Real Life with Ryuei

Buddha vs. Cthulhu

Back in the mid to late 80's, when I was just in my teens and early 20s I first started learning about Zen Buddhism and then got involved with first Nichiren Shoshu of America, then Won Buddhism. For awhile, maybe until the early 90s I fretted about whether I was Buddhist or Christian. I finally settled for Buddhist. And for some time after that I thought that during that period I had been caught between two mountains whose spiritual peaks lay in the metaphysical clouds beyond where I could see. I could only climb one of them it seemed to me, but which one? I had to choose between what I had grown up with that resonated on the heart level and what I had discovered that made more sense and seemed to have greater scope and even more practicality as far as actual methods of spiritual cultivation went.

But now I look back and I think something else was happening. It wasn't that I was just caught between my attraction to Christianity and Buddhism, but that Christianity couldn't hold up to the real threat and I was trying to shore it up with Buddhism. The real threat was a bare bones anti-metaphysical approach to reality that made a mockery of spiritual pretensions but also of beauty, values, and meaning. The hedonistic, amoral, and purely selfish consequences of this were articulated in a blunt and wise-ass fashion by the founder of the Church of Satan, Antoine Szandor LaVey in his book The Satanic Bible. I rejected what I read there and consciously decided that I didn't want that for myself. It was one reason I was impelled to really give Nichiren Buddhism a try, and have stuck with it (more or less) ever since. Now I can't say I have totally uprooted selfishness, hedonism, and amorality but at least I don't make excuses (at least not to myself) and I do aim for something a bit higher than that - and Buddhism has blunted the worst of it (as has getting older) and given me a bigger picture to keep in mind.

But there was still the fact that behind all religious propositions and metaphysical assumptions there still lay a reality that is impersonal, uncaring, and devoid of any intrinsic meaning. And here is where I think H.P. Lovecraft has best articulated the view of the world that I have come to think of as the real common sense that no one will admit to and which people desperately try to distract themselves from. I read all of Lovecrafts works in high school and though I didn't realize it at the time, his stories were "horrifying" not just because of the fantastic elements, but because they symbolically and sometimes more prosaically expressed the nihilism of the modern worldview. In one passage in particular in his story "The Silver Key" H.P. Lovecraft articulated his feelings about the religion and irreligion of his contemporaries in the 20s and 30s. I would like to share this excerpt because I feel it best expresses the actual dilemma that people today live in. I don't think people need to choose between Buddhism and Christianity or some other religion. The real problem is how to assert any meaning at all. Personally, I agree with the Kyoto Philosophers that in Buddhism a way has been found that defeats nihilism by going through it and then turning that nihilism on itself. But that is a whole other article. Suffice it to say that I believe Buddhism showed me a way wherein the core values I learned in Christianity could still be upheld in a serious and mature way even after the weathering the following from Lovecraft's The Silver Key:

"Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency.

"In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unkown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal fantasy.

"But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them to be even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amid an aimless cosmos save only in harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety for those of license and anarchy.

"Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone, while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all of Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old ways with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgements, and the sole guides and standards, in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in a bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realise that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence." (pp. 253-255, The Dreams in the Witch House And Other Weird Stories)

Such wonderfully overwrought nihilism and whining! But what a great indictment of the fundamentalists, anarchists, hippies, punks, theocons, and just about everyone else. What a great rant!

Unlike Lovecraft, or at least unlike his character Randolph Carter, I don't think the solution lies in returning to some imaginary romance of dreams and childhood innocence.

I do think that the solution lies in a Zen expression I read back in high school and which I have never forgotten: "True emptiness is wondrous being." It is a shame that Lovecraft never had the chance to learn about Buddhism, especially the Vijnanavadins or Consciousness Only School of Mahayana Buddhism and its practical expression in the Vajrayana. I think he would have found them very satisfying on all levels. Who knows? Of course, the other problem is that Lovecraft was also afraid to have a life. He was so fearful and timid that he was incapable of getting out of himself and experiencing what emptiness really is, rather than just its nihilistic shadow/distortion. Lovecraft saw nothing to grasp and nowhere to stand and so was deeply disillusioned and even frightened. But the Buddhist sees that there is nothing to grasp and nowhere to stand and therefore concludes that in this there is freedom and so all things come to hand and one can take one's stand anywhere the need arises. Reality is not empty and nothing, but Empty and Marvelous. And here I edge just a bit into a whole other theme (that I referred to above in connection with the Kyoto School of Philosophy). But for me the bottom line is this: the Buddha trumps Cthulhu.

Posted by Ryuei at June 22, 2006 12:19 AM