Going back to a year that might have changed my life

 Yes and . . . 

Dear James, 

Your “Best Read on Jesus and His Message” was more than quick summation of the Jesus sayings, miracle stories, resurrection narratives, including possible source materials, how they were collected, and the way the early church used them, including the split between the Jerusalem vs the Greek/gentile communities. It is, from my understanding, pretty accurate. It might be a good jumping off point if we are just looking to examine the impact of what comes down to us, for both good and ill, of the “the Jesus Teaching.” I have to admit that it took me in another direction.

Can I tell you that your Unitarian training is showing? Let me chime in from the more liturgical Catholic point of view, even though I am definitely a former Catholic with little affinity left for ritual observance of any kind, even the spare zen kind.

I’ll call this “Going back to a year that might have changed my life.”

This morning I find myself thinking about the year and half I spent at Dartmouth in the Religious Studies department. After I came back from France in 64, I decided that I would enter the Jesuits. I wanted to go to the novitiate right away, but my parents objected. I talked with the Newman Chaplin, and decided to switch my major to Religious Studies. I’d written on the religious drama of Paul Claudel in France, and there were no majors in the department, so I worked out a split major. I spent my last full year taking every course given by a stellar faculty, the kind of top level scholarship rarely assembled anywhere. Every day Jacob Neuser, H Hans Penner, Jonathan Z Smith, Robin Scroggs and a Belgian Augustinian who'd been a peritus at Vatican II, a visiting scholar, directed my study. There were few other students so my classes were basically seminars. I wrote my senior thesis on the Prophetic Voice in the Christian church under Neusner. I was closest to Neusner. He liked me and encouraged me. His Judaism also came closest to the way in which I held my Catholicism, faithful, open-minded and inquisitive. I wrote to him several times over many years, and he always took the time to respond thoughtfully and generously.  

If it had not been 1965-66, the end of the Vatican Council, and if my deep personal bias is what most would label extremely liberal, I might have fallen in with some right wing group like Opus Dei though some might argue that the Jesuits could be classified as a left-wing cult. Regardless, I was cult material. Thank god I was more interested in what John Courtney Murray, Gus Weigel and Hans Bea were up to. Throw in some Urs Von Balthasar, Hans Kung, Thomas Merton mixed in a bit of Mircea Eliade and you got me theologically. Add hard drinking, avoidance of dealing, or even acknowledging my homosexuality, and you got me personally. Looking back I was extremely conservative, even defensive, sure that the Roman Catholic Church had all the answers, or at least kernels of “The” truth were there if you looked carefully, thoughtfully, prayerfully, and critically enough. 

My concerns, at least from a theological point of view, were reconciling the apparent discrepancies in the resurrection narratives. Jesus had to have been bodily resurrected into heaven. It all hinged on that. When Scroggs, I think, asked me how I handled the outlier report of the risen Jesus telling his disciples to go before him to Galilee where he would ascend to heaven, I felt that there was either some misreporting or reporting a miscommunication. Further textual analysis would solve the mystery. Perhaps I really just had to learn Greek and/or Aramaic. 

Neusner had just published the first of the more than 900 hundred books and articles he wrote during his stunning career: A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai. Leiden, 1962. Ben Zakkai was a contemporary of Jesus, and central to the creation of Rabbinic Judaism that took root in the diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Ah ha, so Jesus was not a stand alone figure in the religious turmoil of his era. Neusner was an amazing scholar. He’d studied the religious history of Palestine during the first century of the common era exhaustively. He said there was evidence of hundreds of wandering teachers like John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazarath, and Yohanan ben Zakkai populating the parched landscape. This estimate might be very conservative. 

Toying with the idea of converting to Judaism, I talked with Neusner. He was always the scholar, but he was an extremely approachable and friendly man. He cautioned me, ”the conservative Jewish position is quite cultural. Conversion does not work the way it does in Christianity. It normally happens when Jew marries a Gentile, and the couple has to handle the day to day observance of the Law.” I was not going to get married, period, Jew or Gentile. My sense was that he had the confidence of a religious man that his particular faith tradition, let’s call it religious proclivity, provided some clues. He said that he could not deny that Christians had helped spread the teaching of the Prophets throughout the world. How’s that for endorsement of a religious belief system? I’m looking for the Messiah and he says that Christianity would do as a promotion, including a byline, on the back cover of a particular understanding of the Law of Moses. Oddly at the time that was enough. He encouraged me to enter the Jesuits. He perhaps felt, or hoped that with the discipline of the Jesuits I might be able to become a scholar. He might have felt that truly mastering scholarship would unlock some of the questions that I wrestled with. 

Your quote from Robin R. Meyers about early Christianity is certainly provocative. “Consider this remarkable fact: In the Sermon on the Mount, there is not a single word about what to believe, only words about what to do and how to be. By the time the Nicene creed is written, only three centuries later, there is not a single word in it about what to do and how to be – only words about what to believe.” This not entirely true, or at least it's certainly misleading. First, the presupposition is wrong; very few of the parables in the narratives contain any doctrinal statements. Meyers has framed his "remarkable fact" for the spirituality vs religion crowd.  He says “only three centuries,” but neglects to say that those three centuries were as eventful as the last 75 years in terms of the rise and fall of religions and empires. But most importantly he completely neglects the importance of the confession of faith amongst the early believers.

From the time of the very first churches, there was always emphasis on what you believed in, and who you believed in. That was in fact the path to salvation. I was just reading an interview with Neusner. He was asked, "Why is dogma essential to orthodox Christianity and not to Judaism?" His response: “The main reason is that Christianity begins with the demand to believe in something or someone. There is a proposition attached to the beginning of the faith. You are saved through what you believe. This is certainly the message of Paul and the early church. Christianity stresses theology, not merely dogma in the sense of what one must believe, but theology in the sense of a systematic study of the faith and of the propositions of faith. The result of this is that the Christian, particularly the Protestant Christian, will think of religion in terms of faith.” 

I think that this is just a given. What was emphasized and what was neglected or changed is a parochial argument, but once you enter into a polemical conversation, it is part and parcel. If you take the position that the only course of understanding in Christianity is through discourse, however evenhanded, clear and logical, some residue of this trails along. It is the nature of the beast, intensified by the internecine bickering that was rampant in the early churches. 

It is also the key, not just backstory for the Christian polemic that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was a singular, history changing event. My own take on this has evolved over the years. It is a life changing event in your history if it changes your life. That depends on you and you alone. I’ll let you call it grace if you include some qualifying statements. Personally I’ve moved from Paul to Kiekegaard but that’s another story.

This argument still doesn’t account for how the cult of Jesus along with the corresponding cults of Mary, and the saints and martyrs came to capture the religious imagination of the West. Listening to the early writers of the gospels, it was proven by the reports of miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. I would venture that this is still the case in the vast majority of Christian religious communities today or at least it’s in the general guidelines for membership. Listening to the church of religious science, in any of its forms, the reason is that it coincides with the nature of the human spirit, and according to most liberal theological thought, it is where our discourse lands us.

But for me this does not come close to answering the question of how among hundreds of itinerant preachers wandering in what we now call the Holy Land, did Jesus come to dominate the Western religious imagination? The believer says it's a statement of faith--that he was the son of god and it had to happen, but that’s a belief. I want to exert my personal prerogative to examine other possibilities.

I mentioned Jonathan Z Smith. The position at Dartmouth was his first as I recall, but even then he was working out the complex interactions of culture, ritual and belief. He scared me. After one seminar, because I was pretty resistant to his thesis, he looked at me and said, “If I lived in a culture that fostered a vibrant cult of Socrates, I’d be a follower.” Another time he said, “Christianity was the mystery cult that won.” Talk about provocative statements. But I remembered them. 

Let’s look at one of those propositions and see where it goes. In zen, as things fall away, beliefs get challenged inside where they reside. Let’s look at the belief in Jesus dying and being resurrected as a kind of myth that may or may not have a lot of import on many levels. It’s hard to be objective, but I have to acknowledge that several key elements of the pagan mystery cult are present. The god dies, initiates share some of the elements of the god in a ritualistic way, and the believer emerges with some aspect of the divinity. The sharing of bread and wine as a memorial of the sacrifice of Jesus in the communal rites of Christians, though probably very unlike what we know today as Mass, was practiced. You even have the separate entity of the primary god who presides over the unfolding of the mythic ritual, accepting the sacrifice of his son.

Information about mystery cults remains mysterious because they were secret. But they were rather widespread so some of the details have become known. I find it interesting that a lot of our information comes from early church fathers denouncing them. They were not blind to the similarities. Membership was also sought after. It was also used as a way of social advancement. Early Christianity among the Gentiles was regarded as a religion of slaves.

I’m not citing any of this to either prove or disprove any of the tenets of Christianity. But if I were looking for a reason why the teaching of Jesus was the one that found a fertile ground in Greco-Roman pagan culture, I would look here. There were hundreds of preachers with probably as many followers as Jesus, and who knows what they had to say about how to conduct your life. But the myth of Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection was planted in a culture that had a predisposition carved out by centuries of mystery cult initiations that went all the way back to early Egypt. It might have been the mystery cult that won. 

It took me more than 60 years to even entertain the possibility that Smith suggested. A few more and I’ll rewrite the Nicene Creed.

Your loyal reader

James Ishmael Ford’s Monkey Mind, "Mind-monkey," 心猿

Let me begin my tribute and thanks to James Ford for his blog “Monkey Mind” with a guess that he’s never experienced living with monkeys. Among Western Buddhists, he would not be alone. I’ve been around long enough to understand the shorthand we use to describe this experience of the mind’s vagaries, and I know the honored etymology of Monkey Mind, originally from the Chinese, "Mind-monkey" 心猿. We’ve all had some experience in meditation of the tenuous connections between jumping thoughts, feelings popping up, sometimes with inexplicable twitching's, swinging from branch to branch, hanging on by our fingernails. This was a metaphor, a vivid linguistic picture, until I moved to India. Here it's been filled out with a more complete experience.


Monkey Mind and Money Matters in an Indian “spiritual” context.

In 2011 on our first trip to India, Ashish and I visited Shimla where east of the city on Jakhu Hill a 108 foot statue of the Monkey God had been unveiled just the year before. But for hundreds of years before that at Shri Hanuman Mandir, monkeys had been venerated and pampered, producing some pretty outrageous ingrained behavior. One jumped me and stole my glasses, my spec’s, and refused to return them without forfeiting a ransom. The animal wanted candy which, along with small versions of its supernatural idol, is readily available from the concessioners set up in the Temple precincts testifying to the long, universal symbiosis between religious observance and extortion. These annoying, religiously-conditioned primates have been crawling over the shrines of northern India for generations. On the 12 km trek up Vaishno Devi in Katra, near Jammu, they steal your overpriced Pepsi’s in a kind of comedy routine, and of course do not pay any delivery cost to the way station at almost 12,000 ft above sea level. And we’re not talking about satisfying basic needs—for monkeys Pepsi is an acquired taste.

OK, perhaps filling out the picture of monkey mind and money is no antidote for the pain of paying the cost of spiritual pursuits, but the experience of real monkeys is closer to the bone. For me at least, seeing the image of god as a creature with such distasteful behavior was a shock. My cynic wants to highlight the cunning of extracting a price without getting anything in return. And theologically we are worlds apart from Norman Vincent Peale’s sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where he taught Donald Trump and his father: think the right positive thoughts, and cash will pour into the coffers. Here nasty monkeys’ stealing and conniving is seen as just that and not a holy virtue worthy of the celestial realm. It’s as real as the writing in Monkey Mind. In this regard James is not easily distracted.


Monkeys as Kings and Gods in Buddhism

The Hindu pantheon is not unique in elevating the monkey to a revered status. In some Buddhist lore, monkeys are both kings and scoundrels at the same time, in the same body, in the same world, in all worlds. I can still almost hear Zenshin Phil Whalen’s guffaws as Lou Hartman read aloud Arthur Waley's abridged translation of the Journey to the West (Chinese: 西遊記; pinyin: Xī Yóu Jì), Adventures of the Monkey God, two old monks delighting in the ingenuity of Wú Chéng'ēn’s story telling. Also known as Ruzhong (c. 1500–1582 or 1505–1580), he weaves a long tale about the risky transplanting of the Buddhist Teachings they both loved from India to China. It’s based on a true story of another famous monk, Xuan Zang, of the Chinese Tang Dynasty (602-664) who journeyed to India, the birthplace of Buddhism, to retrieve the “true” Buddhist holy books, and when he returned, translated the Sutras into Chinese.

Ruzhong weaves in all kinds of folklore and fantastic tales into a complicated and convoluted plot with a large unlikely cast of fantastic animals, humans, and celestial beings. Over 100 chapters, the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, gains power, rebels against heaven, wins battles, is condemned to death by the Eastern deities, but the Buddha intervenes and traps him under a mountain for 500 years, preparing him to guard Xuan Zang and the Dharma. I’ll skip the Buddhist pig and dragons given the space limitations of a blog post.

It’s late Spring now in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the brown rhesus monkeys have just come down from the mountains—or maybe they’ve come up from the plains. I have no idea why these nasty monkeys seem to appear now in the village, but they’re here. To be fair to the species, their behavior is totally different from their grey langur cousins who live in the higher elevations, but they do not conform to the fanciful literary portrait except perhaps in this way: just as the Monkey King survives the celestial plot to execute him, they won’t disappear. They can’t be silenced, squelched, or eradicated. And this might have been the very quality that the Buddha singled out as important for guarding the Sacred Teachings as they made their way across continents, oceans, languages and cultures.

Everyone hates the brown monkeys. Besides being scavengers, they have ugly orange asses; they scream and fight; they steal my tomatoes just when they’re ripe; they shit all over my balcony, and are not easily scared off. They even throw their shit if confronted. These days, almost as if to highlight our suffering during the epidemic, they crowd the road that runs along the river where cremation gnats receive the bodies of people who’ve died from Covid. Food offerings provide an easy meal.

There are no wild monkeys in San Francisco, and I am a thoroughgoing Westerner. The way that local people deal with “the monkey problem” is for me as new and intriguing as living with monkeys. They simply make lots of space, and live their lives around them.

I’ll contrast it to the way a San Franciscan, for example, might deal with homelessness and poverty. Here there are people who live outdoors, and there are beggars everywhere, but there are no governmental attempts to house, feed or educate the homeless. The liability of drug addiction, here as in San Francisco, seems to be part and parcel of the homeless condition, but it is handled very differently. If an addict is lucky enough to have some family, he or she might get involuntarily locked up in the 30 day detox, the “de-addiction center,” but with no medical follow-up, they are basically left on their own to fight their demons.

Here is another story of living close to the wild, unpredictable, and very dangerous side of nature. Late this Spring near a local water tank, seven people were mauled by a black bear who came down from the high forest. Two died. The tank is located perhaps 500 meters below the Dalai Lama’s residence but still in the dense forest before the large Central Tibetan Authority complex, Gangchen Kyishong, commonly known as the “Library” because it holds perhaps the largest repository of Tibetan Buddhist texts in the world, after the Chinese occupation and wholesale destruction of Tibet’s monasteries. That’s also very close to me so I hear reports, stories of those injured and killed as well as most of the rumors.

My dear friend Bablu left my flat before sundown to return to his village which is adjacent to the Library, and we joke—carry big dunda to frighten off an angry bhaaloo. He knows one of the women who was injured. She tried to fight off the bear without any stick. She escaped alive, but was badly injured. People commended her for a brave fight, but they didn't arm a vigilante posse to stalk the bear and her cubs. That might be a course of action I’d expect if it happened in an American town.

But the presence of the bear and her cubs have made people hyper-vigilant. The furious barking of dogs and loud monkey squalling (I can’t think of a word that describes the sound) served as a warning that the bear was in Bablu’s village next to the Library. And this is as close as I can get to the monkey behavior guarding the Dharma—brown monkeys making a ruckus near a repository of precious texts, warning my friends to keep their dogs inside and watch over their children.

The real lives of people and monkeys is something that has thus far eluded the attention of religious scholars examining the exegesis of Monkey Lore. If anyone can do it, it is James Ford, but alas he might have to sojourn in India for a spell to deepen his understanding. As for me, I will just not plant tomatoes in my garden, and be grateful that monkey screams helped protect the precious children of my dear friends. If he visits, James will not be imprisoned under a rock for 500 lifetimes until he solves some tricky dharma questions, or at least I hope not. (I’ve already mixed monkeys in with bears so I’ll leave the Zen foxes for another time).