50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion

by Daniele Bolelli

  Being told that a religion's sacred book was composed in jail can easily conjure up in our minds familiar images: persecuted Christians hurrying to write down portions of the New Testament before Roman legionaries knock at their door and introduce them to hungry lions in the Colosseum. Or perhaps we could picture pious Jewish prophets composing hymns to God after being conquered and oppressed by one of the many, many, many nations that conquered and oppressed Jews throughout history. Well … we can quickly chase these images from our heads because the story we are playing with here is much weirder than that. The hero of our tale is not in jail as a victim of religious persecution. The opposite is actually true. He is in jail because somebody loved his ideas too much.

  The setting is ancient China, about 2,500 years ago (give or take a century or two). Our protagonist is Lao Tzu, the mythological creator of Taoism and author of the Tao Te Ching (the philosophical foundation of Taoism). At the beginning of our story, Lao Tzu is very old, but he has not written anything yet. Despite having gained great fame for his wisdom among all those who have come in contact with him, he has always refused to commit his ideas to writing. By this point in his life, Lao Tzu has decided he has had enough of living among the noise and the crowds of the city. So, he packs his bags, resigns from his job in the imperial library, and begins to head out of town. By the time he reaches the city gates, ready to enjoy his well-deserved retirement, he is stopped in his tracks by an adoring fan. The fame of Lao Tzu's brilliant teachings, in fact, has reached the ears of one of the guards at the gate. As fate would have it, he had some friends among Lao Tzu's disciples who had told him wonderful things about how the old man's insights had changed their lives. On a couple of occasions, the gate guard even had a chance to join them and listen spellbound to Lao Tzu's teachings in person. Both times he had walked away amazed by the depth of the man's wisdom, and yet with a feeling that he had barely gotten a small taste of what Lao Tzu had to offer.

  But now Lao Tzu was calling it quits. He was getting ready to cash his chips and head off to Florida, or whatever was the ancient Chinese equivalent where old guys went to warm up their achy bones and spend their golden years in the sun. Worse yet, Lao Tzu had so far stubbornly refused to put pen to paper and write down a single word about his unique worldview. And so the old man was about to be gone, vanish forever and be lost to history. The gate guard knew exactly what he had to do.

  After several rounds of polite begging only met with Lao Tzu repeatedly turning down his requests, the guard decided to take matters in his own hands: he promptly arrested Lao Tzu, tossed him in jail, gave him all the paper he could need and told him he would only be free when he would finish a book capturing the essence of his teachings. As it turns out, jail is a powerful motivator, so Lao Tzu spent the following three days writing furiously. Eighty-one short poems later Lao Tzu got up, handed his writings to the guard, waved goodbye and disappeared from the pages of history. According to the story, this is how Tao Te Ching, the most important text of Taoism, came into being.

  Just like in the case of most tales about the founding of the various world religions, no reliable data confirming the historical truth of this story exists. But unlike in the case of most religions, Taoists freely admit that this is probably nothing but a legend—one of many versions of an imaginative tale. According to them, it matters little whether things really happened this way. The point of the story is to highlight Lao Tzu's distrust of words. In case the first line of the Tao Te Ching wasn't emphatic enough as a warning in this regard (“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”), the myth of Lao Tzu's composing the book only under duress makes even plainer a key Taoist concept. Wisdom is something that's alive. On the other hand, words in general, and written words in particular, are an abstraction—too easy to misinterpret. At best, words can give you a glimpse of somebody's wisdom, but far too often people take them too literally and this leads to the annoying tendency of great theories to shape-shift into sinister dogmas. The jail story is a Taoist inside joke to remind us not to take anybody's words as absolute truths. Not such a bad advice considering how often what begin as benign religions turn dark really fast.

  So, here's what you can take away from this. Next time you land in jail, you could just follow Lao Tzu's lead, try to ignore the unsavory characters around you, and kill the time by creating a new religion.

  04 THE DISTURBING AND UNLIKELY MARRIAGE BETWEEN ISRAEL AND CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS

  In the modern American political landscape, Israel has no supporters who are as loyal and determined as some of the most right-winged fringes among Christian evangelicals. By looking at the current Israeli-Christian fundamentalist love-fest, it would be difficult to imagine that these two were not always best friends. But yet, anyone who managed to stay at least half awake during history class should be a bit puzzled by this odd alliance.

  For the better part of 2,000 years, the lives of Jews in any country dominated by conservative Christianity has not exactly been a barrel of monkeys. On the contrary, religious persecution was the name of the game. Rabid anti-Semitism has been the norm whenever and wherever church and state went hand in hand. And over the centuries hardcore Christians have put to use their imagination in coming up with every conceivable way to squash the Jewish religious minority among them: from the brutality of the Inquisition to forced conversions, from confining them to special parts of a city (the original “ghettos”) to downright expelling them from their lands, from the occasional pogroms to ordinary random acts of violence.

  To make matters worse, all of this intense oppression has not been the work of one particular Christian denomination, during one particular point in time. Rather, this has been the norm, and the various branches of Christianity have been outdoing each other in the viciousness of their attacks. Martin Luther, for example, when he first gave birth to the Protestant movement harshly criticized Catholics for how mean they had been toward Jews. But when he realized that Jews were not any more eager to convert to his interpretation of Christianity than they had been to convert to Catholicism, Luther had a fit. He eventually penned a treatise going by the less than politically correct title of On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he advocated setting on fire Jewish synagogues, stealing all their wealth, prohibiting rabbis to teach on pain of death, and enslaving Jews … yeah, even a drunken Mel Gibson couldn't top this. Incidentally, about 400 years after Luther was done spitting his venom, Hitler's Nazi minions faithfully adopted Luther's program as part of their “final solution.” The Holocaust itself, in fact, can hardly be explained without considering the Christian anti-Semitism preached for centuries throughout Europe. By driving a wedge between church and state and emphasizing individual rights, the Enlightenment had seemed to offer hope to Jewish people but, as the Holocaust made painfully clear, you can't undo such long-standing hatred in just a few decades.

  So, the obvious question is: why do the spiritual descendants of those who persecuted Jews are now so infatuated with Israel? The answer is simple. Actually, no, I take that back. Once you understand it, it's quite simple, but the path to get there is less than straightforward. Simple is definitely not the right word, for the answer is so bizarre as to be funny.

  The seeds of the fundamentalist love for Israel were planted just around the time when the 19th century was giving way to the 20th. Back then, new interpretations of one of the most complicated books of the Bible (the book of Revelation) were becoming fashionable among conservative Christians. The book of Revelation is no cakewalk to decode. Written at a time when early Christians suffered terribly under the yoke of the Roman Empire, the book of Revelation is a weirdly symbolic revenge fantasy in which the author gloats at the thought of unbelievers drowning in rivers of blood at the end of times. So, the fact that these new interpretations promised shedding light on this text and offering a new window on the true essence of Christianity attracted much attention. What does this have to do with the modern state of Israel? After all, it hadn't been yet
created at this time. Well, the new interpretation of these apocalyptic prophecy went something like this: in order for Jesus to come back, Israel needs to exist, the Temple in Jerusalem needs to be reconstructed, and Israel's enemies need to stage a massive attack against it. So—the Christian fundamentalist thinking went—if we want Jesus to show up in the neighborhood again, we need to support the nation of Israel. If this sounds like less than a newly found love for Jews by conservative Christians, it's because it's not. In this view, Jews are only to be supported in order to act as bait for their enemies, thereby triggering Jesus's return. Once this happens, some Jews will see the light and convert, while the others will die the horrific death that awaits all unbelievers. Ok, under these premises, perhaps even Mel Gibson can learn to love Jews.

  05 SEX, SAKE AND ZEN

  Most Westerners who become fascinated with Zen Buddhism are intrigued with its reputation as an anti-authoritarian, freedom-loving, individualistic tradition. Books by excellent writers like Alan Watts popularized an image of Zen as a very relaxed, go-with-the-flow type of religion. But even a brief visit to a typical Zen temple is enough to make us painfully aware of the difference between hype and reality. Life in real Zen temples, in fact, is often so structured, regimented and heavily regulated as to quickly dispel the romanticism created by much of the literature about it. Far from being a hippie rendition of Buddhism, Zen discipleship can be demanding and severe.

  But sometimes even misguided stereotypes are born from seeds of truth. Enter 15th century Japanese monk Ikkyu Sojun, who was truly as free, wild and allergic to authorities as advertised.

  For Ikkyu, Zen was not a spontaneous calling. Rather, he stumbled upon it as an alternative to being murdered in infancy. Given that choice, Zen training didn't seem so bad after all. Ikkyu, in fact, was the illegitimate son of the emperor of Japan, and the object of several conspiracies aimed at thinning out the ranks of potential candidates to the throne. In an effort to have his life spared, his mother entrusted him to a Zen monastery when he was only 5 years old: not the most fun-filled scenario for a little boy, but clearly more appealing than having angry assassins slicing you to pieces.

  His early life was extremely tough since the training he received from the Zen monks was brutally stern. Despite some serious bouts of depression in this joyless environment, it became quickly clear to his teachers that Ikkyu possessed an amazing intellect, and that his grasp of Zen was unparalleled. But the fact that he excelled in this setting didn't mean he felt at home in it. Despite genuinely loving Zen (or perhaps because of it), he was less than thrilled with the spiritual bureaucracy of the temples. Also, many of the priests bugged him: too many political games and too much time spent courting the favor of rich patrons. And so when the day came when his master presented him with a certificate of enlightenment—which was both a great honor and the necessary document to begin climbing the Zen hierarchy—Ikkyu promptly decided to wave goodbye to a monastic career and burned it.

  This doesn't mean he had given up on Zen. Far from it. In his thinking, it was the entire Zen establishment that had abandoned real Zen by turning it into a dogmatic parody of what it was supposed to be. Life in the temples was stifled by too many rules and not enough fresh air. The so-called professionals of Zen were in Ikkyu's eyes a bunch of posers—too busy acting “spiritual” to be able to really taste spirituality in its rawest forms. Some people believed Zen enlightenment could only be found among clouds of incense in silent meditation. Ikkyu, on the other hand, found sake-drinking and wild sex more to his liking. As he put it in his poems, “The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation.” Or, even more bluntly, “Don't hesitate: get laid—that's wisdom. Sitting around chanting sutras: that's crap.” Driven by an uncompromising thirst for life, Ikkyu became a wandering monk, testing his Zen insights far away from the seclusion of the monasteries, and earning the nickname of “Crazy Cloud.”

  The point of his erotic escapades and wild adventures was to suggest that the “sacred” is nothing other than regular life experienced with 100 percent awareness. Or perhaps, sake-drinking and inordinate amounts of sex didn't need any justification at all other than the fact that they were a hell of a lot of fun. Ikkyu didn't give a rat's ass about what the religious authorities of his day thought of him anyway. But in the course of his travels, Ikkyu managed to influence great numbers of artists, poets, calligraphers, musicians, and actors in such a way that his ideas left a deep mark on the development of several Japanese art forms for centuries to come. Even his love life came to be celebrated through the ages, since his relationship with Lady Mori ended up being among the most famous romances in Japanese history.

  But since good old Ikkyu was a man who loved paradoxes, when a civil war had destroyed most Zen temples in the country, he came to the rescue of the very institutions he had ferociously criticized. Just when the future of Zen seemed in peril, he was able to enlist the help of the many acquaintances he had met during a lifetime of travels and mobilized them into rebuilding some of the key temples throughout the country. So, oddly enough, much of modern Zen owes a huge debt for its existence to a man who preferred the company of hookers to that of monks.

  06 BANZAI!

  When it comes to using theological arguments to encourage brutal wars, monotheistic religions are far ahead of the competition. The history of Christianity and Islam, in particular, is so drenched in bloody violence as to leave everyone else in the dust. Most Asian and tribal religions, on the other hand, utterly lack the concept of “holy war” that is so popular in these faiths. And yet, to every good rule there is an exception. Shintoism—the only religion that is native to Japan—is gracious enough to offer us a sober reminder of this.

  At first sight, Shintoism seems a very poor candidate for a religion instigating warfare. Here, after all, is a nature-loving, mellow form of a very loosely organized spirituality mostly concerned with purification rituals and honoring spirits. It doesn't demand that people follow a particular moral code. It doesn't require too many specific beliefs. And it doesn't even have a set of sacred scriptures. Shintoism is so seemingly relaxed in its worldview that it didn't oppose the introduction to Japan of foreign traditions such as Buddhism and Confucianism. On the contrary, most Shinto followers readily adopted elements of Buddhism and Confucianism as part of their own practice to the point that it was nearly impossible to tell where one religion ended and another began.

  So what went wrong? I blame it all on Matthew Perry. In case you are wondering, no, I’m not referring to the guy from Friends. The Matthew Perry who's at the center of our story was born at end of the 1700s, had a successful career as a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Navy, and was not nearly as funny. But what he lacked in comedic talent, he made up through sheer force. In the mid-1800s, Perry showed up with several ships in Japan, and promptly informed the Japanese government that the U.S. expected them to open up their ports to foreign trade. “Never”—thought the Japanese—“ We'd rather die than being bullied around in such a way.” “Ok”—replied Perry—“See the cannons here on my ships? If you don't trade with us, we'll blow you to pieces.” “In that case”—the Japanese responded—“ we'd be delighted to trade with you.” (I’m paraphrasing just a bit, but you get the idea ….)

  The humiliation of having to give in to the bossy demands of those pesky Americans was so intense that it radically changed Japanese history. Determined to never again suffer such humiliation, Japan jump-started a period of very fast modernization, transforming their society by copying everything that made Western countries successful in order to be able to compete with them on equal footing. This bad mix of wounded pride and desire for revenge dramatically affected Shintoism. The Japanese government made a conscious effort to transform Shintoism, molding it into a state religion supporting an aggressive brand of hyper-nationalism. This was a rather difficult job, since there seemed to be nothing in Shintoism that could be used for the task.
But eventually somebody took a second look at the myths telling of a divine origin for the Japanese people in general, and the Imperial family in specific, and decided to zero in on them. By overlooking just about every other aspect of Shintoism and focusing only on this, it didn't take long to create an ideology depicting the emperor as a descendent of the gods, and the Japanese as a sort of “chosen” people. The traditional friendly mixing of Shintoism with Buddhism and Confucianism was legally banned, since it didn't fit a nationalistic agenda to have one's state religion mixed with foreign traditions. Alternative interpretations of Shintoism were similarly squashed. And so the mellow Shintoism of old gave way to a pissed-off new version anxious to kick foreign ass for the sake of restoring the national self-esteem.

  The results were nothing but horrific. From the devastation of the Rape of Nanking to the fanaticism of kamikaze pilots, Japanese nationalism took the shape of a hyperactive militarism that unleashed hell everywhere it landed. The end of World War II mercifully euthanized the state-sponsored religion when, as part of the peace agreement, Emperor Hirohito was forced to admit not being a living god. This allowed Shintoism to return to its former relaxed self. But the whole experience was a kick in the groin to any enthusiasm the Japanese may have felt for religion as a whole—a trend that continues to this day.