About ‘Me’

As good a place to start as any is with 心, which is more ‘me’ than anything else. I checked in with the idea for a writing prompt, and found this nice but anonymous post that surveys the very broad and deep relevance of this humble¹ little character that is burdened with the unbearable lightness of representing nothing less than ‘the essence of one’s being’.

The character means kokoro, and in Japanese culture it stretches back thousands of years and connects, unsurprisingly, with Buddhism. (The chronology here might be a bit spurious, because I don’t think Buddhism had met Japan thousands of years ago ~ it had to travel there from ancient India through China over at least hundreds of years, so it might be more accurate to place it’s connection with Buddhism at around a thousand years ago, but caveat: that’s a half-informed guess.) But whenever, and since then, it has come to span so many domains of the human condition that I might say it has a laundry list of applications.

🎯 Now, 心 has a place at the heart of Japanese literature, poetry, art, philosophy, science, psychology, spirituality, scripture, daily life … and even the Bushido Way of the Samurai! It means something like a combination of ‘body’, ‘mind’, ‘heart’, and ‘spirit’, and for that reason it is more ‘me’ than anything else I am currently aware of, and more ‘you’ or even ‘human’ than the regular self-obsessed iteration we seem to be currently stuck in. Considered to be the seat of both emotions and awareness, a well-lived life depends, fundamentally, on cultivating a tranquil 心 through the application of quite-specific discipline which, lucky for us, Siddhartha Gotama got a handle on before he spent the next 45 years as the peripatetic pedagogue² par excellence. Better even than Aristotle, who I believe was another OG of the walk-and-talk teaching method.^peripatetic

Picking terms out of that anonymous Japanse-language-school post now, the idea and experience of 心 is intimately associated with such beautiful things as consciousness and morality, sincerity, intuition, and ‘internal struggle’. In Zen, a tranquil and balanced 心 is essential for enlightenment and at the development of its full potential might³ even be synonymous with that seemingly elusive state of liberation from suffering. Practitioners of dhamma endeavour to cultivate harmony between the intellect and our emotions through meditation intended to quell the turmoil of a constantly distracted and restless 心. A strong and stable 心 is essential for a samurai to remain calm in battle or when they are scaling skyscrapers to visit their Salarymen brethren for a tea ceremony in the spirit of honour, courage, and loyalty. Beautiful, no ~ such that I probably shouldn’t crack jokes about the Salarymen culture, which is unbearable tragic even just on the surface. But I haven’t even finished yet ~ time for a push to GitHub and the beginning of a new paragraph.

The concept of 心 has been embraced in the mystical arts of neuroscience and psychology, presumably both transpersonal and clinical and, 🤞🏼, the dreaded psychiatry. (I like hashtags, have you noticed ~ some of these might get replaced with links one day, and the tags redirected to the opening or closing metadata, 🤷. I also really like emojis, and punctuation if you’d like to know about ‘me’ as well as about 心.) According to my sole resource at the moment, that one blog post promoting a language school in Japan, researchers in these disciplines are exploring 心 as a way of understanding the mind-body connection that Descarte famously denied and left us all writhing in a literalist apoplexy that is now coming to an end with the death of metaphysical materialism and late-stage industrial capitalism. So that’s cool! No more extractive stupidity and a lot more holism.

Time for a pivot toward something more uplifting than the Sixth Great Extinction, not to be confused with the Great Depression though of course there are metaphorical correlates: 心 was explored in the 1914 novel Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki ~ missed opportunity right there, not using the symbol for the title. I was dimly aware of this novel, but it has gone straight to the top of the An Avuncular Reading List after Lacuna because I have been really looking forward to reading that, hoping it is light-hearted evening reading that aligns enough with the dhamma to not be a transgression of the no-entertainment precept: despite appearances such as this heavy-lifting About page, I am not actually constantly being a massive drag-weight by thinking about philosophy all the time ~ I do have a need to ‘Netflix and chill’ sometimes, but I try to not hijack the ol’ dopamine pumps too much anymore these days, so a bit of light poetic prose is really my jam.⁴

If that 👆🏼 wasn’t sufficiently uplifting, I am going to copy-paste a few Japanese phrases using 心:

• 心から感謝します (Kokoro kara kansha shimasu) – “I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

• 心のある人 (Kokoro no aru hito) – “A person with a kind heart.”

• 心を沈める (Kokoro o shizumeru) – “To calm one’s mind and heart.”

Worth noting that 心 is the leading character in each of these, and I would like to note later that the ‘body’ aspect of 心 points at something equally central in Buddhism, which is that liberation from suffering ~ that transcendent state of having permanently abandoned the illusion of self ~ is achieved primarily through embodied-awareness: Buddhist meditation is not the dry, cognitively heavy, boring, and unpleasant activity that many people think it is, but something deeply grounded in the body, and in joy.

So on that note, a fun fact about Japanese language that I learnt through hearsay and have just had Claude confirm: 懐かしい (natsukashii) is an adjective that describes the warm, fuzzy, delighted feeling one gets upon reuniting with a long-lost friend or, apparently, a rarely smelt odour that brings on a wave of nostalgia that feels good, not yearny or clingy because: your friend is back, no longer separated from you who was pining.

About “Don’t Believe What I Think”

Essaying on having saddhā in faith

I want to write something long and beautiful and winding and thoughtful about cosmology and worldviews, about belief, skepticism, awakening, and literalism, and how they impact faith and effort. I feel inspired by the looping, exploratory style of Patrick Harpur in his book The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, for one thing - and the whole vibe of long, sprawling narrative essays is just definitely my jam.

I know there is attachment at play here - I want to enjoy words like epistemology and explore ideas like ‘How can we know?’ - but there is also something very grounded about understanding how my inherited worldview interacts with the Buddhist worldview, because our beliefs about the world directly impact the amount and kind of effort we apply. Arguing against the view that we can discount cosmological facets such like rebirth as “religious trappings of an ancient culture utterly inappropriate for the Dhamma of our technological age”, Bhikkhu Bodhi writes in his short piece “Dhamma Without Rebirth” that when

viewed in their totality, the Buddha’s discourses show us that far from being a mere concession to the outlook prevalent in his time or an Asiatic cultural contrivance, the doctrine of rebirth has tremendous implications for the entire course of Dhamma practice, affecting both the aim with which the practice is taken up and the motivation with which it is followed through to completion.

The possibility of awakening also needs to be considered, and Thān 🏹 talks about worldview in a this context, where there are whole living traditions that prioritise scholarship and memorising the suttas because they believe we are too deep in the sasana to become arahants in this lifetime, so they make merit hoping this will cause fortunate rebirth, ideally at the time of Matreya. Pure Land practitioners chant the name of Amitabha in the conviction they will be reborn in the realm of Amitabha, and in Sucitto’s pilgrimage account they stay at a small Japanese temple where the whole practice is chanting and banging a drum. There must be numerous other examples.

There are also whole living traditions that prioritise awakening over all else, including the Early Buddhist Theravadan tradition I am planning to ordain in.

So as much as I enjoy the word play of essaying, it’s not a purely academic or literary exercise - I am inspired as much by his style as by his idea of ‘double-vision’, the ability or a williingness to see cosmology and even the world as both metaphorical and literal, and vice versa - the world as metaphor, I love that. And such a view is alluded to by Punnadhammo in [their] Preface: “This [cosmology] is the imaginative space in which all Buddhists lived until recently, […] even if it is no longer held literally in all details”.

The Buddha used metaphor, myth, and cosmology “and each [myth?] had its function” (Punnadhammo) to teach aspects of reality and the dhamma that students wouldn’t have been able to understand if he had taught the truth directly or literally. The various literary styles of the sutta teachings have some powerful functions as well, and would be a whole area of not just interesting study but a source of inspiration for application of the dhamma. A cosmological facet may be taken up as an object for contemplation - a kamatana(?) - for the cultivation of insight, such as the multiplicity of world-systems to leaven my attachment to saving this one world at the expense of my own awakening.

Footnotes

1. See how it resembles a tiny human with bowed head? We will check in with the etymology of ‘human’ another time, and its inherent connection with humility, but for now: must press on … I spent a lot of time getting this website live the last few days, and now it’s time to play. ↩

2. I’m going to stick with ‘pdagogue’ for now, despite its association with dogmatism, which I’ll need to unpack later: Buddha was very specific about what he taught and didn’t teach (including instructions about the ‘right’ or most-skilful views to ‘hold’, lightly), but wasn’t dogmatic in the sense that we use the term today. I like the way the syllables of ‘peripatetic pedagogue’ hang together, and if the ducks line up how I’d like, sometime I’ll get to look more closely at Buddha’s masterful use of waxing syllables as a poetic and mnemonic device. literary-devices in buddhism ↩

3. Full-blown-speculation caveat here. ↩

4. It has not escaped my attention that I have deployed a 112-word sentence to convey just how light-hearted and unserious I really am. ↩