Yes, that’s right.
Was that a controversial decision for you?
[laughs] Well, of course. On my next birthday I’ll be 73, so Wu-Tang Clan is, you might say, not the music of my generation. I wasn’t much of a fan to begin with, but I’ve discovered what a following Wu-Tang Clan has, and James Robson — who is a younger man — appreciated the music and made the connection. What was more, you might say, in my groove, was that George Harrison’s “The Inner Light” is an almost exact translation of a phrase or two from the “Dao De Jing”; the German philosopher Heidegger attempted to translate the “Dao De Jing”; we’ve made many connections of that sort, but the one that gets all the attention, I’ve noticed, from younger people, is the Wu-Tang Clan.
You talk about the richness you encountered and the complexity of some of these religions. What were some ways that these religions address the same questions and dovetail in their answers? Did you see a lot of connections across religions?
I quote in my preface a line from a pioneering 17th-century work in comparative religion. The line is, “all religions overlap in something,” and our approach in this volume is not to drive to the essence of Hinduism or the essence of Judaism but to recognize that a variety of practices and beliefs can coexist. Just how they add up doesn’t even necessarily make them all versions of the same thing. This is, as it happens, quite a hot topic just now among scholars of religion: Are we talking about a genus in which each religion is a species or are we talking about something that varies much more greatly than that?
One is struck, yes, by rather stunning coincidences. I quote in the general introduction a wonderful passage from Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” A novelist has died and Proust’s character, reflecting on his passing, seems to invent the notion on his own of reincarnation of the soul and the carrying forward of either virtue or vice from a previous life. This is a core notion, the notion of karma, from Hinduism, and a similar notion is employed in Buddhism. Sometimes you meet a young person who seems to know so much and be so mature and so deep that it is as if he has many lifetimes of learning behind him. Other times, you meet someone who, though mature, is so infantile and so uncivilized that it is as if he was born an incorrigible criminal. How do we cope with that fact? Christianity has its notion of original sin; Buddhism and Hinduism begin with samsara, this cycle of rebirth with guilt or virtue carried forward from the previous lives. One can draw up comparisons of this sort.
I have to make clear that we don’t do that here in this anthology. At the start I thought perhaps we would. I brought my associate editors together and asked them if they wanted to function as a board seeking out such points of coincidence or congruence, and they didn’t want to do so. They each thought they had more than enough to do in bringing together primary texts from the origin of the religious tradition assigned to them. In effect, that search for what might bring them all together was left to me, to some extent, but is really left to the many users of this book, each of whom will be asking your kind of question.
Just talking to you makes me think about how distracted we are these days. I think technology, for a lot of people, has brought them away from these essential questions of finding meaning in life and our place in the world and dealing with the idea that we’re not going to be here forever. It seems like we don’t really address these issues very often, especially younger people, and it seems like something we’re really missing. The people you’re talking to deal with these questions all the time, probably, but there are also some who have not just stepped away from but turned against religion. What do you think that does to us? Do you see a problem with that? Do you think people are finding something else to fill that gap or not?
You’d have to ask each individual if anything is filling a gap or if a gap is even recognized. You, obviously, recognize that some kind of gap is there. Let me make a couple of comparisons to try to get closer to an answer to your question. I was talking recently to a young writer; I had just voted and I asked him if he was going to vote, and he said “No, I haven’t had time to familiarize myself with the interests of the candidates.” This is someone I would describe as quite political, but he doesn’t vote and he doesn’t entertain the question of whether he is a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent; he doesn’t care about any of these things and yet it isn’t as if he doesn’t care about his country, that he doesn’t care about its leadership or its wars or demonstrations in Ferguson and the many other issues that constitute its politics. It would be difficult to say that politics is dead for him; it’s just that the available expressions of it seem not to work for him. Is there, then, a political gap in his life? Does he lack something? Probably so, but it’s not the kind of gap that’s very easily filled, is it?
Another comparison is to art, and here we come to the question of speed that you were talking about. I begin this entire anthology with a poem by a poet named Todd Boss, who compares entering a church to entering a museum. He says you can go into the church just to look at the art, but you can also go into a museum and feel a kind of holiness or solemnity there. To stick with the art side of that comparison, if you walk into a museum and begin looking at a picture and you don’t quite understand what it’s saying, you read the caption and that gives you a little something — but there’s still something more in that picture than the caption could ever capture. So you keep looking at it, but that slows you down, doesn’t it? It’s not linguistic; it takes you out of the chatter of the buzz that fills our minds so loudly now. Well, looking at the texts in this anthology can be compared with going into a museum.
I also make the comparison that this book is 4,000 pages long. Someone could say, “Ugh, 4,000 pages; I’ll never read it!” Well, you can stand in front of a museum and say, “Ugh, hundreds of pictures; I’ll never look at all of them so I won’t go in!” but people don’t do that with museums. They do go in and look at the few pictures they select; they create their own museum within the museum, and that’s how a work like this can affect those who buy it. You can go into a museum, find the map, and go straight to a particular picture that attracts you. Here, you look at the table of contents, something strikes you by the title, you go to that page, you look at that, then you close the book and think about it. It can work in that way.
As for trying to sum it all up, what do all these religions finally come down to, if I were to stand in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and try to tell you what all the pictures and statues finally come down to by giving you the three elements that all art must have, you wouldn’t really know from what I told you what would await you once you walked into that museum, would you? The art itself does things that any summary, any analysis of the art cannot do; well, these texts, which come not from scholars of religion but from the lives of the religions themselves, talk in a different language than is spoken in the classroom. They have, at least, a chance to work upon the mind and heart the way a work of art does.
Do you know the writer Jeanette Winterson?
I don’t, no. A novelist?
Mostly a novelist, but she’s recently written a memoir called “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” She grew up in a very, very strictly religious household with a mother who was mentally ill and she has been searching a lot for something that comes close to religion. Even though the religion in her childhood kind of took over her life, she has very fond memories of having that. She describes her searching for something like that, that sense of community and commitment, and she says the Western world has done away with religion but not our religious impulses. [quoting from the book]: “We shall have to find new ways of finding meaning; it is not yet clear how this will happen.” If you’re looking at ancient religions now, how can these texts help us find meaning now that things are so different?
You know, the United States is remarkable in the way that it handles religion. We do not have a national religion but we do have a national way of dealing with religion. If the Founding Fathers had actually thought that religion was evil and should be suppressed — which is the point of view taken, for example, by Stalinism or Maoism — then the First Amendment wouldn’t say that Congress shall make no law abridging the free exercise of religion. What that constitutional establishment brought about was a situation in which, if all the religions available are unsatisfactory, if the one you were raised in doesn’t work for you you can begin a new religion yourself.
The history of religion strongly suggests that when people begin new religions they pick and choose from materials in available religions. If Jeanette is looking for something or, in her writing, perhaps, trying to invent something, then she could indeed take an enormous work like this one as raw material. She could prospect, she could mine, and find things that might work for her; it might be a bit from this one and a bit from that one and she might look for a long time before finding just what she wanted.
The task is not an easy one. One reason why the founders of the world religions — Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, Moses — are honored as greatly as they are is that what they achieved is rarely achieved; it’s very difficult to do. That matter of gathering up the human condition in all its difficulty and facing the weakness of the human mind, we all come to the end
Yes, that’s right.
Was that a controversial decision for you?
[laughs] Well, of course. On my next birthday I’ll be 73, so Wu-Tang Clan is, you might say, not the music of my generation. I wasn’t much of a fan to begin with, but I’ve discovered what a following Wu-Tang Clan has, and James Robson — who is a younger man — appreciated the music and made the connection. What was more, you might say, in my groove, was that George Harrison’s “The Inner Light” is an almost exact translation of a phrase or two from the “Dao De Jing”; the German philosopher Heidegger attempted to translate the “Dao De Jing”; we’ve made many connections of that sort, but the one that gets all the attention, I’ve noticed, from younger people, is the Wu-Tang Clan.
You talk about the richness you encountered and the complexity of some of these religions. What were some ways that these religions address the same questions and dovetail in their answers? Did you see a lot of connections across religions?
I quote in my preface a line from a pioneering 17th-century work in comparative religion. The line is, “all religions overlap in something,” and our approach in this volume is not to drive to the essence of Hinduism or the essence of Judaism but to recognize that a variety of practices and beliefs can coexist. Just how they add up doesn’t even necessarily make them all versions of the same thing. This is, as it happens, quite a hot topic just now among scholars of religion: Are we talking about a genus in which each religion is a species or are we talking about something that varies much more greatly than that?
One is struck, yes, by rather stunning coincidences. I quote in the general introduction a wonderful passage from Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” A novelist has died and Proust’s character, reflecting on his passing, seems to invent the notion on his own of reincarnation of the soul and the carrying forward of either virtue or vice from a previous life. This is a core notion, the notion of karma, from Hinduism, and a similar notion is employed in Buddhism. Sometimes you meet a young person who seems to know so much and be so mature and so deep that it is as if he has many lifetimes of learning behind him. Other times, you meet someone who, though mature, is so infantile and so uncivilized that it is as if he was born an incorrigible criminal. How do we cope with that fact? Christianity has its notion of original sin; Buddhism and Hinduism begin with samsara, this cycle of rebirth with guilt or virtue carried forward from the previous lives. One can draw up comparisons of this sort.
I have to make clear that we don’t do that here in this anthology. At the start I thought perhaps we would. I brought my associate editors together and asked them if they wanted to function as a board seeking out such points of coincidence or congruence, and they didn’t want to do so. They each thought they had more than enough to do in bringing together primary texts from the origin of the religious tradition assigned to them. In effect, that search for what might bring them all together was left to me, to some extent, but is really left to the many users of this book, each of whom will be asking your kind of question.
Just talking to you makes me think about how distracted we are these days. I think technology, for a lot of people, has brought them away from these essential questions of finding meaning in life and our place in the world and dealing with the idea that we’re not going to be here forever. It seems like we don’t really address these issues very often, especially younger people, and it seems like something we’re really missing. The people you’re talking to deal with these questions all the time, probably, but there are also some who have not just stepped away from but turned against religion. What do you think that does to us? Do you see a problem with that? Do you think people are finding something else to fill that gap or not?
You’d have to ask each individual if anything is filling a gap or if a gap is even recognized. You, obviously, recognize that some kind of gap is there. Let me make a couple of comparisons to try to get closer to an answer to your question. I was talking recently to a young writer; I had just voted and I asked him if he was going to vote, and he said “No, I haven’t had time to familiarize myself with the interests of the candidates.” This is someone I would describe as quite political, but he doesn’t vote and he doesn’t entertain the question of whether he is a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent; he doesn’t care about any of these things and yet it isn’t as if he doesn’t care about his country, that he doesn’t care about its leadership or its wars or demonstrations in Ferguson and the many other issues that constitute its politics. It would be difficult to say that politics is dead for him; it’s just that the available expressions of it seem not to work for him. Is there, then, a political gap in his life? Does he lack something? Probably so, but it’s not the kind of gap that’s very easily filled, is it?
Another comparison is to art, and here we come to the question of speed that you were talking about. I begin this entire anthology with a poem by a poet named Todd Boss, who compares entering a church to entering a museum. He says you can go into the church just to look at the art, but you can also go into a museum and feel a kind of holiness or solemnity there. To stick with the art side of that comparison, if you walk into a museum and begin looking at a picture and you don’t quite understand what it’s saying, you read the caption and that gives you a little something — but there’s still something more in that picture than the caption could ever capture. So you keep looking at it, but that slows you down, doesn’t it? It’s not linguistic; it takes you out of the chatter of the buzz that fills our minds so loudly now. Well, looking at the texts in this anthology can be compared with going into a museum.
I also make the comparison that this book is 4,000 pages long. Someone could say, “Ugh, 4,000 pages; I’ll never read it!” Well, you can stand in front of a museum and say, “Ugh, hundreds of pictures; I’ll never look at all of them so I won’t go in!” but people don’t do that with museums. They do go in and look at the few pictures they select; they create their own museum within the museum, and that’s how a work like this can affect those who buy it. You can go into a museum, find the map, and go straight to a particular picture that attracts you. Here, you look at the table of contents, something strikes you by the title, you go to that page, you look at that, then you close the book and think about it. It can work in that way.
As for trying to sum it all up, what do all these religions finally come down to, if I were to stand in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and try to tell you what all the pictures and statues finally come down to by giving you the three elements that all art must have, you wouldn’t really know from what I told you what would await you once you walked into that museum, would you? The art itself does things that any summary, any analysis of the art cannot do; well, these texts, which come not from scholars of religion but from the lives of the religions themselves, talk in a different language than is spoken in the classroom. They have, at least, a chance to work upon the mind and heart the way a work of art does.
Do you know the writer Jeanette Winterson?
I don’t, no. A novelist?
Mostly a novelist, but she’s recently written a memoir called “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” She grew up in a very, very strictly religious household with a mother who was mentally ill and she has been searching a lot for something that comes close to religion. Even though the religion in her childhood kind of took over her life, she has very fond memories of having that. She describes her searching for something like that, that sense of community and commitment, and she says the Western world has done away with religion but not our religious impulses. [quoting from the book]: “We shall have to find new ways of finding meaning; it is not yet clear how this will happen.” If you’re looking at ancient religions now, how can these texts help us find meaning now that things are so different?
You know, the United States is remarkable in the way that it handles religion. We do not have a national religion but we do have a national way of dealing with religion. If the Founding Fathers had actually thought that religion was evil and should be suppressed — which is the point of view taken, for example, by Stalinism or Maoism — then the First Amendment wouldn’t say that Congress shall make no law abridging the free exercise of religion. What that constitutional establishment brought about was a situation in which, if all the religions available are unsatisfactory, if the one you were raised in doesn’t work for you you can begin a new religion yourself.
The history of religion strongly suggests that when people begin new religions they pick and choose from materials in available religions. If Jeanette is looking for something or, in her writing, perhaps, trying to invent something, then she could indeed take an enormous work like this one as raw material. She could prospect, she could mine, and find things that might work for her; it might be a bit from this one and a bit from that one and she might look for a long time before finding just what she wanted.
The task is not an easy one. One reason why the founders of the world religions — Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, Moses — are honored as greatly as they are is that what they achieved is rarely achieved; it’s very difficult to do. That matter of gathering up the human condition in all its difficulty and facing the weakness of the human mind, we all come to the end
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