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[ by Charles Cameron — I’d have put these two “quotes” in my DoubleQuotes format, but wanted to quote quite a gobbit of each, and the print would have been too small ]
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Offering us a fresh angle on two great nations as we (maybe) pivot to Asia…

Excerpted from Hungry Ghost Festival 2013 Begins In China As Spirits Descend On Homes, Wander Streets:

The gates of hell have opened. Its ghosts have been let loose to roam on earth and visit the homes of their relatives.

According to traditional Chinese beliefs this happens every year during the seventh month of the lunar year, resulting in a raucous, feast-and-music filled celebration known as the Hungry Ghost Festival. But not all ghosts are good. There are some spirits who wander the streets, ravenous and envious because they died without descendants or were ignored by their kin while alive.

To appease the hungry spirits, ethnic Chinese step up prayers, aided by giant colorful joss sticks shaped like dragons. They also burn mock currency and miniature paper television sets, mobile phones and furniture as offering to the ancestors for their use in the other world.

For 15 days, neighborhoods hold nightly shows of shrill Chinese operas and pop concerts to entertain the dead.

Excerpted from Indian state outlaws profiting on miracles, summoning ‘ghosts’:

New Delhi – A new law against superstition and black magic in India’s Maharashtra state has triggered a debate between religious groups who say that the state is interfering in personal faith, and rationalists who say religious malpractices violate human rights. [ … ]

“We will challenge the law as it is ambiguous and interferes with personal faith,” says Abhay Vartak of the Santan Sanstha, a Hindu organization. “The law does not define much of what it outlaws – ghosts, for instance. The government itself is not clear whether ghosts exist! And if belief in ghosts is to be outlawed, then what about the Hindu Scripture the Atharva Veda, which says a lot about how to get rid of ghosts who come to inhabit a body?” he asks.

The law specifically outlaws 12 practices, making them punishable by a jail term of seven months to seven years. Of the 12 clauses, two relate to belief in ghosts. The first one forbids recommending violent and sexual practices for purging ghosts from the body – including drinking urine or stool, being tied with a rope or chain, and touching heated objects. It also outlaws creating fear by threatening to invite ghosts.

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For a glimpse of how the notion of “hungry ghosts” might be interpreted in terms of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy — as embodied in the Chöd rite — see Tai Situ Rinpoche‘s Introduction to Chod.

[ by Charles Cameron — the art of memory, with a sidelong glance at swans, typhoid and theodicy ]
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Thomas Harris (and by extension Hannibal Lector) has been interested in memory palaces for a long time. We can begin to infer this this because Lector describes his hobby in Red Dragon (1981) and again in Silence of the Lambs (1988):

So — church collapses?

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As you can tell from that last comment in the Silence of the Lambs quote — to my mind the most brilliant presentation of the problem of theodicy for our day — if there’s a God worth defending, it has to be a God who allows sparrows to fall, typhoid to accompany swans in the vast ecology of existence, churches to collapse on worshipers, and “bad things to happen to good people” from time to time.

And such things, specifically including collapses of religious buildings atop worshipers, do indeed happen in fact as well as fiction.

And they don’t only happen to Christians, either… Bon is the shamanistic religious tradition of Tibet, prior to — and later, somewhat assimilated by — Buddhism…

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The thing is, when I read that Hannibal Lector collected church collapses, it not only made me start to take note of them myself, it also made me think of Simonides. As Frances Yates tells us in her book, The Art of Memory:

At a banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos chanted a lyric poem in honour of his host but including a passage in praise of Castor and Pollux. Scopas meanly told the poet that he would only pay him halfthe sum agreed upon for the panegyric and that he must obtain the balance from the twin gods to whom he had devoted half the poem. A little later, a message was brought in to Simonides that two young men were waiting outside who wished to see him. He rose from the banquet and went out but could find no one. During his absence the roof of the banqueting hall fell in, crushing Scopas and all the guests to death beneath the ruins; the corpses were so mangled that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable to identify them. But Simonides remembered the places at which they had been sitting at the table and was therefore able to indicate to the relatives which were their dead. The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash. And this experience suggested to the poet the principles of the art of memory of which he is said to have been the inventor. Noting that it was through his memory of the places at which the guests had been sitting that he had been able to identify the bodies, he realised that orderly arrangement is essential for good memory.

And by way of reinforcing my Lector-Simonides conjecture, Lector certainly had a remarkable interest in memory, as we learn from his dialogue with Clarice Starling:

“Did you do the drawings on your walls, Doctor?”
“Do you think I called in a decorator?”
“The one over the sink is a European city?”
“It’s Florence. That’s the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo, seen from the Belvedere.”
“Did you do it from memory, all the detail?”
“Memory, Officer Starling, is what I have instead of a view.”

A belvedere, from the Italian, is “a structure (as a cupola or a summerhouse) designed to command a view” — and a beautiful view at that. Belvedere is also, ironically, the name of the town in Ohio where Buffalo Bill, Lector’s serial killer ex-patient, lives…

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So it didn’t surprise me to discover that in Hannibal (1999), the book that follows Silence, this brilliant man who as we have seen collects church collapses and has an exquisite memory in place of a view, is revealed as a practitioner of Simonides’ art:

The memory palace was a mnemonic system well known to ancient scholars and much information was preserved in them through the Dark Ages while Vandals burned the books. Like scholars before him, Dr. Lecter stores an enormous amount of information keyed to objects in his thousand rooms, but unlike the ancients, Dr.Lecter has a second purpose for his palace; sometimes he lives there. He has passed years among its exquisite collections, while his body lay bound on a violent ward with screams buzzing the steel bars like hell’s own harp.

Hannibal Lecter’s palace is vast, even by medieval standards. Translated to the tangible world it would rival the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul for size and complexity.

We catch up to him as the swift slippers of his mind pass from the foyer into the Great Hall of the Seasons. The palace is built according to the rules discovered by Simonides of Ceos and elaborated by Cicero four hundred years later; it is airy, high-ceilinged, furnished with objects and tableaux that are vivid, striking, sometimes shocking and absurd, and often beautiful. The displays are well spaced and well lighted like those of a great museum. But the walls are not the neutral colors of museum walls. Like Giotto, Dr. Lecter has frescoed the walls of his mind.

Brilliant. And a delight, years later, to have my hunch connecting the church collapses and prison cell with only memory for a view with Simonides and the Art of Memory confirmed by the third book and film in the series…

You’ll note, btw, that the Lector (caveat lector) of the first two books has now become Lecter in alignment with the films starring Anthony Hopkins.

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I love symmetries, so let’s move from the most monstrous criminal mind in literature, to the greatest detective…

Sherlock Holmes — in his latest television incarnation — builds memory palaces of a sort, though I’m not sure Simonides would recognize them.

I’m posting the clip from the series here to honor my son Emlyn, with whom I have been watching the series…

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And then there’s the Jesuit whose use of the Art is explored in Jonathan Spence‘s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci:

In 1596 Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace. He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember: the most ambitious construction would consist of several hundred buildings of all shapes and sizes, “the more there are the better it will be,” said Ricci, thought he added that one did not have to build on a gradiose scale right away. One coul create modest palaces, or one could build less dramatic structures such as a temple compound, a cluster of government offices, a public hostel, or a merchants’s meeting lodge. If one wished to begin on a still smaller scale, then one could erect a simple reception hall, a pavilion, or a studio. And if one wanted an intimate space one could use just the corner of a pavilion, or an altar in a temple, or even such a homely object as a wardrobe or a divan.

You’ll note that in this early example of virtual reality as an pedagogical technology, Ricci doesn’t start with the easy stuff, the single wardrobe or divan — he begins with “the most ambitious construction”…

Enough for now. When I want to talk about in a follow up post is detail… the crucial importance of detail.

[ by Charles Cameron — surprising infrequency of capital punishment, though mandated in Sharia and Torah ]
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I’m always struck by formal parallelisms, particularly in matters religious — so when I came across this fascinating reference to the infrequency of capital punishment by stoning in the Ottoman Empire in a book review today (upper panel):

I was immediately reminded of a similar Jewish reluctance to use capital punishment — stoning being one of the four choices — as recorded in Tractate Sanhedrin (lower panel)

And i thought the Dalai Lama (inset) might like it too…

Of course, there’s more detail and nuance to be had in each case, but the parallelism is nevertheless instructive.

Sources:

Review of Kadri in Pakistan’s Express Tribune
Jewish Virtual Library, Capital Punishment

On a personal note, highly subjective: you gotta love R. Akiva — but you gotta respect R. Simeon, too.

As usual, life is nuanced and — dare I say this? — “systems dynamic”.

[ by Charles Cameron — in memory of Carlos Fuentes, requiescat in pace ]
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Carlos Fuentes‘ great novel, Terra Nostra, opens with these words:

Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal.

It’s a sentence to stop you in your tracks, a sentence to give pause to time itself, circling back on itself like the serpent that eats its own tail, a dream of a sentence, a dream sentence.

Fuentes continues:

Monstrous the first vertebrate that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth.

How does a mind move so agilely among these many and diverse firsts — the sleeping, the archeo-anthropological, the technical, the musical, the shameful or sinful or perhaps decorative, even erotic? In a single paragraph — the first in a book that will run 890 pages and not tire?

And Fuentes continues:

About four o’clock in the morning one fourteenth of July, Pollo Phoibee, asleep in his high garret room, door and windows flung wide, dreamed these things, and prepared to answer them himself.

Pollo Phoibee dreamed these things, Carlos Fuentes dreamed Pollo Phoibee…

And we are in Paris, Paris of the artists, of the garret, and yet a Paris where the Seine is boiling, where the Louvre has become crystalline, the black eyes of the gargoyles of Notre Dame see “a much vaster panorama”…

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Carlos Fuentes died today, and I am saddened — remembering him signing my short, fat British Penguin paperback of Terra Nostra (its fondly remembered cover image above) and commenting that it was his preferred English edition, since one could slip it into one’s pocket…

And Terra Nostra was special to me, both as a great and tumultuous fiction, and as a fiction that quoted Norman Cohn‘s In Pursuit of the Millenniun, the book that back in my Oxford days introduced me to the history of apocalyptic thought… a fiction also familiar with Frances Yates, another scholar I greatly admire, and her writings on the Memory Theater…

Carlos Fuentes, the imagination that conceived Terra Nostra, is no longer with us.

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He had been a diplomat, this great imagination. Born into a diplo family, he had served as Mexican ambassador to Paris — Paris of the diplomatic banquets, but also of the artist’s garret, of this New World imagination spanning continents and centuries as though they were a playground, the playground of a single, multiple, cosmopolitan and erudite mind.

The poet Paul Claudel, French ambassador to Japan, was reproved by the Surrealists in 1925 with the words:

One cannot be both ambassador for France and poet!

The poet Saint-John Perse was secretary to the French Embassy in Peking, and later General Secretary of the French Foreign Office. The poet Giorgos Seferis was Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The poet Pablo Neruda was Chilean ambassador to France… The poet Octavio Paz, Mexico’s ambassador to India.

Among novelists, it was Lawrence Durrell — an Englishman born in India with what he described as “a Tibetan mentality” — one who found life in England itself “like an autopsy … so, so dreary” — who was British press attaché in Alexandria, Egypt, during World War II, where as they say:

Ostensibly working, Durrell was in reality closely observing the assortment of sights, sensations, and people that wartime Alexandria, a crossroads of the East and West, had to offer.

The result was his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet.

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Fuentes is heir to many lineages: of Mexico, of the world, of literature, of diplomacy, of the imagination.

In honoring him today, my researches turned up this apposite quote from Aldo Matteucci at the Reflections on Diplomacy blog:

To survive, a diplomat needs poetry. Filed amidst the many layers of the brief, the short poem will refresh the bleary mind. Poetry brings distance – hence perspective and insight. Poetry reminds the diplomat that the best professional is the amateur.

Most deeply – poetry is truth.

Carlos Fuentes survives us all.

[ by Charles Cameron — suicide, protest, martyrdom, the self-immolation of Buddhist monastics ]
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You can set your enemies on fire, you can set yourself on fire, you can blow yourself and your enemies up…

Protest, mayhem, suicide, martyrdom?

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As usual, my interest is in the theological sanctions and constraints involved — in this case, by Buddhist self-immolation — so this excerpt from a Q&A with Lobsang Sangay, the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile caught my eye:

Q: Does Buddhism allow self-immolation?

A: It’s a complex issue. One could refer to Jataka tales, which concern the previous births of the Buddha. In one story, the Buddha, in a previous incarnation, gives up his body to feed a starving tigress and her four cubs. Some other stories also talk about self-sacrifice by the Buddha.

Although suicide is violent and prohibited in Buddhism, some Buddhists believe it depends on the motivation. If you do it out of hatred and anger, then it is negative. But if you do it for a pure cause … it’s such a complex theological issue. You can’t go either way or have a definitive answer. But the action is tragic, so painful.

That’s a start: it’s a theologically complex issue…

The young Karmapa Lama, second in influence only to the Dalai Lama himself, is quoted in a Guardian report as discouraging this form of protest:

These desperate acts … are a cry against the injustice and repression under which they live. But I request the people of Tibet to preserve their lives and find other, constructive ways to work for the cause of Tibet.

In Buddhist teaching life is precious. To achieve anything worthwhile we need to preserve our lives.

It should be noted, however, that a number of monks in exile from China are depicted in the same article, bearing posters that call the self-immolators “burning martyrs”.

Robert Thurman, Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia and president of New York’s Tibet House, provides his own justification for such acts:

When you destroy your body, you violate your own life, the lives of what Buddhists call “the 84,000 cells” that constitute it. This does seem violent. Yet in this case, the individual sacrifices herself to appeal to her enemy, to convey the perhaps all-too-subliminal message that they have nothing to fear from her, that she will resist their relationship of fear and harm by removing herself from being the target of their ultimately self-destructive, evil behavior. That is true non-harming—perfect resistance by complete surrender. If your victim prevents you from harming her by harming herself and taking herself out of your reach, then why were you afraid of her and wanting to harm her in the first place? Since she won’t harm you, she must love you. She wants you to stop fearing and hating; she wants you to be happy! Indeed, she cries out to you with her very life to wake up and behold the power of love—how it does not fear death, how it gives itself away to reality, how it overwhelms hatred.

And we should remember that even within Buddhism, self-immolation is not an exclusively Tibetan phenomenon. Here’s the celebrated Vietnamese zen monk and poet Thich Nhat Nanh, hearkening back to the days of the Vietnam War in his open letter “In Search of the Enemy of Man” (addressed to Martin Luther King):

The self-burning of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963 is somehow difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand. The Press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity. During the ceremony of ordination, as practiced in the Mahayana tradition, the monk-candidate is required to burn one, or more, small spots on his body in taking the vow to observe the 250 rules of a bhikshu, to live the life of a monk, to attain enlightenment and to devote his life to the salvation of all beings. One can, of course, say these things while sitting in a comfortable armchair; but when the words are uttered while kneeling before the community of sangha and experiencing this kind of pain, they will express all the seriousness of one’s heart and mind, and carry much greater weight.

The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, says with all his strength and determination that he can endure the greatest of suffering to protect his people. What he really aims at is the expression of his will and determination, not death. To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people.

In a later post, I’ll return to Nhat Hanh‘s comment about monastic ordination, comparing it with the symbolism of the “red” given to cardinals on their elevation to that dignity.

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Someone who is neither a monk or nun, nor a Tibetan, nor even a Buddhist — a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi — set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid not so long ago, and the rippling wave of events triggered by that act have included the toppling of long-entrenched dictators — is it so remarkable that an 18 year old nun, Tenzin Choedon, and other Tibetans too might hope that an act of self-immolation would galvanize the population around them and the world, resulting in the toppling of the hated Han regime in their part of the world?

I am not sure whether Prof. Thurman’s attempt to tie the Buddhist monastics’ mode of self-sacrifice to the notion, “see, we’re no threat” really works, but it is surely worth considering when it comes from a man who often speaks as a western mouthpiece for the Dalai Lama…

There are of course differences between monastics and laypeople.

Bouazizi’s self immolation was an act of despair, Tenzin Choedon’s an act of courage — as the photos of her standing there, ablaze and unflinching, while another woman offers a silk scarf into the flames in the traditional gesture of respect clearly show.

And when Prof. Thurman declares that the nun wanted her people to be happy, he surely doesn’t mean that she wanted them to be pleased at the sight of her standing there in the middle of the street ablaze — but that she wanted her people to be liberated from the repressive yoke they were and are under, and to feel the joy that comes with liberation from dictatorship.

But Bouzazi’s act, too, must have required considerable courage, while Tenzin Choedon’s act was surely also born of desperation. We humans, as individuals, are by our very nature blended beings.

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As an Addendum:

Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche in his book, Dharma Paths, tells the Jataka tale of the Buddha giving his body to feed some tiger cubs as follows:

In one of his previous lives, the Buddha was born as the youngest of three princes. When he was only five years old, the three princes were in a forest playing together at hide-and-seek and other games. As they were walking in the forest, they came to a cave where they saw a wounded female tiger with five cubs. The mother tiger was very weak and was unable to provide food for the baby tigers. The Buddha’s older brothers went to search for some food, and they asked the young prince to stay near the cave to take care of the mother tiger and the five cubs.

While the Buddha was taking care of the wounded tiger and her five cubs, he began to think that it was not proper to kill other beings and give their flesh to the tiger. He found some large thorns and pressed them into neck, and as the blood came out, he let the cubs and their mother suck the blood. In fact, he gave his whole body to the five cubs and their mother as an act of generosity. As he did this, the Buddha prayed, “Right now I am only able to give temporary help to these starving beings, just removing their hunger. May these tigers who are enjoying my flesh, blood, and bones be reborn to a higher realm, and may I be able to teach them and lead them out of cyclic existence.”

We are naturally entitled to take the Jataka tales as scriptures, morality tales, or legends, fairy-tales — but the Rinpoche makes it clear in his telling that the bodhisattva who would later become Gautama Buddha “gave his whole body”.

In the Chod ritual of Tibetan Buddhism, practitioners symbolically give their own flesh to sate the hungry demons…