Evening thoughts while sipping bourbon

It's a rare moment when I find that some of my disparate but related thoughts come together into a coherent understanding of an idea or aspect of life. I've been reading articles on the relationship between images and text. The first was a chapter from Roland Barthe's Image-Music-Text, and the second, which I've only just begun, a chapter from Norman Bryson's Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime. Bryson's subject is religious images and the way in which they are determined by the words to which they refer. At least for the moment (as I haven't finished the article), he asserts that religious images lack independance. I'm not sure that any image really ever has independance, but I know what he's getting at and there's no need to nit pick, not yet at least. But all of this is only of tangential relation to what I started off writing about. While reading Bryson's article, at some point after the first paragraph, I drifted off into thought.

My thoughts jumped back to about seven years ago when I was sixteen. I have a very distinct recollection of a conversation in a kitchen with a man about thirty-five years my senior. It was not so much a conversation as it was an exchange of information and opinion—there was no rapport established. Somehow old man came to know that I was buddhist (I may have mentioned it, though I'm not sure) and he responded something like this, "You know, when I was in Laos (or Vietnam, or...insert some south east Asian country), I encountered a lot of buddhist monks. They weren't very good people. I remember they used to just show up at people's houses and expect to be fed. The people hardly had enough to eat themselves, and the monks would just sort of extort food out of them by a tacit appeal to religious duty." I've made the remarks more explicit. For example, I don't think old man actually said "they weren't very good people", but I'm quite sure that's what was being communicated. I don't recall how I responded (I think I said little at all), but I've been thinking about it ever since, albeit not very often. Yes, I have been carrying this with me for seven years, but I've done so with good reason. Ill-conceived though it may have been, the criticism was not unfounded. At the level of denotation, it was perfectly valid, but it's connotation that buddhism is bankrupt and its followers silly was not, and it struck not only at my own beliefs—which were but nascent at the time—but at my family as well. Now, my own beliefs are a fickle thing. I will proclaim non-attachment, but in truth, I frequently experience an attack on my beliefs as on attack on me, because—understanding "beliefs" in the broadest possible sense—I am nothing other than the aggregate of my beliefs . "I" is simply the signifier to which the group of signs (or signifieds, depending how you want to think about this) that make up "me" is attached. Now I really can't remember what I was going to write about. Oh yeah, so, what have I finally, after seven years, decided might be the proper response?

People are not saved by religion, but by religious practice. Why, because at the heart of most religious practice (of all that I am aware) is some kind of discipline. Religious belief is important because it is what makes the practice of this disicpline enjoyable. Without belief, the practices of religion are simply an empty set of rules (which they may be anyways, but that's a different discussion), an orthodoxy that is as foreign and perhaps non-sensical as it is old. But religious practice—or discipline—coupled with genuine belief engenders a generally happy and productive life. Simple really, but important. It is really the discipline part that I think important. Because if the decline of the American empire is anything, it is the decline of discipline (I sound remarkably like Cato here). I'm going to keep talking about this, because, well, I will.

Some may remember a post I made a long while back about an essay competition for which entrants were to compose a piece on the "Power of Purpose". I ridiculed the idea at the time. The slogan still brings to mind one of my father's favourite responses, "gag me with a spoon". But it has a kernel of truth, which is to say it came out of a genuine insight into the nature of human experience. The power of purpose is precisely the power of discipline [at least in my world]. Purpose is nothing other than a clear understanding of and belief in what one is doing [I'm not sure about the belief part]. Maintaining this view, and the actions it requires (the hypothetical imperatives), is discipline. In this sense, discipline need not be religious. One could find such an approach to life and human experience in other ways. Science is an obvious example. Really, any sort of analytic self-reflexion that yields a sense of ideals, standards, beliefs, what have you, is probably what's important.

So why did this take me seven years? Well, it took me a long time to realise the discipline part. I could have said the part about religious practice seven years ago, but it wouldn't have meant all that much. I had yet to grasp the ngedong (tib. for, roughly "meaning beyond words" or "ultimate wisdom") of religious practice. I'm not saying I fully understand it now, but I've some inkling of insight that wasn't there before.

One last thought: "On belief" Strickly speaking, at an absolute level (as opposed relative) a buddhist of my type (some buddhists believe in mind, and I assume there are others who believe in other things) does not believe in anything, precisely because to believe is to make that thingexist, to enter into an artificial subject/object relationship. I'm inclined to say that belief is a useful tool, but ultimately empty....now I'm feeling confused again.