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About once every two years or so, I have a bit of a Tolkien splurge, in which I read the books (including commentaries), watch the (extended special-edition) films and generally experience a sort of nerd-nirvana over the space of a few days. I started reading the Silmarillion this morning, effectively the King James Bible for Elves, and it struck me that Tolkien had dreamed up a creation myth that was, in many ways, more coherent and sensible than the equivalents of modern religions.
For those that haven’t delved into the Silmarillion (it’s the least read of Tolkien’s three major works), the basic myth goes like this: Before the beginning of Time, Iluvatar, a sort of loose Yahweh-analogue, brings forth from his mind a host of heavenly beings called the Ainur. Being somewhat bored with the silence and nothingness of the Void in which the find themselves, the Ainur have a bit of a sing-song, with Iluvatar as the divine conductor, and from this delightful chorale they form Time, Space and the World. Unfortunately, one of the Ainur, Melkor by name, is a bit on the arrogant side, and tries to weave his own themes into the music. He’s either tone-deaf or a fan of John Cage, since his tunes are atonal and dissonant, and they cause the existence of fire and ice and hardship and suffering and general bad stuff. Iluvatar, smug bugger that he is, claims that all this will help emphasise the glory of creation, and goes on to point out how pretty snowflakes are, which wouldn’t have existed without Melkor’s icy cold. Fair point, but I imagine few of the Elves who later died from hypothermia during the icy crossing of Helcaraxe would have thought, as they gasped out their last breaths on the ice, “Blimey, these snowflakes are pretty…” It’s a novel solution to the Problem of Evil, which clearly puzzled Elven as well as human philosophers, but still not a terribly satisfactory one. But I digress. Having sung Middle-Earth into existence, a bunch of the Ainur go to live there – including Melkor – and make up a sort of Olympian-style pantheon; there’s a god of the air, a sea-god, a fertility goddess, a god of death and so on. This pantheon then have a massive ruck with Melkor, causing all manner of property damage and resulting in landscape features such as mountains and steppes, before finally capturing him and retreating to the mythic island of Valinor. When the Elves eventually turn up, the earthbound Ainur (now known as the Valar) coax most of them to come and live in Valinor, where they live in bliss – at least until the evidently-rather-short-sighted Valar decide to let Melkor out again, which results in all sorts of disastrous shenanigans…
As a creation myth goes, it’s a pretty good one. It covers the age-old Problem of Evil (falling back on the adversarial Satan figure as the principal cause of suffering, but also side-stepping the issue slightly by making Iluvatar a hands-off, deist sort of god), it establishes why certain landscape features exists (mountains were thrown up during the battle with Melkor, the Isle of Balar is the remnant of a larger island which the Valar snapped off to use as a transport to Valinor) and it establishes causes for natural phenomena (storms at sea are the result of Osse being a capricious sea-god, the Sun and Moon are the last remaining flowers of the Two Trees, carried by two of the Ainur). Not only that, but thanks to the immortality of the Elves, many of the characters mentioned are still alive in the time of the Lord of the Rings narrative (Galadriel, played with supernatural elegance by Cate Blanchett in the films, lived in Valinor and hung out with the Valar in her early days), thus providing eyewitness accounts of the gods and their doings. As with many fictional worlds with their own deities, atheism is non-existent, being a foolish position in light of the obvious existence of gods and angels. Frodo, hanging out with Gandalf, might not have suspected that the beardy-weirdy with the pointy hat was actually a Maiar (a sort of Ainur-lite spirit thing), but the guy clearly had abilities which were not to be accounted for by natural science. As for nasty Sauron, how many natural creatures manifest as a giant fiery eyeball? The necessary adjustments to biology alone beggar belief.
For Frodo and company, religious belief was not necessarily central to their lives (neither Iluvatar nor the Valar demanded adherence to any particular system of ritual, nor did they even require faith), but evidence of the gods was available from any sufficiently ancient Elf, or by wandering into Mordor and throwing rocks at the big flaming eye-on-a-stick. Not so in the real world, where the only evidence for God is a book that claims to tell the story of the deity’s deeds in the ancient past. Given that the Silmarillion is exactly the same thing, why are we not building temples to Iluvatar and his merry band of all-singing, all-dancing Ainur?
It is commonly believed that when Darwin published On The Origin Of Species in 1859, there was a tremendous religious outcry. In actual fact, notwithstanding Robert FitzRoy’s embarrassing outburst at the British Association For The Advancement of Science, there was little immediate opposition to the idea of evolution by natural selection, at least from religious circles. A far greater hullabaloo was generated by a book published the following year, which has now been largely forgotten – Essays And Reviews, by a coalition of seven liberal clergymen (including the soon-to-be Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, and Master of Balliol College Benjamin Jowett), caused a furore on its publication, which resulted in two of its authors being indicted for heresy and an official synodical condemnation from the Church of England. It outsold On The Origin Of Species by a huge margin, selling more copies in two years than Darwin managed in two decades, yet today is almost unheard of. So what was all the fuss about?
For about a hundred years prior to Essays And Reviews, scholars had been tentatively applying the ideas of what was to become known as “Higher Criticism” to the Bible. Higher Criticism is a form of textual analysis which seeks to place a text in a particular socio-historic context, by comparing it to other literature of a similar period and by cross-referencing with the fields of geology and archaeology. It was generally considered a purely scholastic discipline, and was virtually unheard of outside academia, but Essays And Reviews blew that idea completely out of the water by making the methods and conclusions of Higher Criticism available to the lay public for the first time. Central to the book was the essay by Benjamin Jowett entitled “On The Interpretation Of Scripture”, which argued strongly for a position viewing Genesis as myth, the Gospels as propaganda and Paul’s use of Jewish Scriptures as highly selective. None of these concepts appears novel to us today, of course – indeed, virtually all Biblical scholars working in modern academic circles today see Jowett’s views as entirely correct – but in the 1860s, this was heresy of the first order. The knives came out, in the form of pamphlets, petitions, letters to the national press, threats, court injunctions and appeals to the Privy Council. Darwin joined others in defending the “Seven Against Christ”, as their detractors called them, and commended Essays And Reviews for trying to “establish religious teachings on a firmer and broader foundation.”
The main opponent of the essayists was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, best known today as a fierce critic of – you guessed it – On The Origin Of Species. It was he who famously asked Thomas Huxley if he was descended from an ape through his grandfather or his grandmother. Wilberforce first attacked Essays And Reviews through an article in The Quarterly Review, and followed with an open letter in The Times, but as is so often the case, it was the vigorous criticism and resultant controversy which propelled the book up the bestseller lists. Wilberforce’s assaults thus served to push the ideas of Higher Criticism still further into the public eye. Another inadvertent publicist was the novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward, who wrote her novel Robert Ellsmere as a direct response to the Essays And Reviews scandal. In the book, the titular character undergoes a crisis of faith brought on by the study of Higher Criticism, and goes from a Bible-believing rector to an agnostic libertarian.
It’s quite amusing that, a century and a half later, Biblical literalists are still huffing and puffing over Darwin’s straightforward solution to evolution, whilst the insidious ideas of Jowett et al are quietly ignored. In many ways, Essays And Reviews was a far more damning indictment of literalism than natural selection could ever be, demonstrating as it did that the Bible, far from being the divinely inspired Word of God, is in fact a collection of jumbled, contradictory and very human writing. It’s also interesting to consider, in the light of archaeological finds during the last twenty-five years or so, that Higher Criticism is enjoying something of a renaissance. Now that archaeology has started to disprove large sections of the Old Testament Histories, we need more than ever to examine the Bible with regards to its true origins, and understand it in the same way that we understand other works of the same period. To do so is the only honest, respectful and realistic way to approach this strange and divisive book.
I’ve just been excoriating mantisdave on Proud Atheists for this comment, in which he claims:
“I looked up this passage in the ‘message’ translation of the Bible (which in my opinion is the most accurate translation from the original texts into english.. unlike King James that has many mistakes in the translation).”
Now, I’ll grant that there are some problems with the KJV. Notwithstanding the crazies who think that it’s the “only” truly inspired Word of God, and that all other versions, including the original texts, are fallacious, the King James is an imperfect translation. Commissioned as it was for the Church of England, it is doctrinally skewed towards Anglicanism, and it relies entirely upon the Masoretic Text for it’s version of the OT – and a single, arguably inaccurate version of the Masorah at that (the translators worked from the text of the tongue-twistingly-titled Jacob ben Hayyim ben Isaac ibn Adonijah, which has been the subject of debate ever since he put it together). For the NT, the KJV used the Textus Receptus of Erasmus, which is again of dubious quality (it is often thought that Erasmus created the Greek Textus only to show off the superiority of his Latin Vulgate New Testament). Compounding these issues is the fact that the KJV is written in the English of 1611 (its year of publication), which, with all its “theeing” and “thouing”, can be pretty incomprehensible to us modern bods.
mantisdave’s choice of The Message as “the most accurate translation” actually made me snort coffee through my nose, though. Alright, he does quantify that it’s only his opinion, but if I opine that the Lambrini Bianco in my local offie’s bargain bin is superior to a 1787 Chateau Lafite-Rothschilde, that just indicates that I know fuck-all about wine.
The Message was a project by Presbyterian pastor Eugene H. Peterson, and is an attempt to “bring the Bible to life” for a modern generation by paraphrasing it into contemporary language. The problem with this is threefold. Firstly, it results in inaccuracies in translation – the example in mantisdave’s Proud Atheists comment is the difference between The Message’s: “…clear them out of here. I don’t want to see their faces around here again” and the precisely translated: “kill them in front of me.” That’s a major change!
Secondly, it results in severe doctrinal bias – much more so than in the King James Version. Consider the KJY version of John 3:5-6:
“Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God”
Then compare with The Message:
“Jesus said, “You’re not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation—the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life—it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom.”
Peterson has reworded the original (which is closer to the KJV passage) to reflect his particular personal interpretation of the lines. In doing so, he completely removes the necessity for water-baptism – a fundamental tenet of the Baptist Church. Because Eugene H. Peterson doesn’t believe in baptism by water, now, neither does Jesus, and screw the Baptists who thought that Jesus said otherwise.
Finally, The Message suffers from the rapid progress of modern colloquial English. Even though it was only published seven years ago, its language already seems dated in 2009. It reads like your Dad’s attempts to relate to your mates – out-of-touch, uncool and really a bit embarrassing. The KJV is a product of its time, but it is sufficiently removed from modern conversational English that it remains timeless. The Message already looks like a product of the late 1990s, and will no doubt be mentally filed by most people with the Teletubbies, Pogs, the good series of Friends and the Macarena.
As a tool for Bible scholarship The Message is about as valuable as the CliffsNotes. For Taming of the Shrew. Citing it is a sure sign that you haven’t thought out your position very deeply. The only instance in which it might be useful is for someone for whom English is a second language – but only if they wanted to pepper their scholarly discussions with the occasional “dude” or “gnarly.” However, if you want to really fail at Bible scholarship, you need to get yourself a copy of The Word On The Street…
I found an interesting book review at the Baha’i Competitive Society website, in the form of Stephen Phelps’ take on Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. You can recognise where it’s going fairly early on:
“while Dr. Dawkins and other new atheists believe the way forward lies in a world without religion, Bahá’ís approach the issue of God, nature, and religion from an entirely different perspective.”
The over-arching theme of the review is effectively, “yes, religion is bad, but what we do is different, so it doesn’t apply to us.”
“When set against traditional religious understandings of God, Dr. Dawkins’ arguments are quite powerful. But against the Bahá’í understanding of God and nature, the contradictions that he identifies between science and religion simply dissolve.”
So what is “the Baha’i understanding of God,” which is so in tune with science and reason? Well, the first argument in their arsenal is that God transcends human understanding – that “[t]he very categories of “being” and “existence,” which underpin logic itself, are inadequate when referring to God”. At which point, one has to ask, why do you even bother speaking about this “God” thing, then? There must be some unity to your idea of God, since all Baha’is sing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak. Once you start claiming that a thing is beyond all human understanding and definition, you remove the concept from discussion entirely. Not only that, but by making the demand that we view God as a supernatural concept, beyond the ken of the natural sciences, the Baha’is place themselves firmly in the camp at which Professor Dawkins directs his spleen; those that insist there is “something more” than the natural world. To then claim that the Baha’i God is compatible with science and reason is completely contradictory.
Retreating from the idea of God as an ineffable, extra-real mystery, the reviewer then turns to the argument from design, aka: the Argument From Personal Incredulity. We all know and love that one, don’t we, boys and girls?
“Bahá’í writings suggest that God’s action and the laws of nature are folded together — and that the natural laws that, say, guide evolution, are merely an extension of God’s will.”
Lacking a Genesis to interpret literally, the Baha’i faith naturally has little problem with evolution, but still tacitly refuses to accept that the diversity of species could have come about without a Designer. ““Nature is the expression of God’s will in and through the contingent world,” writes Bahá’u’lláh”, or in other words, “goddidit”. This argument, like the standard Christian argument from design, basically revolves around its proponent’s inability to cope with the idea that natural processes can be explained by science. Baha’i ideas are at the opposite end of the scale to Christianity’s, but they still find it necessary to invoke a supernatural cause for a natural phenomenon. The writer states that:” God’s action in the world looks more like physics than magic” – which is hardly surprising, given that it is physics.
Jumping back to the idea that Baha’ism is compatible with a naturalistic worldview, Phelps’ goes with the Argument from Somebody I Respect Said It, So It Must Be True:
““Religion must conform to science and reason; otherwise, it is superstition,” said ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.”
No argument from me there, Mr Baha. However, I would be at pains to point out that your religion does not conform to science and reason, since, as your reviewer so helpfully pointed out, he can’t deal with the idea that natural process occur without some sort of divine motivation – despite the fact that all empirical science suggests otherwise. Essentially, Stephen Phelps wants the Baha’is to have their cake and eat it too – to posit a god who only appears in the form of completely naturalistic, scientifically explicable phenomena; a god who isn’t a god, in other words.
The rest of the review goes on to argue that laws come from God, and that this too supports Dawkins argument, in that religious memes are predicted by the Baha’i worldview. Again, it exemplifies the fundamental weakness of Stephen Phelps’ Baha’ism. I get the distinct impression that he (and the other Baha’i) are desperate to believe in something, and so shoehorn their concept of God into smaller and smaller boxes, or define it in more and more nebulous ways, until finally they end up with a deity who is so abstract, or does so little, that they no longer need to find any evidence for his existence. So my message to the Baha’is is – give it up. Be free. Read The God Delusion again, and pay particular attention to the title.
God: Delusion. That includes yours.
With our first baby on the way, Wifeshui and I are naturally thinking a lot about child-rearing techniques. How can we instil values in our daughter-to-be? How do we ensure that she is given the social and moral tools with which to address society? How will we educate her as to what’s right and wrong?
Well, Robert Heinlein has an answer, although not one which particularly resonates with us. In Starship Troopers, he advocates corporal punishment as the “obvious” solution to juvenile delinquency, suggesting that one should train a child in the same way as one trains a puppy – by punishing them with pain when they misbehave. It’s a view which is popular not just with fascistic sci-fi societies, but with contemporary Christians as well, especially the fundies. Much of this is due to the Book of Proverbs, which contains five verses specific to the disciplining of children (Proverbs 13:24, 22:15, 23:13, 23:14 and 29:15), all of which are variations on, “spare the rod, spoil the child.” Being somewhat primitive in their paedology and pedagogy, the ancient Israelites went with a simple child-rearing system which basically amounted to: SMACK! It’s an idea which has persisted in these more enlightened times, most notably in the poisonous spew of Focus on The Fascism Family’s James Dobson.
In Dobson’s writings on child-rearing, he invariably frames the parent/child relationship as one of antagonism and conflict. Children are referred to in his case studies by such terms as: tyrant, brat, rebel, dictator, tiger, anarchist and other such stigmatising labels. By contrast, parents (pre-Dobson’s intervention) are described as nervous, frustrated, defied, defeated and embarrassed. The solution? Well, in any battle, one plays to one’s strengths – parents are bigger, stronger and quicker than their children, and so belting the hell out of a disobedient “little spitfire” seems – to Dobson – to be the obvious choice. In fairness, it was certainly the way he himself was raised – in The New Dare To Discipline he describes how his own mother used to beat him with “a multitude of straps and buckles… Believe it or not, it made me feel loved.” (You know who else talks like that? S&M fetishists. I’m just saying…) Raised in violence, Dobson has written numerous books imploring others to meter out the same treatment to their own children, and fundagelicals across the world have lapped it up. My own parents owned at least one Dobson book (I think it was Bringing Up Boys – or “How to make your sons not be gay.”) and were no slouches in the smacking department – their tool of choice was a wooden spoon on which (with no apparent irony) I had personally carved the words, “God Is Love” in a Sunday School craft lesson. As a result, I can safely say I’m in the camp he proudly describes in The New Dare To Discipline:
“I’m told Dr. Benjamin Spock is loved by millions of kids who are being raised according to his philosophy. I have an entire generation that would like to catch me in a blind alley.”
By his own admission, Dobson is responsible for a generation of children growing up with hate and violence – and the fucker is pleased about it!
So Wifeshui and I will, by mutual consent, not be following the advice of “Dr” James Dobson (medical credentials? Er… none, actually) and beating the tar out of our daughter when she comes along. There will be moments, I am sure, when it may seem like an attractive proposition, but I intend to raise our child in an environment of love and respect, not fear and blind obedience. If that eventually leads to the downfall of Robert Heinlein’s perfect society, so be it – there are better worlds in the imaginations of our great sci-fi writers (Peter F. Hamilton springs to mind) than his Nazi utopia.
A fellow bookseller stumbled across this piece of dreck in the course of their daily routine, and sent it to me as an example of possibly the worst example of jacket blurb in publishing history:
This story begins in 1991 when Sheryl meets her second husband named Richard. Her expectations are different than they were for her first marriage. That said, she never dreams that it will become so awful. Unfortunately, physical abuse is a part of the story. Divorce seems a clear and almost certain option. Sheryl has always believed that God helps those who help themselves (which is not biblical). Like most people, she believes it is up to her to fix herself and her marriage. But nothing she does works. The level of desperation is tremendous-a desperation that Sheryl has rarely experienced. But then.God. Sheryl finally turns everything over to God. God steps in and, wow, the old, ugly marriage dies and what is left is better than a dream come true. Everything is brand new, squeaky clean, and joyful. Jesus was, is, and always will be the center, the bottom, the top, and both sides. There really is no life without Christ Jesus.
So basically, this is a story about a battered wife who saves her marriage by sticking by her abusive husband and hoping “God will sort it out”. Nice morality tale for the kiddies, there. Remember, girls, if you grow up and marry a man who hits you, just pray and Jesus will make it all better.
One of the things I think all atheists should do at some point is read the Bible. Back in my Christian days, I read the whole thing cover-to-cover several times, and by around reading number three I was beginning to have some serious doubts about my faith. Be that as it may, the Bible has informed so much of our modern culture that you really are missing out if you haven’t read it at least once. Yes, it’s tedious, repetitive, dull, dry and irrelevant in places, but there are also some half-decent stories and some great poetry crammed in there, so it’s worth persevering with. However, it appears that you don’t actually need to any more – David Plotz has done it for you, and has synopsised the whole thing in his own inimitable style.
Well, I say the whole thing… Plotz comes at the Bible from a Jewish perspective, so his version of the Good Book is actually taken from the Tanakh – the Jewish version of the Old Testament. Jesus barely gets a look in, except for a couple of references regarding OT prophecy, and Paul & co. are right out. Instead, we get Plotz’s reworking of the Genesis myths, the story of the Exodus, the books of Judaic Law, the histories and the prophets. It’s a clever idea, and he carries it off rather well, covering the whole thing chapter by chapter, picking up on interesting points and retelling the classic stories with a comical flair. He also considers how the Tanakh has shaped his Jewish heritage, and uncovers the origins of many obscure customs. Good Book reads as a voyage of discovery – we are carried along on Plotz’s journey through Judaism as passengers, whilst he makes intermittent exclamations of glee at some new finding that relates to his modern world.
Plotz begins reading as an agnostic, and finishes the same way, although, as he puts it:
“I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey, and no God I can love.”
The overall impression one gets is of a gradual dawning horror, as the author comes face-to-face with some of Yahweh’s less glorious moments. Had Plotz been a religious man at the start of the process, I suspect he would have come away severely shaken by what he found. It’s only when he takes the Bible as a whole that he realises just how much the wrathful, petulant, insecure, spiteful God outweighs the merciful, loving, kindly one.
Good Book is sold as a “man in the street” rendition of the Bible, and so lacks any notable scholarly input. This results in a few errors in Plotz’s reading – he seems to accept that the book of Daniel was written during the Babylonian occupation, when it is set, and not (as we now know) some 400 years later, he treats Isaiah as the product of a single author (there were two) and he provides little historical background for the books of Kings and Chronicles, as well as the prophets. Essentially, this an examination of the Old Testament as read, devoid of any textual analysis or historical context beyond that which is contained within its pages. Perhaps this is, in fact, the best way to read the Bible – read just “as is”, without any apologia or interpretation, one can come to one’s own conclusions about the text.
There are no plans in the offing for David Plotz to tackle the New Testament, so we’ll have to wait for another writer to pick up that baton. Nevertheless, if you’d like to learn exactly what’s in the Bible without having to wade through great columns of begetting, this is a very good place to begin.
My friend Jen has just written a rather nice short horror story which I greatly enjoyed – if you have ten minutes to spare and like well-written Gothic tales, you might like to take a look.
Bart Ehrman is one of the most readable and insightful biblical scholars working today, and his latest book, God’s Problem does not deviate from the mould. The book is an investigation into the Bible’s attempts to explain the Problem of Evil – not the standard Free Will defence which has become popular in modern Christianity (although Ehrman does touch on it and examines its failure as a theodicy), but the work of the original writers, who looked around them and tried to explain the suffering they saw.
God’s Problem deal with three main approaches to the issue. The first to be addressed is what Ehrman calls the “prophetic” theodicy, as outlined by the Old Testament prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah et al. This essentially states that suffering is the result of sin; that God punishes His people when they stray from His strictures. The second argument, outlined in the book of Job, suggests that we cannot know the cause of suffering, since God is too powerful to be questioned. Finally, the book looks at the “apocalyptic” approach; the idea that evil is the work of God’s cosmic enemies but that He will imminently usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Ehrman outlines these positions and a few other treatments of the concept with substantial biblical referencing and explanations of the historical context, before systematically showing how the positions presented in the Bible are unsound. His arguments are thorough and easily followed, but it’s actually the exposition of the Bible-writers’ ideas that is most interesting (let’s face it, most atheists can do the Problem of Evil in their sleep).
Interspersed with the arguments are real-life examples, including some from the author’s own life, and a bit of background on how theodicy informed Ehrman’s own journey away from evangelical Christianity and into agnosticism. These serve to give the book a personal touch, and make it read less like a theology lecture and more like a conversation. As I’ve mentioned before, Bart Ehrman is eminently readable, and his easy prose can convey quite complex philosophical issues in a manner accessible to almost anyone. Nevertheless, he still retains academic credibility by constantly referencing his sources and showing how they provide solid empirical support for his views.
All in all this is a nice, stylish piece of writing, on a par with the excellent Misquoting Jesus, and shows Ehrman at the top of his game. A fascinating insight into the thought-processes of biblical writers is combined with a coherent and well-organised dissection of the Problem of Evil, and the result is a book that should be required reading for Christians and atheists alike.
Amongst the many tangents that I’ve investigated as a result of my obsession with all things Japanese is the discipline of Zen Buddhism. A substantial amount of my personal library (well, a couple of shelves-worth) is devoted to the study of Zen – in many ways it’s the closest thing to an atheist religion I’ve encountered. I have long practised zazen, the sitting meditation characteristic of the faith, and I find many of its tenets to be applicable to everyday life. It was with interest, then, that I read Dave Chadwick’s account of his time at a Japanese Zen temple, Thank You And Okay! Chadwick spent a period of some months living and training at Hogoji (actually Shogoji) temple, and the book relates the minutiae of Zen life as seen from the other side of the tatami. Gone are the peaceful, serene and inscrutable monks which spring to mind when one imagines a Buddhist retreat, and in their place the author introduces the argumentative Norman and Shuko double-act, the withdrawn and bitter Jakushin and the affable yet workaholic Koji. Much of the narrative is held together by Chadwick’s respectful account of the decline and eventual demise of Katagiri Roshi, a Zen teacher of some note in the Soto branch of the religion.
This is not really a book about Zen, so those seeking insight and enlightenment should probably go back to their Suzuki and Thomas Cleary translations. Thank You And Okay! is more of a travelogue than anything else, examining the human interactions within the temple and the sensation of being a gaijin Buddhist monk in a highly insular society. Little attention is paid to explaining the philosophy of Zen, but much is made of the practices of the monks – one especially interesting chapter concerns their expedition into town to perform takuhatsu, a sort of formalised begging – and of the relationships within the temple community. Many amusing stories stem from the antagonistic antics of Chadwick’s fellow gaijin Norman and his Japanese opposite number Shuko, who appear to be engaged in a persistent and multi-faceted personal feud with one another, whilst other tales concern the author’s attempts to navigate the maddening waters of Japanese local government bureaucracy, without going insane or being ejected from the country.
Chadwick’s writing is immediate and elegant, and his attention to detail is almost Dickensian at times. Although the narrative is non-linear (different episodes in the author’s experiences are interlaced to provide a sort of emotional tone-poem, rather than a chronological story) the jumps through time and space are not jarring, and in fact serve to heighten the slightly meditative nature of the story. Especially interesting (to me at least) are the book’s little diversions into Japanese Buddhist history and culture, and the comparisons that are drawn with Chadwick’s experiences in American Zen. The non-judgemental stance that he takes gives a further sense of the “otherness” experienced by the foreigner in Japan, and also serves to illustrate some of the Zen principles by which he tries (and, by his own admission, fails) to live.
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