[Buddha-l] Another Emersonian insight

[Richard P. Hayes]

In some of the recent discussion in these precincts there has been a
good deal of quoting of authoritative texts, apparently to prove that
one's own prejudices are sahred by others. All this quoting has reminded
me of Emerson's attitudes to scholarship. His views are complex and
moody (and as Emerson observed, "our moods do not believe in one
another," which explains his tendency to say something in one mood and
then to contradict himself a page or two later, when his mood had
changed---a habit that I most heartily applaud), so it is not easy to
summarize his attitudes. 

On the one hand, Emerson never tires of reminding his reader that books
are potential traps in that we are tempted to cite them as if they were
unimpeachable authorities. A book is valuable, he says, only when it
inspires the reader to do his own thinking and find his own way of
saying things. (Emerson was a strong advocate of a reader's choosing
carefully which of an author's words to accept and which to reject; he
does not mention that from the Greek verb meaning "to choose" we get the
English word "heresy." Emerson no doubt knew that fact and would have
worn the "heretic" label with an interesting blend of humility and
pride.) 

Sometimes, says Emerson, some writer has said something so beautifully
or so memorably that it cannot be improved upon, so one may want to
quote words that express one's own thoughts especially well, better than
one could do oneself. But too often, quoting a book from the past is
done not to invite admiration of elegant phrasing, but to invite
admiration of the quoter for having a celebrated authority on his side. 

In his address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1937, Emerson talks
about the old notion that Man (by which, of course, he includes Woman)
is a unified whole capable of many functions, but in industrial society
most human beings have been forced to specialize in just a few
activities. A human being becomes a factory worker and by so doing
becomes part of the factory machinery rather than a human being. The
only part of the whole Man of interest to the factory owners is the
hands that pull levers and the little bit of brain power necessary to
move those hands. And so the whole Man becomes symbolically dismembered,
losing his wholeness. So the worker provides hands, the seamstress
provides fingers, the counsellor lends an ear, the postman provides feet
and so on. And what of the intellectual? Emerson says:

\begin{quote}
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated
intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate
state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
\end{quote}

Much of what Emerson says in this talk applies to religion and to
religious authority. Emerson, in other addresses, speaks of how the
ministers in most churches have become like corpses, intellectually and
spiritually dead zombies that can do no more than cite the dead letter
of scripture and of exegetes and of the occasional theologian. They are
no longer Man Thinking, but parrots (a favorite image in Emerson's
essays) who are so witless that they themselves cannot be inspired by
the words they recite. Emerson, of course, was talking mostly about
Christians and their cousins, the Unitarians (among whom he once counted
himself before he thought better of it).

When I was doing Zen practice, I once asked my teacher why he did not
encourage koan practice. He said "A koan is like a turd. It is what is
left after someone else has extracted all the nutritional value out of
some experience in his life. Chewing a turd will not give you much
nourishment. You have to get your nutrition out of your own life
experiences." 

A while back my wife and I went to meditate with the local insight
meditation outfit. After the meditation there was quite a nice dharma
talk by a seasoned teacher named Eric, a very gentle soul who
articulated his thoughts especially well. He was talking about some
thinking he had been doing recently, which involved, among other things,
questioning some of the traditional teachings of Buddhism. When he had
finished his talk, he invited questions. Someone is the audience was
fast off the mark with the observation that Eric was deviating from the
Pali canon and that some of his thoughts sounded suspiciously like
Mahayana. (A few gasps of horror escaped the lips of shocked listeners,
and I think one tender-minded woman may have fainted at the sound of the
dreaded M-word.) Eric was clearly in for stern disapproval, for he had
forgotten to check his brain at the door and was thinking for himself
and choosing (as is a heretic's wont). He was Man Thinking (despite
having earned a PhD in an American university, which more often than not
kills all interest in thinking for oneself), not Parrot Reciting. He had
stepped outside the Canon. His audience wanted a canonical bird, not a
reflective man.

I'd love to go back and hear Eric speak some more. But, frankly, I am so
put off by the pettiness of the crowd surrounding him that I have taken
(yet again) to meditating on my own and steering well clear of anything
that calls itself a Sangha.

Although I'd love to stay and chat, I must go off and read a few more
essays by Mr Emerson, for they are like balm to my chapped soul.

-- 
Richard Hayes
***
"Books are useless to us until our inner book opens; then all other
books are good so far as they confirm our book."
        (Swami Vivekananda)