[I wrote a theology-based analysis for Hellworld this week. Check it out if you want.]
“To the blind-born may be likened the creatures blind with infatuation. Attachment, aversion, and infatuation are likened to rheum, bile, and phlegm. The four herbs are like vanity (or voidness), causelessness (or purposelessness), unfixedness, and reaching Nirvana. Just as by using different drugs different diseases are healed, so by developing the idea of vanity (or voidness), purposelessness, unfixedness—the principles of emancipation—is ignorance suppressed; the suppression of ignorance is succeeded by the suppression of conceptions (or fancies); and so forth, up to the suppression of the whole huge mass of evils. And thus one's mind will dwell no more on good nor on evil.”
-The Lotus of the True Law / Lotus Sutra; Mahayana Tradition
Sometimes I worry that by placing “theology” solely in the realm of religion, we miss the root of theology as a unified study of the unknown–something that seems pretty important nowadays, given how much more apparent it’s becoming that we don’t know as much as we like to pretend. Scientific epistemology is on the ropes and ready to finally get put out of its misery, not because science lacks in utility but because it’s becoming clear that “science” as a unified means of finding truth is just as fucked up as religion was. I plan on expanding on this in the future, but the short version for now is similar to what the brilliant and misunderstood philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote about in Austria before the Gestapo tried to kill him.
Voegelin noted that science as a means of understanding the world is incomplete if it lacks an existential element, because existence is more than a set of static facts about things that happen. Instead, these things that happen trigger existential feelings in the individual that reverberate through societies and civilizations in the form of the causal relationship between overall metaphysical outlook and material action. Voegelin’s frame of reference was quite obvious: he was watching the Nazis use the language of science to implement a genocide and manufacture consent among the population. While Christian and Nordic pagan esoterica informed some of the more deranged elements of Nazism, it’s important to remember that a foundational portion of it was faux-scientific belief in the superiority of white people based on made up statistics that were curated based on our sense of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior.
When a highly-paid and prominent writer like Megan McCardle at the Washington Post tweets that she is in touch with OB/GYNs about whether or not a 10-year-old can give birth, she is not using the language of Christianity, but the language of science. And when trying to make sense of how someone could interpret or even broach scientific justification for an act so atrocious, we return to the existential element that Voegelin referred to. McCardle’s instinct is to seek this because–through some combination of faith, upbringing, personal experience, etc.--she already “knows” that abortion is “wrong” and is now seeking to use the accepted vocabulary and language of the Age of Science to create unwinnable argumentative scenarios. It’s a rhetorical lawyer trick, basically, which is the only thing the American political class is good at anymore. You said science was the answer, well here’s the science that justifies my harmful worldview.
This is yet another massive failure of Marxism, and why its literalists are so warped (and why it never works). Without an existential element to a civilization and a means of approach to the world, the long term efficacy of the civilization is in jeopardy. For the “scientific proof” that these Marxist folks always seek, I would simply point to a pretty solid sample size of 20,000 years at minimum. That’s behavioral science. That’s instinct. Religious beliefs may be an opiate for the masses, but humans also evolved alongside opiates and have developed a significant reliance on the chemical reactions they create in the brain, whether provided by a literal pharmaceutical or a nice, relaxing hit of nostalgia.
One of my favorite examples of this is not from a faith-based parable, but one with deeper cultural resonance in China and Japan: the heroes and bandits of the The Water Margin, one of the most important works of historical Chinese literature. For those unfamiliar, the novel recalls a semi-historical account of folklore from the Song dynasty of the 12th century. The novel itself is dated to the collapse of the Song and beginnings of the Yuan dynasty ~150 years later–notable because the Yuan dynasty was a conquest dynasty (i.e. Khan territory, as in descendants of the conquering Genghis Khan). The story itself focuses on many characters–it is the formalized origin of the 108 Heroes of the Suikoden–but mostly follows Wu Song, a massively important folkloric character in Chinese history. Wu Song was a dark-skinned man of humble origins who sought to help the indigent with his excellent mind and skill. Zhao Kuangyin, the founder of the Song dynasty later dubbed Emperor Taizu, was a skilled warrior and strategist who fought off the hierarchical Liao dynasty that was–for lack of a better analogous situation between our cultures–more scientific and urbanist in approach. The Liaos accumulated wealth in the city and placated technocrats while imposing brutal persecution on the peasantry in the Han territories it had conquered. Emperor Taizu looked like this:
[Quick blog note: Conquest dynasty, as a term, is somewhat controversial given that it implies that Chinese dynasties are only authentic historically when they are Han dynasties, but that specific aspect is not a topic for me to tackle for obvious reasons.]
There’s enough nuance to fill a few hundred thousand research papers, but for the purposes of today’s discussion, those are the relevant details for someone with little to no knowledge of it. The Water Margin features quite a few tales where Wu Song enlists the help of great spirits and bandits who had been driven into the mountains to launch an armed rebellion against their aristocratic oppressors. The drawing below is referenced from one of Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s woodblock prints of the 108 Heroes, the work that propelled him to superstardom in Japan. Zhang Shun, a massive heavenly spirit who fights on the side of righteousness, rips open the fortress gates as arrows rain down upon him. His physical form dies but his spirit inhabits a palace guard and strangles the evil aristocrat to death. Even in Chinese folklore, what we’d call the Holy Spirit can never be contained.
The specific parable, and The Water Margin as a whole, is beautiful and worthy of reading for those who haven’t experienced it. Aside from the text itself, however, what the legend preserves is an iterative and symbolic piece of folklore with resonance beyond the events. The heroes of the story have their stronghold in Mount Liang, a real mountain with lore dating to Chinese prehistory, named for a prince of the Han dynasty who lived between 100-200 BCE. It sat in a sort of no-man’s land near the Yellow River, preventing any sort of consistent military presence or governance, and the shipments along the river made for plenty of pirating opportunities. In fact, the bandits there gained a reputation for being like Robin Hood of Nottinghamshire, intentionally targeting the rich and helping those with less.
Before The Water Margin was ever penned, Mount Liang and the bandits had deep symbolic meaning, and Wu Song was a narrative manifestation of the bravery and persistence of the Han people. Wu Song’s companion in the novel, Song Jiang, is based upon a real Chinese figure that led armed uprisings against the Song dynasty.
[Quick Blog Note: Given Europe’s history of reappropriating stories that travel along the silk road and turning them into legends like Gawain and the Green Knight, it’s difficult to rule out the possibility that Robin Hood is yet another of those. The similarities between Hood and the Merry Men are unshakeable, and the Robin Hood ballads didn’t arrive until the 15th century, more than 400 years after the events fictionalized in The Water Margin and the associated folklore that preceded it. Then again, the Celts and Scottish were tormenting their own set of aristocrats on a similar timeline, much of which originated from what we now think of as the Scottish Highlands. Maybe we’re linked by more than we acknowledge, or maybe we just evolved to hate the rich. What’s the difference.]
Since its inception and subsequent embedding into Chinese culture, the heroes remain mostly the same–brave and thoughtful men, sometimes brash and rude, but always righteous and fighting for the glory of the land and people around them. As such, one can find echoes of the actions of the heroes throughout the history of the Han people. One of the things I’ve always found most striking, for example, is the parallel between Song Jiang and Mao Zedong as poets. Like the eventual leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang is a poet who writes a few beautiful stanzas while drunk, celebrating rebellion and dreaming of liberating his people. The Chinese tradition of poetry and natural beauty is what has always made Mao’s work so much more appealing to me than the work of Marx or his peers. The German work is so ugly; beautiful only in the same way a flayed body is to the physician.
It’s the villain, though, where I find the most interest–at least as it pertains to the general thesis that informs my work lately. Fang La was the wealthy aristocrat that was taken down in The Water Margin, also based on a real historical figure from the wealthier regions of Jiangnan where the story takes place. Given the proximity to the Yellow River, this region of China has been home to many dynasties due to its inevitable accumulation of wealth and power under aristocratic hierarchical systems. Fang La’s rebellion was later associated with Manichaeism, despite the fact that he was never Manichaen—likely because of its association with Maitreyan Buddhism and the White Lotus Society that had gained in prominence during the Song dynasty. The Persian Manichaens were a merchant class religious minority in the dynasty; the tale acting as perfect means of rallying the Han people against an ideology that threatened the established order of the elites.
The meaning of the tale shifts depending on who is in power, the dominant cultural force capable of shifting centuries of public perception with small tweaks to a beautiful national narrative. The heroes are still fighting for the side of good; the preservation of a beautiful tradition. But the class of people who control the “authenticity” of history is also the class capable of weaponizing those narratives to warp an essential sense of identity, creating an enemy where there was previously a neighbor. Our ability to cooperate depends on our sense of self and our collective death of ego, but this is only possible through a taxonomy of the stories we tell ourselves about our past, and the people who warped them for their benefit.
Near Mount Liang in the Shandong province of China is the Thousand Buddha Mountain, renowned for the numerous Buddhas carved into the stone. The Maitreya Garden was built there in the year 2000, named for Maitreya Buddha, regarded as the future Buddha of the world who will return and restore the Dharma back to Earth. During the Song Dynasty and the time of the Song Jiang tales, the Maitreyan Buddhists were declared heretical because they led a revolt, expecting the return of Maitreya–itself a millennialist tradition in Buddhism. I hope they were right and just had the math off by 1,000 years, because I’m tired of this world; of pretending there’s reason for optimism outside of the miraculous.
all the best,
Casey Taylor