History

Maybe We Should Be Copying

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Think about how much of human knowledge was dependent on Some Person With A Pen. Before the internet, before the printing press, there was Person With A Pen copying books stroke by stroke, word by word.

Even as technology advanced, Person With A Pen was important (and after a point, Person With A Typewriter). Print shops, printing devices might be carefully controlled by the government or just unavailable due to cost. Person With A Pen was there, and knowledge continued outside of official sources.

Others might have copied things for which a printing press might be excessive. Among my library of Taoist literature is a book on massage and energy exercises called Immortal Fang’s Longevity Quigong. The original book is rather small and illustrated, so people passing around these exercises might find it easier to copy them. The book seemed to have been passed among friends, so that was probably the norm.

There are doubtlessly many motivations for Person with a Pen, but one common thing they all share is that they are getting very intimate with a book. Imagine what it’s like to copy a book, how it sits in your head, how it’s burned into your mind. Imagine what it’s like to do it more than once.

It has to drive the knowledge into your head, to make you understand it more. I’ve often heard stories of people borrowing books to copy them, some people making both a copy for themselves and another for someone else. Imagine what it’s like for religious and spiritual professionals to copy a holy text, the words settling into their souls.

Now of course it’s usually easy to get books. If it’s not in stock you can probably get it print on demand or find it used. Looking at my own library I’m grateful for how many people made this possible.

But, and you can guess where I’m going, I wonder if maybe some of us spiritual and religious types should give copying a book a shot now and then.

I’ve thought of doing this with a few Taoist works – at the top of the list are The Secret of the Golden Flower and maybe a composite of my favorite Tao Te Ching translations. Even typing them up – let alone writing them – would make me evaluate words, remember them, live them. I wonder what I’d learn, retain, and feel if I just copied some of the worlds that have influenced me.

I’m not sure I’d do it, but hey three years ago I wasn’t thinking of zines.

Maybe it’s an exercise some of us should try. Imagine taking time, like a weekend away, just to copy a spiritual work that’s important to you. Imagine reliving the role of Person With a Pen and connecting not just to the work in question, but with our history.

–Xenofact

Win One For Confucians

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Win One For Confucians

Last column I talked about how Taoists irritated with detail-obsessed Confucians reminded me of how people got annoyed with conspiracy theorists. It was a strange revelation, and one I’ll probably analyze for awhile to understand underlying human behavior. But let’s talk about something I learned from my (limited) reading of Confucian thought.

First, I want to be open about my opinions – and limits on my knowledge – of Confucianism. I took an interest in it due to A) Taoists arguing with them and B) an interest Chinese history, usually communications. I’ve read a few texts, a few historical documents, and a larger amount of Taoist mockery or fellow-feeling depending on when said texts were written. I’m no expert.

I would sum it up as “anal-retentive humanism about cultivating morality.” Confucius himself seems to have been a thoughtful, witty, pleasant, but at times anxious or neurotic person who didn’t seem to really intend to found a religion. In practice it has often served power and patriarchal culture, but through it run elements of counter-culturalism and principle. My limited experience have been more “WTF” than I expected.

But in my limited readings, a story stood out – one that, years later, taught me a lesson. So let’s give the Confucians a win.

In my readings there are often stories about the importance of mourning one’s parents when they pass. It’s important to recognize their sacrifice, the duration of mourning, and so on. There’s enough dead parents in a casual reading Confucian literature to make you worry you stepped into a Disney film. Yes I get filial piety and all that, but still.

Once or twice I’d encounter a story of an king who’s father (who had stepped down) passed away. This meant big public ceremonies and so on because, hey, dead king. What stood out to me is people being impressed at how sad the living king was, how he wept and mourned so aggressively. At first I thought the stories were annoying, performative – I mean, you know, let’s not make a show of it, be honest.

Years later, as I contemplated politics in America in the 2020s I thought about all the transgressive politicians. The ones that were basically online Influencers, the ones acting like they were Shock Jocks. The ones who were supposedly both the best of us and hideous assholes and in no way role models.

They were being performatively against what we supposedly valued.

. . . and suddenly I got the king and his Big Mourning.

I don’t want leaders who violate our principles, I want them to embody them. I want the continuity and stability of society, not its fracturing. Wanting leaders that violate everything you say you care about means you’re both an asshole and destructive – and stupid. Even if a leader is, dare I say it, a bit performative, it’s saying there’s an agreement on what matters, even if things might get a tad fuzzy around things in the “best face forward” way.

Moral performances of certain kinds – what people might call “virtue signaling” – are ways of communicating and reinforcing values. They are reflections of the agreement that hold society together. It may be a janky agreement, it may have edge cases that aren’t on the edge, but unless a society is totally screwed, it matters.

Then I got it. These kings were virtue signaling, but about stuff important to the community, the love of parents, the proper activities. King and peasant were bonded together in “when we lose our parents, we respect those that created us.” A weeping king was, at that moment no different than a farmer who lost his mother and father.

So know what? Chalk one up for the early Confucian writers. Some moral and ethical continuity, via ritual, is important. Yeah it might not be 100% true or honest all the time, but if it’s enough for society to grow and function, then it’s important. It might not seem like a ritual, but there is a time to say “we are on the same side” and act on it.

Because we’ve damn well seen what happens when destroying everything is lauded, and violating what actually works is worshiped.

-Xenofact

Who We Were In Time

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I was recently reading Thomas Cleary’s The Tao of Politics. These are extracts from the heavily Taoist document the Huainanzi. Having read another set of extracts (Original Tao), I thought it would be a refresher, and helps convince me to buy a full translation which is 1000 pages long. As of this writing, it’s in the mail, so I got convinced.

However, beyond my compulsion and Cleary’s ever-excellent translations, he made an interesting comment on the Huainanzi and Taoism. The Huainanzi was written in a time of rebuilding after a painful period of war, a look back and a plan for the future. Cleary noted other formative Taoist documents, the Tao Te Ching and Chuang-tzu were written in times of war, and were affected as such. These were Taoist documents but written in radically different times.

That got me thinking about history and the words of wisdom we seek. Yes, we all know writings we partake in are written “of the time,” under certain conditions, and so forth. We accept that, but Cleary’s comment made me think that we know that but maybe we really need to think about it.

We may read books and scripture and so on that are written of their time, but even books of the same lineage like these Taoist documents are written under radically different situations. This isn’t different generations alone, these are people who wrote between war and peace, destruction, and construction, dying randomly from civil strife or having a chance to not do so.

I think it really behooves us to look at documents of our philosophical and mystical efforts and when we see something of it’s time, pause and reflect on that. Maybe we don’t just read and admire and learn from the great minds and philosophers in our library but ask what were they going through and seeing. History is experienced.

It’s said that Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching wrote it while hightailing it out of a city in disgust with the age. Sure, it’s probably mythical-metaphorical, but people of the time might get it as wise guys were saying “screw this, I’m riding a buffalo into the mountain” because things sucked.

It’ll help us better understand what we read because we get the time, the who, and the why. It’ll also let us have some empathy on those we seek to learn from. That above comment about bugging out of society makes me feel some sympathy for Lao Tzu even if he is a pen name or metaphor. Sometimes I want that buffalo – and boy do I get Chuang-Tzu’s desire to be poetically sarcastic as hell.

But another advantage to this? When you look at philosophical lineages – again like Taoism – across time, the writings occur in radically different situations. However among those books and essays across centuries you read, there are consistent patterns. Those consistent patterns are lessons that have survived different times, places, events – they’re worth learning from.

None of us are outside of history. When understanding timeless wisdom, we need to understand history to learn what’s transcended it – and understand what people went through. The timeless and the specific together.

-Xenofact