People who write homilies and other spiritual tracts have a wish list:

We’d like a license to skew our grammatical constructions to allow for amphiboly. Ah… to be as oracularly correct as Delphi. Think of it: A Greek general, contemplating war against the Persians, asks, “Which side will win?” Quoth the Oracle: “Apollo says, ‘The Greeks the Persians shall subdue.'” It’s the sort of advice the CIA usually gives. That’s why they’re never wrong.

Also on that wish list there’d be a safety net that would catch us before we went into self-contradictory free fall – as when we rhapsodize about a spiritual experience, claiming that it is absolutely ineffable, and then plunge into the murky depths of pages trying to describe it.

We’d also like to call something ‘utterly unambiguous’ and be able to describe it in the photographic flash that that description suggests.

It would be wonderful to wish into existence a writer’s right never to be wrong and always to be succinct and clear.

Sometimes an essay is like putting a message in a bottle and casting it adrift. We’re never quite sure if, or when, or where it will be read and what effect it will have upon the reader.

I was sitting in a bordertown cantina, doing what folks generally do in a bordertown cantina, when I was approached by an off-duty Mexican motorcycle cop. He was young, handsome, fluent in English, and pleasant; and if this were not enough to induce conversation with him (and it certainly should have been) he regularly read our webpages. He had a question for me regarding the Lex Talionis essay: he wanted to know how to qualify and quantify desire. “If desire is so integral to the process of like-retaliation,” he asked, “what happens when we do the right thing for all the wrong reasons?”

Good question. I tried to look knowledgeable, wanting to say something oracular, like: “The Buddha says, ‘Desire must a man destroy.'” For, oddly enough, amphiboly provides the means for ruthless self-examination. The I Ching works so well because it is precisely so ambiguous. I could maybe let this police officer read into the answer the solution he was seeking. Stalling for time, I asked him to give me an instance of the problem. What specific experience had made him ask the question?

It seems that while he was on crowd-control duty outside a stadium, stationed there with several other police officers, four American tourists exited the stadium. One of them, a woman, was carrying a camera. Another, a man, had signaled a cab and called to the others to hurry and get into it. The woman asked him if he spoke English and when he said that he did, she asked if he would be kind enough to take the camera to the lost and found. She gave him the number of the seat under which she had found the camera and also a general description of the man who had been sitting in the seat. And then she hurriedly left.

The camera, he said, was a Hasselblad… and it was in mint condition. Immediately one of the other officers whistled enviously at his good fortune. Heaven had opened, and a very valuable camera had fallen into his lap. He was an amateur photographer. This was a crisis in faith.

He said that a variety of thoughts crowded into his head at that moment. “First, we have a saying, ‘For every peso another officer lets you get away with, he will demand payment of a hundred pesos later.'” He looked around at the three other officers and knew that if he kept the camera, sooner or later they would demand of him that he ignore much more serious misdeeds of theirs. He did the math and it was staggering. For the price of this camera they would own him, body and soul.

Still, the lost and found office was a quarter turn around the circular stadium. He could say that he was going to turn it in and then simply hide it in his motorcycle bag. No one would know. But, naturally, sooner or later somebody would find out that he had a Hasselblad and the truth would be out.

As he stood there examining the camera, one of the other cops said that if he turned it in, the attendant who accepted it would keep it for himself – the real owner would never get it one way or the other. And then he thought, yes… and if the attendant who accepted it didn’t keep it, one of those officers could easily send a friend to claim it. They all had heard the seat number.

So he righteously announced that he was going to turn the camera in and started off on his cycle; but once out of sight of the other three officers, he again considered hiding the camera. If he didn’t want to be caught later with a Hasselblad he could always take the camera into the U.S. and hock it. Then he said he disgustedly thought, “Jesus… why don’t I just hold up a bank and be done with it.” And so he dismissed that idea… and by this time he was at the office.

Very officiously, he proceeded to document the transaction. He demanded proof of identity of the attendant and he recorded it in his log book. He obtained a receipt for the camera… and on both the original and the carbon, he made the attendant write the seat number and description of the owner and the details about the camera’s make and style. “In short,” he said, “I covered my ass.”

But then, as he drove back to the others, satisfied that he had done the honorable thing, it occurred to him that honor had had nothing to do with it. “I should have done my duty because it was my duty. I shouldn’t have even considered taking the camera. This is the new Mexico. I’m proud to be a Mexican police officer, and there I was ready, willing, and able to act like a ladron, a common thief. So I did the right thing… but for all the wrong reasons. Instead of being glad to do right, I was just afraid to do wrong.”

Yes, Hamlet, Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

Fortunately there is a point at which we cease having to confront ourselves with the advantages and disadvantages of doing our duty, a point at which we do what is right because to do otherwise is simply unthinkable. That point comes when we figure out the common sense of religion and when, armed with that information, we revalorize the people, places and things of our lives. We acquire this strength of character in stages.

In the beginning of our Dharma journey, our ability to make ethical decisions can be calibrated on a scale of 1 to 10. A “1” usually thinks it is incumbent upon him to express moral judgments about everything. He’s read somewhere that Buddhists are non-violent and so he’s firmly against capital punishment. Not while he was around could anybody drive a stake through Count Dracula’s heart. Let the world swarm with vampires. The Buddha said we must not harm living things, and the un-dead surely qualify.

And beginners also have trouble with discretion: when to keep their mouths shut and when to speak out. I remember years ago when laws against marijuana possession were way out of proportion with the nature of the offense and a young man had been caught with half a kilo in his possession – and for this faced ten years in prison. I was in the jury pool waiting for the first group of temporarily seated jurors to go through the Voir Dire process, when one young man in that group haughtily informed the prosecutor that he was a Zen Buddhist and, further, that he thought the laws against marijuana possession were unconstitutional. He was immediately excused and as he walked past me out of the courtroom, I remember thinking, “Kid, if you were seated in that defendant’s chair, you would have wanted somebody like you on the jury.” I later wondered if he had ever bothered to learn that the boy had been convicted. Yes, discretion is always the better part of valor.

In matters of morality, we are like people standing by the edge of a lake noticing a drowning man. Always our first impulse is to jump in to save him. This is the natural inclination of Dharma. It is in the second moment that we should calculate our ability to accomplish the rescue. If we are strong swimmers and if we’re prepared to handle the panic of a drowning man, we can dive in. If we’re not strong or if we are ignorant of the facts of panic – that panic and ethics don’t co-exist, that panic prevents constructive thought or genteel deference, that a drowning man will push down his rescuer to stand on top of him to get air – then if we go out there, we’ll drown with him. (Of course, he just might save himself at our our expense – the First Aid equivalent of turning state’s evidence.) Weak, untested resolve soon gets us in over our heads.

A friend wants a slightly illegal favor. We say, “What the hell…” and then get sucked into the vortex of his swirling troubles. Later we’ll lament our lack of foresight.

But instinctively, if we keep our priorities in mind, we’ll learn to evaluate morally dangerous situations. With habit, we do the right thing automatically. It comes with having a cerebral cortex.

But suppose, I asked the motorcycle cop, he had kept the camera and one of the other police officers had come upon a wallet that contained a lot of cash… or a stash of cocaine… and that officer wanted to keep it. Having already compromised his own integrity, how would he have responded? Or, if after he turned in the Hasselblad, one of the other three police officers had asked a friend to claim it. When he learned about it, what would he do? Would he sacrifice a friend for the sake of a camera’s worth of integrity?

He assured me that he had been unable to think about anything else since that wretched gringa dumped the problem on him.

But he, in effect, had already “pre-emptively” answered his query. I pointed out to him the obvious: he had turned in the camera because it was the right and honorable thing to do. He had taken the attendant’s name to deter him from becoming a thief. He had obtained a receipt to protect himself and the owner of the camera. He had carefully recorded the transaction in order to discourage the other police officers from attempting to exploit the opportunity to get the camera. “When you got back to the others,” I asked him, “did you tell them exactly what you had done?”

“Yes,” he said, a little amazed that he had been so judicious.

“Then what makes you think you did the right thing for all the wrong reasons?”

The Buddha’s Five Precepts are eminently practical. If we don’t cheat on our faithful wife, we’re not likely to get AIDS. If we don’t get drunk, we’re not likely to drive off a cliff while intoxicated. If we don’t lie, we not only don’t have to remember what we said, we’re not likely to be convicted of perjury. If we don’t steal, we’re probably not going to be shot as a burglar. And if we don’t hate, we won’t murder… and then have to get bankrupted by the legal system.

But he insisted that especially when our actions involve persons whose friendship or loyalty we value, the ethical abscissa remained… the line on which confusing and conflicting negative and positive desires existed. “How do we clarify the ambiguities and decide which is the correct course to follow?”

We use our brain and force ourselves to become aware, to consider every aspect of the problem, and if we’re smart we anticipate the worst. We do just what that police officer did. Cynically, we play the Devil’s Advocate. We remember Hsu Yun’s story of the man who stole food for his family and his friends in order to gain their love and admiration. Many ate well and often; but when he was caught, none came forward to make restitution or spend a single night in jail for him. Worse, they all condemned him for being a thief.

We take a child through a toy store, and everything he sees, he wants. We know that if we yield to his desires, we will harm him psychologically. We want to be generous parents, but how do we say “No”? This is a drowning man problem. If we are strong swimmers and can handle panic, we’ll jump in. We’ll stop and talk to the child and reach an accord. He can pick one toy not to exceed a specified price. Does he understand? Sometimes he’ll astonish us and respond, “Can I have two toys that add up to that amount?” “Yes,” we’ll say, envisioning, “My son, the Secretary of Commerce!” An incompetent Dharma swimmer would yank the kid’s arm, scream at him, make false promises, and eventually drown with him.

But if, after all our analysis and expectation, we are still confused, we can rely on our instinctive ability to supply intelligibility even to the most enigmatic presentation of conflicting choices.

Philologist Benjamin Whorf once examined the logically absurd expression in English, “The exception proves the rule.” What does it mean? It was once a clear statement: “to prove” used to mean “to put on trial” and the saying indicated that an exception tested the validity of a rule by demonstrating its merit or lack thereof. But then came a semantic change: “to prove” no longer meant “to put on trial” as it did when the expression originated. “To prove” now meant “to establish the existence of a fact.”

We could have dropped the expression as being meaningless; instead we examined it and discovered new sense in it. So that when we now say, “The exception proves the rule” we mean that were it not for the exception we wouldn’t be aware that a rule even existed. It would be as if every baby at birth measured exactly 14 inches in length. Who would bother to measure the length of babies? It would have been as superfluous a bit of information as stating that Mrs. Jones gave birth to a humanchild. But not until someone delivered a baby that was a startling 18 inches long would we have realized that this exceptional child was exceptional precisely because he did not follow what was, for us, the rule of 14 inches.

Just as we know what is meant by “The Buddha says, ‘Desire must a man destroy,'” the Buddha’s audience, assuming that he ever made such a silly statement, would also have instinctively known that the “negative” element was desire and that the imperative was not that desire ought to destroy a man, but rather that if a man didn’t destroy desire, it would likely destroy him.

The man of conscience considers his actions and acquires the strength of character and the skill to handle any thrashing temptation. But if, on occasion, he still feels confused, he knows that with effort he can find insight into deeper meanings, just as he can calibrate desire.

If he repeatedly scans for intuitive insight into compromising situations, he’ll find that it’s rather like learning music well enough to get a billing in that great theater in the sky. He will find clarity in ambiguity.

The confused tourist asks: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”

The wise New Yorker answers, “Practice! Practice!” 

Author: Ming Zhen Shakya

A Single Thread is not a blog. If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching, please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com

Shakespeare gives us a fine image of good intentions gone awry: to his own detriment, a fellow so eagerly tries to mount a horse that he jumps clear over it. Just so, Macbeth, pondering his plan to murder the king, worries about his “…vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other.”

In the cause of separating church from state, we seem to have o’erleaped ourselves or, to use a more homespun metaphor, to have thrown the baby out with the bath.

As a member of a minority religion, I’m hardly in a position to denigrate the value of religious freedom. It’s a sacred right and the more vigorously it is preserved, the better off we all are.

But religion and spirituality are not the same thing. In trying to protect the interests of the former, we have all too easily sacrificed the latter. In banning spiritual expression from our public schools, a great chunk of what was once an integral part of American heritage and culture has been placed in escrow or some sort of trust account to which a few executors have access and a privileged few may derive whatever moral benefits can accrue to those who gain at the sorry expense of others.

Recently several events brought the problem into focus and clarified, without resolution of course, at least some of the pertinent questions: What have we lost and why did we lose it and what will happen to us if we don’t recover it? Something is terribly wrong.

On July 20th, l969, during the Apollo 11 Mission, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first men to walk on the moon. We earthbound citizen taxpayers were well informed about the lunar excursion and could track the whole adventure. To discuss the details of this scientific achievement, we learned a new vocabulary: lunar orbit insertion burns; lunar module docking and undocking; PDI (powered descent initiation); and a whole litany of terms. We knew how the crewmen urinated and what they ate. This was knowledge in its finest hour and NASA wanted us to know everything… except… well… not the fact that Buzz Aldrin celebrated Holy Communion before he and Neil Armstrong went down that ladder. That we weren’t allowed to know. NASA didn’t think it prudent to inform us that something spiritual was happening on the moon, that men of science could also be spiritual. Of course, we did know that the astronauts were religious men. They had to be religious. We wouldn’t have sent atheists to the moon or even let them into an astronaut training program.

But just a minute here… the Miracle of Transubstantiation on the moon? Somebody partaking of consecrated American bread on the moon? No way. Six years before the lunar landing, the Supreme Court had declared its “no prayers in public schools” version of the Constitution’s separation of church and state and that separation extended even to government-sponsored events on the moon. So NASA drew that religious line in the lunar sand. Why weren’t we allowed to be told about this lunar Communion? Not until a quarter century after the fact did word leak out to puzzle those of us who heard it. Something was wrong here.

Then last September in Boulder City, Nevada, at Grace Church’s interfaith meditation session, Gard Jamison, while speaking about Christian meditation practices, tried to rustle up some audience participation – always a dangerous venture – and referred to the Sermon on the Mount. Hoping to elicit a little feedback, he quoted Jesus, saying, “‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall–‘” and then he waited expectantly for the assembly to shout out the answer as to what the pure in heart could expect, but nobody said anything. There was this great silence as Gard, eyebrows raised and mouth open, sat poised to hear the vault of sound break open and the precious answer issue forth… but all he heard was a faint echo of his own voice. It was an awkward moment and I turned to Richard Smith, the Pastor of Grace Church, who, as you might expect, was groaning with his hands over his face; and I quizzically whispered, “See God?” Could it possibly have been something else? Again I asked, “Don’t the pure in heart see God?” “Good grief,” said Richard in perfect agony, “My flock sits there dumbly while a Buddhist knows the Beatitudes.” Well, in all fairness to his flock, his flock was a pretty young flock and this Buddhist was a pretty old Buddhist who happened to have learned the Beatitudes from hearing the Bible read every morning in Public School in Philadelphia.

But we Americans are not allowed to hear the Bible inside our public institutions any more. There’s a line between church and state and that line is drawn between the citizenry and one of the most beautiful presentations of spiritual truth the world has ever known. Nearly an entire generation of Americans have never heard the Beatitudes because the only voices that ever uttered them have been silenced. Teachers can’t teach anything spiritual. And where shall this generation learn? In most American families, Mom and Dad both work and are understandably too exhausted or too hurried to begin each day with a thoughtful Bible reading. And on Sunday mornings, Jesus can speak from the Mount all he wants, but he’d better be calling NFL play action if he intends that his voice be heard in American homes.

Then, a few weeks ago, during an email discussion of the cosmic Dharmakaya with Chuan Zhi, the webmeister of our Nan Hua Zen Buddhist Page, I quoted Psalm 8: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Our webmeister, trained in nuclear physics, emailed me back, awestruck, “That was so beautiful! Where can I find more of those Psalms?” Now, Chuan Zhi is a profoundly spiritual man, a candidate for Buddhist ordination, a man who happens to appreciate the finer things of life: the saxophone of Stan Getz; the poetry of Rumi; Nilsson singing the Liebestod; but he grew up under the new interpretation of a separate church and state; and though he had been apprised of the secrets of atomic power – the boast of a proud nation, nobody had ever so much as hinted to him that it was possible to stun a man with the beauty of one of David’s songs. Something is wrong here.

Is this what the Founding Fathers intended?

As I write this, a neighbor is washing his car to the accompaniment of a boom-box that is dispensing Gangsta’ Rap by the decibel. In this lyrical exultation of free speech, we, the men, women, and children of the neighborhood, are permitted – indeed, we cannot avoid – the brute machismo celebrations of obscenity, violence, racism, drugs, the defiance of elected authority, and the abuse of women and families. Did the Founding Fathers intend that the State may not deprive us of the pleasure of hearing Gangsta’ Rap on our city streets and through our open windows while at the same time must protect us from hearing the Psalms of David in public institutions of knowledge and learning.? I may not have phrased it well, but it is a good question.

What are we really discussing by “knowledge” and “religion”? Certainly not wisdom and spirituality. No, wisdom is to knowledge what spirituality is to religion. They have a relationship but they are not kissing cousins.

To me, knowledge is information and shares this in common with religion: it is organized and disciplined; it is vocal and literal, it is something disseminated, broadcast, discussed. Knowledge wants to be known and seeks a forum’s setting just as a church, if nothing else, is an auditorium. What is a class to one is a congregation to the other.

While knowledge and religion are shared experiences, wisdom and spirituality are not. Nobody can participate in another person’s wisdom or intercept his experience of God. Wisdom is a quiet thing and so is spirituality. However much it’s sought, wisdom doesn’t seek. The wise don’t proselytize – that they are wise makes them know better – and the spiritual more than anything appreciate solitude. Wisdom looks inward and it looks deeply enough to see in itself the essence of all others. And that, of course, is what spirituality does. It retreats into the Void to see the ubiquity of God. Wisdom and spirituality are unitive. They see sameness. Knowledge and religion see and profit from differences.

Where Wisdom is recorded, the libraries of the world’s diverse religions keep the sacred books. And here we may perhaps find at least part of the source of the problem.

Who, ultimately, is responsible for the removal of sacred literature from the classroom? Were we acting to protect the atheist from being subjected to wisdom’s spiritual expression? Or, rather, when the issue first presented itself did we succumb to religious haggling and parochialism, masquerading bigotry as patriotism? Rather than risk having some doctrine of fairness applied, of having to expose our children to wisdom contained in other libraries, did we prefer to remove our separate versions of wisdom from the bargaining table, to secrete them in fortresses – the private schools and other institutions – where followers could flaunt their uniforms of exclusivity and privilege? Did we prefer to hoard our Truths rather than share them and accept a share of others?

If it is true that we have privatized Wisdom, is it not curious that though we insist upon our domestic separation of church and state we have no such requirement for those nations we consider allies? Americans who quite literally could be jailed for reading Proverbs before a public assembly of citizens may be asked to fight on foreign soil in support of governments which have, de facto if not de jure, state-sponsored religions and which, for that matter, may actually be intolerant of the religious views of those American servicemen and women who have come to defend them. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to foresee the possibility that the same fellow who commits a criminal act by reading Proverbs before an assembly of American school children would also commit a criminal act if, when drafted into military service, he declined to fight for the sake of any foreign government which mandated the reading of specific religious literature to its school children.

We are not so naive as to suppose that our government has separated church and state in any meaningful way. Religious institutions are tax exempt just as religious schools, in one way or another, are financially subsidized with state and federal revenues. While the children of the rich or of the righteous hear the scriptures and are nicely groomed for positions of authority – astronauts or politicians, the children of the poor and of the disaffected all too often become street-wise or discover the beauty of Truth by some chance utterance.

We all want the generation of citizens which follows us to have more opportunities than we had. Whether an illiterate man does or does not want his children to learn to read, we insist that his children shall at least attend school and be given the opportunity to learn.. That man, regardless of his desire, is unable to teach them; and we, therefore, supply by law the means of their education. But a religiously disaffected man, who is likewise unable or unwilling to impart traditional moral values, may raise, to use a Biblical quote, “a generation of vipers” for all anybody cares. We’ll simply build more prisons, a Constitutionally permissible solution.

No, we cannot be certain that the children who are denied access to scriptural wisdom will never occupy positions of authority. Power is no respecter of persons. We have had our fill of godless dictators just as we have also had a surfeit of religious fanatics whose fervor was never tempered by spirituality, or by anything resembling universal love and tolerance. Nothing in recent years has broadened the horizons of such persons. If anything, their vision, thanks to our turn towards separatism, has further narrowed to an on-edge knife blade’s. All proclaim One Virtuous Fatherly God but limit God’s legitimate offspring to the members of their particular society’s brotherhood.

What are the real ligatures of religion? Are they not those lines of Truth, those sutures, those Scriptures and Sutras and Suras that bind us to God? Those Sacred Lines of Thought which infuse knowledge with wisdom, which impart conscience to science, which inform fact with meaning and give significance to event? And do they not also tie us to the mystery of life with awe and reverence? For two hundred years the Republic flourished, enriched by freely stated spiritual expressions. Where was the problem that required judicial redress? The definition of prayer could perhaps have been clarified, but the system wasn’t broke and it didn’t need fixing. In repairing what was not broken, in tinkering with the freedom of expression, the Court created an instrument which no longer operates with any common sense. Gangsta’ Rap versus the Beatitudes… and Gangsta’ Rap wins? Is the quality of any American’s life improved by this?

Perhaps when public “prayer” was first suppressed we began to flatten the moral landscape, the topography of divine providence and individual responsibility. We no longer seem to walk resignedly through the Valley of Death or to climb the Path of Righteousness to reach self-discipline’s heavenly summit. We seem instead increasingly to be mired in a swamp of torts and government programs which compensate the consequence of immoral or self-indulgent behavior. Nobody is responsible for his own choices and mistakes; and were it not for the error of others, we should all live a thousand sybaritic years.

I recall no instance in a public classroom when a teacher used the Bible in an attempt to further his own religious agenda. Teachers, the educated among us who serve all too often as surrogate parents, were, in my recollection, invariably circumspect in their Biblical selections. Perhaps a professional pride made them respect their roles as being not merely purveyors of knowledge but as instruments of wisdom. I, for one, miss hearing that I could lift up my eyes unto the hills to find some needed strength and being reminded that though I spoke with the eloquence of angels if I didn’t have love in my heart, I might as well shut up.

And so we silence the voice of Wisdom; and many there are who, strangers to its resonance, will one day mediate the great issues of science and law, of genetic engineering and organ transplantation, of zoological experimentation, of weaponry, of interplanetary decorum, of privacy, of worldwide electronic communication, of censorship, of ethics, fairness, and political responsibility, and who will supply their generation with a definition of human decency.

The fourth event that led me to consider this problem was reading a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, the Pole who recently won the Nobel Prize in literature. Szymborska, too, seems to have been considering the problem of knowledge without wisdom. She, too, came of age when Communism had succeeded, admirably in its terms, not only in separating church from state but in replacing church with state and, of course, in eradicating spirituality altogether from its Manifesto of political ideology.

Meaning and Significance, Reverence and Awe were sent into exile, leaving Knowledge behind, alone, grim, and quite bewildered.

Her poem “Going Home” was sent to me by a thoughtful friend, Father Mark Serna, a Benedictine Abbot who knew how troubled I had been about NASA’s censoring the news of Buzz Aldrin’s lunar Communion.

I’ll leave you with Szymborska’s poem which has been translated by Baranczak and Cavanagh:

GOING HOME

He came home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
Pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He’s nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists just as he did inside his mother’s womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he’ll give a lecture
on homeostasis in megagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.

 

Author: Ming Zhen Shakya

A Single Thread is not a blog. If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching, please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com

Originally published in 1996 titled, A NOBEL PRIZE, LUNAR COMMUNION,
THE BEATITUDES AND A SONG OF DAVID’S

Belief, being as contagious as a virus and often just as deadly, can put a teacher in the uncomfortable position of being both its vector and its cure.

I wish imparting a truth were more like planting a specific seed into the fertile field of someone’s mind, where the seed would germinate and grow… or not. And if it did grow, we’d all know exactly what kind of plant it would turn out to be: A zinnia or a tomato seedling would break through the soil and let us happily watch the natural progression of flower and fruit.

But often something unexpected happens. We think we’ve planted one kind of seed, then to our horror we wake one morning to find the field covered with a wild growth – a plush but unproductive kudzu has choked out the mind’s capacity to reason. It’s not easy to undo the damage. Kudzu does not lend itself to harvester or plow. Only herbicide or deadly frost tames it.

And so it happens that people who seemed calm and rational on Monday, when we first introduced a new technique or fact to them, have, by Friday, become fanatical converts, the slaves of silly or bizarre notions that owe their genesis to something we have said but that bear no relationship to anything we intended. Something has gone wrong. Plague or smothering vine… it’s shocking to see the speed at which disaster moves.

We cannot talk of dangerous beliefs without the referent specters of Jonestown, Aum Shinrikyo and, most recently, of Heaven’s Gate, to name but a few of the macabre apparitions our media sources have produced – those visions of death that came upon us, as the tombstones used to say, “sudden and awful.” In these images we see belief in its wildest, most virulent form.

How easily rampant fantasies obscure the signposts of logical direction! But we must be careful when we shake our heads in wonderment. All too often, when considering these tragedies of obsessional faith, we “safe” observers easily succumb to dangerous beliefs ourselves.

Our first mistake comes with the territory. It inheres in the separation of observer and observed. We examine whole organizations as if they were specimens in a Petri dish or zoo, creatures that have been divorced from the humanity that the rest of us still enjoy.

If possible, we find the story of their plight as funny-haha as we find it funny-strange. The size, rhetoric and industry of Jim Jones’ penis presents an interesting concept in crowd control. If only we didn’t have to see those thousand bodies bloating in the equatorial sun.

And Shoko Asahara, fright-wigged and pudgy faced, claiming to be a reincarnated Buddha… or was it Vishnu?.. while stockpiling all that lethal Sarin! Hilarious except when we recall those subway victims choking to death on poisoned gas.

As yet (God Help Us) there’s been no picture of uncovered corpse nor discovery of “other” victims to spoil our appreciation of Heaven’s Gate. All those intelligent, educated people castrating themselves and playing the slots in Vegas while they waited for a comet- trailing spaceship to come and pick them up? As Oscar Wilde said upon reading Dickens’ lugubrious account of the death of Little Nell, “a person would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.”

When we get over the shock and the consternation and, yes, the laughter, we get serious and constructive and strive to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible. Given our “they and we” vantage point, we’re limited in our response. We have to content ourselves with taxonomic notice, believing that merely by designating an organism as “a cult”, we have isolated it in some sort of biohazard lab. It won’t drift out the window or creep under the door. We’ve kept the Tribbles out of the triticale. Our second mistake is to confuse the very nature of our confusion. Has anyone ever written about cults without citing a dictionary definition before proceeding to speak authoritatively on the subject? Nope. We have to get the label right because, ultimately, that’s what we’re going to discuss. Naturally, someone will point out that according to this or that strict definition Christianity was once a cult or that Buddhism also was one or still is, depending, of course, on the speaker’s liberality. We construct and deconstruct; propose thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; declaim on the topics of drastic personality change, altered states of consciousness, brainwashing, hypnosis, and informational manipulations.

And so we substitute psychspeak for science and the next thing we know we hear some fool classify Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Marshall Applewhite with Jesus of Nazareth and Siddhartha Gautama. Well, weren’t they all cult leaders?

Again and again we learn of cults and never do we move one lesson closer to the problem. Experts will write books for no other purpose than to discuss and criticize other experts. Art, however, will succeed where scholarship fails. We’ll get our Manchurian Candidate and our Clockwork Orange.

OK. We may not know how to define it, but we know it when we see it. It’s a shared irrational belief. Like carrying a rabbit’s foot? Well, no, that’s just a lucky charm. What about sacred relics, miraculous medals, fetishes, talismans? Nirvana? The Resurrection? Ah… Let’s get back to psychspeak.

Why don’t we just say what’s true: A cult is a collection of individual believers whose shared creed we cannot understand, just as an epidemic is a collection of individual victims whose shared disease we could not prevent. And yes, just as we don’t have an epidemic of wellness, we don’t have benign cults. (When they’re benign they’re just clubs.) The operative word is “individual”. A cult can be a unit of one.

And if the individual’s self-destruction is wrought by drugs, or alcohol, or gambling fever or by any of the familiar forms of desperation, what ultimately is the difference? In every plague, single persons suffer and are either saved or lost. Heaven’s Gate was not mass murder, it was mass suicide, the ultimate destruction of self..

So we can ignore the psychspeak. Jargon and cant will not help us. Ultimately, “cult” is rooted in belief, dangerous belief, and the problem is religious not academic. Those of us who are ordained in ministries of salvation know that the very act of being saved implies the presence of danger. We cannot ignore that precarious element which is contained in every technique and scripture of salvation we teach. A desperate soul is not lucid by definition. If he could think clearly, he would not need our help.

Every teacher can cite multiple examples of religious belief gone awry. (This, too, comes with the territory.) I’d like to relate two instances of my own experience which I hope will demonstrate that we don’t need to look to the horizon to identify the lunatic fringe of dangerous beliefs. All our lawns and landscapes are vulnerable. When the season’s right, the kudzu grows.

She was a middle class matron, attractive, educated, with a trim athletic figure and enough savvy to meet the challenge of greying hair, not by dying the white hair dark, but by bleaching the dark hair light, ash blonde, so that she successfully created the image of a younger, vibrant woman – which she was not.

She was a grandmother who found herself at fifty-one suffering from the vagaries of boredom, disappointment, a petrified husband, and two grown children who had become as emotionally remote as they were geographically distant. To combat the loneliness and rejection, she did what society expected: she followed the usual regimen of hobbies.

After failing at music and orchid raising, she tried her hand at art – a subject which had always interested her – and produced landscapes of bold stroke and unusual aspect according to gallery owners who nevertheless declined to exhibit her work; but then, at the height of her creative enthusiasm, she overheard two of her closest friends ridicule her talent as “hopelessly pedestrian” while they jokingly debated the best place in the garage to hang the gaudy artifacts she had bestowed upon them in lieu of real gifts.

Chagrined, she put away her brushes and retreated into herself and evidently finding nothing there, she decided to seek adventure, to stuff herself with the non-pedestrian substance of treks through exotic locales. She went to India.

There, near the end of her excursion, on a whim, she accepted a two-week volunteer post as conversational English teacher in a mountain village school. In the course of these two weeks she fell madly in love with a teacher’s aide who was thirty years younger than she. He did not ridicule her, in bed or out. He called her a goddess and kissed her hand in public; and she knew that he was sincere because she had overheard him tell his friends that she had initiated him into the mysteries of Tantra. Even his family was impressed, his father dutifully curbing his excitement lest he be “like the old fellow in Ray’s Deviwho saw Kali where he ought not to have looked.” Yes, she was a Yogini of no small accomplishments. Her Beloved had assured her of this, even as he praised Shiva for having helped him to preserve his virginity until that first glorious night with her.

He taught her how to wear a sari and she outfitted him in tasteful suits and sportswear; and for the final week of her visit they traveled, inseparable, exploring the Himalayan foothills and the delirium of flesh. One curious thing his sweet fondling discovered was a small lump in her breast.

She returned home, exultant in what she claimed was her first knowledge of true sexual love; and in exercise of solemn duty to those who needed some incentive, conveyed this information in dozens of letters and articles which she submitted to a variety of seniors’ publications. She also immersed herself in Tantric lore by which means she hoped to raise her introduction to divinity at least to an intermediate level. She had a new life and a new identity and she lived for no other purpose than to return to her Beloved and to her destiny in India.

From a flurry of clandestine love letters, she fashioned an ostensibly solid plan: she told her family that she would be returning to India simply to invest in a business property there, an altruistic venture.

But to her circle of fastidious friends, whom she delighted in shocking with lurid details, she revealed that she and her consort intended to purchase an old Tudor-style Inn they had visited in their travels. She had thought the place charming and he had recently discovered that it was for sale. They would gradually convert the place into an ashram, over which she would, of course, preside. He insisted that her letters were so beautifully written that her teachings would be internationally salable; and until such time as the world harkened to her revelations, the Inn’s restaurant and guest rooms would sustain them financially. He did not think it wise, and she agreed, to let the seller know that she was interested. The prospect of a ‘rich’ American buyer would surely cause the price to be inflated. He would deal with the real estate agent in the guise of being his father’s representative.

She applauded his cleverness. It reassured her as she laid plans to gather the money required for her to complete her apotheosis and for him to acquire title to her shrine.

Meanwhile, there was this nasty little problem of the lump. Her friends pressured her to consult a physician, issuing the additional warning that her medical insurance would probably not be valid in India, but still she demurred. Finally, her husband, apprised by the husband of one of her friends, inquired about the problem; and, fearing further betrayal of confidence, she relented and submitted to diagnostic evaluation. And so, in May, as the rainy season commenced in India, she was informed that she had breast cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy, strenuously prescribed, were just as strenuously declined. In September she had a delicious rendezvous planned in Calcutta and she did not intend to keep it scarred and bald.

Instead, she recalled a talk I had given about Zen meditation in which I had referred to the incredible power of meditation to change one’s life, a power that I said was difficult to obtain. Was she not a Yogini of no small accomplishments? She called me and asked if I taught meditation. I said no, that I taught Buddhism of which meditation was a part. I asked if she was interested in Buddhism and she replied, with a certain hauteur, “No, not in the least.” Then, stiffly, she asked if I knew anything about “left hand” (sexual) Tantric meditation forms. Our conversation having taken a pointless, disagreeable turn, I said that I was sorry I could not help her and explained that I had been ordained in a celibate, “right hand” Path. I recall the arrogance in her voice as she responded, “Pity…” and hung up.

I finally met her for the first time when she called again in August and came to my home for tea and a discussion of a stubborn problem she was having, the full extent of which she would not, unfortunately, learn until a few more weeks had passed.

She complained that she was being victimized by people who pretended to be what they were not. They had said that they were knowledgeable in the methods of meditation but they were either fools or knaves – incompetents or lying cheats. Everyone had assured her meditation was a simple matter; but though she had spent much money on books, hypnotists, on the purchase of a mantra, on spiritual therapists, on seminars, on a lava lamp and crystal ball, she still could not enter the meditative state.

I was dazzled by the spectrum and the zeal with which she had traversed it. But why was she so motivated? Almost with annoyance that I had not intuited the problem, she blurted out the distressing diagnosis and then continued to enumerate the methods she had tried.

I had been startled and as the situation became clear to me, her efforts took on a bizarre, ludicrous character. She had tried laughter therapy but the lump’s increasing size tended to deflate such risibility as the amusement offered. And every morning she spent half an hour visualizing microscopic “good” white-cell knights jousting in the tumorous lists of her breast with many “nasty” cancer-cell knights. She did not know why they weren’t performing at tournament level and flat-out asked me what she was doing wrong. I gulped. “Everything,” I said.

“Meditation,” I explained, “is not something you can learn the way you can learn to tango. It is difficult and all the determination in the world doesn’t guarantee results. It requires a certain faith and peace of mind and humility.” I stressed humility again and then concluded, “Meditation, like prayer, is a devotional exercise. Nobody, especially someone who has no spiritual ‘history’, can demand a miracle or purchase instruction in Divine Union.” Her attitude and her approach were wrong. I agreed that meditation could be a beneficial adjunct to conventional therapy, but I insisted that it should never be used to replace it. “There may be miracle cures associated with meditation but no one should count on the occurrence of a miracle.” I urged her to return as quickly as possible to her physicians, to seek other opinions if that would satisfy her, and then, when she was in more responsible hands than self-help, alternative-cure quacks, I’d gladly give her religious manuals and whatever technical help I could with meditation.

Disdainfully, she rejected my advice. I stood up, expressing regret that I couldn’t be of more help. “Perhaps,” she said, “if you understood why I can’t submit to surgery, you’d understand.” I sat down again and listened to her pathetic tale of love and adventure.

Then she asked if I had ever heard that a priest must be without blemish. I said that I had and recounted a sad event in my own ordination in China: a woman whose hand had been severed in an industrial accident was not permitted to become a priest because, among other reasons, she could not perform sacred hand gestures, mudras being an indispensable element in Buddhist ritual.

Then she said with astonishing sincerity and simplicity, “Now if you, an ordinary priest, cannot be with blemish, how can I, a Yogini, consent to be marred? The law is stated,” she offered for my edification, “in Leviticus, Chapter 21.” I’m not often at a loss for words; but I was stunned into silence that day. I muttered that I’d check the Bible and offered to speak with her again at some future time. I gave her a copy of some pranayama instructions I had written and again urged her to consult her physicians. She studied the paper I had handed her “like a duchess looking at bugs,” as Tarkington would say. It was insultingly elementary and she folded it in half and then in quarters and dropped it into her purse.

The next time she visited me she came fortified with an old batch of spurious arguments:

“Doctors lie, you know.”

— “Then why did you believe them when they told you you had cancer?”

“Stress causes cancer and meditation relieves stress. Relieve the stress and you relieve the cancer.”

— “Pediatric wards are filled with babies who got cancer without having to worry about mortgage payments or cheating spouses. Stress may weaken the immune system and contribute to the disease process, but a cancer is not dependent upon stress to maintain itself.”

“Countless people have been cured of cancer by diet and meditation.”

— ”If diet and meditation could cure cancer, countless saints… Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramakrishna, and a host of others, including many vegetarian Zen masters, who were all adepts at meditation, would not have succumbed to cancer. But they did, and they had even become diseased despite their extraordinarily stress-free lives.”

At several different seminars she personally had talked to people who had been cured of serious disease by meditation. “Were they liars?” she asked.

— “I discount neither the placebo effect nor the body’s ability to cure itself. I also know that imaginary treatments can cure imaginary illnesses.”

“What about all the books out there… testimonials written by patients who were cured with alternative-medicine methods?”

— “Fifty cents worth of bullshit for every nickel’s worth of truth,” I said, adding, “The failures don’t get published. They’re dead.” I gave up trying to convince her.

A week later she called again, frantic and violently angry. A few of the friends to whom she had so lavishly bragged about her love affair had betrayed her to her husband and he had surreptitiously emptied their joint bank accounts and had canceled her credit cards. Worse, he was in possession of many love letters which she had insouciantly kept in a lingerie drawer. She cautioned me not to nag her about medical treatment, adultery, or improbable love affairs. “I just wanted you to know that nothing is going to deter me. Without love, there is no life. I have been given love and I intend to live.”

She wrote to her beloved about this new test of their commitment to each other, sold some expensive jewelry and returned to India in time for her appointment.

But despite the sacrality of their lovemaking, she detected a certain secular uneasiness in his manner. Something was troubling him and it couldn’t have had anything to do with money, as her friends would later insist, because he was no more nor less troubled before or after she gave him eight thousand dollars towards the downpayment on the Inn. Yes, he had expected more, but until they gathered the necessary sum, he would resign himself to accepting the delay which, on the other hand, would give them more time to enjoy each other without the distractions of pecuniary considerations. Had she no other assets to pledge? Yes, but to get them she would have to get divorced, a complicated procedure.

He continued to brood until, walking along the beach, after she had implored him to confess the cause of his dark mood, he proposed marriage to her, or rather demanded it. She had to marry him, he said, because only then would he have exclusive rights to her. It had been disturbing to him to think that God had doubtlessly intended that she lead other men to enlightenment as she had led him. He knew he had a duty to serve her and to share her, but – God forgive him – he could not bear to do this duty. She loved him all the more for this weakness.

Radiant and sanguine in certainty, she returned home to attend to the legal details of divorce and the division of property and, incidentally, to a new and irritating little bulge in her armpit.

Several weeks later, she visited me again.

She was euphoric and when I commented on the expansiveness of her mood, she told me that she thrived on adversity. She was triumphant. Let her husband accuse her and cancel her credit cards. What was money, anyway? Let her children side with her husband and threaten to have her committed. She had never been so sane as she was now! Besides, she noted sardonically, they would never commit her – it would cost too much money and money was all they were really interested in. Thank God she had already sold her jewelry! Let her friends desert her. Good riddance to jealous fools. She would prevail. She was surrounded by ugly people who had shown her the ugliness of her former existence. How lucky she was to be set against them. Yes, God had seen fit to bless her with adversity. She was stronger for it.

It was a Saint Crispin’s day speech and I got the feeling that she was trying to rally my help in what might reasonably be considered a hopeless cause. It was an awkward moment. I asked why she had come to me. She stared blankly into space, not knowing the answer. I asked again, and suddenly she began to cry. She had not heard from her young lover since her return from India. He had not answered any of her letters. She had called the school in which she had taught and learned that he no longer lived in the village. His family said they didn’t know where he was. She had called the Inn and learned that months earlier it had been sold to a Swiss couple. Where could he have gone? Had her husband harmed him?

A smug, impervious certainty enveloped her mind, and reason could not penetrate it. I begged her to reconcile with her family and to seek medical help. She looked at me as though I were mad. “One poison in my body is enough. You want to put a second one into my system!” We were back to the old arguments against chemotherapy and surgery.

By Christmas, she was dead. To my knowledge she never heard from her Beloved again. But right until the end she engaged spiritual consultants to come to her bedside to effect telepathic communication with him and, of course, to teach her how to meditate. With fluids dripping into her, with her body skeletal and wracked with pain, with eyes so glazed that she could barely distinguish light from dark, she received them. Her husband paid them with his personal check.