Common or Garden Dharma
Essays in Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. II
by
Michel Clasquin-Johnson
Smashwords Edition
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Published by:
Michel Clasquin-Johnson on Smashwords
Centurion, South Africa
Copyright 2011 by Michel Clasquin-Johnson
ISBN: 978-1-4581-6446-9
Smashwords Edition License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for noncommercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.
Cover Image: kongsky / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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Contents
Religion - What is it, anyway?
The Martians are coming! Or going, actually
Demythologization in Ancient India
Hinduism in Tshwane (Pretoria)
Ixopo: The story of a South African Buddhist center
A missed opportunity? The WCRP Declaration of 1992
Buddhism, science and other world views
On being Buddhist and unemployed
Connect with Michel Clasquin-Johnson online
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The emergence of e-books has created new opportunities for academic authors. Like many academics, there are a number of shorter works that I have published over the years for which I never signed away the electronic publishing rights - mostly because they didn't exist at the time!
Some of these started out as academic articles and have needed to be rewritten extensively to appeal to a broader audience. Others were always written in a more popular style, but were tucked away in newsletters that were not archived effectively, or appeared in now-defunct websites. A few were published in books that went out of print years ago.
I am making a few of these available as a free e-book on Smashwords. It does not include articles that can easily be found online, even if they are stuck behind a paywall. If you would like to see a volume 2 in this series, drop me a note: my email addresses are listed at the back of the book.
These essays have served their purpose: they appeared where they needed to appear, they were read by the people whom I needed to read them. They brought me to where I am today. So why dredge them up and rework them for a new audience?
Academics are funny creatures: most of us are used to working for below-average salaries, and we can labor on for years with no realistic hope of tenure. The one thing academics can't stand is being ignored, having no-one read their work. So, is this a vanity project? Why, yes, of course it is. I am a Buddhist. I never said I was a good one. This is an attempt to get my thoughts onto the perpetual backlist of e-books, my pathetic little shot at immortality. Thank you for participating!
The essays that follow are not arranged from oldest to newest. They don't pretend to form any sort of coherent whole. Each essay stands (or falls, more likely) on its own. Each one expressed my opinion at the time: I may have changed my mind since then, but you will have to wait for my new publications to find out. And here and there I have sneaked in something that doesn't deal with Buddhism at all, but which I still think is worth sharing.
Volume I in this series ended up more unified than I had planned. There are a few shorter pieces in it that are apropos of nothing at all, but for most of it, now that I read it again, I see how it reflects my own astonishment at finding myself teaching Buddhism in a faculty of Christian theology, at a university in an overwhelmingly Christian country. My efforts to see how Buddhism reacts to history, other religions, mythical patterns and society at large was also an effort to make sense of my own situation. I ended up getting caught in my own little Grand Narrative. Damn.
No such deficiency will be found in this volume. This, I promise, is a truly random, chaotic, farraginous gallimaufry of pieces that bear no relationship to one another whatsoever. I am really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. If you are a graduate student far in the future thinking of writing a dissertation on "A Unifying Theme in Volume 2 of Clasquin-Johnson's Common or Garden Dharma", I have one question for you. Do you believe in ghosts?
I also promise never, ever to use the words "farraginous" and "gallimaufry" again. Mind you, they are real words.
As before, some are academic pieces rewritten for as non-academic audience. Others were always meant for a wider audience, but did not always reach them.
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Religion - What is it, anyway?
This article was originally published in the now defunct alternative lifestyle magazine Namaste in 2003. But long before that, it was written as the introductory chapter of a book to be published jointly by junior academics in the Departments of Religious Studies and Biblical Studies. The book project fell through and the article languished for a decade before Namaste picked it up.
What is religion? If we are going to talk about religion, it might be a good idea to start out with a clear idea of what we are looking at. It is only too obvious today that there are different religions, churches, denominations and sects. And it is equally obvious that they don't agree with each other very much. So let us ask ourselves, what is "religion", what does it mean when we say that a person is "religious" and don't all the religions worship the same God in their own way, in any case?
One could argue that it is obvious what religion is. After all, I am religious, I believe this and that and I do such and such, therefore that is what makes something a religion and therefore what constitutes RELIGION itself. It may be so. But let us try an analogy: Suppose you are a capitalist, and someone asks you what "economics" means. You might then define "economics" as "the interchange of goods and services in a free market." That would be an answer of sorts, but an answer that simply ignores Marx's analysis of class exploitation, Keynes's advocacy of state involvement in the economy, the experience of millions of people in rigidly-controlled command economies ... the list is endless. You are free to argue that economics as you understand it is the best kind, but you cannot claim that it is the only kind. And the same is true for religion. There are many religions, and what they teach differs.
Even so, might it not be possible to take one's own experience, strip it down to its most basic essentials, see whether those same essentials also apply to other religions and create a workable understanding of religion from that? Many have tried this approach, and have come up with answers such as "religion is the worship of a divine being or beings" or, more broadly, "religion is the human response to that which is considered sacred".
However, if we dig a little deeper in the various religions of the world, we come up with a number of problems. Let us first tackle some basic beliefs. Christians, Jews, Muslims and many others all claim to believe in the existence of a single god who created the world and everything in it (this is called monotheism). But they disagree strongly with each other (and among themselves) about the details, not to mention what He or She might require of humans.
Hindus respond that, in their view, a monotheistic setup is fair enough, but there is also something to be said for incorporating some aspects of polytheism, at least on a subordinate level. In the final analysis some of them might also agree with the Buddhists that the ultimate nature of reality is devoid of personality and that its beginning and end, if such things were to exist, are lost in the mists of time. And that marvelously humanist Chinese sage Confucius once replied to this whole debate by saying, "You do not yet know how to serve people, why then worry about serving the gods?" One cannot regard basic beliefs as the common denominator of all things religious - to say that all religions worship the same God is just too simplistic, too easy. If we take religious people seriously, we have to learn to listen to what they are saying about their beliefs and recognize their uniqueness.
But if basic beliefs about the world and its origin do not help us along in our search for the meaning of "religion", perhaps we can find something else that all religions have in common. I am not referring to acts like praying, lighting candles or prostrating - there the differences are all too clear and we will be discussing some of these in future articles - but perhaps there is something uniquely religious about ethics. After all, don't all religions teach people not to go around killing, raping and robbing each other?
Well, in a sense they all do, but only in highly selective ways. Christians are told to "turn the other cheek", but Islam values a somewhat tougher attitude. Buddhists will extend, in theory at least, their non-harming attitude to all living beings, then indulge in endless debates among themselves whether this implies compulsory vegetarianism. Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians disagree among themselves on the sinfulness of suicide and abortion.
Hardly ever has any religion succeeded in preventing the miseries of war; on the contrary, almost all of them have had a hand, at one time or another, in starting wars against people who happened to be heretics, pagans, heathens, infidels or apostates, in other words, "not like us".
However devoted we are to our respective traditions, we must face up to the truth: "Religionism", like racism and sexism, has caused suffering for millions of people. We might like to think that we have moved beyond all that, but the destruction of the World Trade Center, and before that, the poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway, was a rude awakening - religion as a destructive force continues to exist.
So, if there is indeed a common factor that not only unites all the religions but also helps us to understand what, essentially, it is, it is not plainly visible. We will have to dig a little deeper. What about the structure of the word itself? The word "religion" is derived from a Latin source that means "to tie back" or more figuratively "to re-connect". But this does not help us much, either; the question immediately arises "reconnect to what?" and we are back in the interminable debates about the existence of God, the nature of reality and what human beings really are.
Besides, that only works in some languages. In Afrikaans, for example, the most common term is "godsdiens", literally "service to God". Clearly the same problem arises, for the existence of God is presupposed in the very term itself. This means that a term like "die Boeddhistiese godsdiens" is self-contradictory!. For this reason, Afrikaans-speaking scholars of religion have increasingly turned instead to the neutral, if somewhat artificial, neologism "religie".
We have a problem here. When we started out, we thought we knew what religion was, but now we are not so sure. The fact that religions are different from each other means that as we learn of more and more of them, the concept keeps getting fuzzier.
There are at least three possible reactions to this dilemma. First, there is the fundamentalist option. I can say that while all other traditions are man-made and false, my own is divinely inspired and true. In other words, my beliefs are the TRUTH, while all others are mere "religions". Their followers have been deceived by dark forces. I may tolerate their existence, but I do not accept that they have anything important to teach.
While this approach has the virtues of frankness and simplicity, it is also true that it leads to a fanaticism and a disregard for the rights of others that would no doubt have horrified the founder of the religion in question. This strategy seems most common among monotheists, that is, Jews, Christians and Muslims. But is by no means restricted to them: Even in Buddhism, usually the most tolerant of religions, you will find schools of thought that deny that any other schools teach the true words of the Buddha.. Also, many monotheists reject this approach - they cannot see how a loving God would allow deception on such a massive scale to happen, considering the results for all concerned.
A more subtle variation of this strategy is to declare that all religions have a certain amount of truth in them, but mine happens to be the completely fulfilled truth, which has emerged after a long evolution - the older schools have been corrupted by human misunderstanding of the initially flawless revelation. Alternatively, if this is not yet the case, my religion is at least the closest approach to this complete truth that will be revealed in the fullness of time.
This strategy has long been a favorite among Hindus and Buddhists, but it seems also to have taken root in certain sectors of twentieth-century Christianity: one thinks here of Raimundo Pannikar's phrase "The unknown Christ of Hinduism". One can also see elements of it in the Islamic concept of the "people of the Book". But while this approach may be more refined and humane than the fundamentalist one, it is imperialistic in nature. It refuses to take other people and their beliefs seriously, preferring instead to remake them in its own image.
The Baha'i Faith refines the concept even further: they declare that each major religion was taught by its founder in a way appropriate to its time and place. Therefore, the most recent revelation is the one most appropriate to us, and those of us who prefer to cling to an older faith are not exactly wrong, but maybe a little old-fashioned in a "stick-in-the-mud" kind of way. As a result, Bahai's tend not to evangelize their beliefs aggressively: as far as they are concerned the better fit of their own teachings to our times will eventually become so blindingly obvious that people will naturally turn towards it. Until then, those who stick to other religions will be saved by them, if with more difficulties than is really necessary. We have come a long way from a simplistic fundamentalism here, but there is nevertheless an evolutionary line from the one to the other extreme.
The second major way to react to the problem of the differences between religions is to declare that the only true religion is mysticism. Mysticism may be defines as a process whereby the mystic plumbs the depths of the self and reality in a radical process of meditative self-discovery to discover the true nature of reality. And the sayings of mystics of all kinds of different traditions show that they have known very similar experiences. Therefore, the true unity of religion can be found in mystical experience. In mysticism, we can find the "perennial philosophy", the common ground of all religious experience. All the rest of religion, the ceremonies, the scriptures, the deeply-held beliefs, are reduced to a kind of life-support system for mysticism.
There is a lot of evidence to support this train of thought. But mysticism is, was and probably always will be a minority interest among religious people. Where does this leave the rest of us? Moreover, the mysticism approach and the fundamentalist attitude share one shortcoming: there is no way that they can be proven to a disinterested outsider. Instead, they require a leap of faith or a mystical experience that is itself religious. Thus, basing a definition of religion on them leads to arguing in circles.
The third reaction to the problem is to ignore it. This approach, which grows naturally out of the exclusivism of the first strategy, was perhaps possible in the past, when some religions dominated large geographical areas. But today, it would imply shutting oneself up in a self-imposed ghetto, avoiding all contact with everyone who might possibly not share one's beliefs and never venturing outside. Surely an unacceptable "solution" to most of us. After all, most religions do believe that their message is valid for all people; how is this truth to be transmitted to other people if we ignore them?
So perhaps there is a fourth way, a way of approaching the differences between religions that will not deny the religious feelings and beliefs, and therefore the very humanity, of people of other faiths and that will not restrict us in the practice of our own religion.
If we cannot identify one common characteristic of all religions, perhaps we can devise a system of classifying them. Then, perhaps the way we classified the religions will itself show us what they have in common.
There are many ways to classify religions. One popular way is to distinguish between local, national and universal religions. The local religion is limited in terms of both geography and missionary intent. Usually, one is born into a local religion; it is the faith of one's family, tribe or clan and one has little interest in extending it to others. On the contrary, since the religion is the source of the group's power, and therefore its means of survival, one should be careful not to divulge too much of it to outsiders. While this type of religion is most common among "primal" communities (hunter-gatherers, herders and premodern agriculturalists), remnants of it remain even in modern societies - witness the secrecy that surrounds groups such as the Freemasons.
National religions usually have to do with the common bonds of a shared language, culture, ethnic background or a shared history. Orthodox Judaism is a good example of this, traditional Hinduism another. While it is not impossible for an outsider to join a national religion, to do so requires that one adopts, not only the religious precepts, but an entire lifestyle. As a result, national religions tend, after an initial flowering that is associated with the growth and political dominance of the associated community, to stop growing and only perpetuate themselves, or even to decline.
The universal religions, on the other hand, have divorced themselves from a specific society to such an extent that they have become "portable". They can adapt themselves to almost any society in which they find themselves. Universal religions are clearly oriented towards converting people of other faiths. Christianity, Buddhism and Islam are the most often quoted examples of universal religions. Keep in mind, though, that there are always "mixed" types. For instance, Hinduism contains aspects of all three these types, depending on whether one investigates it on the village, caste or philosophical level.
But there is a problem with this classification system, useful as it is, if we are looking for the essence of religion. It simply classifies traditions according to their missionary zeal, or lack of it. In terms of this system, classical Marxism-Leninism, with its drive to "world communism" would have to be classified as a "universal religion". While there are some scholars who maintain that it was precisely that, it is problematic to call this philosophy, which denied the truth-claims of all religious systems, a religion. In other words, we cannot use this classification to define religion as something that tries to convert other people.
More fundamentally, conversion is mainly a concern of the universal religions; the other groups care much less about it. In essence, it says that there is a group of missionary religions and two kinds of non-missionary religions. But how can one use a defining characteristic of one group to set up a system that then goes on to define all the groups? In other words, isn't this like the old South Africa, where you were either "white" or some kind of "non-white"?
This shows us that we can never look at religious phenomena with a blank mind, ready to receive "what is out there". Our previous experience always colors our perceptions. Not that this is fatal to good thinking, as long as the reality of the influence of this previous experience is recognized and used positively. Thus, classification systems, although useful, cannot give us the essence of religion, either. All they do is reflect our existing ideas about religion.
What can we learn from all this? Simply that religion is not a single thing. To understand religion, we must accept that it is a composite, something made up out of many things, any one (or even more!) of which may be present or absent without affecting the "religious" nature of the whole. We cannot isolate a single aspect such as belief or worship or prayer and set that apart as the "essence" of religion.
Consider the work of the philosopher Wittgenstein. As a young philosopher, he engaged in highly abstract work on logic, but as he grew older he became interested in concepts and ideas that seemed to defy definition.
Wittgenstein developed his philosophy using "game" as his first example. What, he asked, is a game? Many games are played with balls and sticks, but chess is a game, yet it involves neither. Games are played for fun, unless you happen to be a professional sportsman who does it for the money even when you are injured. Games can involve competition, but some others stress cooperation. And so on.
In the end, he decided that "game" could not be reduced to one single defining attribute. Instead, it was the sum total of all its attributes. If one looked at a human activity and saw that the majority of its properties could be found in the list that together made up the definition of "game", then one would be justified in saying that that particular activity was a game. But it was not necessary for all of them to be there.
Can you see how the same is true of religion? It is a big composite of ideas, customs and practices, all sharing a certain "family resemblance", but no single one being so dominant that it alone makes the whole thing "religious". It is all those little things taken together that religion its identity, and if one of those little things falls out of place, this does not make the whole complex invalid. For centuries, religious thinkers have been telling us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It turns out that this is equally true for religion itself.
In fact, this understanding of what religion is closely reflects the evolution of the concept. When the early European explorers set out on their voyages in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they already had some idea of what religion was. This notion was derived mostly from Christianity, but they were also aware of Judaism and Islam, even if they regarded these as false religions.
When they reached India, they encountered Hinduism. This ancient civilization had systematized beliefs and practices that bore a sufficient resemblance to what they were used to at home for them to refer to Hinduism as the "religion" of the Indian people. The same was true when, later, they reached China and the Americas. In each of these cases, there were separate social structures that were not necessarily identical to European religion, but which bore a certain "family resemblance" to it. With each discovery of a new "religion", the very term itself was widened and it became easier and easier to describe a newly-discovered social phenomenon as "religious".
Sometimes this process would break down, of course - some of the early Christian missionaries to Southern Africa would write in their letters home that the indigenous people of Africa had no religion! Actually, what happened was that those activities that would be considered "religious" in western society were, in African communities, so tightly integrated with the rest of social life as to present a seamless whole to the observer. To some extent, this is also true of Judaism and Hinduism, as we have seen. Even in modern western society, it is not always easy to say where religion stops and, say, politics begins.
If we stop looking for one small defining property that makes religion what it is, the problem of differences between religions immediately starts to fade away. It is no longer a problem, but rather in itself a glorious expression of the human capacity for making sense of the world. Religion may or may not be divine in origin, but it certainly is human in execution. That people living in different times and places should have responded to their experience of life and death in ways different from mine, but still broadly recognizable as religious, is not a scandal of philosophy, but a celebration of human ingenuity and adaptability. I do not have to adopt another religious system in its totality, but I can still appreciate the beauty and grandeur of that system.
And the same must then be true in our personal religious practice. My bona fide religious experience is completely valid within the framework of my religious tradition, and so is your religious experience within the framework of yours. The fact that my religious experience is not the same as yours, or that our religious systems contradict each other on many specific points, does not change the fact that on the experiential level we have both experienced a life-altering event of the deepest possible meaning. All of us, the Catholic and the Copt, the Buddhist and the Baptist, stand before the Great Mystery, begging bowl in hand, dumbfounded by the greatness of what we can see only dimly.
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I wrote this one for Namaste magazine too, but I don't recall that they ever published it. It was just around the time that the magazine folded, so that was probably what happened.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. - Pablo Picasso
Art among a religious race produces relics; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.- Henry Fuseli
In the year 730, the Byzantine emperor Leo III issued an order forbidding the use of religious images (icons) in Christian worship. Icons were to be destroyed all over the empire; this came to be known as iconoclasm (literally, the breaking of the images). Leo's successors maintained this policy, but the empress Irene reversed it. She was an iconophile (literally, a lover of images) and during her reign the use of icons was restored. Iconoclasm was reinstated by her successors, but under the empress Theodora the iconophiles finally won the day, more than a century after the controversy first broke out.
The use of icons in worship has endured ever since in Eastern Christianity. To this day it is the norm in Orthodox Churches, and Theodora was declared a saint. In the meantime, though, various people had suffered banishment and imprisonment for being on the wrong side of the controversy whenever a new emperor or empress made yet another switch in religious policy.
Almost a thousand years later, a new wave of iconoclasm arose, this time in Western Europe. Of the Reformists, both Zwingli and Calvin were dead set against the use of art in religious practice. Luther took a more moderate stance. Once again, priceless paintings and statues were destroyed. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church continued to use artistic representations of saints and angels to inspire religious fervor in its adherents - many of the world's greatest artistic treasures, like the Sistine chapel and Michelangelo's statue of Moses, were commissioned by the church. To this day, even a member of another religion can tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant church just by looking at its interior. Anglican churches can go either way.
Clearly, there is an uneasiness about art deep within the world's largest religion. But where does it come from? Perhaps the most obvious place to start is with the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them (Exodus 20:4-5)
You will recall that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he found to his disgust that the Israelites had already broken this commandment, with his own brother Aaron among the culprits! In one sense, one could say that the commandment had not yet been formally promulgated when they cast the Golden Calf, so perhaps one might forgive them this little error. But clearly, this was the result of a much longer process - unlike all the other nations among which they lived, the Israelites worshipped a god who did not limit himself to a specific shape or place. It was really just a matter of time before it was formally forbidden to even try to make a representation of him. And this has ever since been the question that has plagued artists and theologians ever since. For the artist, the question is "How can one depict something, no, someone, who is both a personal deity and the vastly superior creator of the universe?" Theologians, for their part, ask "Can we mere humans even dare to do such a thing"?
The dilemma has not been confined to Christianity - all religions that get their inspiration from the Old Testament in one way or another have had to face it. Judaism is naturally closest to the source, and it has taken it very much at face value. This is not to say that Jewish religious art does not exist, but it tends to be abstract and non-figurative - decoration rather than figuration.
Islam has taken a similar line, although in Persia it seems that it was reinterpreted a little: as long as the subject was clearly non-religious and no-one worshipped it, some figurative art was allowed. Persian miniatures thereby became an artistic treasure.
More traditional Muslims maintained that any artistic representation of any living creature was forbidden by the Koran, just in case someone might feel inclined to worship it. Abstract decoration was allowed, though, as was elaborate calligraphy. In fact, scholars have speculated that it was this insistence on non-figurative art in Islam that inspired Leo III to proclaim the policy of iconoclasm. After all, the Muslims were at the time beating the Byzantine army back on all fronts, and they were more strict on this issue than the Christians. To the medieval mind, cause and effect could easily be deduced in such a case. The Muslims have recently made their peace with non-religious representation, or Al-Jazeera would not be able to broadcast. But they remain touchy about artistic representations of revered people, whether it is in paint, film or in any other medium. Just ask Salman Rushdie!
But of course, there are religions that do not base their philosophy on the Old Testament. Hinduism seems to have the fewest problems with religious art. There are a few modern reformist movements that do not use paintings and sculptures of deities, but they are in the minority.
Most Hindu temples and homes are filled with representations of the Hindu gods. Which is a little strange, really, because Hindu philosophy sees the ultimate nature of god (Brahman) as beyond form, indeed, beyond human imagining. But below this, there are many other levels of divinity, and it is these more personal divinities that are commonly depicted. And so we get Hanuman, with his monkey-like face, the blue-skinned Krishna, the elephant-headed Ganesha, and many others.
But if the Hindus did not see a problem in using art in their religion, their cousins the Buddhists certainly did. After the Buddha's death, Buddhism gradually became strong and wealthy enough that the monks could afford to decorate their monasteries. But while they had no problems depicting significant events in the lives of the Buddha and his chief disciples, they stopped short when it came to depicting the Buddha himself.
According to Buddhist doctrine, the Buddha had escaped from the circle of life and death and gone into the beyond of parinirvana. It wasn't just that he didn't exist anymore. He neither existed nor non-existed. He had gone beyond both existence and non-existence. it was felt that to make a representation of him would imply otherwise. And so for several centuries, Buddhists painted and carved elaborate scenes in which adoring crowds of disciples stood around - nothing much. Where the Buddha would have sat there was perhaps a lotus flower, or an eight-spoked wheel, or just a footprint, all of these symbolizing the presence that was absent, the Buddha who was also referred to as the thus-gone (Tathagatha). In a way, these ancient artists faced the same problem as their counterparts in Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures: how does a mere physical creature give form to that which is essentially beyond form?
This changed when Buddhism reached Gandhara in the northwestern outreaches of India. Gandhara had long ago been settled by Greeks, and while their descendants were enthusiastic converts to this new religion, they were not much impressed by the theology of non-presentation. If they were going to be Buddhists, they were going to make sculptures of the Buddha, and there was an end to it! One small problem arose: There was no longer anyone around who remembered what the Buddha had looked like, and the Buddhist texts were quite ambiguous. So they based their first statues on those of Apollo, and this started an artistic tradition that spread across Asia, changing shape whenever Buddhism entered a new cultural area, but always recognizably descended from those first Greek-Indian statues.
In all of those cases, one can see a common thread. Art had a certain utility value, but not necessarily an inherent one. It could be used by a ruler to glorify his reign, or by a a priest to glorify his god. But its primary value was that it adorned and glorified something else. "Art for art's sake" would have been a perfectly meaningless phrase to the pre-modern mind. The artist was basically an artisan: "Herr Bach, we are having the Duke of Saxony over next week and we need you to compose two minuets and a violin concerto. That will be all."
This changed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Photography was invented, and portrait painters found themselves out of work. Edison discovered a way to reproduce sound and thousands of journeyman musicians were surplus to requirements. This turned out to be a double-edged sword. It was true that art lost much of the patronage on which it had been living for so long, but those artists who decided to stick it out were now suddenly free to experiment with form, sound and emotions. Before, the important thing had been the client's wishes. Now, the artist needed only to listen to his (and increasingly, her) inner feelings. Perhaps Oscar Wilde expressed this new conception of art most clearly:
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.
Forms of artistic expressions, which had once evolved so slowly that it still makes sense to speak of, say "18th century English painting", now started to arise and die out with dizzying speed. Impressionism begat Fauvism, which begat Cubism, which begat Futurism, which begat Abstract Expressionism . . . The public at large stopped even trying to keep up and turned away from the world of art even more that they had been doing already.
Oh, there have been artistic movements, especially in music, that have tried to bring their vision to the masses. But they have been quickly subverted by commercial interests. The blues originated as a cry of anguish against slavery and discrimination. it gave birth to jazz, which was then tamed to become the comfortable middle-class music of the big-band era. Later on, Bob Dylan and John Lennon reached back to the original spirit of blues and folk music, again to express their deepest feelings about what they saw going on around them. But what is their legacy today? Pre-manufactured boy bands, whose music expresses absolutely nothing. In the same way, commercial interests have felt free to plunder the visual arts. Where would advertising be without Surrealism? Popular art is at the mercy of the editor, the market researcher and the record executive.
Eventually, a new kind of patronage was found. Not the mass patronage of the past, where every well-to-do burgher needed a portrait of himself to hang on the wall, but a small section of the seriously wealthy, who might not be able to create art themselves, but who aspired to share the artist's vision.
Of course, there were never many such patrons, and it is from this period that we first observe the rise of a popular stereotype: the struggling artist, starving in a garret, spending money on nothing but art materials and the occasional dose of narcotics, creating works of art understood by no-one but himself, a few other artists and, hopefully, future generations. Vincent Van Gogh was one of the first to live this kind of existence, and is by now the most famous. But there were others whose work has been entirely forgotten.
But let us think about that. Does this kind of lifestyle not remind us of something? To give up a comfortable bourgeois way of life in service to a higher calling: To insist that there is more to life than making money, or even making babies: To work with the finite in a stylized way in search for infinity: To insist that one knows a truth that others do not, a truth accessible only to the initiated. It sounds a lot like religion.
And indeed, today art has become a secular religion. It has its temples (art galleries) its high priests (curators) and heretics (art critics), its theologians (art historians) and its sacred icons. It does not offer an afterlife yet, but note how easily the word "immortality" slips into the conversation when talking about major artists. The original sin of this new religion is vulgarity, and it offers the sacrament of the exhibition opening, bringing us the salvation of good taste.
Anyone may try to join this cult, but to be accepted in the inner circle takes effort, dedication and talent. Or money - artists may tolerate starvation in the garret for now, but still they long to be "discovered", to make that million-dollar sale to a gallery, to get that publishing or recording contract. This faith is closely connected to our other secular religion, commerce, after all. The day of the gentleman amateur is far behind us, and while artists no longer wish to be seen as mere artisans, few seem able to resist the lure of celebrity status. In time, the successful artist becomes a parody of his former self, creating searing indictments of capitalist society while lounging in the back of his Rolls-Royce.
Meanwhile, the old religions soldier on. Now that they can no longer count on the services of the really good artists, they are reduced to repeating the decorative patterns of the past, stamped out in ever-increasing numbers and ever-decreasing quality. Same old, same old. Kitsch.
Today, when an artist consciously uses images and ideas from the established religions, it is front-page news. And the result is as likely to be uproar as appreciation. When Muslims burn a Rushdie book in public, when Christians protest against the showing of The Last Temptation of Christ, or against the showing of Mapplethorpe artworks, this is not merely in outrage over a secular person misusing the symbols they hold dear. It is a fully-fledged conflict between two very different ways of seeing the world. In a small way, it truly is a religious war.
We started off this essay with quotes from Picasso and Fuseli. Let us end it with another, this time by Marcel Duchamp:
Art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People speak of it with great, religious reverence, but I don't see why it is to be so much revered. I'm afraid I'm an agnostic when it comes to art. I don't believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it's probably very useful for many people, very sedative, but as a religion it's not even as good as God.
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The Martians are coming! Or going, actually
This article was also originally meant for Namaste magazine, but after that was closed down it ended up being published in Odyssey magazine instead in 2004.
We will go to Mars. It may not happen soon, and it may not come about as a result of President Bush's recent directive to NASA. But sooner or later we will go. The whole of the emerging global culture points to it.
There was a time, long ago, when there were many different human cultures on Earth. From the American Northwest, where one's status depended on how many of your possessions you were able to give away, to the African Savannah, where the deciding factor was the possession of cattle and the killing of lions, there was an amazing diversity to human life. Thousands of distinct languages were spoken, thousands of religions were practiced. Societies were small, typically between twenty and two hundred people
This started to change between two and three thousand years ago, in the period that turned out to be so pivotal to history that the philosopher Karl Jaspers called it the Axial Age, that is, the axis around which history turns. At that stage, there were already major civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and elsewhere, but they were mainly conglomerations of smaller units. What we call Sumeria was really a collection of independent city-states (village-states, really, by our present standards). Local languages largely survived, and local beliefs were not only tolerated, but incorporated rather unsystematically into state cults.
All this changed during the Axial Age. Egypt was probably the earliest to show the way to the future: a single system of writing cemented the supremacy of the language that became known as Egyptian, and the worship of Amon-Ra slowly pushed other cults, survivors from an earlier age of village religions, into the background. Things moved slowly back then, but from our present vantage point we can see how over the next thousand years, the same pattern repeated itself again and again in India, in China and in Europe. One local dialect gained supremacy and became a national language. One religion became a widespread ideology. Slightly later, the same pattern of events even took place in the Americas, in the civilizations of the Mayas, Aztecs and Incas.
The logic of the Axial Age continues unabated to the present day. In fact, it has accelerated. Linguists warn that local languages are dying out almost as fast as species of animals in the rain forests. In South Africa, for example, the Nama language will probably not see the twenty-second century and Griqua, while enjoying a brief spell as a "local is lekker" curiosity, is on the endangered list.
Religions have followed the pattern faster than languages. A half dozen religions dominate the thinking of the vast majority of our seven billion fellow humans, and almost all of them (e.g. Buddhism, Christianity) can be dated to the Axial Age. The only one that came a little later was Islam, and even that religion acknowledges its roots in the Axial Age development of Judaic and Christian thought.
It is by now almost impossible for us not to think in terms of Axial Age logic. It crops up in the most unlikely places. In the computer world, the buzzword is "interoperability". It seems right and proper, without any further reflection, that all computers in the world should be able to talk to each other. It seems perfectly natural that any telephone user should be able to call any other telephone in the entire world. Any restriction on this (like DVDs that divide the world into a number of incompatible zones) is experienced as an inconvenience. We don't need to think about this, we don't need to argue the point It just seems obvious. One language, one religion, one operating system. That is the logic of the Axial Age.
But in fact, this logic has been around for little more than three thousand years, and only in the last three hundred has it really gone global. For well over ninety percent of its existence, homo sapiens lived in small isolated bands, and the notion of a universal language, or a universal religion, would have been utterly incomprehensible. As it remains incomprehensible in those pockets where local languages and religions survive (for now). The ideology of one-ness is a very recent heresy in human development, and just because we all share it does not mean that it is necessarily right.
What do I mean, "we all share it"? Surely not? Oh yes. Even while I am questioning this philosophy, I am doing it in English because I think that that will allow the largest number of people to read it. I constantly try to keep the "average reader" in mind to make sure it will be understood. And I will send it to the editor of Smashwords in Microsoft Word format because I know that their computer is likely to interpret that properly.
Even criticism of the Axial Age and its consequences is deeply embedded within the structures of Axial Age thinking itself. It has become a prison of the mind. A very modern, progressive prison, sure. But still a prison. A few hardy "postmodernists" claim to have escaped from this prison. But from time to time they have to break back in for supplies.
The twentieth century saw the ultimate logical consequence (so far) of the Axial Age: a single global culture. I am not talking about Disneyland in Paris or Coca-Cola advertisements in Addis Ababa. Those are mere symptoms, not the main thing. It is a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world. In this global culture, whether you are a Christian in Alabama, a Buddhist in Japan or a Hindu in Madhya Pradesh actually makes very little difference. Not merely do we watch the same TV shows, or different shows with essentially the same plot, but we expect to see the same kind of thing when we switch the TV on. Free-market democracy, consumer society, modernism, call it what you like. The overall pattern is a steady growth towards one-ness, same-ness.
Talking about TV, watch the news tonight. It doesn't matter which channel. Does it tell you the day's movements on the New York Stock Exchange? It is probably safe to say that 99% of South Africans don't own any American stocks, so why do we need to know this? Because New York is the financial center of the global culture, just as Paris is the fashion center and Washington the political center. Whatever happens in these centers reverberates around the world. If, in the future, that financial center moves to China, we will be getting the results of the Shanghai Stock Exchange on South African TV. But that would be a mere detail. The system endures.
During the twentieth century, communism promised an alternative vision. But that was a sham. Marx's thinking was solidly based on the philosophy of Hegel, which built on that of Kant, and so on all the way back to Plato. Communism was merely a minor variation of the emerging global society and its philosophy. It too was solidly grounded in the logic of the Axial Age, indeed, it was even more overtly so than capitalism. After all, Marx predicted that just one class would remain standing after the revolution. Lenin introduced absolute rule by one party. Again, we see the move to one-ness.
Few "revolutions" and "paradigm shifts" are really radical, and those in recent memory have been less radical than most. Feminism? It insists that there are not two unequal kinds of human being, male and female, but just one. They are right, of course. But this argument is a logical extension of the earlier battle over the assertion that there were not two unequal kinds of people, serfs and aristocrats, but just one.
Environmentalism? Now that one once looked promising: after all, what is environmentalism if not a philosophy that promotes diversity? But much of contemporary environmentalism has become locked into a static view of nature, of preserving nature in an idealized form that excludes humanity. It has become yet another form of one-ness philosophy. "Become one with nature". Well, what else can you be?
The global society is not simplistically "western". One can call it that for reasons of (fairly recent) history, but the Axial Age logic that underlies it is as much Chinese and Indian as it is European. Once contact was made, the Axial Age cultures rapidly started to merge. India, Japan and China may have been "westernized", but Europe and America have equally much been "orientalized". Minimalist architecture and design echo the austerity of Zen temples. Japanese swords and swordsmanship feature in films and cartoons rather than European sabers and rapiers. Even modern-day cowboys (like the character played by Chuck Norris in the long-running TV series "Walker, Texas Ranger") are expected to know their karate moves. Western culture is a local outcrop of global culture and it is already hard to tell where it ends and other outcrops start.
And so, the global society with its Axial Age logic has become the overarching ideology, the uber-religion, under which we all live. As religions go, it is tolerant of what came before. By and large, it allows remnants of the earlier religions to go on, as long as they remain private and subjective matters, not to be discussed in polite society. One by one, the older religions have succumbed and accepted this reduced place in the greater scheme of things. Islam (at least some forms of it) is the last hold-out, and its resistance to assimilation is being played out in the Middle East as we speak.
There is one aspect of this uber-religion that concerns us greatly here. It carries the unquestioned assumption of the value of expansion. In the film "Wall Street", the Gordon Gekko character famously declares that "greed is good". He was too modest in his assessment. The greater truth, in Axial Age logic, is that "growth is good".
Religions must compete for adherents - whether they are up-front or subtle about it, the unquestioned assumption is that that things would be better if everybody else adopted my religion. Kingdoms must expand their territory. Languages must increase their number of native speakers. And this logic remains with us today.
Again, watch the TV news and read the newspapers. The need for economic growth is an unquestioned good. If only we can grow the economy, we will all have a little more. On a smaller scale, companies compete for market-share. political parties for voters, universities for students. There are bragging rights and practical benefits involved in being able to say that "my department is the biggest on campus", or "we are the most-watched TV station in South Africa". Growth is good. Expansion is a necessity.
But this is not the only way to run a society. Even a little study of anthropology reveals that there have been societies that have valued stability over growth. There have been societies, notably the potlatch economies of the American Northwest, that valued distribution rather than growth. One could argue that these have been spectacularly unsuccessful societies. They did not grow, they shrank and disappeared. But to make that argument is to argue from within the very Axial Age philosophy to which these societies pose an alternative! Our minds remain imprisoned.
And all of this brings us to why we will go to Mars. If expansion is a central goal of society, that implies that there is a frontier, beyond which there is a wasteland into which we can expand. The Axial Age's relentless drive towards one-ness requires a two-ness, an Other that we can gradually turn into our One.
But what happens when there is no more unoccupied land, no more heathens to convert, no more savages to turn into placid consumers? What happens when there is a single culture everywhere, when there is one company with 100 percent market share, one university, one universal religion? What happens when there is no more frontier, and no more wasteland? Where does our global society grow to then?
We're not quite there yet. But things certainly seem to be moving in that direction. New religions spring up all the time, but frankly, they are just local variations on some very old themes. New countries declare themselves independent just as the concept of the nation state is made irrelevant by the greater reality of a shared global culture. Giant corporations merge into mega-companies that could buy small countries with little more than the advertising budget. Even when entities remain formally separated, they are linked into virtual organizations by layer upon layer of networks. Eventually the only way out will be to go up.
And that is why we will go to Mars. Not because of scientific research, not because of immediate economic benefits, not even because it is a piece of high adventure. Those are pretexts. We will go because three thousand years of cultural pressure to grow, to expand, will become an irresistible force. I doubt I'll live to see it. But it will happen.
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Demythologization in Ancient India
A version of this article, which was originally based on my MA dissertation, first appeared in Religion and Civil Society. Papers from the founding congress of the South African Academy of Religion (De Gruchy & Martin 1995. Pretoria: Unisa Press), and a related article appeared in Myth & Symbol in 1995. This version cuts down on the academic wordiness and most of the referenced material and presents the basic argument.
The term "demythologization" (G. Entmythologisierung) is usually associated with the name of Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann indeed, it did not enter the English language until 1950. It refers to an effort to see beyond the specific, culturally defined mythical embellishments of religious teachings. It differs, however, from ordinary positivist debunking in that the intention of demythologization is not just to prove the myths factually wrong, but to discern a deeper, timeless meaning that is assumed to lie buried beneath layer upon layer of mythical material. Bultmann was deeply influenced by the existentialists, particularly Heidegger, and he felt that an existential encounter with the text was the correct approach to scriptural material, one that would yield not only intellectual clarification, but also personal faith. In order to do this, it would however be necessary to strip away mythical expressions that were specific to another time and another place.
But while demythologization is certainly not the same thing as debunking, it can be seen as a reaction to it, as a rearguard action by the faithful against the ascendancy of the secular debunkers. Consider, for example, that Bultmann lived and worked out his theory of demythologization in the heyday of positivism, that is, the early and middle twentieth century, and conversely, that the last two decades have seen both a resurgence of interest in myth and a lessening of the attention paid to Bultmann. The process of demythologization can therefore be seen as a symptom, rather than a cause, of a clash between an older, traditional paradigm and a newer, more skeptical culture.
The demythologizing position is open to a number of criticisms, most of which concern the assumed duality between the intrinsic, essential message and the medium in which it is expressed and embellished. In this essay, however, my intention is to show that very similar processes were happening in India twenty five centuries ago.
It is of course each academic generation's inalienable right to think that it is the first to "escape" from the "straightjacket" of mythical thinking and the first to have discovered the true meaning of life and death, beyond any mythical linguistic confusions. And few academic generations have not made use of this particular right. Nevertheless, this is an incorrect assumption. We should not think that demythologization is a modern invention, even less that it was invented by Bultmann. In previous periods of social, intellectual and religious upheavals there have also been movements that attempted to strip the tales of old of their mythological accretions while attempting to retain some measure of the symbolic truth allegedly hidden within.
In Athens, for example, Socrates was accused of impiety, that is, of denying the divine nature of the celestial bodies, and the general demythologizing and debunking positions were known well enough that he could ridicule his accusers by asking:
My dear Meletus! Do you think that it is Anaxagoras you are accusing? Do you so despise these judges here and think them so unlettered that they do not know that it is the books of Anaxagoras ... which teem with such statements? Are young men to learn these things specifically from me when they can buy them ... for a drachma, if the price is high, and laugh at Socrates if he pretends they are his own? (Allen 1980: 47)
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