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II. Talk on the Common Course (1952) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Next>> 7. Sketch of the life of Laotse, which was in perfect accord with his teachings: He did not act except to help others; as legend reports, he wrote a book only to fulfill the wish of a simple-minded agent of customs whom he gave the book, since he always gave everything away. Like Buddha, Laotse led a perfectly contemplative life, and his answer to the ultimate question he derives from pure contemplation. How does he answer the threefold question about the meaning of Being, the value of life and the being of man? Being is One and is in itself meaning; Life maintains and sustains Being, is the nourishing force of Being and therefore has value for Being; Man acquires his own value by joining the force of Life, behaving in accordance with the nourishing force of Being. By not acting, man lets Being be and nourishes it; he avoids changing the world lest he bring it out of order and destroy its meaning. This not-acting is meant as an active furthering of life everywhere; this is similar to what Goethe called "active tolerance," by which he meant the furtherance of others in their own being. (Reference: Similar passages in Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "To water the roots of everything that grows."). Water is the symbol of the nourishing force; smiling is the symbol of human behavior in accordance with it. Everything good is done by water and smiling. Human judgment here is an absolute Yes to Being, an absolute Yes to the value of life and absolute No to man's self. Man's Being consists in an absolute self- sacrifice to Being, in an absolute denial of the will for the sake of identification with Being; will must serve everything except man himself. Humanly speaking, this seems an impossible solution, and yet a religion was built on this teaching and men have tried to live according to it until our own time. This is the perfect religion of Peace; but not because it is a solution to certain problems, but because it expresses one of the strongest resolutions man ever made: will denying itself through sheer will-power. This may sound strange to us if we think of it as an absolute. In fact, one of the greatest creative powers of man was discovered and established here, the power of our will for self-denial. As long as free men live, the sun of Laotse's smile of creative benevolence will shine through life ever again. A new meaning was created by man in answering the ultimate question for meaning, the value of life was enhanced and a certain kind of meaning put into the world. Relating himself freely to the whole world except himself, one man created the capability of establishing relations and transforming them meaningfully out of the sheer natural involvement in the world in which man is merely related. Life becomes pure joy in the unconditional identification with the All-life. Out of it has grown the great culture of Chinese painting and poetry in its buddhistic form as it was transformed and influenced by Taoism. Here, the aim is not freedom but liberation; not the world shall be changed, but man shall be liberated from the tyranny of his own will; it is the liberation of man from his self. Buddha's aim is not freedom either; the world shall not be changed, it shall vanish. He too aims at liberation, but at the liberation of the self from the world. This answer is given out of pure contemplation of the world as it seems to be. Buddha's answer to the threefold question is an absolute No to Being. Being is without meaning and Life therefore has no inherent value; it participates in Being and consists of suffering. Against Life and Being stands Man as the only reality and the only bearer of meaning. This meaning is the self; the self is the only reality, everything else is maya, delusion, which results in vain suffering. Life in itself, if it is lived according to Being, has no value; but Life can be endowed with the highest value by man, if it is used as a procedure of self-liberation from the Being of the world. This includes liberation from the gods, all of whom belong to Being and are maya. When the highest stage of negation of everything that is is reached, the self is by no means dead. Nirvana is not death and not nothingness, but the eternal bliss of the self alone with itself and moving only within itself. This has nothing to do with selfishness in practice, but is actually its transcendental form. The No of Buddha is as absolute as the Yes of Laotse. The power of saying No to the world which man has and which was discovered and established here for ever is as great in its creativity as the power of saying Yes. Laotse established the human capability of self-denial; Buddha established the human freedom of of self-assertion, i.e. the freedom of man who can do without everything and still be. Here again, an active relation is established out of the mere involvement in the world and the merely being related. Buddha relates the universe to himself -- all the worlds and gods of India -- in order to get rid of them. Laotse discovered the social power of man. Buddha discovered the individual power of man. Both are individuals, not personalities, Laotse the social individual and Buddha the isolated individual; but by establishing the two poles of sheer will power and the absolute Yes and the absolute No, they both together have set the framework within which man can make a stand in the world and in Being, and thus strive to become a creative personality. They liberated the creative power of man by showing to which extremes of efficiency human will power can go. We need the self-abandonment and the benevolence of Laotse as we need Buddha's intellectual self-concentration and power of self-determination. The 118th discourse in the Buddhist Bible gives us an opportunity to learn how self-awareness and self-control can be trained. 8. Discussion of texts. Question and answer period. Buddha's influence in Europe (the European pessimism) and America. How does Laotse help us to understand China? Comparison with Confucius. Laotse and Buddha, two human individuals, have discovered that man can raise himself above Being, become the judge of the world, and take life in his own hands by creating values in life and establishing a certain way of life. They liberated themselves from the absolute involvement of man in the world, from the merely being related and being lived; they overcame mere existence by making life meaningful and establishing meaningful relations. All this they did by relating themselves to a meaningful absolute. Through a decision for freedom, they established the human possibility of freedom. The same decision for freedom meant to Laotse the mobilization of man's active power to say Yes to the world, and to Buddha the mobilization of man's passive power to say No to the world. Laotse's Yes showed how much man can give to the world and Buddha's No showed how much every man (be he king or beggar) can refuse to take from the world and still add to the stature of his own being. How about this Yes and this No today? Let us examine the Yes-sayers of today and summarize their answers: Conformism as the Yes to all powers that be. Let us examine the No-sayers of today and summarize their answers: (for instance, the use of the veto by Soviet Russia in the United Nations), ruthless use of arbitrary power. The modern Yes is no longer a creative power that gives to the world, instead it wants to receive from the world. The modern No is not a self-asserting power that shows how much man can refuse to take from the world, but on the contrary, it wants to take from the world as much as possible and deprive others. In their way they both cooperate and Laotse and Buddha are misused by both groups. (Reference: Nietzsche who feared that European nihilism may become active, the doing of No). If we go back to the sources, we see that these, present Yes- and No-sayers mean the opposite of what Buddha and Laotse taught. Both brought about the first dawn of freedom. They raised man above the world, related him to an absolute meaning, enabled him to establish meaningful relations by making a stand in the world. Even though neither of them wanted to change the world, each one enabled man to take a position and thus change his situation in the world. Against this, we see that the modern Yes- and No-sayers try to submerge man in the world process; now man is supposed to shift constantly his position in terms of the situation until he is entirely "processed," instead of proceeding by himself; without being related to an absolute, he relates him-self to more and more relative things, until the devaluation of man, life and world makes everything "relative." Nihilism answers the threefold question by saying that Being, Life and Man are equally meaningless. It thereby destroys the human will which enables man to act and transforms him into a mere re-active being, destroys his capacity for conditioning life and world and converts him into an entirely conditioned being. This process of destruction is not beyond good and evil, but even beneath them, because the capacity of decision itself is annihilated. The fact that one can transform man into a being that lives only in relations and the relative and merely re-acts without ever deciding anything shows the infinite human potentialities for change without changing anything. Metaphysics is helpless against this process because the metaphysical concept of man knows only human potentialities (as distinguished from man's capabilities); these potentialities, it is true, were thought of as having a divine origin and as long as the divine was firmly believed in, they always harbored capabilities of freedom. If the divine origin is denied them, they become what they are believed to be today. Metaphysics, by definition, could only hide but never develop a working concept of freedom, without which the creative capabilities of man cannot be discovered, established and maintained. The distinction between Laotse's and Buddha's creative Yes and No and the nihilistic Yes and No is decisive, and yet, it is best summarized by what may seem to be a merely verbal difference: The creative Yes of Laotse is active, the destructive Yes of nihilism is passive; the creative No of Buddha is passive, the destructive No of nihilism is active. A passive Yes and active No - that is the perversion of nihilism, the passive death or active destruction of freedom. Passive submission to everything that is or active destruction of everything that is, both eliminate man's capacity to decide. The man who discovered decision as a possible absolute, as an essential capability of man, was Zarathustra. He established it by his life and his deeds. We know so little about him that we do not even know when he lived, in 1300, 900, 700 or 500 B.C. His thoughts and teachings, as we find them in the Zend Avesta texts, are entirely submerged by the interpretation and additions of the Parsi religion, which was built upon them. (Reference: S.A. Kapadia, The Teachings of Zoroaster and the Philosophy of the Parsi Religion. London, John Murray, l905). But decisions need few words and the discovery of decision needed even less. Two sayings of Zarathustra are enough: "I praise the well-thought sentiment, the well-spoken speech, the well-performed action." - "Speak the truth and learn how to handle bow and arrow well." (Assignment: Think about the meaning of these two sayings and work out a tentative interpretation.) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Next>> |
