Читать книгу The Mad Monk Manifesto - Yun Rou - Страница 8

Introduction

You hold in your hands a manifesto for change, an eleventh-hour emergency survival manual utterly devoid of bright-future reassurances and New Age pabulum. You will find nothing here about how thinking positive thoughts will help you look great in tight jeans, how brilliant your children are, how the whales really love us for killing them, or how the work you do in your high-salaried corporate position is critical to the survival of the universe. Although I hope you will find my words as spiritual as they are political, I am no Pollyanna. I don’t believe that all will soon be right with the world or that we are almost through the tough times. I don’t accept social media as a substitute for reality, or that our evolving into half-digital cyborgs will take away all our pain. I believe in the transformative power of both meditation and love, but don’t believe either or both will solve all our problems. I am a monk, not a carnival barker, and thus skeptical of quick and easy fixes; thus, I hope you will find the ones I offer in the chapters that follow to be substantial, meaningful, and worthwhile even though they may require effort. When contemplating these changes, please remember that change is the only constant our world offers.

I begin with such straightforward urgency because our floating home, zooming through the galaxy at high velocity inside the wildly spiraling solar system that contains it, has become a watery blue purgatory. More slaughterhouse than paradise, more frenzied, violent battlefield than garden of enlightenment, more cesspool of fractiousness than temple to unity, our beautiful planet is dying and we are its murderers. Wonders remain, but the effects of global industrialization, executed upon a foundation of Western values, guarantee such wonders won’t last long. The values I refer to are mostly about what it means to be human, but also our greed, material excesses, species-centrism, the religiously-based notion of human hegemony over the natural world, and, of course, overpopulation.

The last item on that list may be obvious to those suffering traffic jams, polluted parks, and the disappearance of peace and quiet, but its global consequences are actually complex, underestimated, and inaccurately predicted. Wars over land, air, and water have already begun. The macro-organism we call Planet Earth, desperate to survive in its current, diverse glory, uses various methods to fight its way out from beneath the meaty weight of the human herd. These weapons include diseases, wars, automobile accidents, gender variances, and religious fundamentalism—anything and everything that pares down our numbers. Even so, there are still those who believe that their god encourages them to have ten children or more.

And then there is climate change, another feature of our greed, lack of sensitivity, and the religiously fundamentalist notion that the planet is our playground. Regardless of how many political leaders label it a hoax, weather patterns are changing at human, not geological, speed. It’s tough to wrap our minds around the size of the changes and how soon they will be here. I write this as a displaced victim of one of the largest Atlantic hurricanes on record, having just watched the state of Texas suffer a thousand-year flood, and now seeing the state of California battling the largest and most deadly wildfire outbreak in recorded history. Tropical cyclones are growing more violent and frequent, ice caps are melting, glaciers and permafrost are disappearing, island nations are in existential peril. Tens of thousands of miles of coastline will soon be lost to oceans which are acidifying so rapidly that jellyfish will be the only “seafood” they can soon support. Vast continental plains are becoming deserts while deserts are becoming dustbowls, putting our food supply in jeopardy. Deforestation and marine algae die-offs suggest that the oxygen we breathe will eventually vanish. If all these challenges appeared in an apocalyptic Hollywood thriller, the screenwriter would be told to tone things down so as to make them believable.

Consider, too, the Sixth Great Extinction. The history of the earth—billions of years long, not the mere thousands of biblical fantasies—has seen five previous events of this type, variously caused by bursts of gamma-ray radiation from space, erupting volcanoes, and even the impact of asteroids. This latest extinction, though, is on us—the direct result of our activities and unchecked propagation. Who would have thought that humans could be so catastrophically destructive? Perhaps our atomic atrocities might have offered a clue. Any way you look at it, Earth is a bad place to be a non-human animal these days, be it an insect (whose indispensable group is severely affected), salamander, rhino, butterfly, tiger, turtle, or shark. The level of loss, thanks to our pesticides, condos, golf courses, cities, ocean trawling, and oh-so-much-more, is so staggering that scientists can’t even fully assess it. Bottom line? We will never regain the natural world of our parents, and if our kids manage to survive over the long term, we wouldn’t recognize the world they will inherit from us.

Thanks to the metastatic spread of certain Western values across the world, the nightmare we are facing is not just environmental, though without a habitable planet all other problems are obviously moot. Such foibles include violence, cruelty, greed, religious fundamentalism, and materialism, the last of which exists in inverse proportion to morality. It is time to educate against indulging bad behavior. It is time to see the sometimes-luscious literature of Abrahamic faiths within their original context and to bring their instructions and exhortations into the modern world. It is time to move beyond for-profit education offered on the basis of racially biased tests, the outrage of billionaires and yachts existing alongside homelessness and starvation, and the pernicious fiction that healthcare is a privilege and not as basic a right as any other afforded by civilized society. Failure to do so means the litany of human moral transitions will continue to poison the Western world and the Eastern world, too.

Despite our truly marvelous potential and episodic bursts of transcendent creativity, selflessness, heroism, and redemption, the violent ape known as Homo sapiens has proven thus far to be neither knowing nor wise. A fully fleshed-out catalog of our transgressions could fill the rest of this book and a hundred more, but, especially at this late hour in human history, I am more interested in a prescription than I am in a post-mortem. The prescription I offer involves a paradigm shift. We must abandon the Abrahamic faiths in their literal form. We must abandon the pernicious cycle that produces more technology, which in term creates apocalyptic problems, then create new technology to solve those problems, and on and on. This fruitless recipe, promulgated by material greed, does nothing but misdirect our attention away from the real problem, which is not so much what we do as who we are. We must stop relying on technology and catalyze our own spiritual evolution.

The first step in such a paradigm shift is gaining an understanding of how life really works. Life, as it turns out, is based not on the guiding hand of a white-robed god floating in the clouds with a stick in his hand, but rather on mathematics, physics, and biology. Life is a fractal. This means it retains its design elements, its core characteristics, at every level of scale. Every living thing, from bacterium and oak tree to elephant, woman, and nation-state, transforms energy. Every living thing reproduces. Every living thing contains DNA. Every living thing moves, every living thing must maintain its harmony and balance, and every living thing evolves.

Long before there were Western academic disciplines, the ancient Chinese philosophy known as Daoism was in possession of these deep truths about life. In the chapters that follow, I will explore how Daoism leverages life’s fractal nature, and outline how work at the level of the individual resonates and repeats at the level of the whole world. Specifically, I will detail straightforward personal changes, then changes in attitude, action, and policy, which, when enacted by the billions of individuals planet-wide, could become a single, coherent, magnified force powerful enough to solve famine, drought, abuse, slavery, intolerance, injustice, poverty, violence, environmental devastation, greed, crime, and the scourge of religious fundamentalism.

A nature-based philosophy historically associated with China’s intellectual and power elite, yet also popular with artists, merchants, and hermits, Daoism gained coherence during the Axial Age (800 to 200 BC) and reached its apex during China’s two most successful and enlightened dynasties, the Han and the Tang. This was the time when China was the world’s dominant power and culture, as it is on its way to becoming once again. Unlike ancient traditions that have remained fixed inside static, primitive societies, Daoism grew and deepened over time, gaining sophistication and texture alongside the culture that spawned it. That is because it is fundamentally permeable, having adopted many of the evolving ideas that arose from the long series of invasions, natural disasters, rebellions, and revolutions found in Chinese history.

Among the smorgasbord of the world’s great religions, Daoism sits somewhere between the anthropocentric Abrahamic traditions, with their beliefs in a personal god and the importance of sainted interlocutors, and Buddhism, which stresses self-annihilation, the better to free us of ego, attachments, and the suffering they bring. Refined over millennia, Daoism is a philosophy, in relatively recent expansions, a religion, and in its inquiry into nature, a science. Like Western biology, it offers practical directions for living based on how nature works; like sociology it provides guidelines for getting along with others; like psychology, it helps us understand ourselves. Unlike those Western sciences, it combines the various disciplines within a single all-encompassing view.

The word Dao means “path” or “way.” It is not a road in the physical sense of something we can step onto and follow. Like evolution, or a divine intelligence, it moves things forward and binds them together, but really isn’t an “it” at all, being unknowable, omnipresent, and ineffable. It is far too subtle to be a deity to which we can speak or pray, and in this sense is best referred to simply as Dao rather than “the Dao.”

In the West today, Daoism is associated with alternative medicine, self-reliance, the Green Movement, a growing awareness of and interest in Chinese culture, and George Lucas’ Star Wars universe, where spiritually-inclined rebels in search of a just and natural life battle tyrannical, high-tech imperial armies bent upon expansion and conquest. Daoist themes are also increasingly found in rewilding, mindfulness, sustainable agriculture, industry without planned obsolescence, human rights, and self-care. Its circular, black-and-white symbol appears on everything from surf wear to bumper stickers. Interestingly, its Western popularity is even driving a Daoist resurgence in China, revitalizing an important aspect of traditional Chinese culture. International interest in Daoism is also generating the hopeful expectation that this edgy, out-of-the-book form of ancient wisdom might just be able to heal the world.

Daoists don’t believe in any separation between man and nature. Abuse of nature, therefore, is tantamount to abusing ourselves. Indeed, because its seeds sprouted in Neolithic proto-China, a time when men and women lived in necessary and intimate association with nature, Daoism may be the original environmentalism. Daoism sees everything in the known and unknown universe as part of an interconnected fabric characterized by a cyclical, balanced, and harmonious interplay between opposing forces or qualities known as yin and yang. Yin is associated with the feminine, dark, heavy, mysterious, and slow; yang, with the male, bright, weightless, obvious, and quick. Yin and yang are not static qualities, but rather are fluid concepts constantly shifting, changing places, dancing, one becoming the other in a myriad of different ways. Many recent discoveries in quantum mechanics, theoretical physics, astronomy, cosmology, and mathematics support this fluid, not-merely-binary model, along with the concept of multiple layers of reality, or multiverses found in very early Daoist thought.

Daoism’s growing popularity worldwide likely arises from the way it generates a community of like-minded people who have found its tenets practical and usable as both a spiritual system and recipe for living. Using intellection, meditation, and physical practice, its adherents develop calm, clear minds and an abiding sense of the rationally unfathomable fabric out of which our world is made. This peaceful state serves as a welcome antidote to the frenzy of modern living, and to the disenfranchised sense of alienation and isolation that leads many people to depression and despair. It counters both the personal and societal challenges arising from beliefs that Planet Earth is all about us.

Daoism’s shamanic emphasis on understanding natural cycles and energetics also puts it very much in tune with the modern science of biology, particularly when it comes to the nuanced relationship between body and mind. Thousands of years before the field of epigenetics was coined, Daoism addressed the same processes that branch of science studies today—namely, the way our environment can shape our beliefs and moods, and how those mental states can in turn change our physical bodies. Modern scientists engaged in basic research, driven by curiosity rather than corporate or government directive, are doing the same work early Daoists did when they closely observed nature. Perhaps it is this underlying link that allows Daoism to exist as a complement to modern science rather than standing in opposition to it like so many other world religions.

Over time, Daoists cultivate what are known as the Three Treasures: compassion, frugality, and humility. Daoists see these as our natural inclination, the way we saw things, and behaved, during simpler times, before agriculture and industry, when we were able to more easily fit in with the unfolding of nature. It was then, and it is now, perfectly normal to be sensitive to the feelings, wants, and needs of others, utterly regular to be careful with resources, and quite effortless to be humble when we realize our tiny place in the universe and our insignificant role in the unfolding of history. These are not, therefore, qualities to strive for but rather ones that exist within us at all times. No matter how violent, unpredictable, or treacherous the seas of life may prove, Daoism teaches us that if we but lightly seek these qualities under our skins, we will find them in ample supply.

Religious Daoism exists in pockets across China. It features multiple lineages and sects. These answer to no central authority, do not exclude other belief systems (Daoists who are also Buddhists are common), and do not proselytize. This expression of Daoism, however, stands apart from the focus of this book, which is on the philosophical principles that both antedate and underpin its ritual manifestations. Beyond this enormously powerful body of wisdom, Daoism is also interesting for its far-flung community, and for the fact that its adherents enjoy reduced preoccupation with material things and a rekindling of their inner light.

Living a Daoist lifestyle means staying cool, calm, and collected, all the while sensing the unfolding of events and the subtle energies at work in the world. This rock-steady, insightful state is so personally rewarding, it may be the primary driver of the global Daoist awakening. Daoists call this state wuji, the same term used to describe a step in the Daoist cosmogony, or creation story. Analogous to the void from which God created heaven and earth as chronicled in the Book of Genesis, wuji is a state of perfect stillness—empty but pregnant with infinite possibility. In wuji, anything and everything is about to happen, but nothing yet has.

When the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great entered the Phrygian capital of Gordium (in what is now Turkey), he was presented with a knot so thick and tight, nobody could untangle it. His answer was to slice through it with his blade. Our prejudices, limitations, habits, and beliefs are our own version of that Gordian Knot. We can spend lifetimes trying to untangle it, or we can cut through it in one fell stroke, returning to wuji by bringing yin and yang into balance within ourselves and then in the world outside. The process of returning to wuji is called tai chi, part of the name for the increasingly popular martial art that serves as the backbone for my personal Daoist practice.

Another way in which I personally cultivate wuji is to guide others in doing the work the world requires. That is the purpose of this manifesto. I may not be able to physically restore tropical rainforests, save whales, end factory farming, prosecute the cause of global birth control, wipe out tyranny and the poisonous concept of the free market, educate the ignorant, and help to see wealth redistributed worldwide, but I can certainly have an effect on the intentions of those who are in positions to achieve these goals.

A summary of my apparently unlikely trajectory from Manhattanite to monk shows why it was not really so very unlikely after all. That’s because I was born a seeker. While certain folks swim hard and fast against the river of life, others navel-gaze on the bank, and some simply float along without a care, seekers yearn to know what secrets lie beneath the river’s surface. We, seekers, are a suspicious lot. We distrust glib and facile answers, and we doubt what we’re told about the world. We worry that, if we conform to social norms, we will lose touch with the truths buried deep inside our own consciousness and want to dig for those truths. While many people focus their efforts on career, money, luxury, fame, sex, family, and community, seekers are driven to discover their own true natures, and that of the world.

As a child growing up in the home of a famous physician, I found some of the people around me—scientists, teachers, artists, even a Nobel Peace Prize laureate—to be genuine and compassionate. Yet others, often the richest and most famous, struck me as vainglorious and narcissistic. More to the point, I sensed waves of disquiet in them. They went to prison for tax evasion. They killed their wives. They were depressed. Their children hated them. They committed suicide. Even so, the general population seemed enchanted by their celebrity lives. This made no sense to me, and set me to questioning the prevailing social narrative.

If what I was being told about wealth and fame and power was suspect, might other tales be equally dubious? What about religion and politics? What about life and death? If business is really the primary way in which people interact, should personal profit really be its sine qua non? What about equal opportunity for every color and creed? What about social contracts and class warfare? Questioning memes and mores set me to looking at larger issues. Is America’s role as beneficent policeman to the world accurate, for example, or are we simply a self-serving empire? What about socialism and communism? Is the military campaign against drugs truly necessary? Are spiritual people just too dumb to be scientists? Is it a good thing that specialization has extinguished the age of the renaissance man or woman?

Having lost so very many family members in Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust, it may be that rebelliousness and righteous indignation are lodged in my genetic memory. My grandmother was the sole surviving member of her family of gifted Viennese intellectuals and musicians. My father’s luminous career began with a very real struggle to simply survive, his childhood darkened by the looming threat of genocide. Even after the Second World War came to a close, the burbling of anti-Semitism had every Jew fearing a loud knock on the door in the middle of the night. Life seemed so fragile and fraught, the individual so powerless, that assuming a dubious, even cynical posture seemed about right. As a teenager, I became prickly, obstinate, stubborn, and indomitable. I favored my middle finger over all others.

And then I saw my first Bruce Lee movie.

I was immediately entranced. Here, in the brand-new category of kung fu superhero, was empowerment and invulnerability of an exotic and marvelous kind—accessible, too, at least compared to flying around in tights and a cape. Nobody was dragging Bruce to the gas chambers, nor were they abducting David Carradine’s character, Kwai Chang Caine, ass-kicking star of the TV show Kung Fu. Out of left field or, more precisely, out of a fantasy version of China, came the precise steering wheel I needed to make a sudden left turn in my life. A sickly child, I wasn’t strong and healthy enough to actually do Chinese martial arts, but I could certainly become an armchair gladiator.

And I could learn from books. Fascinated by the monks on Kung Fu—though never dreaming I would one day become one—I read widely on Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, thereby discovering the glue that has held China together longer than any other continuously-existing culture on the planet. I especially noted the tension between the latter two systems of thought. Confucianism prescribes top-down authority; Daoism stresses the debt a leader owes to his people. Confucianism respects fixed social roles: Daoism emphasizes wu wei—relaxed, effortless, unconstrained natural living. Confucianism legislates loyalty and respect for others; Daoism prizes self-expression and the bonds that arise naturally between people.

Famous not only for their ability to see to the heart of nature and the affairs of men, but also for their martial and sexual prowess, the first Daoists were Bacchanalian men and women. Worshippers of nature and connoisseurs of the sensual, they were equally likely to be found legislating at a high level of the imperial court, meditating for a month in a cold mountain cave, or engaging in a bout of orgiastic revelry in the forest. Quietly influential and powerful, they were scholars, librarians, archers, swordsmen, generals, and fortune-tellers to kings. Their emphasis on the human sensorium of sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell led many to become poets and painters in the wilderness school, keen renderers of the beauty of nature and man’s tiny role within it. In their view, nature has already addressed the problems with which people so tightly grapple, and has found solutions to all of them. There is no need, according to the Daoist way, to replay that well-sorted drama. Everything we need, from personal guidance to political principles, exists right before us in the natural world. Our only job is to pay attention and follow the cues.

Through all my childhood readings, I most loved the flat-out weirdness of Laozi’s Daodejing, Daoism’s foundational classic: its rebelliousness, irrepressibility, fearless insistence on the existence of higher laws and principles, revolutionary defiance of authoritarian intrusiveness, and perhaps, most of all, its shamanic roots and resultant emphasis on nature, intuition, mysticism, and transcendence. Daoism, it turned out, gave a framework to the revolution I somehow sensed was required in the West. It cut right to the bone of everything.

This is not a memoir, so I have omitted much about my personal journey. Though I remain far less than the man I one day hope to be, I’ve seen great and terrible things, traveled the world, lost one wife to a car accident, and gained another with whom I’ve raised a fine son. I’ve been persecuted in ugly ways and seen family members die horrific deaths. I’ve watched my parents sadly decline, said goodbye to my father, and endured mortal challenges to my own health. I have been a park ranger, corporate executive, advertising copywriter, management ramrod, zookeeper, screenwriter, speaker, novelist, martial artist, philosophy teacher, and, most importantly, monk. I have spent decades studying Daoist arts with a brilliant master and shared those arts and ideas with an audience of thousands (millions if you include my work on television).

Despite the dark and dire start to this introduction, I do not believe it is necessary to let the obfuscating razzle-dazzle of what we call civilization, with its lap dogs—culture, society, and politics—stop us from listening to our intuition about what is right and true and kind and important. I believe that, by acknowledging our miniscule role in an infinite landscape, as Daoist artists do, we can step off the path of widespread pain, suffering, and injustice and onto one of joy, equality, compassion, and mutual respect. Philosophically and spiritually, we are evolving in the direction of being able to do this. Evolution is not a linear process. Rather, it radiates in all directions, producing a wide range of beautiful examples of intelligence, physical capacities, shapes, sizes, and strategies.

Among other important improvements, we are increasingly sensitive to what we are doing to the planet. More, though still abused around the world, human rights have at least become a subject of major discussion and concern. We have abolished slavery in most places. Women are slowly but increasingly left in charge of their own bodies. Domestic violence, racism, and sexism are coming into the critical spotlight of public opinion. We are starting to recognize that substance abuse is a disease and that mental illness is not a character deficit. We are questioning the torture and consumption of sentient beings. We are facing corruption’s corrosive presence in our governments and societies. Perhaps, most significantly, we are finally, though again too slowly, recognizing the poison in religious extremism and other fictions of faith.

We have reached the point in our evolution where our survival depends upon us coming to understand how our minds work, how our minds drive our behavior, and how our behavior affects the world. Every ill in the world begins as an illness inside a human being, and every human illness has an emotional and spiritual element. Mahatma Gandhi, not a Daoist but a person who understood, as most spiritual people do, the link between our minds and our world, declared: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” More profound and beautiful words have rarely been spoken. To counter the catastrophes of our time, we must address our chaotic compendium of personal confusions. We must peel back layer after layer of misunderstanding, self-indulgence, lack of discipline, misguided beliefs, and pathological disconnection from the natural world. The fruit of such internal resolution is external revolution. In a world of awakened human beings, so much of what is flat-out wrong can no longer stand. If we can evolve fast enough, we can tip the scales back in favor of our species, and of the rest of the world, too.

The blueprint that follows is based on the notion of building a strong body as a foundation for an awakened mind, then using that mind to assume personal responsibility and fully awaken the self. This prescription applies even when fortune fades, moods change, circumstances worsen, and titillation dims. It emphasizes connecting with others (once we have done the work to repair damage to ourselves) and then with all of nature. It includes both hints for personal spiritual hygiene and sweeping political creeds melded together in what is the quintessence of Daoism. All this may seem mad in the sense of crazy, utopian, naïve, outrageous, extreme, unrealistic, quixotic, and hopelessly romantic, but Daoists have followed this path for millennia and never found it lacking.

I believe that the most effective way to help each other onto the path is to foster constructive dialog, particularly with those in other “tribes,” about what matters most to them and their communities. The increasing number of seemingly impenetrable borders between us—including religious fundamentalism, greed and self-interest on a national scale, and, not least, tech-centered communication that minimizes altruism and empathy—have deprived us of such dialogs, substituting for them superficial exchanges that are quite often more bombast and bluster than compassionate substance. If we could use the ideas in this manifesto as a starting point for sustained, open, and positive channels of communication, we would certainly do better than could any top-down cohering force (an oxymoron if there ever was one), much better than any biblical or alien savior, and much better than any future digital overlord.