Over the past several years, I’ve been working my way through the oeuvre of the Australian novelist Patrick White. One of his books I wrote about a couple of years ago was Riders in the Chariot. Since I happened to pick it up immediately after re-reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I couldn’t help but compare the two writers. I described Dostoevsky’s writing as masculine and White’s feminine. My reasons? All of Dostoevsky’s heroes are men, and his writing makes use of action and dialogue as the primary storytelling tools. By contrast, White’s heroes are usually women, and his writing relies on subjectivity rather than action and plot. These brief impressions occurred to me at the time, but I didn’t think any more about them.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I recently decided to tick another of White’s works off my to-read list and found that it’s his direct answer to The Brothers Karamazov. The book in question is White’s seventh novel, The Solid Mandala.
As is usual with White’s work, the Karamazov reference is subtle and could easily be missed. It’s a feature of White that his art requires a certain level of “initiation” into the Western canon. For example, his novel Voss requires an understanding of the Book of Job, the gospels, Goethe’s Faust, Jane Austen, Nietzsche, and Jung.
The Solid Mandala also has obvious references to Jung (the Swiss psychologist became interested in mandalas later in his career). But it is the Dostoevsky reference that is the key. White uses it to create one of the pivot points that occur in seemingly all his novels. These force the reader to completely re-evaluate the story until that point while also opening up a new and unexpected development afterwards.
This is the same trick that White pulled in Voss, where he leads us to believe that the story is about the titular hero, but it ends up really being about Laura Trevelyan. In The Solid Mandala, the reversal is even more stark because the first part of the story is told from the point of view of Waldo Brown, who we assume is the hero. Almost the exact same events are then re-told from the perspective of his twin brother, Arthur. This re-evaluation begins with a seemingly academic argument between the two brothers over the meaning of The Brothers Karamazov.
For those who haven’t read Dostoevsky’s great work, the story revolves around the relationship between four sons and their father. The boys’ mothers died when they were young, and their father, who is a drunken old letch and miser, sent them away to be raised by others. At the beginning of the story, they have all returned to their hometown for different reasons. The main drama in the story revolves around the murder of the father and the trial of the eldest brother, Dmitri. But it is the character of the youngest brother, Alyosha, who is both the real hero of the story and the centre point of a psychological dynamic which is present in all of Dostoevsky’s work but which reaches an apotheosis in Karamazov. In Nietzschean terms, it’s the psychology of ressentiment.
Alyosha is a saint, a paragon of virtue. In the Christian tradition, you can only become a saint after you have died. This is called canonisation. One of the results of this is that saints are abstract figures whose virtue is symbolised in legends, relics, and holy places. Dostoevsky’s brilliant question was to ask what would happen to a person who was a real-life saint? What would happen if even Jesus himself returned to earth?
The Brothers Karamazov deals with this question theoretically via its most famous section: the Grand Inquisitor. However, this philosophical exposition sits alongside the main body of the story, where Dostoevsky explores the same dynamic via Alyosha and his interactions with those around him, including his own family. Alyosha is the Christ-like paragon of virtue. The other characters in the story know that. They acknowledge it openly. But they cannot worship Alyosha, because he is not claiming to be either god or saint, and, in any case, he is their son, their brother, and their neighbour. He is just a normal person who happens to manifest saint-like virtue.
What response would we expect from people confronted with a saint? We might naively assume that Alyosha would be praised and the others would try to live up to his standards. But Dostoevsky knew that this is not what happens in the real world. In the real world, the presence of a virtuous individual causes other people to become ashamed because the virtuous one makes them look bad. When they are unable to rise to the same level, shame turns into resentment, and resentment turns into hatred and revenge. The psychological complex that Dostoevsky shows us involves people who fully understand Alyosha’s virtue but hate him for it. Unable to raise themselves to the higher standard, they try to drag him down to their level by tempting him into sin.
Once you learn to see the psychology of ressentiment as so beautifully portrayed by Dostoevsky, you realise it is everywhere in the world around us. Any time you hear somebody denouncing an individual, organisation, or idea that has not actively harmed them, and which they therefore have no legitimate grievance against, it is almost certain that resentment sits beneath the surface. The seeming paradox is that the resentful individual secretly admires what they claim to hate. The hatred is really self-hatred. It is a cover for shame and impotence, the inability to live up to the higher standard.
In The Solid Mandala, Patrick White begins with the same premise as Dostoevsky. The saint in the story is Arthur Brown. He is an idiot savant. Most people would have met an idiot savant in their life. I remember we had one at my school, a young boy who knew the birthday of seemingly everybody because he could remember after being told only once. Another kind of savant is the one who can do incredibly complex arithmetic in their heads and give correct answers immediately.
The special talents of idiot savants make up for the fact that they lack skills in other areas, most notably social niceties. They are the kinds of people who are called “a little slow” and, as adults, are often assumed to still be children from an intellectual viewpoint. That’s why they used to be called “retards”. However, it is precisely this childlike quality that is assumed to be saintly. Thus, both Arthur Brown’s and Alyosha Karamazov’s virtue rests in the fact that they retain a childlike belief in truth and virtue while those around them have long since become cynically attuned to the “real world”.
It is this latter category to which Arthur Brown’s twin brother, Waldo, belongs in The Solid Mandala. For him, Arthur is mostly a source of frustration and social embarrassment. Nevertheless, Waldo also realises that Arthur’s naivete is a kind of purity. All of this is presented in a very subtle way for the first two-thirds of the novel. In fact, the connection with Karamazov never even occurred to me during this part of the book. The story is typical of White. He shows us the lives of two ordinary people doing ordinary things in post-war suburban Sydney. Waldo’s frustration with his brother is understandable and we are not invited to hold it against him.
As he always does, White builds his story slowly and methodically, laying the groundwork for the dramatic re-evaluation that overturns the reader’s understanding leading into the third act. Waldo Brown is the intellectual brother. In that respect, he is similar to the character of Ivan Karamazov. But Waldo is a failed intellectual who, unlike Ivan, never has any ideas of his own. He ends up becoming a librarian.
Waldo’s increasingly bitter nature throughout the novel seems to stem from his failed ambitions not just at work but also in his love life. As an idiot savant, it is not surprising that Arthur never marries. For Waldo, not marrying is a failure, just like the rest of his life. That failure is symbolised by the fact that Waldo still lives with his brother, even though the two of them are in their sixties when the novel begins. We assume Arthur is still mentally a child, yet Waldo is still living in the home of his parents. Isn’t he also still a child?
Waldo is resentful of his life. However, his resentment is not directed towards Arthur for the first part of the novel. We assume his attitude to his brother is just part of his general grumpiness. That is what gets overturned in the most extraordinary fashion when Arthur suddenly takes an interest in The Brothers Karamazov. We learn that both Waldo and his father had always hated the novel (read: resented). Sibling rivalry rears its head, as it has numerous times throughout the story.
One day, Arthur goes into the library where Waldo works and picks a copy of Karamazov off the shelf. There’s no question that this is a deliberate provocation by Arthur. After all, he’s an idiot savant and is too pure for that kind of thing. Waldo discovers his brother with the book and an argument ensues over the meaning of the Grand Inquisitor. Arthur is nominally doing what he has done throughout the story, i.e., embarrassing his brother in public. In that way, the scene shouldn’t be anything new. But, this time it’s different.
Arthur may be an idiot savant, but he is not a complete dope. His brother and father may have hated the book, but Arthur realises that it resonates with him. In fact, he has started to grasp the true meaning of the work, and he is raising questions that Waldo, the arch-rationalist, does not want to think about. This would all be a purely academic exercise except that the questions that Arthur is asking relate directly to the relationship between the two brothers. Arthur has accidentally gone straight to the heart of the resentment complex that has been building in Waldo his whole life.
Waldo realises that Arthur does understand Karamazov. He is not a complete dummy. Maybe he never has been. Is it possible that Waldo has spent his whole life misunderstanding his brother? Or is it the case that Waldo always knew perfectly well what was going on but repressed the truth? It doesn’t matter much because Karamazov is the trigger that opens up the ressentiment. Waldo realises he hates Arthur. It’s the same kind of hatred that the other characters in Karamazov have for Alyosha, i.e., he secretly admires his brother’s virtue but cannot attain it.
The brilliance of all this is that the revelation that Waldo goes through is the same one we go through as the reader. All of a sudden, the correspondences with Karamazov become obvious, and we re-evaluate the entire story in light of them. Of course Arthur is Alyosha. It’s so obvious. As for Waldo, although he bears some resemblance to Ivan Karamazov, his resentment links him also to the other characters who try to subvert Alyosha’s virtue. In fact, we realise with Waldo that he may have spent his whole life trying to subvert his brother.
That in itself is a testament to the power of stories and their ability to re-align our understanding of the world. Once we have read Dostoevsky’s brilliant portrayal of the psychology of resentment, we can see it everywhere in the “real world”. Great works of art can make us re-evaluate in this way. It’s this exact same re-evaluation that White shows us in his novel. All of the facts about Arthur and Waldo were in the story from the start, but they only come to light once we learn to see them through the prism of Karamazov. If that can happen to us as the reader, then we also understand at a visceral level what has just happened to Waldo. The Brothers Karamazov is forcing him to re-evaluate his whole life.
All that would be brilliant enough, but White goes a step further by pulling the same trick he employed in Voss. Not only does the Karamazov revelation force a re-evaluation of the story so far, but it also opens towards an unexpected ending. In Voss, the hero dies at the end of act 2, and we realise that it is Laura Trevelyan who is the real hero. In The Solid Mandala, it is Waldo who dies and Arthur who steps forward. The final act of the book involves a retelling of the story through the eyes of Arthur.
That is a fascinating reversal in itself. But it is no mere intellectual trick. What White is going to do is call into question not the psychology of resentment but the psychology of the saint.
Waldo dies, but White deliberately obfuscates the cause of death. One thing we do know for sure is that Waldo was so incensed with his brother that he thought about killing him. This is the same heightened resentment which leads to the death of the father in Karamazov. Waldo goes from being an intellectual like Ivan to a resentful potential murderer like Smerdyakov. However, it is clear that Waldo does not succeed in his mission because Arthur is still alive.
Partly because of this, and partly because of our understanding of Arthur as an idiot savant, what happens next is quite extraordinary. Waldo has died in mysterious circumstances. Arthur is going to be held responsible for the death of Waldo. Could the saint be a murderer? In the last section of the book, White forces us to re-evaluate not just the Brown brothers but The Brothers Karamazov too. Of all of the reversals that White created in his novels, this may be the most spectacular.
Let’s return to the psychology of resentment. It begins with the virtuous individual who attains a higher standard than those around them. The others recognise this virtue but also feel ashamed because they have been made to look bad. Different people will respond to this in different ways. Some will redouble their efforts and attempt to lift their game. Others will simply dissociate and not even recognise the virtue at all. The resentful ones are those who recognise the virtue but can’t raise themselves to meet it. They externalise their shame onto the virtuous person and despise the saint for making them look bad.
White’s dangerous question is this: isn’t there an element of validity to this resentment? Doesn’t the saint bear some responsibility for what happens? Isn’t it true that the saint is the cause of the shame and resentment?
This may sound absurd, but it is not that different from what Dostoevsky does in Karamazov. In that story, it is bitter and resentful Smerdyakov who actually commits the murder. The middle brother, Ivan, did nothing to directly help. In fact, Ivan is completely unaware of Smerdyakov’s plot. However, Dostoevsky also holds Ivan responsible because he had put philosophical ideas into Smerdyakov’s head (“everything is permitted”), which convinced the bitter young man that it was acceptable to commit murder. If Ivan can be responsible for that in Dostoevsky’s novel, then why can’t Arthur be held responsible for the death of Waldo in White’s novel?
The question here is not a legal one. There is no law against propagating philosophical ideas. There is certainly no law against being virtuous. Ivan Karamazov is not called to answer before a court of law. He is called to answer before his own conscience, and his conscience finds him guilty. White follows the same idea, only it is Arthur Brown who feels himself guilty at the death of his brother. The saint feels guilt for causing resentment in the sinner.
White’s alteration to the psychology of ressentiment actually sheds a fascinating new perspective on Dostoevsky’s novel. One of the things that always struck me as strange about The Brothers Karamazov was the way in which Alyosha plays almost no role in the events of the second half of the book when his brother Dmitri is being charged for the murder of his father. Alyosha’s journey is to receive initiation from the Elder Zosima, to process the pain of Zosima’s death, and then to come out the other side and become an Elder too. Dostoevsky shows us this in the second half of the book where Alyosha helps a family through the trauma of the death of their son while also assisting the young boy’s classmates to come to terms with the tragedy.
All of that is fine, except Alyosha’s own father has died in the meantime, and his brother has been wrongfully charged with the murder. Meanwhile, both Ivan and Smerdyakov are going through their own inner turmoil. While Alyosha is off helping another family, he pays scant attention to his own. For a man who is supposed to be a saint and paragon of virtue, there is an implied indifference to the sufferings of his own kin. It’s all rather strange.
White must have noticed this too because in his novel the domestic side of the equation takes predominance. In fact, the story is almost suffocatingly housebound. White presents us with twin brothers who never marry and spend their whole lives living together in the house of their parents. That is also deeply strange. But the result is that Waldo and Arthur are the main characters in each other’s lives. There is no escaping from that fact and therefore no escaping from the responsibility that Arthur feels when Waldo dies.
Arthur is virtuous in a way that Waldo never could be, and Waldo spent his whole life resenting Arthur for it. That is the revelation that drives Waldo to his death. However, it is also true that Arthur has been completely oblivious as well. The reason why Arthur’s conscience is triggered when Waldo dies is because he comes to realise that he accidentally spent his whole life tormenting his brother. It was his own saintliness that did it. But, of course, the big question is whether it was “accidental” at all. Perhaps Arthur was wilfully ignorant. Perhaps Waldo was too.
If we again transpose this dynamic back into The Brothers Karamazov, we can see that the same line of thought raises some uncomfortable questions about Alyosha. If Alyosha was such a saint, how come he was unable to prevent his brother from murdering his father? Why did Alyosha make little attempt to diffuse the situation? Why does he afterwards show seemingly no remorse for what happened and no guilt about his own ineffectiveness in stopping it? Why does he have such enormous grief for Zosima but seemingly none for his own family?
Of course, these questions are similar to those which can be asked about the gospel story. Jesus knows full well that Judas will betray him, and he must also know that Judas will commit suicide afterwards. Nevertheless, he allows events to unfold. Doesn’t that make Jesus at least partly responsible for the death of Judas?
It may be blasphemy to ask such questions about God, but Alyosha is not God. White’s re-evaluation reveals a vital flaw in Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s great insight was to place a saint among the living. But there’s a reason why saints are only canonised after their death, because only then can it be known that they lived without sin. Since Alyosha is a human, there is always the potential for sin. The living saint is therefore a contradiction in terms.
If Alyosha is a human, then he is at least potentially a sinner. He may not have sinned yet in his life, but there will always be the possibility of sin as events unfold. Dostoevsky tries to prove Alyosha’s saintliness by having other characters tempt him. We see him pass the test. Fine. But he is still a human and the next sin is always potentially just around the corner.
More importantly, there is a different kind of sin which can work retrospectively. It’s the sin that both Waldo and Arthur Brown experience: a re-evaluation of the past not based on any new actions but on a mental re-alignment. A revelation. Dostoevsky clearly knows about this kind of sin since it’s exactly what happens to Ivan Karmazov: he realises he was partly responsible for the death of his father. That message is even reinforced by Dostoevsky in the character of Zosima who actually says earlier in the novel that we are all responsible for each other.
Why is Alyosha immune to the same thing? Why should he take no responsibility for the murder? Dostoevsky avoids this whole question by leaving Alyosha out of all the difficult machinations that unfold in the second half of the novel. That’s the only way that he can he ensure his hero remains a saint.
But isn’t this also true of saints themselves? Isn’t the only way to remain a saint to stay above the fray and not get involved in affairs that might tarnish one’s reputation? Hasn’t the saint removed themselves from the dirty business of life? Moreover, isn’t it only possible to uphold the image of the saint by believing that you are not capable of sin? Isn’t the saint therefore guilty of pride? And if the saint nevertheless constructs for themselves an aura of sinlessness, aren’t they also responsible for the resentment they cause in others who know that they cannot meet the same standard? All of this could be avoided if the saint would only be honest and admit that they, too, are at least potentially a sinner.
That is what White shows us in the character of Arthur Brown, the saint who comes to realise that he has sinned. In truth, Arthur is far less responsible than Alyosha because Alyosha has a public image as a saint, and he could use that to influence those around him. Arthur, on the other hand, is viewed more like a village idiot. Even if he tried to make a difference, nobody else in the story would take him seriously, not even Waldo.
Another pressing problem for Arthur is the question of whether he really is an idiot at all. Clearly, he is not as dumb as he looks. Maybe he has spent his whole life living up to the projection that others had placed on him. Maybe it suited him fine to be thought of as an innocent fool. Maybe he used it to his advantage. If so, then he had also not lived up to his potential, just like Waldo. If that’s true, then Waldo may actually be superior to him on this score because Waldo at least recognised his own failings while Arthur coasted along allowing himself to be thought of as sinless. The lack of resentment in the saint now looks like not just pride but dissociation. Maybe Arthur has been wilfully blind to himself, just as Alyosha has been wilfully blind to his family.
What White shows us in The Solid Mandala is that The Brothers Karamazov is actually a hagiography of Alyosha. The character may be fictional, but Dostoevsky’s portrayal of him is religious in form. Dostoevsky, the great realist writer, stumbled at the moment of his greatest triumph. This implicit critique of Karamazov is also a critique of art itself. Dostoevsky was writing at a time when he and others really believed that art could fill the void left by religion. But he crossed the line out of the former and into the latter. This is the lesson that Nietzsche had to learn through his break with Wagner. (Actually, it’s the lesson that Wagner taught Nietzsche and, as I noted in my book on the subject, it’s an incredible coincidence that Wagner was writing Parsifal at literally the exact same time that Dostoevsky was writing Karmazov).
As a 20th-century writer, Patrick White couldn’t help but have a less idealistic approach art. For White, whenever we make an abstraction, whether it be a great work of literature or a blog post such as this one, we potentially fall into the trap of Ivan Karamazov and Waldo Brown: we become caught up in the Jungian Thinking function. We run the risk of mistaking the map for the territory. We can imagine White saying to Dostoevsky, Yes, that’s a great work of art, my friend. But aren’t you and I also just Ivan Karamazov and Waldo Brown whenever we make art? Aren’t we also detaching ourselves from life? Aren’t we losing ourselves in religion?
There is no way around this. It is simply the cross that the artist and the intellectual must carry. Patrick White’s bore that cross while still producing great works, unlike the rest of the (post)modernist tradition, which threw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s for that reason that I rate him the greatest novelist of the 20th century.
All posts on Patrick White:
Review of Voss
Review of Riders in the Chariot
Review of The Vivisector
Review of The Solid Mandala
In Mahayana Buddhism those who return to this realm after achieving the first step towards permanent realisation are titled Bodhisattva – the highest aspiration in the Mahayana tradition. This first-step is non-trivial and so far beyond our comprehension that from our mundane perspective a Bodhisattva is indistinguishable from a fully enlightened Buddha.
Now, there is an implicit and unconscious assumption made when discussing the lives of Bodhisattvas – if they are highly realised, then their behaviour should be perfectly saintly. After all, the wisdom of a Bodhisattva is said to be so all-encompassing that they are capable of directing their actions perfectly for the benefit of other beings at all times.
In reality the behaviour of such individuals (throughout history, and among us today) is emphatically not that of a saint. In fact the surest way to identify a charlatan is if they _do_ present in a saintly manner. This dichotomy is the source of enormous conflict within (and across) various Buddhist communities, in particular from a rational mindset as on a first-order analysis it is a contradiction. Thus endless accusations of debauchery and corruption (not unwarranted) are levelled at such individuals, and curiously in many circumstances such actions are even publicly flaunted by these people.
Again, none of this makes sense in a rational analysis of first-order effects. However, as you note Voss shows, if one expands to second-order, third-order effects and beyond then the net effect of perfectly saintly behaviour can be negative. Thus the ideal action to be undertaken would sit at some dynamic crossroads between short-term immediate harm for the beings involved, and long-term benefit for those some beings. And the actions of a being with sufficient wisdom to know these outcomes would thus not be (externally) those readily recognisable as perfectly saintly.
It is said that the work of a Bodhisattva is invisible, and that the limiting factor to recognising such beings is ones own ignorance. These second-order effects and beyond explain why. In essence, a saint cannot manifest directly within this realm by definition because to do so would not be saintly behaviour.
In a more Christian sense, it is not that a human saint _could potentially_ sin, but that their mere existence is to an extent sinful. And by choosing to exist, they are thus accepting the repercussion of seeding sinful behaviour in others. Much like a certain author of a certain book – good theme for meditation that.
Interesting to hear that this same dynamic exists in a different religious tradition. Invariably, these discussions reveal an implied moral framework. Our ideal of a saint as chaste and pure is already culturally specific and certainly not universal. In the Old Testament, if God is happy with you, he rewards you in this world. He also punishes you in this world too. Thus, according to Old Testament, success in this world is a sign of “saintliness”. The ancient Greeks and Romans would have agreed with this.
Of course, it’s far easier to understand how people would be jealous of the rich and powerful. What Dostoevsky shows is that the same dynamic holds even within a humble Christian framing. It sounds like the same is true in Buddhism. In other words, it doesn’t seem to matter what morality is at play, the “saint” will be resented.
Simon, Daniel,
This all depends on what we mean by “perfectly saintly behaviour”. The Early Buddhist definition would be “the type of behaviour that produces no negative 1st, 2nd or 3rd order effects”. The most basic instantiation being conduct that involves no deliberate killing, stealing, illicit sexual activity, lying and taking of intoxicants. If we could all just adhere to those 5 simple guidelines, we’d all be much happier. Imagine a world where everyone voluntarily abstained from stealing, let alone the other 4.
The historical Buddha basically said that he’s done the calculations on everyone’s behalf and those 5 rules can be trust in all circumstances to produce positive effects in all orders. This simplicity pulls us out of the rabbit holes.
Of course, it does require one to trust the historical Buddha at his word.
That Buddha was more loved than he was resented and died a natural death surrounded by the loving attendance of faithful devotees.
Jinasiri – that sounds to me a lot like the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament.
Dostoevsky was coming at the issue from an Orthodox Christian perspective, which takes an even more extreme position than Catholic and Protestant Christianity in relation to the responsibilities we bear to each other. As the Elder Zosima says in The Brothers Karamazov, everybody is responsible for everybody else. Thus, when someone commits a murder, everybody bears responsibility. Dostoevsky shows what that means in the book through the character of Ivan, who had nothing directly to do with the murder of his father, but who indirectly contributed to it. What Patrick White realised was that Dostoevsky did not apply the same rule to the “saint” in the book, Alyosha.
In a world that just keeps on bust’n sensible limits, old fashioned Precepts give a real sense of relief and safety. The Commandments and Precepts both fulfill this function. The Precepts however are dissimilar to the Commandments in one important respect. They’re a training guide based on observation of cause and effect to be voluntarily undertaken, not rules imposed from an Almighty above. Rewards and punishments flow from natural consequence, not from Judgement.
…
The Orthodox position seems to make emergence out of the muck of suffering impossible! I suppose that’s why from that perspective Salvation has to be irrational. I prefer a worldview that leaves me in the driver’s seat with a map.
In a roundabout way, this was the point the Protestants made (certainly Kierkegaard made it). Almost nobody should call themselves a Christian because Christianity asks the impossible. That’s why Dostoevsky had to turn Alyosha into God. Another way to put it, Christianity requires faith. It provides no map because there is no fixed process to go through to receive redemption. It just happens. All you can do is have faith that it will happen to you.
Simon,
> In other words, it doesn’t seem to matter what morality is at play, the “saint” will be resented.
Assuming logic, this is inevitable. – absolute perfection by definition static, unmoving, dead. A perfect being in this imperfect world is a contradiction and other beings react to that, whether it be through resentment or otherwise. It is one reason the Buddha referred to himself as “thus gone”, beyond conception, absolutely not _perfect_. Some of the most profound Buddhist teachings I’ve ever heard point out that all the methods, actions, the teachings themselves are just tools to be discarded at the end, because the goal is a logical impossibility. In the meantime the tools and lessons demonstrated are all we have.
Jinasiri,
> If we could all just adhere to those 5 simple guidelines, we’d all be much happier
Indeed, it is an admirable goal and for individual liberation is a solid path. However this thinking always strikes me as a perfect world fallacy – if only all cows were perfectly spherical then physics would be a doddle. Or if everyone was a perfect Marxist, then the world would be utopia. It is tautological.
What White points out is that given the world evidently isn’t perfect, putting perfect beings into it doesn’t work in much the same was a perfectly spherical cow cannot reproduce so ceases to exist. Or actually never did exist. Dostoevsky didn’t take his thought experiment to its final conclusion, and in doing so undermined his own model. Whether this was deliberate or not I cannot know; although trying to make a story work perfectly falls into the same fallacy, which makes perfectly satisfying endings impossible so he had limited choice.
Daniel – good point. It raises the question of whether there is any point at all to the methods and tools. Isn’t it better to face the sacred directly? That’s what Protestantism states. There’s another angle on the same thing which is that methods and tools become an excuse, a way to avoid ever facing the sacred itself. Over time, the pathway to the sacred becomes blocked and the only way to get there is to hack away at the conceptual jungle that has grown up around it.
> It raises the question of whether there is any point at all to the methods and tools. Isn’t it better to face the sacred directly?
Absolutely. The issue is that we cannot get out of our own way to do so. Thus the methods and tools are an indirect method, basically a cognitive trick to trap the habitual mind such that it fails to maintain coherence and lets the sacred shine through.
It is said that the proliferation of such methods is due to the generally worsening state of beings in degenerate times – many methods to reach as many beings as possible. However as you note this also leads to more dead ends. Curiously it is also said however that for those who do follow a genuine path progress can (potentially) be much faster that historically. This is because there is more merit (clarity) when undertaking committed practice in challenging or adverse circumstances. In the Buddha’s time minds were clearer, and direct insight was more straightforward but it was also easier to be lazy and cruise on the “good vibrations, dude”.
I guess some kind of signpost is necessary. But, the more complex it becomes, the more likely we are to fixate on it and not what it points to.
Simon, Daniel,
>It raises the question of whether there is any point at all to the methods and tools. Isn’t it better to face the sacred directly?
Only after proper preparation. That’s what Path training is for. Unprepared, people regularly go nuts and then declare their own religions and cause their followers to go nuts (and start wars) too. Attempting to face the Sacred unprepared always ends up as mistaking one’s own Ego for the Divine.
Path training demands zero compromise on minimum standards. In Early Buddhism, the bottom line is 5 Precepts. It can be done by ordinary human beings – if they value the peace, security and freedom the Precepts create when enacted strictly.
> However this thinking always strikes me as a perfect world fallacy
Only if assuming that one’s goal is to make the whole world a perfect place. The historical Buddha’s goal wasn’t that. His was to show a method for creating safe, sane, simple and straightforward micro-environments wherein those who wish can make proper preparations to face the Ultimate. It also makes sense that creating such micro-environments is also the best way to help others suffer less, as it encourages others to create such micro-environments for themselves too.
I would counter that spreading a culture that normalises and justifies the compromise of the 5 Precepts does great harm to both human kinds worldly prospects as well as his connection with the Divine. Just War Doctrine, for instance, produces very very long wars. 5 Precepts is not for idealists living in a dream world, but for pragmatists who wish to preserve minimum standards of sanity and civilisation.
Jinasiri – it reminds me of an analogy with music. Some level of practice is necessary to play an instrument. However, in my opinion, this should take a backseat to “play”. Play is where you are trying to express or discover something deeper, i.e., the sacred. I think life is the same. Too much training leads to empty ritual. Combine it with social rewards and you get sanctimony and hubris, possibly the most common vices among people who call themselves religious.
I agree. The structure needs to be in the background. I think of it as like the rules of genre. The creativity within those limits gives the artist an extra challenge, for he can’t just do whatever he wants. When the limits are broad and generalised (5 Precepts is hardly a prison cell), it’s not a matter of fitting square pegs into circular holes but of instructing the kids to play inside and not outside the village.
Now it’s precisely by sticking to the basic agreed limits (or at least only stretching them slowly) honoured by his genre-tradition while finding a way to express himself authentically that he is able to connect past, present, future, self and other. It makes for vibrant individual and community life because there are benchmarks by which meaningful internal and external interpretation and appreciation become possible.
Being too rigid is a kind of insanity. Being too creative is another. The journey into the Sacred is an ever fraught balancing act with madness waiting to pounce whenever the seeker stumbles from the tight-rope. Sanity comes from choosing to get back on the rope over and over again. The funny thing is how Bureaucracy keeps people off the rope by putting them on a conveyor belt to nowhere, creating the appearance of safety while normalising insanity and stupidity.
The rope can be thrown out once the Far Shore is reached. But the Buddha recommended leaving it behind for those who would follow. Throwing it out while anyone, including oneself, is still using it is unkind.
Agreed. As we’ve discussed before, an excess of holiness leads to rigidity and brittleness and an excess of sacredness leads to being so open-minded that your brain falls out. That’s why I think “initiation” is always a journey round the cycle. It will be much the same journey that the ancestors have gone through but it’s crucial that the journey be “real” in the sense that something is on the line. How to instruct the initiate without removing the sacredness of the journey is another tightrope walk.