Zen and Uncertainty

At least in the U.S. in the 21^st century, I think it’s common to see belief systems that emphasize interconnectedness as inherently supporting pacifism, and those that emphasize individuality as more prone to conflict. I suspect that this emerged due to the United States’ experience of the anti-war movement in the 1960s, which had (or was perceived to have) relatively high overlap with the exploration of (or active embrace of) communism and Buddhism. There’s an appealing logic to it as well: if the individual self is less important, then surely peaceful environments are better for the world or the collective whole, and therefore are more likely to result. It’s beyond the scope of this project to exhaustively compare levels of violence or conflict across different systems of belief, but two cultures as different as the samurai and Renaissance-era French nobility had no trouble reconciling their conceptions of the individual’s role in society (or the universe) with combat.

I actually started reading Trevor Leggett’s Samurai Zen: The Warrior Koans back in the religious section of the library, but didn’t finish it for at least 2 years. I really wanted to read it and include it in this project, I didn’t want to speed through it and fail to even try to get some wisdom out of it, and I didn’t want to put the whole project on hold while I finished it, so I tried to give myself a week or so to ponder each of the 100 koans, but it was hard, and I probably needed a guide. My goal was not to become a Zen master, but rather to try to engage somewhat with the mindset that, per Mr. Leggett, “set [the samurai] free from fear of death.” This added another quandary for me; how long to spend on any given koan? Leggett again says “an acceptable solution must be one that changes the whole life when it arises,” which sounded like an overly-ambitious goal to have happen every week. So I decided to settle for the “outer form” answers: something that felt consistent with Zen principles, but had not, say, imbued my entire being with its truth. Mostly I fell back on some version of “all is one” and “the mind is all.” While this might help with overcoming fear of death, neither of these messages (at least in the mind of a non-master) leads inexorably to charity or lovingkindness, and as best I understand the samurai mindset, it doesn’t even equate to a position of universal equality. Having the same Buddha-nature didn’t change the fact that a samurai had privileges not extended to merchants, nor did it prevent the wars over the shogunate. In fact, those who successfully overcame their own fear of death might think more lightly about taking others’ lives as well.

[As a side note, prior to reading this book, my sense of zen koans was that they were pithy and universalist: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “What happens when the all-cutting sword meets the uncuttable stone?” and such. In fact, however, many of these refer to specific other Buddhist sutras, Japanese historical figures, or ritual practices, and pre-suppose familiarity with those cultural contexts. Since there’s no “answer key” (except for a few examples in which he includes a particular candidate’s successful response to the master), deciding when to move on to the next one rather than continuing to grapple with something I barely understood even the outer form of, was its own puzzle without an answer.]

Another critique of contemporary U.S. culture is that it is overly transactional. The hypotheses here seem to be that a “strictly business” mindset makes our relationships shallower, that doing business with a firm handshake feels more human and respectful than via contracts. It’s beyond the scope of this post to fully examine the truth of those assertions, but Kristen Neuschel’s Word of Honor asserts three main theses about 16^th-century French nobility, describing a less transactional society in which:

1. Nobles’ relationships with each other, were not rigid hierarchies of duty or contractual obligations, were defined by complex interconnections of family, “loyalty” and land/neighborliness,

2. The sense of self and relation to others was more focused on the present due in part to its limited literacy and greater orality, such that dynamics were more based on a vague sense of the varied aspects of one’s relations than detailed or clearly conceptualized clientage, and

3. The concept of “honor” was directly intertwined with economic and military power, not independent of it. I.e., losing power meant losing honor (and vice versa).

The combination of these three principles, however, does not lead to a world of greater peace, or even one in which loyalties were less self-interested, despite their relationship-oriented (i.e., non-transactional) nature. Neuschel writes: “Violence was not simply an instrument to achieve a specific strategic goal… Violence was also an essential prerogative, an attribute of their status, a form of behavior that delineated who they were.” Over the course of three civil wars over less than 40 years, they demonstrated that, while their allegiances may have been more mercurial than the samurai, a more individualistic view (with no particular attempt to transcend fear of death) still enabled violence.

So what does all of this mean? The lesson that I take from it is that society is less deterministic than we sometimes think. It’s tempting to mistake correlation for causation, seeing egocentric individuals at the heart of contemporary violence, and assume that if we could eliminate our egocentricity, it would reduce the violence, but multiple societies have managed to espouse both. The enemy of my enemy isn’t always my friend, and just because one mindset led to a bad outcome doesn’t mean that reversing it would lead to a good one. There may be no silver bullet, and while it’s good to seek out root causes, sometimes we just need to focus on the symptoms, because the root cause is either untreatable or because there’s too much uncertainty between an initial condition and the outcome. And maybe that’s a zen insight of its own: that while the inner world may feel controlling, sometimes the objectives should just be the exterior objectives.

I wrote this reflection as part of my ongoing effort to read one book from every aisle in Olin Library.

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Yours on the journey,
Jacob K. Lehman