We in Christian-majority countries are whelmed this time of year in the Nativity. That is, the legend of Christ's birth, with attendant prophetic prognostics. Public emphasis is on the divinity of a baby conceived without sin – functionally, without sex. I could rant about that a bit, but right now another detail preoccupies me.
Namely, why wasn't Mother Mary killed?
Because that's what should have happened. As bluenoses still petulantly carp, past generations, in their presumed moral superiority, hated nothing so much as unkosher sex. And young Mary – about 15 at the time – had only just married the much older Joseph when she came up heavy.
We know from elsewhere in the Gospels that termination of the marriage contract was the least of potential results. Others included execution by having small rocks hurled at you until you died.
By decent good-standing members of the Church, of course.
Under duly-enacted law of a theocratic state.
In short, this act of "restitution" wasn't simply tolerated, it was ordained. In fact, holy.
But that's not what happened, and the solution to this mystery is found in the Shadow Gospel. Turns out, Joseph was a Jew.
Not a respectable Jew.
Not a Biblical Jew.
An actual Jew.
(Frankly, now I think of it, it's a wonder they didn't kill him as well.)
Says Matthew:
…Joseph [Mary's] husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
It goes by fast; did you catch it? Joseph wasn't religious. He was righteous. And in this case, that meant turning his back on human authority and putting moralism – and indeed, the law – aside. Rather than stalking back to his new wife's hometown and thrusting Mary back into the arms of her parents with loud and public remonstrations, destroying her life and theirs – again, his legal and ethical duty – Joseph decides to protect her from the legal and the ethical.
Exactly what Joseph's long game was is a bit hazy, but at this point God dispatches an HR guy to handle the predicament:
But while [Joseph] thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.
Again, Scripture is vague on exactly how God and his Angels prevented the rest of the Hebrew nation from killing them both, but since childhood, the Nativity paradox has fascinated me: it's facilitated by a deliberate rejection of received morality. As my religious education grew broader, so did my grasp of the import of Joseph's decision, and the risk he incurred.
So this Christmas – a time of opening hearts and auditing egos – I suggest we every one, Christian and less so, meditate on the koan of dogma and Dharma.
Because I suspect it's essential to the difference between what we are and what we're not.
(Photo of Joseph and Mary in private conference courtesy of Tomas Castelazo and Wikimedia Commons.)
Recently heard on Bhante Sujato's Dhammanet podcast (available from the website and the usual aggregators):
"A man found a piece of truth on the ground and picked it up. Seeing this, Mara smiled.
"'Why are you smiling?' asked the Buddha.
"'Just give him five minutes,' Mara answered. 'He'll make a doctrine out of it."
(Nepali painting of Mara's retinue courtesy of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)
"A point of view is merely one degree out of the three hundred and sixty degrees of a circle; each point of view can see from that point only, and so is three hundred and fifty nine degrees blind."
Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi
(From Before Thinking.)
(Photo courtesy of Nevit Dilmen and Wikimedia Commons.)
Once upon a time a mighty nation considered itself the holiest, most righteous in history. The ruling class especially leaned heavily on religious rhetoric, invoking the name of a great prophet to defend its every worldly whim.
Then the nation began committing colossal atrocities against other peoples, and viciously repressing its own. And how did all of those pious believers react?
(Spoiler alert: not well.)
In Zen at War, Brian Daizen Victoria scrapes the stickers off many a smug Zen bumper. Taking Japanese Buddhism by the root he shakes it hard, and a lot of bitter fruit falls out. In the political history of our religion, once considered a seditious foreign cult in Japan, he finds pivotal concessions early teachers made to buy safety and comfort. Spooling forward, we watch these dubious innovations draw in all denominations, until the distinction between the Buddha Dharma and Japan's organic (and congenitally nationalistic) Shinto becomes academic at best.
Arriving at the fascist period and world war, we find virtually no Japanese Buddhists, Zen or otherwise, living the Buddha's teaching. Exceptions are either obscure or excommunicated. Meanwhile, Buddhist teachers kink like contortionists to make patriotism, emperor worship, and wholesale killing intrinsic to the Dharma.
Parallels with America scream in the reader's face. Reading Zen at War, I realised that the American mishmash of messianic nationalism and Christianity is nothing less than State Shinto. Where nation and culture are declared 'scripture made flesh', authentic religion is impossible. And just as a society that muddles God and Mammon castrates Christianity, so one that equates selflessness with service mutilates Buddhism.
The first edition of Zen at War concluded with an illuminating review of the ways that Zen is used to gain obedience in postwar corporate Japan, but the most powerful chapter is only available in the second. In "Was It Buddhism?", the author brings Buddhism forward from India, where it had already become a policy tool for the powerful, through China, where it acquired the relativism of Taoism and the paternal piety of Confucianism. (Deviations any honest Zenner must admit are now fundamental to Zen, pagan origin notwithstanding.) These he compares to the Buddha's actual teachings. For example, investigating sangha, a concept much cited in defence of priestly authority, Daizen notes:
The [Buddhic] Sangha was based on noncoercive, nonauthoritarian principles by which leadership was acquired through superior moral character and spiritual insight, and monastic affairs were managed by a general meeting of the monks (or nuns) […] All decisions required the unanimous consent of those assembled. When differences could not be settled, a committee of elders was charged with finding satisfactory solutions.
Daizen is a Sōtō priest trained at Eiheiji. He holds a master's degree in Buddhist Studies from Komazawa (Buddhist) University in Tokyo, and a doctorate in same from Temple. His andragogical résumé is extensive and tedious. In short, this is not the man to mess with.
But the work does suffer from a lack of editing (or maybe intrusive editing), and a tendency to beat certain points to death. Prominent Western Zenners, including Gary Snyder and Brad Warner, have challenged Daizen's indictment of some iconic figures, charging lazy scholarship and wilful misreading. I'm not qualified to have a side, but in the end, the fact remains that no ordained Zen teacher in Japan actively opposed the war until it was lost.
Aside from that, the book's greatest flaw is its title. Zen at War is actually about all Japanese Buddhist denominations; it takes Daizen half the book just to get around to Zen. All of it is relevant and readable, but I found the Zen monk in me saying, "C'mon, Brian, get to the Zen already!"
But such objections pale before the historical significance of this groundbreaking work. The Japanese edition has already inspired unheard-of public acts of contrition in several influential Zen lineages; this, in a culture even less inclined to apology than Western ones. Zen at War has changed the way Japanese Zenners see themselves. Whether it will change their behaviour as well, only time will tell.
Meanwhile, Western Zenners remain arrogant as ever. Perhaps if more of us read Victoria, we too will be inspired to confront some of the dubious assumptions we've imported whole-cloth from Asia, and so attain greater understanding of the Dharma.
But surf is a dogmatic mind, and almost always spits the offering right back into the launcher's footprints. Which is what happened this time, as I learned when I emailed the address it bore.
The bottle was crammed with folded paper, and one dried rose. I didn't open it, because a note visible from outside advised the finder to email its position and toss it back. Since I found it very near the campground, I suspected it hadn't got far, and my suspicions were confirmed by the response I received. This read in part:
[My wife] and I were married just this 1.11.11 at 11:11, a crystal clear cold but beautiful day, under the canopy of plum trees at Seattle's Volunteer Park. We invited all the wedding party to post their own hopes dreams and wishes into the bottle. We then enjoyed a walk along Alki beach to throw the bottle but the current was not right. [We] headed to Golden Gardens Park... again wrong tide. We sent off the bottle with parents going to the ocean. It was tossed this weekend into the ocean.
Hmmm. I have long experience with drift bottles, and told my new friend I'd give this one the benefit of same. First I threw it in the river; sometimes that will get it past the surf. The next day I found it right back where I'd been standing. It was time to stop playing around.
The best way to lodge a bottle in the grey Pacific is to give it to an outbound fisherman and have him dump it overboard when he reaches the horizon. Unfortunately the nearest fishing terminal is quite a distance away and I had no foreseeable plans to travel that far in that direction.
So I took up my stick and humped the bottle out to Damon Point. This long, low spit of sand stands well into the harbour's throat, where it confronts open ocean swell to the southeast and shelters still bay water to the northwest. On a stormy, rain-soaked winter Monday I slogged its two miles of soft sand to the end, to the mighty pushing and shoving of colliding seas.
With an east wind at my back, on steep shingle beach and a turning tide, I pitched the bottle over a single line of surf. And it came right back. So I pitched it again. And left.
I got soaked to the skin in the process, and caked with grit. That's how I know the job was done.
The bottle probably came right back, but that's OK; from Damon Point it will soon be sucked out to sea. It's the best beachcombing in the county; but for a hundred feet of sand, you could be adrift on a raft in the middle of the harbour's mouth. Any wind save a true NNW will sweep anything off that beach, and the entire contents of Gray's Harbour busting back into the main will drive it away for good.
And if it comes back again, by God, I'll drive to Taholah. The Tribe'll get it done, you may count upon it.
