2006 - First Two Months

This year's first entry begins with a little whining that provides some insight into how I was doing physically, and the challenges that my battle with chronic severe pain was posing.

January 23, 2006

What I really would like is to be chemical-free. To wake up every morning feeling rested and healthy and excited about the new day. Not limping in severe pain to the pill-bottle and counting the minutes until relief sets in. I’ve pretty much had it with depression, too. So today I’m going to get all my work done – all the stuff that is hanging over my head. And then I’m going to finish my Dad’s letter. I do have to run in and teach a class, and stop at the grocery store on my way home, but that still leaves me a lot of time to get things done around the house.
In short, I want myself back. I had that short window between the defense of my dissertation and the onset of shingles, where I saw a few glimpses. And then she’s been drifting away ever since. I know Jim wants her back, too. Not only have I been mopey, but he’s also been afraid to touch me, for fear of hurting me, though he recognizes that I’ve really needed to be touched.

Okay, already accomplished one task. It had been too long since I read Mary Douglas, so when I presented her analysis of the food laws in Leviticus, I got it sort of messed up, and my students almost got into a fight over whether or not some animals have cloven hooves. So I need to fix that for today, and will also revisit it quickly on Tuesday.
Rereading her, I’m struck again by how much sense she makes. Her basic argument is that none of the restrictions in Leviticus make sense if taken piece-meal. That all of those who try to explain food taboos without reference to the rest of the text will always fail, or introduce too many contradictory and confusing and complex concepts. That really it is quite simple and it is all present in the text. To understand food and other rules, one has only to understand the Jewish conception of the universe. It is split into holy and unholy, clean and unclean. And the basics are laid out in Genesis. God created the world in 3 basic parts; earth, sea, and air. And he made creatures to fit those parts, which walk, swim, or fly. Those animals that are clean are those which most closely fit or represent the category. Those considered unclean are those that mix categories, having features from more than one.
When one also considers the other laws, one sees that the idea of mixing is consistently seen as a bad, unclean, unholy thing. As she says, “We can conclude that holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused.”
When one looks at orders such as that garments must not be made of mixed materials – I.e. not flax and wool, nor should you plow fields with more than one kind of seed, or let 2 types of cattle breed with one another. So, she says, the sexual laws, too, have less to do with morality than with holiness. A married person fits one category, a single another. A married person should not behave as a single one. Incest and adultery are wrong because they violate the rights of husbands and brothers.
Finally, she says, “If the proposed interpretation is correct, the dietary laws would have been like signs which at every turn inspired meditation on the oneness, purity, and completeness of God.”
To start from the beginning then. We are to strive toward Holiness, because that will bring us blessings. Not doing so will bring us curses. What is holiness? Separation, Completeness (witness all the injunctions against incomplete men or animals approaching the temple). Also, important activities were not to be left incomplete. And then Perfection, meaning conforming to the class or category. The word usually translated “perversion” is tebhel, which really means “mixing” or “confusion.” That says a lot right there.

Doesn’t this argument, this interpretation, make a lot more sense than either pious allegories or the claim that the Hebrew priests were simply law-crazy and made up a bunch of arbitrary rules? I think it makes more sense, too, than the medical and ecological explanations. The medical is that one can get trichinosis from uncooked pork, or improperly cooked pork. The ecological is that pigs compete with humans for the same foods, so in an area of scarce resources, it doesn’t make any sense to keep them. Better to raise animals that can eat things you can’t – like grass.
The problem with these is they only explain the pigs – not the other gazillions of animals that are considered unclean. You’d have to come up with an individual argument for each one of them. There is also the separation argument, that pigs weren’t allowed because the followers of other religions ate them. But what about all the traditions of others that the Israelites borrowed, or shared, anyway – like sacrifice?
Douglas’ interpretation is valuable because it is comprehensive and consistent. And it is very useful to me, because it sets up the importance and value of Geertz’ definition of religion – focusing us on symbols and on the meanings we create which then govern our thinking processes and our behavior. So I’ll do a much better job with it today, and should help my students on Tuesday get it a lot better.

January 29
I think that Bush genuinely believes he has the mandate of Heaven. That God has ordained him to lead the world, and that means, to him, that he is above the law. Orders from God of course trump any one nation’s rules, and I think he thinks he has such orders. He is a mad man. An evil mad man.
We ask ourselves how the people of Germany could have allowed themselves to be led by a Hitler, how they could have blinded themselves as they did. Justified extreme measures. Now we need to ask ourselves the same questions. We can’t claim not to have known. After the first four years, we knew. But a majority chose to look away. The allowed themselves to believe that his stance on one thing – usually either gay marriage or abortion – was so important that it justified the violation, not only of the spirit and sometimes letter of the constitution, but the very morals these same people claim to hold.
And I know, when they are called to account in this life or the next, that will be their cry. “But I didn’t know!” That is no excuse when you had every chance to know but turned away.
These folks who have convinced themselves that God is punishing our nation for its tolerance of sin – they are only worried about sexual sin. Show me, anywhere in the Bible, where God is more concerned with sexual immorality than with social justice! You can’t, because it isn’t there. How can they believe God is going to be more upset with two men for expressing their love for one another through sex than he is going to be at all of us for turning our backs on the poor, the ill, the elderly and the unfortunate? I have to believe that hate and greed take us farther from God, or the Divine, however defined, than any kind of love.

Even if it turned out that homosexuality really is abhorrent to God, how could it possibly be more abhorrent than the rich feasting on the misery of others? And it seems like this should be obvious. If we all sat down and discussed it rationally, how could anyone disagree? How could they argue that God asks to point out the faults of others when we ourselves have so many, when Jesus could not have been clearer about it?
But the sad truth is that honest dialogue is rarely possible in our country right now. I don’t know that we have been this divided since the Civil War. Whereas in some ways I’d still like to argue that there is a wide diversity, a broad range of opinions on any given subject, in fact I believe we are getting more and more polarized. We’ve been split into two camps, and our opinions and views are diametrically opposed to one another. We find it harder and harder to even entertain the thought that the Other might have a valid point. I am as guilty of this as anyone. The Neo-conservatives, the fundamentalists, are just wrong! They seem so completely and obviously wrong.
Wait – that isn’t really true. Take abortion. I am pro-choice, but I can see the point of the pro-lifers. I could sit down with them and say, “Yes, in fact, I agree with you. I believe life begins at conception, and I don’t think we should be throwing away human lives.” But, would they listen to me when I stated my objection to making abortion illegal? For the record, it is that making it illegal won’t end it. We know that for a fact, because it used to be illegal, and what happened? Then it was only, or mostly, the unscrupulous giving abortions. So in addition to the wrong of taking an infant’s life, we added ruining women’s health, murdering young women, exploiting them financially, psychologically, and even sexually. We increased the number of children born with health problems stemming from botched, failed abortive attempts. And then, what about those infants you manage to save? How many will be born into poverty, into abuse, crime, etc.?
The way to end abortion is to reduce the demand. We don’t want to hear that, because it means we have to end poverty and hopelessness and racism and ignorance. That’s too hard.
But see, I can try to see their point of view, and I think I could have a calm, reasonable discussion. Many of us on the liberal left feel frustrated because it seems the right will not be reasonable, will not discuss calmly and rationally – instead, when they are losing the argument they start thumping their Bibles and screaming about faith, and the conversation is over.
It is so terrible to me that the most immoral, hateful people I can see have claimed the moral high ground. The people most yelling the name of God seem to me to be the complete opposite of what God – the God of the Bible – called for. Didn’t Jesus say something about that? “Many of you will say Lord, Lord.”
My problem is – how do I find a way not to be part of the problem? How do I keep myself from hating these people who hate me? How stay calm and keep inviting them to discuss?

February 4
Here is a quote from Eco’s [Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana] book, which I’m still reading: “I install, by means of science, the anthem of spiritual hearts into the work of my patience, scour atlases, herbals, and rituals.” What does it mean? I’m not sure, but it really grabbed me, it says something true to me about myself, but I’m not sure what.
It comes at a point in the text where he is kind of between religions, between purposes. He is struggling with his guilt over his participation in a mortal sin during the war, and mourning the death of his philosopher friend, which together symbolize much of the horror and meaninglessness of the war for him. Also he’s experiencing puberty. So he throws himself first into the flesh-denying practices of Catholic penitence and torments himself with the belief that one impure thought will send him to hell, which he is able to vividly envision. After a couple years of this, he realizes that it is as empty as anything else.
The paragraph before the above quote is this: “I am not like the failure, but I would like to become so. To fashion from his bibliomaniacal fury an opportunity for my own nonmonastic escape from the world. To build a world that is all mine. But I am not moving toward a conversion, if anything, I am coming back from one. Seeking an alternative faith, I become enamored of the decadents. Brothers, sad lilies, I pine for beauty . . I become a Byzantine eunuch watching the great white Barbarians go by and composing indolent anacrostics; I install, by means of science . . .”
I don’t know that I feel like picking it apart intellectually to find out why it resonates with me. I think it may mean something different for me, but it seems to me to be what I am doing. Installing, by means of science, the anthem of spiritual hearts . . . it seems to be what ethnography is.

February 5
I finished Eco last night and began reading Karen Armstrong’s Buddha. I only read the first 20 pages and so far it jibes with everything else I know about the Buddha's life and early Buddhism. The introduction discusses the history of the texts, pointing out the difficulty of writing a biography of someone whose life was lived before writing was invented (there in India), and whose life was only written about for specific purposes. I learned more about how the Pali Canon was constructed, and which are thought to be its earliest, most authentic parts. I’m currently in the middle of her discussion of the Axial Age. Something weird sure was going on. Look at these dates:
Confucius (551-479 BCE)
Lao-tzu (6th century BCE)
Socrates (469-399 BCE)
Plato (427-327 BCE)
Zoroaster (6th century BCE)
Gotama Buddha (c. 563-480 BCE)
And then the writing prophets of Judaism in the 8-6th centuries. What caused this massive transformation in the consciousness of humanity, and why did it only happen in five or six places? Because, I forgot, the Upanishads were written about this time (c.600-400 BCE), and Jainism was also founded at this time in India.

Jim suggested some kind of event in space, like a huge solar flare, or a supernova or something that affected humanity like a wave, spurring them to do new and different things, maybe even altering brain chemistry or something. The problem with that is, why did it only affect these 5 places? Jim’s answer at first, thinking only about the new world, was that perhaps stateless societies were spurred into state creation, while those that already had states had to change in other ways. But the question then is – what about Egypt and Babylonia? They had state level societies and were in close proximity, and they didn’t develop an Axial philosophy. Also, why weren’t people in Europe and Africa and SE Asia spurred into state-construction?
The first theory Armstrong presents is the Aryan Invader Theory. We know that people from the Russian steppes did migrate into the Middle East and the sub-continent in waves over a period from 800-200 BCE. And they caused a great deal of upheaval and change and sometimes terror and horror when they did. They did affect India profoundly. But – they never came into contact with the Hebrews, that we know of, and their migration or invasions happened over nearly a millennium, affecting different places at different times, and the Axial philosophies are clustered pretty tightly, depending on which of the Hebrew prophets you include.
My own feeling is that it had something to do with the development of the state and with population pressure. Things had reached a kind of critical mass in some of the places where agriculture and states first developed. But I don’t know enough yet to be able to explain exactly how it happened, and why it only happened in some places.
The next thing Armstrong notes (which I just read this minute!), is that all of the new ideologies were born in the context of the marketplace. So there were merchants that could contest the power of the king and temple.
Then she details the political economy in India at Gautama’s time – all of the changes that were taking place. She leaves discussion of the Axial Age behind for now, to explain why the man who was to become the Buddha left his home to seek his enlightenment. But it is surely an important question, one I think we should think about to look for parallels to our own time.
February 6
I’m nearly half way through Armstrong’s Buddha. It is, obviously, highly readable. So much so that if I was teaching Intro to World Religion again I would seriously consider using her books as texts. I never did finish getting my Hinduism lectures all typed up, but I’m kind of glad because I learned a lot from her that I’d like to work in. I don’t have a lot of time this morning, since I have to take the car to the insurance adjusters.
But one thing I have to revise in my lectures is that Smith presents Buddhism as being a reaction against the excess and abuses of Hinduism. But in fact, Hinduism as such didn’t exist yet. He was very much a man of his time, and he lived right in the middle of the general dissatisfaction with the Vedic tradition. The Upanishads were being written at the same time. Some of them and their philosophies of Atman and reincarnation, karma and Brahman as God-head had existed, but Armstrong argues these were secret teachings in a different region of India, and that it is very unlikely Gotama would have known of them. Later, yes, very likely. But it wasn’t his unbelief in those things that drove him out of the householder life and into the forest.
Also, he was born in a region that had not been subjugated by the Aryans and had no caste system. So he would have been able to look at that system with an outsider’s objectivity. He later associated himself with, or presented himself as a kshtrayia, but he wasn’t born to it and raised in it. Both of those facts should shed new light on the man and his philosophy.

February 8
I began reading the anthology of the Buddha’s discourses in the Pali Canon that Jim got me for Christmas. I admit that so far I am a little disappointed. I understand that these were first oral texts, and they had to be put into a format that was easy to memorize, and to recite. But the little I’ve read so far is very repetitive and circular, or tautological. There are some real gems, but you have to wad through the text patiently to find them.
Maybe it gets better, and it is only the first texts, about human nature, that are so unreadable. I like the way the editor organized the discourses. In general, the anthology progresses through those that lay out Buddha’s analysis of the human condition, then those about his own path to enlightenment, his diagnosis of our crisis, our suffering, and then his prescription for how to make it better. First are his exhortations to follow his Dhamma for the rewards it will bring in this life, then the rewards next life, or how to secure a better re-birth, and then how to secure the final release. Following that are discourses on method, and on how to live in the world as an Awakened being, and finally the few things he said about what Nibbana is like.
Since I just read Armstrong’s biography, I’m kind of skipping over the discourses about his life. I read the whole first part, about the human condition. Two pearls I found in it:

His discourse on pain. He makes the point that those unenlightened beings like myself actually feel two pains when we are physically hurt: the physical pain and an accompanying mental pain. We do not have to experience the mental pain. It arises because of our misguided belief that we are our bodies, and our attachment to those bodies, especially as sources of sensual pleasure. The Dhamma provides the way for us to realize we are not our bodies, and that all of the sensations, painful and pleasurable, that it provides are temporary, impermanent. We cling to things that are destined to pass away. If I could, therefore, see my pain objectively, it would not cure the pain, but would limit it, and prevent the accompanying mental anguish. My body has pain, but not me.
So that is helpful in that it offers hope. If I keep reading and learning and begin to practice, there is a possibility I could achieve a state where the pain ceases to matter.

The other was the metaphor of a dog on a leash. We humans regard form as self, feeling as self, perception as self, volition as self, consciousness as self. Like a dog on a leash, tied to a pole, we keep running around and around form, feeling, perception, etc., and all that running does not free us; in fact, it binds us ever more tightly to form, feeling, etc. Thus it ties us to ageing, birth and death, sorrow, pain, dejection and despair. Our freedom will therefore depend on ceasing to be tied to the five skandas – form, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness. Easier said than done, eh?
In the meantime, I still have all these things to deal with and do, being still attached to these things, these skanda. I guess I’ll keep writing and reading until 9 am, then call Samaritan Hospital, try to get the bill sorted out, then go online and deal with e-mail, and then get to work.

February 10
I’m really plowing through the Pali Canon in what is probably not a very thoughtful way. Nearly half way through the anthology, having skipped a few parts. I’m beginning the section “Deepening One’s Perspective on the World.” I’ve read about his life and enlightenment, his instructions on how to live a good life here, how to obtain a good re-birth, and am now ready, at last, to read and learn more about his analysis of our condition and the source of suffering. These texts are all about attachment, and the ultimate futility of desire.
Here he is talking about three “moments” in the process of acquiring insight, when we realize the truths of gratification, danger and escape. We find gratification in sensual pleasures, in form, and in feelings. There are five cords of gratification in sensual pleasure: Visible forms, odors, flavors, tactile objects, and sounds. The pleasure and joy that arise from these 5 are the gratification.
The danger of these are the pains and sorrows that come from pursuing these things, the disappointment when we don’t get them, the anxiety and worry of protecting them if we do get them, the sorrow and grief if we lose them – a mass of suffering visible in this present life.
Further, on account of these sensual pleasures, kings fight with kings, mothers with fathers, mothers with sons, etc. Men go to war, or become thieves, or seduce other men’s wives. We indulge in misconduct of speech, body and mind, and then are born into another life of misery.
Our only escape from the dangers of sensual pleasures is the removal of desire and lust for them. To highlight the dangers of gratification from form, he instructs us to think of a beautiful young woman – perfect in form. But won’t she age? Decay, become ill, maybe bent over, grimacing in pain, suffering from decline? Won’t she eventually die and begin to rot? He’s very graphic about it, too. Then he goes on to say that even the highest states of meditation are dangerous, because they, too, pass away.
It’s good to be reminded that the Buddha didn’t ignore the obvious fact that we derive a lot of pleasure and joy from life. The problem, of course, is that those joys are temporary, impermanent, changing. And we dislike that; we cling to them, but we can’t make them stay. I think Smith could do a better job of highlighting that, since impermanence is really the Buddha’s primary concern.

I read through the Canon quickly in part, I think now, because I was in search of something that would help me conquer my physical pain. I had already taken two college classes on Buddhism, had read many of the primary texts before, and had been teaching the basics for awhile. And while the practice of Buddhists is appealing to me, I have never agreed wholly with the philosophy. More on that to come. I had always been taught that Gotama was offering a reform of Hinduism, and I preferred different reforms.