311. Genji + Buddhism

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Buddhism & Mann

For the past week, due to a friend’s traveling around India with a group of chanting Theravadic Buddhist monks and my resuming my reading of The Tale of Genji (now post Genji, see below) I’ve been thinking about Buddhism. And for me that means doing some reading and also conducting a series of thought experiments -- Buddhism didn’t do well, though no worse than other paternalistic religions. One thing I keep coming back to is a consideration of what makes a “great” person. The Buddhist I’m most familiar with is probably the Dalai Lama, so he would be an obvious candidate. And I do consider him to be a good man, but not really great. The names I kept coming back to were Richard Feynman and Michael, a friend who died several years ago now. It wasn’t until today that it occurred to me that my thinking here echoes The Magic Mountain. Feynman and Michael, in this context, have somewhat the same virtues as Pieter Peeperkorn. Whether my thinking has been shaped by Mann, or if my fondness for TMM is based on this similarity between us, I don’t know at this point.

While Peeperkorn, in TMM, mostly represents Dionysus or Bacchus, he also represents love for this world. For the simple pleasures, as the character might have said. Buddhism is not a friend of this world. Which means, drifting back to a previous train of thought, that neither Western Philosophy nor Eastern Religion is particularly interested in what is the best way to live in this world. Any value system based on (can’t find the term for things based on salvation that I keep running into lately) can only be accidentally useful in this world.

In Genji, besides all the praying, the only indication I see of a Buddhist mindset is the desire expressed by almost all of the characters at some point to retreat from life and devote themselves to religion. While many characters do this, and while Genji is talking about it for most of the book, he never does -- in the chapters we have -- and for good reasons, like needing to take care of all his ladies and their children. Buddhism, in Genji seems to be exclusively concerned with Eschatology. Which, in some ways, I have no problem with. This seems to me the thing religion should focus on even if it is just a placebo. But this leaves us with no guide for the best way to live our actual lives. And with unsatisfying “models” in the form of religious people like the Buddha.

Of course this is tricky, as establishing a value system independent of religion is as silly as establishing a physics independent of any meta-physics. You either have to come up with a religion that affirms this world, or you need to preface your value system with a declaration that religions are nothing but people telling each other nice stories. And good luck with that.

Genji

The Shining Genji is dead. We don’t know how or when, exactly. His death is simply announced at the start of a chapter, following the chapter that was all about his mourning for Murasaki. So what is this new chapter about, why the careers of the next generation: Niou (the son of Genji’s daughter by the Akashi lady) and Kaoru (Genji’s son who is actually Kashiwagi’s son.) 

Kaoru somehow outdoes even the Shining Genji in one way, his person seems to interact with scents to make them stronger. This affects anything, like flowers, he passes and has the women reeling. 

I’m not clear on the significance of perfume and scents in Japanese culture at this time. One of Genji’s chief charms was the perfumes he wore, but in the case of Kaoru, he seems to be a sort of perfume all by himself. I wonder if anyone has written a dissertation on this subject, and if it’s been translated into English? “The Importance of Scent in the Tale of Genji.”

Just as the ex-Emperor came to discover that Genji was his real father, Kaoru suspects there’s something about his paternity he doesn’t know. There are at least two women who could explain this to him -- his mother being the most obvious -- but that seems not to be an option. His half-”brother” Yugiri also has suspicions about this, but I’m not clear how this has come to be widely known. 

Free Falling

I was just listening to the Sid & Susie cover of Tom Petty’s Free Falling and started thinking how my life would have been different if we had stayed in the San Fernando Valley... or Boulder, or Louisville. I wasn’t a big fan of any of my family’s moves aside from the one to Boulder -- and if I had known the consequences of that I probably wouldn’t have liked that one either. Still, I can’t imagine myself minus the experiences I associate with the three places we moved to. Even Scottsdale.


Yet it’s still curious to think who those other mes would have been. I envy the me who spent the rest of his childhood in Boulder. I pity the me stuck in the Valley smog for four to eight more years. The Louisville me is the hardest to imagine.