem to focus predominantly on the doctrine of No-Self, or in a larger context, “emptiness” or “suchness.”

To summarize the passage: In the beginning, on page 452, the Buddha is asking Subhuti about various physical analogies for the nature of “emptiness” described in the dharma. Upon hearing the teaching from the present-day buddha, the wise Subhuti “burst[s] into tears” (453), finding himself with a grasp of the Tathagata‘s teaching and also “possessed by the greatest astonishment” (453). Having reached an understanding, Subhuti restates the doctrine to the Buddha so that the reader or audience might better comprehend them. The most important idea within the teaching, he explains, is that for those who master it, “a conception of a self will not occur to them, nor a conception of a living being, nor a conception of a personal soul, nor a conception of a person” (453). In other words, one who has honed and perfected one’s wisdom will no longer be limited in thinking only of conceptions; rather, one will perceive and apprehend the true suchness, or emptiness, of reality. The passage ends, for the purposes of this analysis, where “folio 6 is missing” (454).

One important distinction in the text is the denotation of Gautama Buddha by the title “Blessed One,” while the Buddha himself repeatedly mentions the teachings of one he calls Tathagata, which means “title for all Buddhas in Mahayana” (407), according to Mitchells. Early in the passage, the Buddha mentioned “a tathagata” (453), which would denote anyone elevated to point of Awakening in the sense that one could be called a buddha. Later, the Buddha clearly speaks of Tathagata as someone separate from himself when he explains that “This, Subhuti, has been declared by the Tathagata to be the greatest perfection” (454). So part of the teaching is indicative of even the Buddha’s lack of a self-conception; because the tathagata is a cosmic entity, neither bound to a human soul or final mortality, the Buddha can be at once many beings throughout spacetime, or the various “world-systems” he describes.

A key image in the text, however cryptic, is that of the River Ganges. The Buddha explains that “if a woman or man were to give away their person as many times as there are sands in the River Ganges, [it] would [...] produce great merit, immeasurable and incalculable” (453). The act of “[giving] away their person” is especially vague, whether intentionally so or not. The sentence conjures images of intentional self-drowning, of self-sacrifice, and even of merely meditating to the point that the notion of a self is fully extinguished. After all, the syntax of the statement is little more than a clever simile, as well as perhaps a hyperbole to drive home the Buddha’s point; this makes the image of purging the self through concentration and wisdom the dominant one, and that seems to reinforce the greater purpose of the passage’s teaching.

Another important piece of imagery is the Buddha’s memory, from a past existence, of when

“an evil king hacked the flesh from all my limbs, [...] there was for me on that occasion no conception of a self, no conception of a living being, no conception of a personal soul, no conception of a person.” (454)

This situation, above all else, illustrates the literal extreme of truly achieving perfect wisdom as the Buddha sees it. For one to endure such visceral agony, one must become fully detached from the sensations, cravings, illusions, and most importantly, conceptions of the human form. One who sees independently of self, of one’s physical being, can see past the pains of this world, however great, and view the true emptiness of reality.

Mitchell describes this understanding of “suchness” as having a “liberating effect” (108). By “experiencing the emptiness of all things,” he explains, “one’s attachements to the things of the world are loosened, defilements are brought to an end, and delusion is dispersed” (108); this is recognizable as the very path to Nirvana. But since the Mahayana sutras prescribe followers to seek the “Middle Way,” rather than achieving the total emptiness of pure Nirvana, it is interesting to consider the implications these ideas might have for modern life, and what such adherence would mean in the context of possible futures.

For instance, today we have access to pharmaceutical drugs which largely numb bodily sensation at the expense of mental side-effects, while those that affect the body without hampering the mind often induce some degree of paralysis. It is not too far a stretch, however, to assume that some sort of nerve-deadening therapy in the near future might have the potential to alleviate pain in the physical sense while leaving the mind more or less intact — undamaged, if not unchanged. This would bring us nearer to achieving a kind of distance from our conceptions of physical being, but it would be imperfect, because the body’s relationship to the mind would still limit us to an understanding of the self, due to the constraints of a human body in relationship to the greater universe, the dukkha posed by the body’s needs, and our existence within the human form — glancing downward and seeing the heap of our flesh, our legs in stride, our hands at work.

There is theoretical technology believed to be just beyond the horizon at present — the seed behind much of today’s science-fictional extrapolation: the idea of the Singularity. Whereas the predicted Machine Singularity is the belief that artificial intelligences will achieve a kind of consciousness equal to that of a human’s, the Human Singularity is the idea that one day soon, a human mind will conceivably be uploaded by one of several plausible methods of cerebral “recording,” and achieve a kind of immortality free of the limitations of the human body. Self-described “transhumanists” believe this is the logical next step for civilization; the visionary mind of Arthur C. Clarke predicted it over half a century ago, not long after he proposed the idea of a global satellite array to enable instantaneous communication throughout the world. If such a being ever does exist — and there are countless scientists who have no doubt on the matter — then it seems that an “infomorph,” or computerized human consciousness, without need for physical sensation, without limitation of sight, and with boundless mental capacity through the aid of computers, would have the best chance of achieving the Buddha’s notion of Perfect Wisdom.

Reflections on Buddhism, Chapter 2

In the scene subtitled “His Excursions from the Palace” (60-64), from The Buddhacarita: The Life of the Buddha (deBary, William Theodore, ed. The Buddhist Tradition. New York: Vantage Books, 1972.), Prince Siddhartha Gautama encounters for the first time in his life the concepts of suffering, age, and death. It is this scene that establishes, if one is to regard the text as factual history, the basis for what will eventually become the Buddha’s First Noble Truth: Life is dukkha. Life is rife with suffering; and before the attainment of nirvana, life is dissatisfactory.

If the ascendency to a state of No-Self, of the noble “supermundane,” is the ultimate goal of the Buddhist path, then it is reasonable for the Buddha — or, more likely, his followers — to want to establish nirvana as the ideal state of being. In order to do this, it makes sense to first prove that life is indeed full of pain and dissatisfactoriness. “His Excursions from the Palace,” therefore, serves as an apt illustration of the ways in which our lives are by definition subject to dukkha.

While the text was written during the rise of Mahayana Buddhism, it was intended to simply convey the larger meaning behind the teachings of the Buddha himself given the limited knowledge of his life (56). It describes the sudden allure Gautama felt toward the outside world when he “heard about woods filled with songs, abounding in fresh grass, with trees in which the cuckoos sounded, adorned with many lotus ponds” (61). That the Buddha would be drawn to such simplistic beauty among nature says much about his character. One could argue that the tanha to be satiated within the king’s palace did not fulfill Gautama’s thirst for worldly beauty because of his destiny to become the Buddha, having experienced life in the cycle of Samsara for long enough to somehow know that he would find no comfort in the isolation of the palace. Otherwise, one could pose the argument that Shuddhadhivasa gods, instrumental in setting him on the path toward enlightenment, instilled him with a curiosity for the beauty of the outside world. Whatever the cause, the prince sets out for the city beyond his father’s kingdom.

The full extravagance of the Buddha’s upbringing is revealed in the means by which his father, the king, is able to keep knowledge of the world’s dukkha from him. The king orders that “all commoners suffering any affliction should be kept off the royal road” (61), to protect his son from learning of the ills of human mortality. Moreover, the prince travels on a “golden chariot, to which were harnessed four well-trained steeds with golden trappings” (61), further indicating the extent of Gautama’s earthly wealth. These details, doubtless, are meant to deliberately juxtapose the life of the eventual Buddha with that of the sheltered, ignorant prince; and to reinforce the truth that material riches mean little when compared to the freeing immateriality of nirvana.

Among the city, “joyful as paradise” (61), the prince eventually encounters an old man, created by the Shuddhadhivasa gods “to incite the prince’s renunciation of the world” (61). When asked to explain the man’s condition, the charioteer explains to the prince that old age is “the destroyer of beauty and vigor, the source of sorrow, the depriver of pleasures, the slayer of memories” (62). The inevitability of age lends this first discovery of dukkha an immediate sense of truth. If everyone ages, and if age is a source of dukkha by way of its destructive, depriving processes, then life is in fact rendered dissatisfactory for everyone.

The First Noble Truth is established, then — but the passage does not end simply by illustrating the truth of its teaching. Instead, it proceeds to deepen the impact of the experience upon Gautama through the gods’ further demonstration of life’s inherent sorrow, and furthermore, to exemplify the Second, Third, and Fourth Noble Truths as well: that dukkha exists because of the existence of tanha, or worldly cravings and attachments inherent to the human form; that the elimination of tanha can bring about the total cessation, then, of dukkha; and finally, that by following the Eightfold Path, one can hope to reach the purity of mind to be found in nirvana and nullify the experience of dukkha.

After witnessing the visible effects of old age, the prince next comes upon a diseased man, and not long after, a corpse, both set before him by the scheming gods (62-63). As with the old man, the charioteer explains that disease is a threat common to all, but that “yet the world filled with suffering seeks enjoyment, however oppressed it is by disease” (63). Most troubling to Gautama, though, is the nature of death and humankind’s apparent lack of fear or concern toward it. He says that “[m]en must be hardened indeed to be so at ease as they walk down the road leading to the next life” (64). Given the established teachings of the Buddha, it makes sense that this particular text should demonstrate Gautama’s distaste for complacency in the face of dukkha and the finitude of the physical body.

Rather than merely accepting the role of dukkha in human life, the prince opts instead to seek solitude and meditate on the worldly horrors he has just witnessed (64). This, of course, is the key to the passage; it indicates to the reader — or student of Buddhism — that there is hope for escape from the ills of mortality, for reaching nirvana. While the Eightfold Path is not illustrated in any detail whatsoever in this particular passage, the scene still makes a point to depict the Buddha as one who would react to the suffering of his fellow human beings by looking inward through the practice of ritual meditation.

From a non-theological perspective, this portion of The Buddhacarita seems valuable for its portrayal of the Buddha’s early life as a way to illustrate the teachings it inspired. While the convenience, or even unbelievability, of the plot suggests that the narrative is likely a fictionalization of what was probably a more subtle, natural encounter with the suffering that comprises much of human existence, the tale conveys its purpose effectively: it explains the nature of dukkha and establishes well the Four Noble Truths that serve as a foundation for much of Buddhist philosophy.

Reflections on Buddhism, Chapter 1

My prior experience with Buddhism comes mostly through word-of-mouth, casual interest, and the occasional light reading on the subject. The majority of specific facts about the religion come courtesy of a half-hour spent on Wikipedia, when I wanted to use the concept of Nirvana in relation to science-fictional ideas about the future in a short story I was writing in late July.

The extent of my interest in the religion is murky, but basically I’ve always had a desire to learn more about it based on what little I’d heard. Any snippet of Buddhist philosophy I happened to encounter, more often than not, I agreed with one hundred percent. Its emphasis on the whole, rather than the individual, has always been particularly appealing to me. Whereas a Judeo-Christian believer is often perceived as having a mostly personal relationship with God, as opposed to a more public, communal one, Buddhism seems to widen its scope to encompass the whole universe, placing humankind in a place of humility and selflessness.

The Bible speaks of animals and nature as existing in a very separate, perhaps lesser, sphere of existence, with humankind on the tier above nature, and God and the realm of the divine far above even us. For me personally, this model of the cosmological food chain has always felt off. Darwin tells us that if we’re anywhere above the realm of the animal, well, it’s not by much; and moreover, if God created everything in the universe as the Bible claims, isn’t all of nature pretty much on the same level of importance?

I’m not so sure we’re any better than animals, except in terms of intellectual capacity. And as we’re finding out more and more ever day, we’re definitely not any better — or more powerful — than nature.

I’d like to gain a more complete understanding of Buddhism’s regard for humankind’s place in the cosmos, then; to either confirm or dispel my suspicions that Buddhism is, quite plainly, closer to a spiritual truth than anything I’ve found in Christianity. While I’ve always liked the idea of a God, I’ve never really bought into the existence of such a deity. Psychology and astronomy continue to reassure my skepticism the older and more critical of religion I get. And the matter of God aside, my experience with various Christian — everything from Baptist to Catholic — churches has always left me feeling spiritually unaffected. The closest I’ve ever come to a mystical experience was either my first U2 concert or falling in love for the first time at the age of sixteen; my only gods hold guitars, raging amplifiers at their backs, or wail into microphones.

Philosophy is a broader term than religion, I think. In these instances I tire the mathematical analogy (perhaps because it’s one of the few mathematical concepts with which I’m fully confident) of the square. A square is always a rectangle, and yet a rectangle is only a square when it is a square. Religion, then, is always a kind of philosophy; yet philosophy need not be even remotely religious. My own definition of philosophy would be something along the lines of a set of epistemological methods, or moral or intellectual truths by which one lives their life and regards the world. Religion, though, deals with the realm of the spiritual. A philosophy of religion I would take to be one which takes at least a portion of its full content from the realm of the unknowable, the nonphysical, or even the supernatural.

This is perhaps where I lack knowledge of Buddhism the most: I have almost no understanding of how Buddhism deals with the question of spirituality, the unknown, and the supernatural. Although I suspect there is no divinity in the sense that Judeo-Christian religions and similar faiths consider a thing to be divine, my hunch is, more or less, Buddhism finds the divine in the worldly rather than the otherworldly. Whereas deities may be absent from Buddhist belief, its status as a religion leads me to presume an appreciation for some level of reality beyond the observable world.