Solomon also has a view of the self. In some ways it is similar to the Buddha's, in others even more radical -- and not as comforting. Central to the vanities and vexations Solomon saw, almost as a fundament on which the others sat, is the illusion that we can fully control the mind, that its stains can be fully cleansed and cleared. Solomon sees the mind as inherently vagrant with internally generated energies of its own, creative energies, sustaining turbulence and freedom. It can never be fully plumbed or subdued once and for all.
(Ecc. 7:23-4)
Where Buddha believed that with right efforts the mental anguish could be overcome, the stains washed away, the mind made into a clear and adequate instrument for attaining reality, Solomon saw this as a piece of delusory thinking in itself, a face-saving magnification of the powers of the mind in the face of an intractable reality.
(Ecc. 7:20)
(Ecc. 8:17)
For Solomon dukkha is woven even into meditative and spiritual practices, even into the highest illuminations and insights, so there is no perfect path, no absolutely prescribed way, and so there is no need for a Sangha, an order of initiates, to follow it, no need for a totally tight rein on the senses, emotions and thoughts. This points to another significant difference from the Buddhist view. There is no late stage exemption from engagement, no wandering phase, no arahant-ship, no renunciation of community action. Seniority does not diminish social responsibility. The deeper values cannot reliably be passed through the generations. Only the artifacts pass, the empty forms, the verbiage. How they are seen, used, read, understood varies uncontrollably. A person's values cannot even be transmitted to a grandchild. You have to learn always for yourself. The Buddha echoed the same sentiment when he said:
Be not led by the authority of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor by considering appearances, nor by the delight in speculative positions, nor by seeming possibilities, nor by the idea: 'this is our teacher.' But, O Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome, and wrong, and bad, then give them up... And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them.
Buddhism, however, presumes that when we attain true understanding our understandings will coincide.
(Thich Nat Hanh. Old Path White Clouds. p.120)
This "full understanding" is exactly what Solomon disputes. What about a disciplined meditation practice? a lifelong training to maintain detachment, and through detachment to find equanimity in the midst of change? This option, which is missing or at least very inaccessible in the Jewish tradition, is central in the East. Did Solomon overlook it? Followed with diligence and devotion, wouldn't meditation practice keep us in anatta (the non-self state) permanently? Solomon might respond by saying: possibly you can experience it reliably in the midst of meditation, and possibly you can learn to carry the meditative center with you and sustain the experience during the day, but only by virtue of living a simplified "chop and carry" life, a monastic life, or the life of a disciplined householder, and even here self-will, desire and aversion would break through frequently, just as it did in the Sangha even during the Buddha's lifetime.
(The Surangama Sutra quoted p. 267. A Buddhist Bible)
From Solomon's point of view, the simplified lifestyle may give partial relief from dukkha, but only because the chop and carry life intentionally depletes the energy of the signal events that form the major movements of life. How consistent is the search for moksha (release from suffering) with active engagement in love and wisdom in their manifold expressions? with raising a family, developing a profession, politics, travel, passion, sex, adventure? with turning points built on intensity and reversal, with the tumultuous shifting self states that rise and fall in the heart of change?
In the traditional east where programs for the cessation of dukkha were developed early on in Vedanta and the Upanishads, and may have originated even earlier in the indigenous Dravidian culture, the impact of the signal events was softened by being merged into social roles based on class, caste, gender and life stage, or were transcended altogether in the lives of mendicants or forest dwellers. In the west, by contrast, the signal events have been validated as defining moments for individuals at least from the time of the Hebrews. We want to become our uniqueness; we want to feel like somebody special. In the contemporary world, unfortunately, the signal events are being drained of meaning by being commercialized, mediafied and redefined as buying opportunities. The natural rhythms of our lives are obscured and this keeps us from taking responsibility for ourselves, not only harming our own and other human lives, but undermining the planetary ecology.
We can reject the prevailing cultural values to some extent, and we can try to bring the chop and carry lifestyle into our turning points, but it won't work. The attempt at Eastern equanimity conflicts with a greater real need -- to recover the intensity and reversal of our own individual turning points, which is the defining virtue of Western culture, but is now threatened by the culture itself. Even if our awareness of pervasive suffering makes us renounce life, what then? Short of suicide our renunciation is itself a way of life that involves sleep and waking, feeding, language, thought and action. We will still have to interact with others one way or another, deal with out thoughts and passions, get what understandings we can, make our mistakes, live with our failings. That's why Solomon says:
(Ecc. 9:7)
Solomon suggests that in dealing with dukkha and vanity we still must make life choices -- and in doing so we want to end up with a life that honors rather than dishonors our opportunities. So he continues:
(Ecc. 9: 8-9)
This means that we have to accomplish our coming to terms with dukkha and vanity in such a way as to leave us with energy and enthusiasm for action. It's a creative approach, but full of hazard and uncertainty in the onceness of life.
(Ecc. 9: 10)
A strange complex causality is implied in the Solmonic vision, not unlike the Buddhist dependent arising.
(Thich Nhat Hanh. Old Path White Clouds. p. 169)
It is Solomonic to accept dependent co-arising but to give special emphasis to its sequential nature, to time's unfolding -- the "to all things there is a season" element -- and this is generally under emphasized in the Orient due to the cyclical view of time as an eternal round. The knowledge of timing, of interacting space-time, the true understanding of temporality, as we shall see, allows for a special kind of engagement with life missing in Buddhism.
The Solomonic world, I would like to say, half facetiously, is closer to the contemporary physics of the observer effect, closer to the chaos theory of causality than to the billiard ball universe that seems to rest behind Buddhist karma and even drives it through the veil of death from one lifetime to the next. With no clear linear relation between cause and effect, between observer and the observed, between behavior and its moral consequences, a more complex interconnection emerges.
(Ecc. 9:11)
In the Solomonic view, the world is more terrible and wonderful than that proposed by any philosophy or religion, east or west. He tells us this about the world: if it was better it would be less. Solomon's is a Blakean solution. The greatest evil is deadness, absence. The passions themselves are energies that can be shaped by understanding.
(William Blake. A Vision of the Last Judgment. 87)
Only the darkness of nonentity is to be avoided. All the rest are workable forms of energy, and we are like smithies with our hammers, we're in both worlds, the world of fire and the world of iron.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)