Quest Magazine

The Golden Age of Zen: Zen Masters of the Tang Dynasty

By John C. H. Wu
Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004.Soltcover, 280 pages.

This reprint of The Golden Age of Zen, a modern classic of Zen studies originally published in 1967, will be welcomed by many on the spiritual path. John C. H. Wu (1899-1986) was one of the most extraordinary Chinese of his generation. Statesman, academic, translator, interpreter of Chinese culture, and above all a pilgrim on the path, he experienced both inner and outer worlds. both past and present, to a remarkable degree. In China he served as judge and law school dean and was principal writer of the Nationalist Chinese constitution, all during China's terrible years of war and revolution. Later, dividing his time between Taiwan and the United States, he taught at Seton Hall University and wrote extensively on Chinese culture. He became a Roman Catholic shortly before the age of forty and served as Chinese minister to the Vatican in 1947-48.

His Christianity, however, was not mere dogmatism. Rather, it served as a vehicle for the generous and mutually enriching exchange between Eastern and Western spirituality that was his most influential vocation of all. He translated the Psalms and New Testament into Chinese (using Tao for Logos, or Word, in John's gospel) and the Tao Te Ching into English. He was a great friend of the no less ecumenical Trappist Thomas Merton, and of that supreme apostle of Zen to the West, D. T. Suzuki. The present volume is enhanced with a preface by Merton and the correspondence between Wu and Suzuki.

The Golden Age of Zen concerns the Zen masters of the Tang period (618-906 C.E.). Then Zen, or Chan, was fresh, exciting, and innovative. It was both countercultural and cultural, the former in its spiritually iconoclastic mood and in the willingness of its monks to work with their hands and endure relative poverty, unlike others content to live very well from endowments; and it was culturally assimilative because of its radical commingling of Taoism and Buddhism to create a remarkably new, but very Chinese, kind of Buddhism.

Wu's golden age was the era of the celebrated stories of students suddenly enlightened when told to wash their dishes after eating or upon a teacher's unexpected shout or blow. At the same time, Zen thinkers like Huineng and Huang-po developed subtle philosophical positions based on the One Mind or original unstained nature, the Buddha-nature, in all beings-though always with the caveat that it is not through words and concepts that it is known, but when it is seen as, say, the cypress tree in the front yard, or in the pain of one's nose after a master has twisted it.

This world is wonderfully captured in John Wu’s book, which is at the same time a tribute to a splendid modern master who entered, among other gates, the gateless gate of Zen. Highly recommended.

-ROBERT ELLWOOD

January/February 2005

Dancing with Chaos

By Patricia Monaghan
Clare, Ireland: Salmon Publishing, 2004. Paperback, 84 pages.

Patricia Monaghan has an unusual academic background bridging science and literature. She teaches literature and environmental studies at DePaul University in Chicago and has been called a “lay physicist" by professional physicists who appreciate her award-winning work as a poet and writer.

Patricia was a presenter at the Theosophical Society's Summer School at Olcott, whose theme was "Chaos, Order, and the Divine Plan." Reading from "In the Beginning," the opening poem in Dancing with Chaos, she elegantly conveyed the movement out from the formless sea of chaos that we recognize from Hesiod, Ovid, and The Stanzas of Dzyan.

Now let me tell you how things change,
new rising endlessly out of old,
everything altering, form unto form,
let me be the voice of mutability,
the only constant: in this world.

The poems from her "Voice of Mutability" draw on an understanding of chaos theory. The book contains a short: glossary that includes brief explanations of Mandelbrot's fractal geometry and other concepts alluded to in the verse for those who are not familiar with the language of chaos in contemporary physics.

But the poems draw on an even deeper understanding of the physics and poetry of grief that emerged when she experienced a sense of loss of control as she witnessed her husband dying of cancer. This poetic voice of mutability takes us on a tour in which we can sense how patterns are established, distorted, and transcended in the world around and within us.

In "The Butterfly Tattoo Effect," she shows how Charlene's desire "to be a little dangerous" at fifty by having the tattoo of a butterfly placed on her right shoulder in turn affects her friend Maggie and then Flo and then Paula until

the world awoke to news of
seismic convulsions
on every continent brought on by
the simultaneous shifting into high gear
of millions of women in sleek red cars.

In "The Poised Edge of Chaos," our guide tells us how

one grain at a time, a pattern is formed,
one grain at a time, a pattern is destroyed,
and there is no way to know which grain
will build the tiny mountain higher, which
grain will tilt the mountain into avalanche,
whether the avalanche will be small or
catastrophic, enormous or inconsequential.

Dancing with Chaos leaves one aware that there are really no insignificant beings or places in the mysterious wonder of our world. Even the smallest choice requires a humble mindfulness that one cannot foresee all the effects that will flow from it. In "Falling Bodies," we read:

Each time we move
we fall into time.
Dancing is simply
falling with grace.

These poems are moving and graceful, worthy of more than one reading, more than one dance.

-ANTON LYSY

January/February 2005

The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God

By Robert Louis Wilken
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Hardcover, 368 pages.

Contemporary scholars have broadened our awareness of the immense diversity of the early Christian movement. In Theosophical circles, there is an understandable tendency to emphasize those elements that were eventually sidelined, such as the various gnostic traditions. There is very important work to be done in recovering such lost aspects of the Christian tradition. Nonetheless, one is often left with an impression of the church fathers as a rather stodgy and oppressive lot, who kept busy condemning any interesting heresies and are presumably the distant ancestors of the moribund, socially established churches of today.

Anyone inclined to such an unfortunate view would do well to take Robert Wilken's latest book as a strong antidote, Wilken is a fanner Lutheran minister and convert to Roman Catholicism. He has taught at the University of Virginia for many years, earning an undisputed reputation as one of the greatest living church historians. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought is the fruit of mature scholarship and deep faith. It will appeal equally to academics and spiritual seekers.

Wilken has a gift for rendering the church fathers as people of flesh and blood, members of living communities, embedded in rich historical and cultural context. His chapters chronicle the development of early Christian thinking on matters as diverse as the trinity and poetry, politics and icons, happiness and the Bible. With great care, he displays both the Christians' continuity with, and transformation of the classical Greek and Roman thought, inherited by the church.

The manner in which Wilken tells the story of the early church is in accord with his conviction that "the way to truth passes through the concrete and the personal." We might add that such truth is mediated by a community, which in turn is formed by a distinctive set of rituals, disciplines, and practices. After all, he writes, "Christianity's unique claim is that spiritual knowledge begins with things that can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands: 'That which was from the beginning, which we have heard. which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life ... that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you' (l John 1:3). " All, Christian or not, who seek the transformative knowledge that comes from participation in the life of God, a knowledge found only through the love that unifies knower and known, will find much to contemplate here.

-JOHN PLUMBER

January/February 2005

D. M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker

By Roderick Bradford
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006. Hardcover, 410 pages

If secular sainthood were possible, then surely DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818-1882) deserves to be canonized. Bennett was arguably the most active, productive, and effective promoter of free thought in the last quarter of the nineteenth century-the quarter that also saw the formation of the Theosophical Society.

Free thought is the principle that all of us have the right to have views, especially about religion, that vary from the conventional opinions of the society in which we live. Free thought rejects the right of authority to limit our conscience, whether that authority is of the state or the church, or some miscegenation of the two. Free thought holds that dogma must give way to rational inquiry. D. M. Bennett is the saint of free thought, though he himself would doubtless have been nonplussed at the idea.

At the age of 14, DeRobigne, then fatherless and on his own, fell in with some friendly Shakers and joined their community in New Lebanon, New York. The Shakers (officially, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing) were an eighteenth-century offshoot of the Quakers who lived spartanly in self-sufficient communities. Because they were celibate, the communities grew by converts, and welcomed orphans and homeless youths. Their worship included group dancing, shaking (hence their popular name), whirling, and singing in tongues. For a time they practiced a sort of proto-spiritualism, by which they received spiritual messages as guidance.

DeRobigne Bennett spent thirteen years in the New Lebanon Shaker community, but in his mid-twenties, he eloped with a Shaker girl, Mary Wicks, whom he married. Although officially apostates, DeRobigne and Mary never lost their fondness for their Shaker friends and in later years often visited the community, which in turn supported Bennett during some of his most difficult trials. In the outside world, Bennett discovered the writings of Thomas Payne and by them was converted to a life of reason and free thought. He eventually founded a periodical whose name, The Truth Seeker, was suggested by his wife.

Through the pages of The Truth Seeker, Bennett launched campaign after campaign to challenge orthodoxy and promote an open examination of life. His antithesis and nemesis was a dry-goods salesman of little talent or intelligence but of great ambition named Anthony Comstock. Comstock formed an alliance with the Young Men's Christian Association in New York and founded a Society for the Suppression of Vice. His aim was to rid the nation of obscenity and blasphemy, and to that end, he lobbied Congress to pass censorship laws and got himself appointed as a legal authority for the Post Office. He was so effective in that role that his name has entered the English language in the form "Comstockery" as a term for censorious opposition to alleged immorality in literature or life.

Comstock's real argument with Bennett was that Bennett promoted the free expression of opinion, whereas Comstock wanted to censor all views incompatible with his own. Bennett was, in Comstock's view, a literally damned blasphemer against Christianity and the social order. The First Amendment, however, made it difficult to prosecute Bennett for such "crimes." So Comstock took another tack. Bennett's periodical was selling mail-order copies of a book titled Cupid’s Yokes, which argued that the institution of marriage should be abandoned. Its thesis was not one with which Bennett agreed, but he sold the book in accordance with the Voltairean motto “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The same book was being sold in many bookshops, but because Bennett distributed copies by mail, Comstock was able to have him arrested, tried, and convicted on a charge of disseminating obscene matter.

Bennett spent thirteen months in the Albany Penitentiary under conditions that seriously affected his health. Although President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned the author of Cupid's Yokes, earlier convicted of writing obscenities in that book, he refused to pardon Bennett. Yet Bennett had only distributed the book, and Hayes was presented with a petition for pardon containing 230,000 names, including those of Shakers, who stood loyally by their former fellow. Bennett's imprisonment quite reasonably earned him the reputation of being a martyr for the free thought cause. And when he had completed his sentence and was released, Bennett was greeted by the free-thought community as a hero.

Throughout his imprisonment, Bennett had produced a steady stream of writings. After his release, he began a tour around the world, sending home letters that were compiled into four volumes of travelogue, critique of censorship, and promotion of free thought. The highlight of that trip was his visit to the Founders of the Theosophical Society in Bombay, where Bennett joined the Society. The longest chapter in this book is one describing the background to the events that led to Bennett's trial and imprisonment. The second longest chapter is that describing his contact with the Theosophists (and it is based on material the author earlier published in The Quest).

Bennett was a heartfelt friend of both Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky. But even more noteworthy is the fact that the Masters also valued and respected him. One of the latter said that Bennett was "one of our agents (unknown to himself) to carry out the scheme for the enfranchisement of Western thoughts from superstitious creeds" (Mahatma Letters, no. 37). And another wrote of him: "Few men have suffered--and unjustly suffered--as he has; and as few have a more kind, unselfish and truthful a heart. ... [He] is an honest man and of a sincere heart, besides being one of tremendous moral courage and a martyr to boot" (Mahatma Letters, no. 43).

Bennett was not the sort of free thinker who rejects conventional religion only to be converted to an equally blind devotion to materialism. Bennett was a true free thinker, that is, one who was open to possibilities beyond those recognized by the establishments of either church or science. He was true to the creed of Thomas Paine, who said, "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good," and to the motto of the Theosophical Society: "There is no religion higher than truth." He was a man whom Theosophists everywhere can be proud to hail as a brother and Fellow.

Rod Bradford's highly readable and engaging book reveals a man who is strikingly relevant to our times-politically, socially, and intellectually--for today we face the same sort of intolerance that Bennett did in his day. Comstockery, McCarthyism, and demagoguery are not dead; they still stalk our society and government at all levels. More than ever, we need the spirit of D. M. Bennett to defend the liberty on which this country was founded and is based.