Book Reviews

Education without Fear and Comparison
Vicente Hao Chin Jr.
North Caloocan City, Philippines: Golden Link College; 209 pp., paper, $14 plus shipping. For ordering, go to publishing@goldenlink.ph.

Teaching is my inner calling. I come from a family of teachers. I remember holding my grandmother’s hand, walking with her to her class of elementary children, and how they gathered around her, smiling. I learned from her how to bring joy to a class. Every time I start a new class, my first sentence is, “Let us find joy in learning.”

So you can understand my excitement when I received Vic Hao Chin’s book, which talks about nurturing individuals and giving them an understanding of human nature. It is a transformative approach.

After my detour from being a teacher for thirty-plus years of working in industry, I went through a certification curriculum to become a high-school teacher in America. The state of Illinois has teaching standards for areas such as content knowledge, learning environment, student management, and professional conduct and leadership. Chin discusses the missing ones, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, self-development, human relationships, and meditation.

The principles discussed in this book have been in place for more than twenty years in schools established by the Theosophical Society in the Philippines, with the main campus being the Golden Link College in Caloocan City. As of 2020, there were six such schools in five cities.

In these schools, the key driving element is character building that is not based on fear, competition, or ranking. There is no punishment for making a mistake. The school is a community where everyone respects everyone. The canteens offer healthy vegetarian food.

Education at any level is also about building relationships and resolving hurdles, academic and emotional. “The Golden Link schools, therefore, incorporate lessons in self-transformation in their curricula—how to eliminate fears, resentments, hatred, depression, anger, and similar distressful coping behaviors,” writes Chin.

It is not my intent to compare these methods with education systems in more developed countries. In America in the seventies, I was personally involved in an innovative engineering education program. The curriculum involved self-mastery: students studied core engineering principles on their own and passed assessment exams designed for mastery without ranking or punishment. Projects were designed to teach teamwork. It was a precursor to education for the twenty-first century. A reader of this review can understand my passion, then, about Chin’s book.

He poses a fundamental question: why do we send children to school? Why aren’t schools a source of wisdom and enlightenment? He asks the reader, “If you had the power to mold your children into anything you want them to be, what top five qualities would you like to see in them by the age of 40?” One can guess most of the answers: have a stable income, be responsible, have a happy family, and so on. Chin asks, how about happiness?

The answer is, of course, a resounding yes. But are our educational systems designed to teach children to become happier people? Chin wonders how many of us have used a quadratic equation after leaving school. (The math teacher in me paused for a second! A course in trigonometry replaced by a course in serenity 101 or introduction to integrated vision?)

Chin acknowledges that such systems exist in other parts of the world, with examples being Montessori, Theosophy, Waldorf, Summerhill, and Krishnamurti schools. The country of Bhutan aligns its national educational goals with its national goal: gross national happiness (GNH) rather than economic progress.

The twenty-four chapters in this book cover topics like understanding human nature, the goals of education, character building, life aspects of education, teacher training, and intelligence. This book explores areas we may not have thought much about as educators, and Chin nudges us to do exactly that. His approach brings a wholesome energy and balance to the classroom.

Two chapters in particular touched me to the core. The chapter “Difficult Children” talked about “resolving the root cause and not suppressing the symptom.” If children are violent, there is a reason. I taught in a school where instances of violence caused frequent lockdowns. My approach to violence in class was to only offer patient love. Nothing else would have worked. At the end of the year, a student left a tiny note in my mailbox that said, “Thank you for not giving up on us.”

The second chapter that drew me was “The Regular Practice of Silence.” We are driven by deeper layers of consciousness rooted in our conditioning. The capacity to be in touch and aware of our inner being must start at a young age, before even more conditioning builds up. A regular practice of silence for young children helps them become aware of their emotional, mental, and bodily inclinations. It teaches them to respond to their inner voice. True satisfaction lies in the ability to respond to life in that manner. It need not be a formal meditation practice, but can be a skillful journey into silence guided by the teacher in the classroom. Chin provides practical instructions akin to guided meditations that can be easily used in this context.

The principles invoked in this book are global in nature and offer a real ability to transform. The teacher in me is saying, “Thank you for your teaching.”

Dhananjay Joshi

Dhananjay Joshi is a professor of statistics and has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. His book No Effort Required; No! Effort Required contains anecdotes from his years of spiritual study.

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What I Don’t know about Death: Reflections on Buddhism and Mortality

C.W. Huntington Jr.
Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom Publications, 2021; 167 pp., paper, $16.95.

Death would seem to be the greatest human mystery, although it appears to be only a bit more mysterious than life. C.W. (Sandy) Huntington Jr. acknowledges that in the first sentence of his book: “I know next to nothing about death.”

 Written during the six months Huntington had left of his life after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in January 2020, this book is his final gift to those of us who are left pondering the meaning of life and its end, death. “Science can tell us a great deal about dying and death from an objective point of view but nothing at all about what it means to directly face one’s own imminent demise,” he writes.

Huntington grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and attended Michigan State University. He earned his PhD in Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. Living in India from 1976 to 1979, Huntington studied with the teachers Ambika Datta Upadhyaya and Ram Shanar Tripathi. He traveled to India many times in his life, taking students in his Buddhist studies program (first at the University of Michigan and Denison College, and then to Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York), to experience that country.

The life of the Buddha and the nature of the spiritual path are the subjects of the beginning chapter of Huntington’s work, in which he notes that the spiritual path is often rooted in discontent, as was the Buddha’s. When the questions loom large in our minds, the search for answers begins. Most of us seek to know why. How can we attain happiness? The search is often a struggle to find the meaning in what confronts us in life, and “how ultimately futile our struggle for control” is.

Some people are critical of Buddhism’s seeming obsession with death and dying, which, as Huntington observes, sees “spiritual work as preparation for death . . . obvious in the case of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,” in which “the message is communicated . . . throughout Buddhist teachings, where meditations on death are commonplace.” But there likely is no more profound teacher of suffering and the way out of suffering than being given a terminal diagnosis of a “dis-ease,” as Huntington terms it in the chapter of that title. Wanting life to be other than it is brings on suffering “whenever our experience runs counter to our desires. What I don’t get what I want, or when I get what I don’t want, I become restless, worried, fearful.”

That reminds me of the phrase in a song by Sheryl Crow: “It’s not having what you want; it’s wanting what you’ve got.” That’s true even if what you’ve got is a terminal diagnosis. This quality—wanting nothing more than what you are given—is called desirelessness in Buddhist philosophy, as Huntington notes as one of the lessons of living and dying. It’s the only way out of suffering.

Huntington explores waking up and what it means as we move through life seeking enlightenment, which more often than not eludes us. His chapter on “A Pathless Land” also discusses waking up. We try too hard to attain enlightenment, which is our greatest impediment: “The harder I twist and pull, the tighter the knot gets. At some point my only choice is to give up trying to not try.” Does waking up (enlightenment) come gradually, through our own efforts, or in a sudden insight? He quotes J. Krishnamurti, who said that “‘truth is a pathless land’ . . . some problems will not yield to rational analysis, so there are skills that cannot be learned by mastering a formula.”

While most of Huntington’s insightful book is focused on the basics of the Buddhist philosophy of living, including nonattachment, equanimity, and desirelessness, ultimately one must learn to let go. “Letting Go” is his final chapter, both literally and figuratively. “I am dying, and what I don’t know about death has become a metaphor for what I don’t know about life. As I’m compelled to give myself over to this darkness of unknowing, I’m finding a new and deepened understanding about what it means to come to terms with what I’ve been given—with what Buddhism calls the ‘suchness’ (tathata) of things.”

Learning nonattachment and the practice of letting go is a lifelong effort, but one that finally gives us the peace and courage required to die. As my late partner, Brent, said to me in one of his last lessons to me: “Dying is easy; it’s living that’s hard. Dying is so easy.”

Huntington died on July 19, 2020, at 1:45 p.m., says his epilogue. “It was an entirely quiet passing. He simply let go.”

Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being, was reviewed in Quest, spring 2022.

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The Mystery of Doggerland: Atlantis in the North Sea

Graham Phillips
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2023. 198 pp., paper, $20.

Lost continents have long featured in lore, but until recently they were derided as mere legends.

That picture is rapidly changing, as archaeologists are unearthing discoveries that point to civilizations that sank underwater in comparatively recent times. Although the last Ice Age is generally deemed to have ended in the tenth millennium BC, large—and inhabited—territories were submerged only thousands of years later.

Graham Phillips explores one of these submerged civilizations in The Mystery of Doggerland. The name is taken from the Dogger Bank, a submerged sea bank in the North Sea. Doggerland was an enormous territory in that sea, to the east of Britain, and at one time connected the island to the mainland European continent.

Phillips chooses to focus on another, smaller island, called North Doggerland, northeast of the coast of Scotland. He prefers to call it Fairland, not only because the name is more evocative but because the last part of it to remain aboveground is Fair Isle, a 2.5 x 3‒mile territory between the Orkney and Shetland islands with sixty inhabitants.

 The great megaliths and stone circles scattered around the British Isles have long been a source of wonder, but until recently it was believed that the oldest ones were in the south (such as Stonehenge and Avebury). It turns out that the opposite is the case: the oldest circles and standing stones are in the Orkneys, off the north coast of Scotland, and the custom of erecting them slowly spread south.

Despite their age, Phillips says that the circles and megaliths of the Orkneys were themselves mere outposts of the civilization of Fairland, and the islands may have been settled in part by refugees of that country as it began to be submerged. One megalithic complex that is now twelve feet below the surface off the Bay of Firth, began sinking in 4000 BC, according to Phillips.

Consequently, “during the fourth millennium BC, a completely new, far more advanced culture than anything that came before suddenly came from the Orkney Islands . . . the characteristic megalithic monuments began to be erected, and the technical innovations of pottery, weaving, and farming suddenly appeared. The Orcadians began building stone houses—the first anywhere in Europe.” These were all the legacy of Fairland.

Myth did not forget the lost country, which, says Phillips, was known in ancient sources as “Tu-lay,” “Tyle,” “Thule,” and “Thoule”; “Tule” was another variant. In the fourth century, the Greek explorer Pytheas followed such legends of this mysterious and bounteous land, but all he found is what we see today—the small, sparsely populated islands of the Orkneys.

Although Phillips does not mention this fact, there is another tradition about Tule, known from the works of the French esotericist René Guénon, who posited a primordial circumpolar tradition that he connected with the Greek legend of Hyperborea. The Greeks regarded Hyperborea as a real but inaccessible country in the far north, but Guénon contended that it no longer existed. (Still another picture of Hyperborea is the one known from H.P. Blavatsky, but it is quite different from both the Greek and Guénonian views.)

All genuine esoteric traditions, said Guénon, were descended from that of Hyperborea. Furthermore, this spiritual center became “occluded” so that our present connections with this primordial tradition can only be weak and tenuous. We might, if we liked, connect this occlusion with the submergence of Fairland.

One may wonder about how all of this came about in such a dismal climate, but Phillips makes the startling claim that “until around 1200 BCE the British climate was warmer than it is today, more like what we would now find in southern France or northern California.”

This book examines myths of other lost continents, such as Atlantis, first discussed in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias. According to Phillips, evidence suggests that a landslide off the coast of southern Greenland around 6500 BC caused a giant tsunami, “hammering the coasts of southwest Europe and northwest Africa with a wave about 30 feet high.” Hence, he concludes, “an island, perhaps sustaining an early city . . . did exist exactly where Plato and his contemporaries had in mind. And it appears that it was completely inundated by a gigantic wave in a single day as Plato describes.” But he is much more skeptical about the legends of Mu in the Pacific and Lemuria in the Indian Ocean.

Phillips takes his investigation into a number of other directions, for example, about traditions of medicinal uses of herbs. Traces of noxious herbs are found in the box tombs of the ancient Orcadian elite, which he says can only have been for medicinal purposes. These plants could only be harvested at certain specific times and seasons, he argues, because the amount of poison they secreted varied at different times: “The organism has evolved to deter some creatures and attract others when it is ready to be pollinated.” Hence “many of the substances utilized in the making of remedial potions need to be extracted at a very specific time,” even “on very particular days.”

Phillips’ suggestions cast a different light on the much-derided old traditions requiring harvesting of plants and herbs at specific days and times and at specific phases of the moon. Here as in other situations, superstitions may contain relics of a very precise ancient knowledge.

Phillips’ book has an unsettling relevance. Sinking islands are no longer risible myths but realities that many parts of the world have to face. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, for example, is expected to be completely submerged by the end of this century. Coastal regions of the United States are by no means exempt. Twelve thousand years from now, skeptics will probably sneer at legends of a magnificent but sunken city known as New York.

Richard Smoley

For more on lost continents, see Richard Smoley’s YouTube lecture “Atlantis Then and Now.”

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What I Don’t know about Death: Reflections on Buddhism and Mortality

C.W. Huntington Jr.
Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom Publications, 2021; 167 pp., paper, $16.95.

Death would seem to be the greatest human mystery, although it appears to be only a bit more mysterious than life. C.W. (Sandy) Huntington Jr. acknowledges that in the first sentence of his book: “I know next to nothing about death.”

 Written during the six months Huntington had left of his life after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in January 2020, this book is his final gift to those of us who are left pondering the meaning of life and its end, death. “Science can tell us a great deal about dying and death from an objective point of view but nothing at all about what it means to directly face one’s own imminent demise,” he writes.

Huntington grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and attended Michigan State University. He earned his PhD in Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. Living in India from 1976 to 1979, Huntington studied with the teachers Ambika Datta Upadhyaya and Ram Shanar Tripathi. He traveled to India many times in his life, taking students in his Buddhist studies program (first at the University of Michigan and Denison College, and then to Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York), to experience that country.

The life of the Buddha and the nature of the spiritual path are the subjects of the beginning chapter of Huntington’s work, in which he notes that the spiritual path is often rooted in discontent, as was the Buddha’s. When the questions loom large in our minds, the search for answers begins. Most of us seek to know why. How can we attain happiness? The search is often a struggle to find the meaning in what confronts us in life, and “how ultimately futile our struggle for control” is.

Some people are critical of Buddhism’s seeming obsession with death and dying, which, as Huntington observes, sees “spiritual work as preparation for death . . . obvious in the case of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,” in which “the message is communicated . . . throughout Buddhist teachings, where meditations on death are commonplace.” But there likely is no more profound teacher of suffering and the way out of suffering than being given a terminal diagnosis of a “dis-ease,” as Huntington terms it in the chapter of that title. Wanting life to be other than it is brings on suffering “whenever our experience runs counter to our desires. What I don’t get what I want, or when I get what I don’t want, I become restless, worried, fearful.”

That reminds me of the phrase in a song by Sheryl Crow: “It’s not having what you want; it’s wanting what you’ve got.” That’s true even if what you’ve got is a terminal diagnosis. This quality—wanting nothing more than what you are given—is called desirelessness in Buddhist philosophy, as Huntington notes as one of the lessons of living and dying. It’s the only way out of suffering.

Huntington explores waking up and what it means as we move through life seeking enlightenment, which more often than not eludes us. His chapter on “A Pathless Land” also discusses waking up. We try too hard to attain enlightenment, which is our greatest impediment: “The harder I twist and pull, the tighter the knot gets. At some point my only choice is to give up trying to not try.” Does waking up (enlightenment) come gradually, through our own efforts, or in a sudden insight? He quotes J. Krishnamurti, who said that “‘truth is a pathless land’ . . . some problems will not yield to rational analysis, so there are skills that cannot be learned by mastering a formula.”

While most of Huntington’s insightful book is focused on the basics of the Buddhist philosophy of living, including nonattachment, equanimity, and desirelessness, ultimately one must learn to let go. “Letting Go” is his final chapter, both literally and figuratively. “I am dying, and what I don’t know about death has become a metaphor for what I don’t know about life. As I’m compelled to give myself over to this darkness of unknowing, I’m finding a new and deepened understanding about what it means to come to terms with what I’ve been given—with what Buddhism calls the ‘suchness’ (tathata) of things.”

Learning nonattachment and the practice of letting go is a lifelong effort, but one that finally gives us the peace and courage required to die. As my late partner, Brent, said to me in one of his last lessons to me: “Dying is easy; it’s living that’s hard. Dying is so easy.”

Huntington died on July 19, 2020, at 1:45 p.m., says his epilogue. “It was an entirely quiet passing. He simply let go.”

Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being, was reviewed in Quest, spring 2022.

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