Friday 22 June 2012

Karen Armstrong, Buddha (Phoenix, 2000) and A Short History of Myth (Canongate, 2005)

Sorry for the long-ish gap in posting.  Initial blogging enthusiasm has perhaps been tempered by poor blogging discipline as the months have gone by.  Nonetheless, since this blog has focused exclusively on fiction so far, and since this represents neither a true picture of my reading habits in general nor the selection of books that came to Manchester in particular, it seems appropriate to turn to some non-fiction.  I hope you'll forgive the gap when you see that this post combines reviews of two books by the same author: a biography of the Buddha and A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Karen Armstrong to me.  I first came across her when her memoir, The Spiral Staircase, was the book of the week on Radio 4 early in 2004.  Having caught a few episodes, I went out and bought the book.  Perhaps I mentioned earlier that I buy very few books: something, clearly, had persuaded me that this one was worth it, and, my goodness, my instinct was right.  Armstrong's account of life after seven years in a convent is compelling, moving and inspiring, but what also struck me was her suggestion that there were more ways of being religious than I had taken into account.  I had assumed, like most people, that religion was a matter of belief: for those of us brought up within the Christian tradition, either you accepted certain premises about the nature of God and the events around the crucifiction and resurrection of one Jesus Christ, or you didn't.  If you did, you could be a Christian, go to church and so on, and if you didn't, you couldn't.  I wanted to believe those things, but increasingly, as I wandered from church to church in an attempt to have some kind of religious practice in my life, I found that I just didn't.  I was going from time to time to the church across the road from my flat in Edinburgh, but growing more and more uncertain than I was in the right place.  I was getting tired of saying to myself, "but it's just a metaphor", as I repeated the words of the creed, and other ways of getting round the obvious (to me) untruth of what seemed to be the central tenets of the Christian faith.  Then I read Karen Armstrong, and began to understand that the emphasis on literal belief was a very modern element of religious observance, and that other religions weren't nearly so keen on it.  The stories of the Bible were, she explained, to be taken as myth, not literal, scientifically-provable truth.  If they inspired their followers to live deeper, richer, more outwardly-focused lives, then they were doing their job, regardless of whether the events described had actually happened or not.  Practice was the important thing, and, in particular, the practice of compassion, which has since become Armstrong's principal concern. 

Karen Armstrong never mentioned the Quakers, and it wasn't until October 2006 that I attended a meeting for the first time, but the seed of my life as a Quaker, as it would become, was laid with her book.  For that, I am profoundly grateful.  In the Quakers I found a group of people who seemed to be following the principles that Armstrong had identified: less concerned with belief than with practice, they never asked me to define what I understood by God or make any statements of faith, but they did expect me, like all Quakers, to make a serious attempt to live by the testimonies of peace, truth, simplicity and equality.  In the gathered silence of a Quaker meeting I found a depth of experience which no other religious ritual had previously offered me; that silence seemed the most eloquent response possible to an awareness of the sacred, and when Friends did speak, what they said often spoke to me much more profoundly than the traditional Christian liturgy.  Through the Quakers I came to understand what a religious community could be, and why anyone would want to be a part of one.  For the first time it seemed possible actually to be friends with the people with whom I was worshipping, rather than dashing away as soon as I could in case someone hijacked me and put me on the flower rota.

Well, the rotas came along later, but by that time I was hooked, and being asked to make coffee or welcome people at the door seemed more like an opportunity than a burden.  Since that first meeting I've re-read The Spiral Staircase several times, and acquired copies of Buddha and A Short History of Myth.  I started Buddha some time ago, got half-way through and got distracted, so, having brought both books to Manchester, it seemed a good moment to finish one and read the other, and review them together here.

Armstrong had written a number of books on religion before Buddha, including a biography of Mohammed and the magisterial A History of God.  She seems in very comfortable territory with Buddhism - a non-theistic religion whose focus is on right action rather than right belief, and whose founder always insisted on the central importance of experience over second-hand knowledge.  The Buddha's story is an inspiring one, of a young man compelled to leave his home, go out into the world as a mendicant monk and devise a new religious system for a people restless and dissatisfied with what was currently on offer.  At the same time, I can't help feeling for the Buddha's wife and infant son who found themselves abandoned in the cause of the new faith; several years later, when the Buddha came back to his home town and converted many there, including his father, his wife refused to forgive him, and who can blame her?  As Armstrong recounts the principal events of the Buddha's life - his birth, departure from home, search for a new approach to life, formation of a group of adherents or Sangha, travels around ancient India and finally his death - we of course learn a lot about Buddhism, and what an appealing religion she makes it appear.  The original monks, she tells us, were a cheerful bunch, whose apparent happiness with their lot drew comment wherever they went  Fundamentally, the Buddha was "trying to forge a new way of being human":

The evident contentment of his bhikkhus [monks] showed that the experiment was working.  The monks had not been infused with supernatural grace or reformed at the behest of a god.  The method devised by the Buddha was a purely human initiative.  His monks were learning to work on their natural powers as skillfully as a goldsmith might fashion a piece of dull metal and make it shining and beautiful, helping it to become more fully itself and to achieve its potential.  It seemed that it was possible to train people to live without selfishness and to be happy. [...] 'Unskillful' states, such as anger, guilt, unkindness, envy and greed, were avoided not because they had been forbidden by a god or were 'sinful' but because the indulgence of such emotions was found to be damaging to human nature. (pg. 129-30)

The "method" devised by the Buddha used well-established practices of concentration and meditation, chiefly from yoga, to transcend the temporal, illusory and impermanent and to break free of attachments to possessions, status and, ultimately, life itself.  The idea of status, together with the wealth which it brought, was an illusion, since these things could never endure but must give way to the more powerful forces of change which govern human life.  Aligning oneself with reality, then, meant submitting to this knowledge, and, in doing so, to achieve a kind of liberation: clinging on to possessions, people and comfortable ways of living could never bring an individual into a deeper spiritual life.  This is a familiar message to anyone conversant with even the rudiments of religious teaching: all faiths exhort their followers to break free of convention and question their most dearly-held assumptions about what matters in life.  Buddhism does this, however, without reference to an omnipotent, omniscient God - human beings can achieve enlightenment all on their own.  The yogic disciplines mentioned above are pretty intense, though, and Armstrong leaves us in no doubt that enlightenment, while theoretically attainable by anyone, is the result of a lifetime of hard spiritual work and not of a week's course in an ashram.  I was nevertheless interested to find concepts emerging which were already familiar to me from my study of yoga - many readers will know that I am training to be a teacher of the Iyengar method.  It's widely thought that yoga is a form of exercise, good for stretching the body and maybe feeling a bit calmer, but this is not in fact the case - physical postures, or asana, are only one of the eight limbs of yoga.  The first two, discussed by Armstrong, are yama and niyama - ethical disciplines which provide the basis for the adherent's practice and which include non-violence, truthfulness, self-control, non-covetousness, cleanliness, contentment, enthusiasm, self-knowledge and surrender to something greater than oneself.  The remaining limbs, after asana and pranayama (breathing exercises), are forms of meditation increasing in intensity from withdrawal of the senses from external stimuli (pratyahara) to complete absorption in the oneness of the universe (samadhi).  Most of us who practice yoga only get a short way along this path.  The Buddha and other "enlightened ones" went all the way along it, and yet remained in the world to teach others: the compassion essential to Buddhists demands that they share their knowledge and not vanish into a private spiritual realm of their own, however tempting that may be.

A Short History of Myth appeared in 2005 as the introduction to a series published by Canongate of ancient myths retold by contemporary authors.  They couldn't have asked a more appropriate person to provide a framework for the stories which followed.  Armstrong is clearly drawn to the mythic mode, finding in it a way of interpreting the world far more fruitful than literal belief.  She defines a myth as a story which, while not being literally true, contains a deeper truth about human experience.  Hence, she argues, the central importance of myth in religion, which, as we know, she sees as held back in modern times by an obsession with belief as an acceptance of factual propositions.  Myth, furthermore, goes hand in hand with ritual - and so it is that all religions link their central rituals to specific events in their mythology.  The Christian Eucharist is a re-enactment of Christ's death and resurrection, and has meaning whether you think that the man in question actually rose from the dead or not.  Similarly with the Jewish festival of Passover:

We do not know what actually happened when the people of Israel escaped from Egypt and crossed the Sea of Reeds [or Red Sea, when, according to the Bible, the waters parted to let them through], because the story has been written as a myth.  The rituals of Passover have for centuries made this tale central to the spiritual lives of Jews, who are told that each one of them must consider himself to be of the generation that escaped from Egypt.  A myth cannot be correctly understood without a transformative ritual, which brings it into the lives and hearts of generations of worshippers.  A myth demands action: the myth of the Exodus demands that Jews cultivate an appreciation of freedom as a sacred value, and refuse either to be enslaved themselves or to oppress others.  By ritual practice and ethical response, the story has ceased to be an event in the distant past, and has become a living reality. (pg. 106-07)

There is much food for thought here, as in all Armstrong's writing.  For anyone interested in religion, there is no better guide to this famously bumpy terrain.  If more contemporary commentators on religion had even half her intelligence, open-mindedness and concern for compassion, we wouldn't be in the mess of wilful misunderstanding and intolerance of each other's faith, or absence of it, that we currently are.