I’m gonna live forever; baby remember my name…

[ornoth]

I always feel some degree of trepidation relating my philosophical revelations. Either they sound like trite, self-evident aphorisms, or they take so much abstract language to relate that they come across completely flat on paper.

Last night I had another interesting revelation. Like the others, it’s going to take some background.

Many Buddhist sects express some form of belief in reincarnation. Throughout his multiple lives, a man must attempt to perform meritorious acts in order to accumulate positive karma and promote one’s future wisdom.

In addition, nearly all schools of Buddhism promote a belief in the unity of all life, some dialect of the concept that we are all truly one in essence.

The point of these tenets is to help adherents overcome the problem of ego. Buddhism stresses compassion above all other values, and modeling compassion requires a certain suppression of the ego’s belief that it is more important than anyone else. It is difficult to express true loving compassion while we’re busy defending our ego’s self-conception of us as somehow special, better, and more important than everyone else.

However, I’ve always had an innate aversion to both of these concepts. I couldn’t explain why, other than indicating a stubborn belief that we are nothing more than bio-mechanical organisms that live briefly and die, and our consciousness, in whatever high esteem we hold it, dies with the meat that houses it. And although we have self-evident dependencies, we are not “one”.

Okay, that’s the background. Now let’s set the scene for the revelation.

I am presently reading “The History of Surrealism”, a horribly dry but authoritative account of the movement, originally written in French by Maurice Nadeau back in 1940. Here is a particular passage where Nadeau speaks about the movement’s primary leader, André Breton.

Life and the dream, he had shown, were two communicating vessels, in which events were homologous, it being impossible for the individual to assert that the latter was more real than the former. This time he went further: he abolished any frontier between the objective and the subjective. There exists, according to Breton, between man and the world, a perpetual and continuous correspondence. There exists, above all, a continuity of events which can be antecedently perceived and whose correspondences remain invisible. Yet self-analysis permits their observation.

Upon reading this, a couple things struck me.

First, the last two lines are a fairly concise statement of a Buddhist approach to life: there is something to life that is beyond its appearance to our mundane senses, and contemplative meditation allows us to access that. Now, the surrealists had a general familiarity with Buddhism, so this isn’t necessarily an independent observation, but it did put me in the mindset of interpreting this passage from a Buddhist perspective. Which led to the following.

It seems to me that Breton, as depicted in this passage, is a bit strident in his insistence upon some existence beyond objective reality. I felt this was an expression of a powerful fear of death, of the very impermanence that Buddhism teaches us to accept.

Or does it?

Breton’s unchecked ego brought him to this conceptual argument in order to bolster the idea that he would somehow live beyond his meat. But in reincarnation and the mystical oneness of all life, Buddhism also seems to provide psychological crutches that allow the overpowering ego to avoid facing death!

In a word, Buddhism’s concepts of karma, reincarnation, and the oneness of all life, while helpful in allowing the individual to suppress ego in order to cultivate a healthy sense of compassion, can also be viewed as the sheerest vanity, providing the ego with ample ways of rationalizing away the blunt, absolutely immutable fact of our impermanence and death.

I find this particularly ironic, because Buddhism is all about mastering one’s ego and accepting the fact that we die. To realize that such an obvious, ego-driven aversion to death can be found within Buddhism’s core tenets was a real revelation.

Comments

[imperator-mei.livejournal.com]

Heh. Well expressed.

I too have always found the idea of reincarnation to be rather vain. For all the rejection of dogma, Buddhism seems to want to find an inescapable argument to compel its followers: you're around forever, fella, so if you act like a prat it's just going to build in your account until you come back as mosquito. Also, you need to adhere to our teachings, or the same fate shall befall you because you're Just Not Paying Attention.

Grumble. Mutter.

I figure a perfectly good way to approach this is to say, "You know, there is no afterlife of any sort. You die, and you take your history with you. Nobody there to judge, nobody there to tally up your deeds and misdeeds. So all you have is your current lifetime; make of it what you will. May I suggest that embracing a nihilist I-can-do-what-I-want-and-ain't-nobody-gwanna-stop-me is indeed a viable approach, but one that will likely leave you kind of miserable and wanting. May I further suggest that you try making happiness your way of life, and give some consideration to those who have made true, palpable happiness the focus of their lives. Good stuff, without which you are likely to descend into the pointless, empty consumerist hell that is slowly applying its cloying grasp to contemporary culture. Really, take your choice: bliss, or malaise."


-- bq, writing from, of all places, Times Square

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

I've been saving up to reply to this, but by now all I can say is that this is extremely well-put. No religion should have to resort to metaphysical coercion to enforce its ethical standard. Of course, that is kind of predicated on humans being rational, mature, and intelligent, which sadly seems to be an infrequent occurrence.

I will say that I've encountered much less of the former (dogmatic coercion) than the latter (thoughtful justification) in Buddhism, but my readings have been primarily in the fuzzier Western stuff, rather than the more dogmatic sects like Zen and Tibetan where reincarnation and karma and all that is more central.