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Wisdom Is Wisdom
My friend, the village atheist, keeps asking me how anyone can believe in some guy with a long beard up in the clouds directing life. The answer is simple. No one believes such a tale. My friend is a partisan Democrat, so he’s an expert in straw-man arguments, argumentum ad hominem, and other foolishness, of which he is incurable.
When I reluctantly left the Catholic Church, there was a vacancy in my spirit; I let the space to the early Buddhists, the ones in Ceylon who do not require any specific metaphysical beliefs. One of the early sutras tells of someone asking Buddha if there is life after death, no life after death, both, or neither. (They were thorough.) He replied that they have not heard him assert any of these, they will not hear him assert any of these, and the reason he will not assert any of these is that knowing the answer to any of these does not lead, does not conduce to, does not bring us to the Religious Life. And if you say I will not enter the Way until I know the answers, you are like one shot with an arrow who says to one seeking to remove it that he will not allow the removal until he knows who made the arrow and of what parentage and color hair he was. Buddha just ignored metaphysics, it seemed. Since I had probably more than one arrow in me, this sounded good to me. Buddhism offered a method, not a belief system.
Around that time, I got to sitting and hanging out with the (much later) Tibetan Buddhists. I had seen Chogyam Trungpa (Rinpoche, tulku, author of Born in Tibet, and founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, who was later metoo-ed) at a couple of lectures at Brandeis and was much impressed. So a few years later, I paid the ten-dollar membership fee and joined the Dharmadhatu in Cambridge. I sat with them, in their beautiful spare meditation room, gazing at the polished wooden floor with bright red cushions in my visual periphery while trying to remember to be aware of my out breath and maybe feeling intensely a presence from a corner of the room where a blond with a ponytail had taken her seat before we all lowered our eyes. Sometimes there were talks from visiting meditation teachers. After sitting, there was tea and talk with members who, unlike me, had actually taken refuge in the dharma and the Buddha and the sangha. I found the sitting and talk enjoyable, and I admired their commitment, but I could not find it in myself to give what the Catholic Church had considered the bare minimum of belief: “internal, prudential assent.” So I remained a fellow-traveler.
One time, after the sitting and tea, someone asked if there were any members who could stay and participate in a ritual with a Tibetan name. Apparently, they lacked a minyan. Since I was indeed a dues-paying member, I volunteered, making the needed tenth. What ensued was not meditation but a chant and response from us who were “slogging through the swamp of materialism, the mud of materialism” imploring one of the iconic subjects of the beautiful wall hangings (all with Indian names, some gods and some humans) to send aid, to assist, to “save us, O lord.”
This litany profoundly shocked me. Was I back in a Catholic church? After all Rinpoche’s talk about being realistic, not expecting to be saved, relying only on sitting meditation and the cultivation of virtue for “the answer,” here we were praying. Cognitive dissonance crashed upon me.
Never believing one should put all one’s eggs in one basket (I had a classical nursery education), I was at this time seeking answers in a more scientific way. If I could not in honesty have a guru, at least I could have a Jewish shrink. Stan (also metoo-ed eventually) called his practice “psychoanalytically oriented, existential, group psychotherapy.” He was my doctor because psychoanalysis itself was financially impossible for me, but even as an impecunious grad student I was able to afford his fee. He had no fixed fee. Instead, he would negotiate with each incoming patient after asking, “What’s a fee that’s fair to you and fair to me?” Mine started out at around four dollars, but we reduced it after a few months when I told him of my realization that “You couldn’t be a doctor if I wouldn’t be a patient,” a position of which he approved.
Stan did share one feature with the gurus: he was laconic and his words were often resonant or ambiguous in thought- and feeling-provoking ways. For example, after one meeting where he had said absolutely nothing, he sent us off with this: “Between now and next week it is important to remember Memorial Day.”
On this occasion, I regaled the group with my recent experience at the Dharmadhatu and my sense of wonder that a non-theistic doctrine had suddenly come to resemble a Catholic church, complete with saints, litanies, and prayers. How could they?
After I finished my rant, Stan said something like, “Maybe they understand Padmasambhava as a higher version of their selves. They may be praying to the best they can be.” That didn’t fully satisfy me, but it did create a space.
I’ve always known that Jewish wisdom and Chinese wisdom and, yes, even French wisdom must be the same: wisdom is wisdom if it be wisdom at all. It will have the same effects or fruits in the lives of those who attain it: friendliness, integrity, and compassion. The myth of cultural appropriation had yet to be devised, thank heaven.
But me? I’m still seeking, though like Sir Thomas Wyatt “I am of those that farthest come behind.” At least after all this time, I have finally begun to glimpse the depth of my own ignorance, though alas, I continue to argue politics altogether too passionately when people like my village atheist friend tell me about Trump’s treasonous deals with Putin.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
French wisdom? Is that like military intelligence or government competence?
Natural wisdom is the same everywhere – this is what your old friend the Catholic Church would call the “natural law.” But is natural wisdom the only kind of wisdom?
Your Buddhist sages, as wise as they are, neglected a possibility. Suppose that, while turning our backs on metaphysical speculation, something extraordinary happens: The God we no longer look for has instead found us.
That is the real difference between Christianity and Eastern religions. Christianity isn’t ultimately about metaphysical speculation or a more refined wisdom; it is, literally, news. The news that, unbeknownst to us, God has been searching for us more even than we have been searching for Him, and has, in fact, appeared among us.
Whether we believe the news or not is another question. The difference between religions, nonetheless, even if we don’t believe it, isn’t a difference between competing wisdoms.
Not if you include Blaise Pascal, Etienne Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain or Pierre Manent.
Great post, Handle. I’m not a searcher myself, but I like to hear about others’ searches.
When I was a young man, I owned a set of books called something like Great Religions of the World. I would go to the book on Buddhism and hardly understand a word. Way too abstract and airy for me.
No kid who grew up in Compton ever became a Buddhist.
Ah, youth.
If only our idealism could last. If only a method didn’t logically imply the existence of a belief system. We could all just be methodists and not have to believe in something.
😜
I identify with your post, to some degree. I was born a Jew with only a modicum of religion. My folks never talked about G-d, although there were a few holidays they sort of observed. I found Zen Buddhism and found a home. The funny part was that although Buddhism doesn’t include G-d, the more I meditated, the more I experienced G-d in my life.
To shorten the story, I had a nasty break with my teacher; I was on a path to become a sensei. And then I thought maybe I’d still want to connect with Buddhism. At that point, I realized that Buddhism was not only Left, but blatantly so. It was time to leave.
Through friends here on Ricochet, through happenstance or divine intervention, I found my way back to Judaism. There was a whole religion I’d never experienced. I’m not Orthodox, but I have practices I follow; I’m about to go offline for the Sabbath. I think if we stay open, and are sincere, the path finds us. It will never be perfect, and in fact can be puzzling and annoying. But in Judaism, G-d expects us to question, even argue with Him. I’m good with that. And I don’t have political conversations with my Leftist friends! Best wishes for your seeking.
Why do you not Capitalize the name Buddha?
More a title than a name. The original’s name was Siddhartha Gautama, after all.
In Contemporary services, they just call him Sid.
I have seen it both ways. I think the books in Theravada tradition do not capitalize the word “buddhism,” but this is from memory. The word means “awakened.” Apparently, given the sense of time in India, there have been many, many Buddhas down through the kalpas.
True. But what mattered was that it did not require a leap of faith, at least no more than submitting to a doctor or dentist does. Of course, saying that something is unknowable is also a statement about what one believes.
I have sometimes thought that Catholicism is too. Certainly Pope Francis wants to stress that side of things. But the emphasis on human dignity mitigates the leftward tendency, since it is not really consistent with collectivism or any form of totalitarianism.
BTW, I never was an anti-Catholic former Catholic. I remember how angry I got the first time I heard someone call himself a “recovering Catholic.” Terms like that (“homophobic” is another) that require those who believe what you don’t to be mentally ill are really nasty.
Your story reminds me of Donovan’s short version of the Ox Herding pictures: “First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.” We get back home, in the end. But we have to take the journey to discover that home was the goal in the first place. And it’s a new mountain because of the trip.
A method has a purpose. Following a method of seeking spiritual truth requires believing that that truth exists and is to be found by the method chosen. If it was not a religious endeavor, but merely a method for seeking gratification or health, like going to the doctor, then I misunderstood you, and what I’m saying doesn’t apply.
The French used be awesome – militarily, technologically, artistically – and in their subconscious national conception I’m sure they think they still are. Maybe that died in ’68 and they haven’t made a reckoning with the fallout from embracing romantic Leftism, but you can’t walk around Paris or study their literature and art and music without realizing that they saw something ineffable about existence that the other continental powers didn’t grasp, or value.
OTOH, their revolution spawned the worst sort of statism and institutional terror. But a boundless capacity for national self-delusion makes them instinctively shunt it away these days, and everyone else lets them get away with it. There was no wisdom in their Revolution. It was not an echo of 1776; it was a horror show black-mirror version, because it was relentlessly secular.
During the Age of Sail, the French were usually ahead on ship-building. They made wonderful ships. The English made wonderful naval officers and sailors. The English would take away French ships, and then have both the better men and the better ships and better ship designs to copy in the future.
Keep searching, @gfhandle, and the Messiah will find you.
You sound like another Patrick O’Brian junkie.
No, I write my own books. O’Brian didn’t really get into the comparative merits of the various classes of ships or innovations and where they came from. He certainly used the technical jargon, but he was also focused on a narrow period and set of characters who did not experience a wide variety of ship classes. He did write some about a few designs and innovations. If I remember rightly, he wrote about one ship that was innovative and sank in bad weather. Again, purely from recall of the one time I read his series, I think the ship was symmetrical front and back. But I don’t think he really gets into the French innovations in 74s, many of which occurred in the 1750’s through 1770’s before his series setting starts.
I set my foot upon the path at the ripe old age of 33, having had many years to pretentiously pontificate on The Divine. I had been looking for “God” since a child in Jewish day school and had become a pantheist: Any “God” is good enough for me.
But now I was dead serious and wanted the truth, rather The Truth, and for years I doggedly pursued the hints and wisps of eternal meaning. I stretched my mind using the riddle “how does a lower intelligence judge a higher intelligence” and it was the hardest mental work I’d ever done.
One Truth I found is that our ignorance exceeds any knowledge we can gather by many orders of magnitude. Every new door you open can be the entry to a hovel, a mansion, or another dimension entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Of course, the Dunning Kruger effect is most common in echo chambers … change my mind.
Why, in particular, did you leave the Catholic Church? Just curious.
As I see it, we of the “lower intelligence” can not avoid judging the higher intelligence. We inevitably do this when we attempt to determine of what this higher intelligence consists and what of us it demands.
The problem I have run into is that I have listened to lots of sermons from lots of different preachers and teachers. They, like me, are human. Those who wrote the Hebrew Bible were human. The authors of the Gospels were human. Paul, the author of anywhere from 7 to 13 books of the New Testament, was human.
Mohammed was human. Did Mohammed really receive the word of God in a cave? Did Paul really receive his Gospel directly from Jesus?
Our intelligence is limited. But the intelligence of these other human beings are limited as well.
Proverbs 3:5 says “Trust the Lord with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” But when you have 1,000 different people saying 1,000 different things about “the Lord,” you will inevitably fall back on your own understanding of who is trying to teach you and who is trying to fool you and who just doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about.
So, I have become an agnostic-atheist until such time as my understanding changes.
It’s all way beyond me, but doesn’t one have to consider the impact notions have on the collective result, the society, community, organizations, families? Are these things just random or do they result from what people actually believe or try to understand? How have Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam impacted these things in contrast to Judaism and Christianity? How about secularism? atheism and the big ideas rooted in it? Maybe it’s just that any set of ideas taken to levels of governance, removed from, disconnected to actual people is the problem, but still there was a level of curiosity, science, discovery, human interaction rooted in Judaism and Christianity that was different, that lifted people, eventually, out of thousands of years of poverty. Of course moderns will say it was secularism that produced modern economies, but the case doesn’t stand up, nor does it appear that the good result endures in places rooted in secular belief systems.
It’s true that people have to try to make sense from the cacophony and deem the wise as they best can. But there was a recent post here entitled “Wisdom is Wisdom” where the consensus seems to be that wisdom is strikingly similar regardless of religious tradition.
But there are instances where some intelligence is so far beyond ours that we can’t even conceive of its perceptual context especially when we need to believe that we ourselves are the context. Failing this perspective is what, I suspect, alienates most from religion … that “God” isn’t doing enough for me personally, and why isn’t He making the world a better place anyway?
I have not read much about the French and their ship building skills. I did read a book on the history of the Royal Navy, and it did have some coverage of their ship building skills versus the French, and overall they didn’t compare well.
I unfortunately can’t find the book I read, and am going by memory. The book’s focus, wasn’t just construction. It included logistics. The British were innovators in naval logistics, including provisioning at sea, which made for effective blockades. Their focus on logistics did include ship building, and included where they acquired the wood for their ships and how they ran their shipyards. They apparently had preferred forests to harvest for their ships, and their shipyards were also setup for such things as planned maintenance of their hulls, increasing the lifetime of their ships.
I have also read a biography of Napolean, and his biographer said that he neglected the French Navy. The Royal Navy was very effective at blockading the French, and stranding their armies, and Napolean was unable to counter that effectively.
Napolean did have advisers that urged him to build up his Navy, but they could not get him to do it, and it’s considered one of the major factors that led to his ultimate defeat.
You might appreciate the biography of Tolkien by Joseph Pearce. He discusses Tolkien’s fascination with “progressive revelation” — God revealing aspects of Himself to pre-Christian peoples. Truth is indeed the same however it is learned. The Church claims to be “the fullness of [spiritual/necessary] truth” and not the only body of believers who know anything.
Contrary to modern culture, Christians are called to share truth always and never shrug away alternate beliefs as if any will do. It should bother us when others live in ignorance and error, if we genuinely care about them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t respect and learn from pagans and atheists.
What, if anything, can we learn from Muslims?
And Buddhists?
The Dalai Lama famously said something like “Look to the religion of you own people.” The body of work produced by Christianity for the last 2000 years would take a lifetime to investigate.
That isn’t to say we shouldn’t or can’t learn from others but beware of the seduction of the exotic … as Buddha might say “It’s not what you think it is.”