The most widely read Vajrayana Buddhist text in the West is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which has been celebrated as a scientific, spiritual, psychological, and humanistic text.31 This funerary manual, whose technical name (or one of them) is Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State, guides the consciousness of the deceased through the intermediate state (bardo) between death and rebirth—a period Vajrayana Buddhists believe lasts for up to forty-nine days. Its words are chanted, ideally by a lama, over the corpse of the dying and the dead.
The afterlife journey described in this text begins with a terrifying white light known as the Great Luminosity. Stay calm, you are told. Don’t be afraid. See the Great Luminosity (which some have likened to the light reported by people who have had near-death experiences) as nothing more than a projection of your own mind. If you are able to do this, to see yourself and this light as one rather than two different things, then you are liberated and will not be reborn. But this is very rare. So most of us go on to the next stage: a parade of ugly and wrathful Buddhas, followed by beautiful and benevolent Buddhas. This time, we are told not to be too repelled by or too attracted to any of these images. Don’t fear them or love them or run to or from them. Just understand each as a projection of your own mind. If you are able to do this, to realize the emptiness of the distinction between yourself and these Buddhas, then you are liberated and will not be reborn. But this, too, is rare. So the overwhelming majority of us go on to the final stage, which determines when and where we will be reborn. In this stage we see various scenes of animals and humans having sex, and on the basis of the good and bad karma we have accrued in past lives, we insinuate ourselves into one of those scenes and are reborn into it.32
Beyond Buddhism
Quick-and-easy formulas are problematic in every great religion. Have you really gotten to the heart of Islam if you perform the Five Pillars? Or to the heart of Christianity if you say “Amen” to the Nicene Creed? With Buddhism, quick-and-easy formulas are particularly suspect. To be sure, Buddhists have long been on the lookout for formulas that could get them to nirvana. And ritual has always played a major role in the tradition. But more than belief, Buddhism is about experience. And for the tradition’s mystics, this experience lies on the far side not only of rites and creeds but also of language itself.
The teaching of emptiness was misunderstood in the West for generations as pessimistic and nihilistic. But in truth it is a teaching of freedom. There are reasons why the Buddha was often described as joyful and why the Dalai Lama seems inseparable from his trademark smile. One is that shunyata offers liberation from suffering. Another is that emptiness liberates us from enslavement to people, judgments, objects, and ideas, including the person of the Buddha and the institutions of Buddhism itself.
One beloved koan reads, “If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” Another Zen saying goes: “There is Buddha for those who don’t know what he is, really. There is no Buddha for those who know what he is, really.”33 Each of these sayings warns in its own way against clinging to the Buddha. Why should clinging to the Buddha cause us any less suffering than clinging to God or self or boyfriend or political party or ideology or nation? But these sayings also make the broader point that anything that comes to you secondhand is worse than worthless; trust only what you yourself have seen to be true in your own experience.
Like “drunken” Sufis who laugh off the Five Pillars as baby steps on the road to Islamic adulthood, Buddhists who experience the mystery of emptiness recognize that ultimately all dualisms are figments of the ordinary mind, which is as binary as any computer. We should “hush the dualism of subject and object” and “forget both” because there is no essential distinction between lay and monastic, male and female, the bodhisattva who does the liberating and the person who is liberated.34
But emptiness does not just short-circuit the dualistic mind. It disables our penchant for judging others. When the habitual mind sees someone do something other than what it would do, it judges. When it sees someone thinking something other than what it thinks, it judges. And when it sees someone worshipping some god other than its god, it judges again. According to shunyata, every creature in this jangle of judgments arises from a false dualism of right and wrong, true and false, good and bad.
Even the most basic Buddhist dualism—between the problem of samsara and the solution of nirvana—is, according to this tradition, ultimately unreal. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are empty, too, as is Buddhahood itself. According to the Heart Sutra, “There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance.”35 And as Mahayana’s master of paradox Nagarjuna wrote, “The Buddha never taught any doctrine to anyone.”36 So we should abandon attachments to every teaching and every practice. Oh, and don’t forget that, according to the teaching of shunyata shunyata (“the emptiness of emptiness”), emptiness is empty too.
This may now sound not only pessimistic and nihilistic but also absurd. If there is no problem and no solution, what is the point? Is Buddhism just one big fat joke?
To say that there is no distinction between samsara and nirvana, however, is not to say that nirvana is impossible. It is to say that nirvana is inevitable. In fact, it is already here. To experience its bliss, all we need to do is to step out of the closed, either/or mind to the open heart of emptiness. Samsara is nirvana if you just accept things as they are. To say that there is no distinction between a Buddha and a dog is not to say that all you will get out of a Buddha is a sniff and a wag. It is to say that, if you see the world as it is, even a dog’s scamper from his leash can lead you to bliss beyond bliss. What the experience of emptiness teaches, in short, is that there is nowhere to go, nothing to wait for. This is it. To borrow from the American writer John Updike, Buddhism serves “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”37
In other words, everything written in this chapter resides in the realm of conventional truth rather than Absolute Truth. Stories about the Great Departure and the Great Awakening of the Buddha are useful, but ultimately Buddhism is more about experience than narrative. Exegesis of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path is useful. Descriptions of the problem of suffering and the solution of samsara, and of exemplars such as arhats, bodhisattvas, and lamas, may be useful, too, but they will not themselves take you over to the far shore. Ultimately Buddhism is more about experience than doctrine. Here ultimate things lie beyond words, in the smile of the Buddha, and in his silence.
Chapter Six
Yoruba Religion
The Way of Connection
In my introduction to religion courses I ask my students to invent their own religions. They form groups and dream up new religions. They then pitch their religious creations online and in class. After every group has had a chance to evangelize, everyone votes (with fake money in makeshift collection plates) for the new religion they like the best. Over the years my students have attacked this assignment with intelligence, humor, and creativity. One group invented Sism, a religion inspired by the grooves of rapper Tupac Shakur and the inscrutability of the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, which promised a posthumous “After-Party” for those who followed its injunction to “respect the rhythm.” Another tried to convert us to The Congregation of Wisdom, which honors Jeopardy! phenom Ken Jennings as its patron saint. Meanwhile, Sertaism and ZZZ aimed not at salvation but at a good night’s sleep.1
Many of my students’ religious inventions were quite profound, however, and the one that moved me the most was Consectationism (from the Latin for “pursuit”). The goal of this religion is to find and follow your own purpose, or “Lex.” And its ethic is simplicity personified: pursue your own Lex, and don’t hinder anyone else from pursuing theirs. In their class presentation, modeled after evangelical Bible-camp skits, Consectationists offered revival-style testimonies about “The Sign of the Covenant,” the sky-opening moment when each found his or her own Lex. Much of our sadness and suffering, the students observed, comes from try
ing to live a life other than our own. So each of us should seek to discover our purpose and pursue it with passion and resolve.
Consectationism is, of course, make-believe, while Yoruba religion of West Africa and its diasporas is a venerable global tradition. But the heart of Consectationism lies surprisingly close to the heart of the religion of the Yoruba people. Here, too, each of us has a destiny we have somehow forgotten. Before we are reborn (the Yoruba affirm reincarnation), one of our souls (we have two or more, depending on who is doing the counting) appears before the High God Olodumare to receive new breath. Olodumare then allows us to choose our own destiny, which includes the day we will return to heaven, our personality, our occupation, and our own unique measure of good and bad luck. With birth comes forgetting, however. So we wander through life veiled from our true purposes, sidetracked by pursuits, in love and work, foisted on us by parents, friends, coworkers, and spouses. The antidote to this forgetfulness is to remember—to recover our destiny so we can do what we were created to do for ourselves, our families, and the world.
Happily, we are not alone in this task. There is a vast pantheon of superhuman beings, known as orishas (orixas in Brazil, orichas in Cuba), able and willing to help us live in harmony with our destiny.2 There are a variety of techniques of divination that can bring the wisdom of these orishas to our ears. And there are specially trained priests and diviners, known as babalawos (if men) or iyalawos (if women), who through Ifa, the most venerable and venerated of these divination techniques, are able to help us recover our destiny, protect it through sacrifice, and fulfill it through action in the world. In fact, one of the first tasks of any parent is to take one’s child to a diviner so that its destiny can be read and revealed.
Although babalawo means “father of secrets” and iyalawo “mother of secrets,” diviners do not dispense any secret wisdom themselves. They know how to cast the sixteen palm nuts or the eight-half-seed-shells divining chain used to begin any consultation with a client. They have memorized at least a thousand Ifa verses—four for each of the 256 possible signatures (16 x 16) that the random casting of the palm nuts or divining chain produces. They chant a series of poems associated with each signature, or odu, including verses that prescribe the required sacrifice. But rather than oracles, these diviners are mediators between clients and orishas. So while the simplest way to understand what is happening when a client goes for a consultation is that the diviner is channeling the wisdom of the orishas to a human being, that is not quite right, since for the Yoruba, as for the ancient Greeks, wisdom is recalling what we already know within.
To understand Ifa divination, it is important to note how active the client is and how passive the babalawo. First, the client does not even tell the babalawo why she has come. She might have boyfriend troubles, or husband troubles, or both. She might be sick or be trying to decide whether to take a new job or move to a new town. She may be seeking prosperity or pregnancy or trying to fend off depression or loneliness. But her presenting problem is a mystery to him. Second, it is the client, not the babalawo, who decides which of the recited stories (typically at least four per signature) is appropriate to her conflict. What the babalawo brings to the table (or to the floor, actually, since this practice takes place with both babalawo and client firmly rooted to the earth) is a prodigious memory for the poems associated with each of the 256 signatures and an ability to chant the verses chosen by his client. But it is the client who does the choosing.
It should also be emphasized that the Yoruba put huge stock in the capacities of human beings. According to the Yoruba tradition, each human being has a physical body called ara. Each person also has at least two souls: one, called emi, associated with breath, and another, called ori, associated with destiny. The term ori literally means head, but in this context it refers to the spiritual center that chooses its destiny. This ori in each of us is animated by the same sacred power that animates the orishas: ashe (ache in Cuba and axe in Brazil). So whatever channeling is happening in Ifa divination is happening between us and the orishas. It is also happening between the part of us that remembers and the part of us that forgets, which is to say between our more divine and our more human selves. Far from demanding our subservience, therefore, the babalawo is helping to call us back to our original selves, to recover the destinies we chose for this life before it began.
At the beginning of a reading, the babalawo touches the palm nuts to his client’s ori. “You know the mystery,” he says to the client. He then touches the palm nuts to the divining tray, which carries the image of the messenger orisha Eshu. “You know the mystery,” he says to Orunmila (aka Ifa), the orisha of wisdom. And then he adds, “I know nothing.” Ifa divination works not because the babalawo is superhuman but because the ori is itself a god within. As a Yoruba proverb goes, “The head [ori] is the greatest Òrìs¸à.”3
The Orishas
Yoruba religion varies widely across time and space—from the traditional practices of West Africa to the contemporary Yoruba-derived adaptations of Candomble in Brazil and Santeria in Cuba. And there are strong arguments for treating these adaptations as separate religions of their own—“rhizomes” of the Yoruba tradition that may be connected at the roots but, by virtue of new soils and new climates, have become distinct plants.4 However, practitioners of these traditions are sufficiently closely connected—far more closely, in fact, than Mormons, Protestants, and Catholics—to be treated together here. And, together these Yoruba practitioners share the view that the human problem is disconnection and that the solution to this problem is to reconnect ourselves to our destinies, to one another, and to sacred power. This can be accomplished through the techniques of divination, sacrifice, and spirit/body possession, which in combination allow us to truly flourish as individuals and societies.
The Yoruba cosmos is awash in sacred power. There are malevolent spirits, called ajogun, who can make your life a living hell if you cross them. There are ancestor spirits, known as egungun, who can get up and dance at festivals and, like the ajogun, are endowed with ashe. But the powerhouses of ashe are the orishas. In this tradition of communication and exchange between human beings and the divine, devotees consult the orishas through the technique of divination and feed the orishas through the technique of sacrifice. The orishas respond by listening to their devotees and making things happen for them.
Orishas come in at least three overlapping types, running from those who are plainly divine to those who might be better described as superhuman. First, there are orishas who were present with Olodumare at creation: Obatala, Eshu, and Orunmila. Second, there are personifications of natural forces—Yemoja as the sea and Oshun as the river—who flip the script of Christian incarnation by becoming divine not by taking on a human body but by disappearing into a river or hill. A third type comprises deified ancestors who once walked the earth as mere mortals, such as the ancient Yoruba king Oduduwa. These categories are not entirely separate, however. Shango, the god of thunder and lightning, is also said to be a former king of the great Yoruba kingdom of Oyo.
One of the most intriguing facets of the orishas is how inescapably human they act. They have personalities and preferences, including their own distinctive tastes in food, drink, and music. Like Hindu gods, they marry. Unlike Hindu gods, they also divorce. And they are far more passionate than the domesticated gods of the Western monotheisms, where the divine temperament seems almost Scandinavian by comparison.
The gaps between sacred and profane, spirit and matter, the supernatural and the everyday, are at best hairline cracks in Yoruba culture. The distinction between divinity and humanity is equally fuzzy, since human beings carry the awesome power of ashe inside them and orishas are by no means above even the basest human emotions. Many orishas are adept at both creation and destruction. The storm (and stormy) deity Oya, for example, brings both the abundance of irrigation and the devastation of floods. Orishas are sometimes compared to Greek gods for their foibles and fallibility, bu
t the comparison is not quite apt, because the orishas suffer for their misdeeds, while it is quite common for Zeus and his friends to get off scot-free. Moreover, most orishas live in the earth rather than on mountains or in the sky (Shango and Olodumare are the notable exceptions).
So Yoruba religion is reciprocal—a system of communication and exchange between human beings and the divine mediated by a vast pantheon of powers (many of them former human beings) with one foot in the natural realm and the other in the supernatural. Here both sides speak and both sides listen. As in Hinduism, both sides give and both sides receive. Without the orishas to empower them, human beings would die. But without human beings to feed them, the orishas would die too. As a Yoruba proverb puts it, “If humanity were not, the gods would not be.”5
Since Yoruba culture is oral by tradition, you might think that there would be an extensive iconography built up around the orishas. Not so. Classically, orishas are represented in shrines through natural rather than artistic objects: stones and herbs rather than paintings and statues. In the New World, the orishas were traditionally worshipped via images of the Catholic saints with whom they were identified. Only in recent decades have images of the orishas themselves started to circulate. This is because the Yoruba approach the divine largely through stories. If, as Régis Debray contends, “to lack a legend is also to lack dignity,” then the Yoruba are a dignified people indeed.6
Yoruba stories can be found in the massive Ifa corpus memorized and chanted by babalawos. Here the orishas seem to be “one of us” rather than sacred in the sense of “set apart.” In addition to the full range of human emotions, they exhibit a full complement of virtues and vices. Like the Hindu gods, they do not present themselves as either wholly good or wholly evil. They can be generous and petty, merciful and vengeful. They can harm as well as heal. And so they challenge us not to eradicate evil but to balance it with good, and not only “out there” in the world but also inside ourselves (where good and evil coexist). This complexity has long troubled Christians, Muslims, and scholars alike, who all too often fail to see the lessons lurking underneath the orishas’ moral failings, as if they have stumbled upon a double bill of King Lear and Othello and have nothing more to say than that Edmund and Iago don’t seem to be proper gentlemen. Of course, Yoruba practitioners have no trouble unearthing these lessons, just as Shakespeare’s audiences saw the complexities of human existence acted out on the Elizabethan stage. But the fact that the gods stumble and stir is one of Yoruba religion’s glories. The Yoruba corpus, writes art historian Robert Farris Thompson, provides a “limitless horizon of vivid moral beings.”7
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