We’re Still in Kansas, Toto
Sunday, November 18, 2007
By John Bruce
Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Those who want to read previous installments will find them on this newspaper’s web site. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.
After I left Dartmouth, I let the whole question of Eastern religion stew for some years—all through the time I was in graduate school. But later, working through some other issues, I realized that I was living in Los Angeles, and if I ever had lingering questions about mysticism short of going to the Far East, I was in the right place to see if I could resolve them. I looked under Z in the phone book, and I found a real Japanese Zen master running a meditation hall not far from where I was living. There was my chance: I went and studied Zen for a year or so, not Alan Watts Zen, nor Mircea Eliade Zen, but real-world Zen.
Here is a typical academic discussion of the Zen koan; I no longer have my texts from Schlatter’s classes, and I don’t remember what he used—but this is standard issue:
A[n example of a] Koan is “ What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Of course, in terms of the conventional world there can be no sound from a single hand. Sound logically needs two hands clapping. However, the question presumes that one hand clapping has already created a sound and that it can be heard. . . . The question is rather about hearing the impossible, which is only termed impossible within the framework of conventional reality. The Zen master is therefore pressing and encouraging the student to critique ordinary reality and to force the mind into other areas of understanding.
I went in to see the Zen master in a specific ceremony called sanzen. Most accounts give you the impression that Zen is a freewheeling rap session, which it isn’t. It’s a semi-monastic environment even in the US, and as you might expect from the Japanese, it’s highly structured and very formal. The koan he gave me in the ceremony was—what else?—“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (actually, “How you manifest one-hand-sound?”).
It took me several weeks to answer it. I don’t think I’m going to spoil anyone’s Zen career or reveal any privileged information if I give the answer: you wave your one hand back and forth in the air in front of you as though you’re clapping. It helps, I suspect, to act as if you’ve figured it out with some effort.
I didn’t experience satori in the process of answering the koan (or if I did, I didn’t notice), although the very typical discussion I’ve cited above suggests a strong connection:
Koans are a method of training the mind in order to achieve the state of Satori. Satori is a very difficult concept to describe in a few words. It is essentially the goal of all Zen meditation and can be compared to the term enlightenment or insight into the nature of reality. These two aspects, Koan exercises and Satori are the central aspects of Zen.
I mostly relied on clues of facial expression to figure out whether my answers were getting warm or not each time I went in to give it a shot. That’s how all education takes place, it seems to me. I wouldn’t have come any closer to an answer no matter how long I sat in meditation on the problem; in the end, I was going to have to find out what the guy wanted.
In fact, I was able to answer several other koans in much the same way, and one impression I took away from my Zen study was that a Cliff’s Notes of koans was a practical possibility. But that raises a question: to what extent are koans simply “secret knowledge” no different from very similar gnostic riddles? In that case, guys, let’s just drop all the stuff about breaking free of conventional reality. We’re still in Kansas, Toto, wondering “just what does that TA want?”
I will say that the process of trying to answer koans combined with several hours per day in a meditation hall did bear some fruit. The best analogy I can draw is to a standard piece of Japanese kitsch, a figurine of an old fisherman walking with a fish dangling from a pole he carries over his shoulder. There’s a part of the mind that doesn’t like sitting still for long periods at all, and that part of the mind is much like a slippery fish. At a certain point, to stay with the program, you have to grab the slippery-fish part of the mind and sort of whack it with a mental hammer.
I remember specifically doing the whack-the-fish-with-a-hammer thing, and some days thereafter I saw one of the little kitschy fishermen, and I suddenly understood the point of the fish at the end of the pole. And I noticed a definite lessening of mental background noise. But no satori, at least as Hartmut Schlatter would have explained it.
In fact, I don’t think the experience I had was necessarily unique to Zen: it brought to mind one of my first graduate school courses, in esthetics and criticism. In one class discussion, I felt I’d actually learned something (interestingly, I never had that experience at Dartmouth). But no satori. If satori is simply the feeling that you’ve actually learned something, I’ll grant that’s what it was—but as one writer said, “Aaaaaaah” is the computer programmer’s national anthem. We would all be Zen masters at that rate.
The problem for the Myth and Ritual school is that it regards the religious impulse as a monolithic, internally consistent entity about which we may make generalizations, across millennia and across cultures. Frazerians rely on a grand, pseudo-evolutionary scheme of religious development. Magical religion is a characteristic of primitive races. More civilized races have, at least theoretically, advanced beyond this stage.
But Western culture, the most advanced civilization as Frazer saw it, is built in large part on a Judeo-Christian foundation. The Judeo-Christian scriptures, though, are a raw, embarrassing, even scandalous collection of stories about rage, rebellion, murder, adultery, sodomy, bigotry, scheming, manipulation, lust, pride, lies, fraud, deceit, complacency, jealousy, idolatry, cowardice, drunkenness, despair, revenge, dreams, prophecy, plague, pestilence, famine, war, betrayal, massacre, hypocrisy, miracles, torture, resurrection, speaking in tongues, visions—once you get into them, they’re certainly not all that civilized, and provide little actual justification for any idea that Westerners are more advanced than any Hottentots. Magic is the least of it.
What Eliade brings to the Frazerian party is the idea that the classical Eastern religions—or actually, highly idealized, heavily redacted and sanitized versions of those religions—are the actual “advanced” religions. This suits the inherently anti-Judeo-Christian bias in the Frazerian position, and it provides a certain esthetic appeal: the human race has moved beyond primitive, magical, excessively complex religiosity to a simpler, more abstract, less anthropomorphic, more intellectualized version of the divine. No more need for praying, reciting creeds, confessing sins, or for that matter engaging in that cannibalistic, bloodthirsty ritual of the eucharist. From Primitives to Zen, the title of one of Eliade’s books, gives the general idea.
The view of “ultimate knowledge” that scholars represent as coming from mystical experiences also has the difficulty C.S.Lewis has discussed in this well-known passage from his essay “Miracles”:
A girl I knew was brought up by ‘higher thinking’ parents to regard God as a perfect ‘substance’; in later life she realized that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca). We may feel ourselves quite safe from this degree of absurdity, but we are mistaken. If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God are, in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the man-like images aroused by Christian theology.
So we also face the question of why Eliade and his followers should necessarily think that the notion of “ultimate knowledge” resembling vast, unrecognizable, ineffable, indescribable non-individuality is somehow more advanced than any other. We may find the idea attractive, but there’s nothing that makes this truth superior to the Judeo-Christian version. It’s been a problem that Zen Buddhists have had to address among themselves that there was no dissident movement among Zen masters in Japan during World War II equivalent to the Christian dissidents and martyrs in Nazi Germany. In fact, some Zen masters were enablers who lent prestige to the militarist Japanese regime.
This still leaves aside the simple issue that Schlatter and Eliade don’t accurately describe real Eastern religions. Once, in graduate school, I met a visiting Religion professor from India. I still hadn’t systematically reexamined my undergraduate Religion courses, but I began to ask him questions about the abstract, generalized “Hinduism” I’d been taught. The vehemence of his reply—and he seemed otherwise a genuinely nice guy—suggested he’d already had to deal with Frazerians many times. “How can you generalize about the myths and the gods?” he asked me. “The meanings of the stories, the roles of the gods, differ from village to village. If you say Kali is this and Shiva is that, you have to recognize that 20 miles down the road, you’ll get a different version.”
I think I took more courses from Hartmut Schlatter than from any other prof at Dartmouth—I was interested in the topic of Eastern religion. But each time I revisited the subjects he taught, I found I had to unlearn more. Schlatter rose to be quite high in the Dartmouth adminisitration, so I assume he was always well thought-of there—he retired fairly recently. But as I look back, he gave only an imitation of an education to those who took his classes, a set of comfortable prejudices that won’t withstand empirical scrutiny. But then, Larry Burlingame, a charming guy, a good-looking guy, a hip guy, was just an imitation of a serious student. They were compatible because each simply flattered the other. Faculty-student friendships can be overrated. n
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