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POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
Science and Religion in
the Twenty-First Century
William Grassie
A Metanexus Imprint
Copyright © 2010 by William Grassie.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010901676
ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4500-3849-2
Softcover 978-1-4500-3848-5
Ebook 978-1-4500-3850-8
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Contents
1. Epiphany on the New Jersey Turnpike ......................................................... 11
Religion by Other Means ...................................................................... 15
2. Ten Reasons for the Constructive Engagement of Science and Religion .... 17
3. Metanexus: The Very Idea ........................................................................... 23
4. Beyond Intelligent Design, Scientifi c Debates, and Cultural Wars ............. 32
5. Which Universe Do You Live In? ................................................................ 36
6. Toward a Constructive Theology of Evolution ............................................ 39
7. Universalism and Particularism: Judaism in an Age of Science .................. 60
8. Resources and Problems in Whitehead’s Process Metaphysics ...................72
Peace by Other Means .......................................................................... 85
9. Sleepless in Tehran ....................................................................................... 87
10. Universal Reason: Science, Religion, and the Foundations of
Civil Societies ............................................................................................ 100
11. Science, Religion, and the Bomb ............................................................... 108
12. Engaged Contemplation for a Troubled World .......................................... 117
13. Leeches on the Road to Enlightenment ..................................................... 133
14. Nationalism, Terrorism, and Religion: A Biohistorical Approach ............. 142
15. Entangled Narratives: Competing Visions of the Good Lie ...................... 158
Evolution by Other Means ................................................................. 185
16. Biocultural Evolution in the Twenty-fi rst Century ..................................... 187
17. Useless Arithmetic and Inconvenient Truths ............................................. 207
18. Rereading Economics: New Economic Metaphors for Evolution ............. 218
19. Post-Darwinism: The New Synthesis .........................................................231
20. Eating Well Together: Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto .... 245
21. In the Heavens As It Is on Earth: Astrobiology and the Human Prospect .... 259
22. A Thought Experiment: Envisioning a Civilization Recovery Plan .......... 271
23. Millennialism at the Singularity: The Limits of Ray Kurzweil’s
Exponential Logic ...................................................................................... 280
Postscript .............................................................................................. 301
24. All My Relations: The Challenge Ahead ................................................... 303
Index ................................................................................................................. 315
133
13. Leeches on the Road to Enlightenment
This essay was originally published on Metanexus, 2008.05.01
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10411/Default.aspx
No one warned me about the leeches. I arrived at Nilambe Buddhist Meditation
Center early on a Saturday morning full of trepidation. The center is located high
up on the side of a mountain about twenty kilometers south of Kandy, Sri Lanka,
where I am spending the year as a Senior Fulbright Fellow teaching comparative
religion in the Department of Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya. I
was several months into my tour of duty, but had managed to avoid the obvious.
Sure I had studied Buddhism in graduate school and had taught perhaps a dozen
introductory classes on Buddhism, but I had never exposed myself to the discipline of
Buddhist meditation. Sure I could discuss the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path,
the Ten Fetters, the Paradox of Anatman, the fine points of Theravada and Mahayana
schools, and the subtleties of Nagarjuna’s deconstructive philosophy.115 Over the years,
I had had opportunities to dialogue with leading Buddhists and Buddhist scholars from
around the world. Recently, I had read a lot about the twentieth-century transformations
in Sri Lankan Buddhism. The books and ideas I knew, but I had never actually practiced
Buddhist meditation.
∞
115. A. L. Herman, An Introduction to Buddhist Thought (New York: University Press of
America, 1983), Richard H. Robinson and Willard L. Johnson, The Buddhist Religion:
A Historical Introduction, ed. Frederick J Streng, The Religious Life of Man Series
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1982). Roger J. Corless, The Vision of Buddhism (New
York: Paragon, 1989).
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POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
Nilambe Buddhist Meditation Center is an example of what some scholars
refer to as “Protestant Buddhism.”116 Buddhist meditation was once the mostly
exclusive activity of the Sangha, which was divided into those monks who served
a more priestly function in village temples and those monks who withdrew to
forest monasteries to diligently pursue their enlightenment through meditation. In
response to Christian missionaries under British colonial rule, however, Buddhism
in Ceylon changed in many profound ways. With the encouragement of Colonel
Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), the colorful founder of the Theosophical Society,
who arrived in then Ceylon in 1880 along with his even more colorful companion,
Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), new Buddhist institutions and new Buddhist
religiosity evolved. In 1881, Olcott wrote “The Buddhist Catechisms,” which in
his lifetime was translated into twenty-two languages and forty editions. By 1898,
the Buddhist Theosophical Society had founded over a hundred schools in Ceylon
modeled after the Christian missionary schools. Indigenous Buddhist leaders, most
notably the monk Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933), adopted a more missionary
and chauvinistic attitude toward Buddhism and promoted a politically engaged
Sangha and a new religiously observant laity. Today, every village temple in Sri
Lanka conducts Sunday Schools, in which children dressed in white go to temples
to learn basic Buddhist doctrines.
∞
Nilambe Buddhist Meditation Center (www.nilambe.org) is one of perhaps a
dozen meditation centers in Sri Lanka today that is focused on training the laity.
Some of these centers also cater to Western Buddhist tourists. Significantly, Nilambe
was founded by a lay Buddhist, Godwin Samararatne (1932-2000). A healthy
representation of Sri Lankan monks, nuns, and lay people also use the facility. It
can accommodate some forty overnight guests.
I arrived early in the morning just after breakfast for my three-day retreat.
“How long have you been here?” I asked the English woman, who oriented me.
“Nineteen years,” she responded. I asked the same of a German woman. “Three
years continuously,” she responded. The elderly Israeli man said that he had been
116. Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich, Buddhism Transformed (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989). Gananath Obeyesekere, “Colonel Oclcott’s Reforms
of the 19th Century and Their Cultural Significance,” in Ralph Peiris Memorial
Lecture (Mahaweli Centre, Colombo: asyasangha.org, 1992). , “Buddhism,
Ethnicity and Identity: A Problem in Buddhist History,” Buddhist Ethics 10(2003),
www.buddhistethics.org/10/obeyesekere-sri-lanaka-conf.html, H. L. Seneviratne, The
Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999).
13. ON THE ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT
135
here five times over the last nine years with his shortest visit lasting four weeks. I
guessed my three-day retreat would not amount to much.
Sri Lanka is known for its many upscale boutique hotels and spas, but Nilambe
is not one of them. Instead I was shown to a small mildewed room with a concrete
bed platform and an ancient mattress stuffed with hard coconut fiber, about a foot
too short for my six-foot frame. Candles and matches were provided, as Nilambe
has no electricity. Men were on one side of the small jungle campus, women on the
other side, each with their own communal bathrooms and cold showers.
∞
And yes, no one had warned me about the leeches. Within an hour of arriving at
Nilambe, I discovered the first leech sucking blood between my toes. This was not
my first encounter with a Sri Lankan leech, but the experience is to be avoided. In
all, I counted five leech bites and a dozen picked off during my three-day retreat. The
leeches were particularly plentiful given the almost continuous rain that weekend.
Sri Lankan leeches are much smaller than those that I have known back home or
than the monster leeches that cover Humphrey Bogart in the closing scenes of the
African Queen. These leeches are diminutive and disgusting. They are the size of
inchworms and move in the same way. Leeches release an anesthetic, so you do not
feel them bite, and an anticoagulant, so that the blood flows freely, even long after
the offending worm has been removed. The slimy little guys stick to you, which
makes picking them off quite a challenge.
The leeches, found only in the Central Highlands, may have played a significant
role in the colonial history of Sri Lanka. While the coastal regions of Ceylon were
first colonized by the Portuguese in 1505, by the Dutch in 1602, and the British in
1802, it would not be until 1815 that the Kandyan Kingdoms in the interior were
conquered by the British. I have been told that the real reason that the Europeans
had such a hard time conquering the interior was actually because of the leeches.
Nor would I conquer samsara during my brief Buddhist retreat, though not because
of the leeches. The little bloodsuckers actually provided a useful reminder of the
law of Dukkha, the Buddhist doctrine of universal suffering, impermanence, death,
and rebirth.
∞
My first experience in meditation was as a teenager at a Unitarian-Universalist
youth group. We lay on the floor, as we were guided through a relaxation exercise.
I quickly fell asleep and began snoring, which resulted in a cackle of adolescent
laughter and the abrupt end of the meditation exercise.
Later, I became a Quaker and submitted myself to a weekly hour of silent
worship, which would generally also involve several people giving vocal ministry.
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POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
Quakers talk about a centering process in silent worship, but there was no great
technique developed over twenty-five hundred years. For me, Quaker meditation
involved working my way through every possible list of things to do or consider,
a taking of inventory in my life, a consideration of existential problems and
relationships, prayers to God-by-whatever-name for healing and fortitude. Once
this was all taken care of, there would be some precious moments of sweet silence,
a space where something else, some stirring of a “still small voice” might rise up
in me.
Make a note to myself: if the Spirit moves me, do not, I repeat, do not give
vocal ministry during the meditation sessions at Nilambe.
∞
In Buddhist terminology, I have an overactive “monkey brain,” actually in
my case more like a drunken monkey in Time Square on New Year’s Eve with
firecrackers tied to his tail. Add to that a lot of reptilian passions in my cerebellum,
and you understand why I approach meditation with trepidation. The idea of
emptying my mind is anathema to me, hence the PhD, all of the reading and writing,
the love of conversation, debate, travel, adventure. I have long claimed to practice
Buddhist mindfulness, but for me, that means filling my mind full with as much
as possible. Buddhist meditation always struck me as more about mindlessness,
a process of clearing away all desires, all sensations, and all thoughts. HADD
welcome to the Dharma.
∞
The main meditation hall at Nilambe is about sixty feet long and twenty feet
wide. At one end, stands an altar with a small statue of the Buddha, candles, incense,
a bell, and a number of other sacred objects. The sides of the room are raised
concrete platforms for sitting with cushions and pillows to help in maintaining
comfort and good posture during the long sessions. The roof is made of hand-hewn
logs and covered with earthenware tiles. The concrete floor is covered with long
hemp carpets. Windows on one side let in natural light and sounds.
A Sri Lankan monk and a Belgian monk in residence sat near the front
near the altar, each with an extra cushion covered with a white cloth to raise
them ritualistically above the rest of us. The other twenty-eight guests spread
themselves around the room, wrapping themselves in sheets to stay warm in the
cool mountain air. At different times, one or more would stand up to practice
walking meditation, making their way slowly with deliberate steps from one
end of the hall to the other. The Belgian monk had brought a dozen Flemish
practitioners with him for a three-week retreat.
13. ON THE ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT
137
The day began at 5:00 a.m. with sixty minutes of meditation, followed by tea
and an hour of yoga. At 7:30 a.m., breakfast was served followed by an hour of
“working meditation,” taking care of the grounds and cleaning the rooms. From
9:30 to 11:00 a.m., there was another meditation session in the main hall. At noon
lunch was served, followed by some free time. At 2:30 p.m., there was another
ninety-minute meditation session in the main hall. At 4:30 p.m., tea was served
with a half-an-hour set aside for mindful conversation. Otherwise, there was not
a lot of talking. Another opportunity followed for yoga. At six, there was some
chanting followed by another hour of meditation. No dinner was served, but one
could avail oneself of a simple snack. The day ended with an eight o’clock Dharma
talk or a group sharing.
Though no one spoke, the meditations were hardly silent. The jungle sound of
birds, frogs, geckos, and frequent rain were constant companions in our meditations.
Sometimes a sound from the valley would make its way up to our mountain retreat.
Sometimes a tuktuk or a van would drive up through the tea plantation to deliver
supplies or a new visitor to our jungle retreat.
About a third of the visitors were Sri Lankans. There was a young monk taking
a retreat. I do not think he spoke English. There was a young Sri Lankan woman up
from Colombo, where she worked in one of the embassies. There was a young Sri
Lankan artist, now living in Sweden, who had been coming here since 1997. There
was a young Sri Lanka businessman from Colombo, seeking peace and renewal
from his hectic city life and the constant worry about the next terrorist attack. There
was the elderly Sri Lankan woman, who seemed to be in mourning over the death
of a loved one. Poya Day was coming, and on my last day, five new Sri Lankans
arrived to take up residence in anticipation of the Full Moon Holiday.
∞
The Sangha in Sri Lanka is in the midst of a quiet crisis, quiet it seems only
because no one will talk about it. Monks are typically recruited at the age of ten
or twelve in a system not unlike Roman Catholicism in Ireland a hundred years
ago. People are poor. There are too many mouths to feed, so you send one of your
kids to the monastery, where they get fed, schooled, and maybe even preferential
admission to universities. I am told, however, that something like 80 percent of the
monks disrobe when they become adults, but I have found no studies to document
this number, why they leave, or what happens to them after doing so.
The monks who seem to do the most to promote Buddhism here and abroad
are the Western converts. While they speak Sinhala and often acquire a scholar’s
mastery of Pali and the Pali Canon, they do not equate Sinhalese culture with
Buddhism and take no part in the Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalism, which has
brought so much misery to this island paradise. Then there is the charismatic monk
Ven. Kiribadgoda Gnanananda Thero, who is attracting educated young men to
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POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
high ordination, preaching a return to the Dharma, eschewing politics, building
new temples here and abroad, and attracting resentment from the caste-dominated
leadership of the main Buddhist lineages in the country. If Sri Lankan Buddhism is
now also somehow “Protestant” in form, then we should expect further reformations
and renewal movements in the decades to come.
In my brief foray into Sri Lankan Buddhism, it is clear that the future health of
Buddhism in Sri Lanka is as an “export-import” industry, taking a page again out of
the Protestant missions, who are once again very active in Sri Lanka today in the form
of the Assembly of God and other Pentecostal groups. In that sense, the well-being of
Buddhism will be increasingly divorced from Sinhalese language and culture. I note
that my students at the University of Peradeniya are all Buddhist monks and nuns
from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma. Why they are studying
in Sri Lanka probably also has something to do with reformation and renewal back
home, a return to an imagined authentic origin in the Pali Canon. I have only one Sri
Lankan student, a curious lecturer from the Psychology Department. Unfortunately,
most of the Sri Lankan monks do not speak English and are not compelled to learn
it. This is not to say that my East Asian students speak English very well, but they are
eager to learn it. If only the village Sunday Schools taught their Dharma classes in
English. That would be a double boon to the increasingly monolinguistic Sinhalese
lower classes in this caste- and class-stratified society.
∞
During the evening sessions, we began by chanting in Pali by candlelight,
ending with these verses, translated in our prayer book.
May there be timely rain,
May the harvest be abundant
May the world prosper
And the rulers be righteous
May the suffering not suffer,
The fearful not fear,
The grieving not grieve,
May all beings be well and happy.
On one occasion, the chanting was followed by a guided meditation on metta
and karuna, loving kindness and compassion, led by Nilambe’s new guru, Upul
Gamage, a young lay leader and student of Godwin Samararatne. In the dark
room lit only by the candles at the altar, we were asked to focus our meditations
on spreading peace and goodwill, radiating kindness over the entire world, and
an end to suffering everywhere. I thought perhaps it would be better to begin our
13. ON THE ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT
139
compassion meditation by reading the newspapers together or the latest human
rights reports, so that we might focus our meditations with some specificity on the
disappearances and murders, the terrorist bombings, the poor young men forced
into military service by poverty, the child soldiers forced into war by the LTTE, the
ongoing attacks on journalists by government thugs, the war raging in the North
with its daily air strikes, the families whose mothers were compelled by poverty to
work as domestic laborers in the Middle East, the one million internally displace
persons, some who have been in refugee camps for twenty years, the already
miserable prisons overflowing, the violence of the growing underworld, the high
rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicides, the inflation eating away at the
already meager income of most of the residents of this country, the steady erosion
of the rule of law, and the unmistakable movement toward dictatorship. And that
is just in Sri Lanka. I had a whole world of violence, injustice, and misery left to
account for in my meditations. I remembered a poem by Walt Whitman:
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world,
and upon all oppression and shame . . .
All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out
upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
Perhaps mindful silence and compassionate concern can be transformative. I
also pray to God-by-whatever-name, but I am not sure that is anymore effective. I
pray to a personal/impersonal God/Universe, whatever you want to call it. I find this
more satisfying than simply meditating on a transitory existence. Of course, though
it technically is contrary to the Theravada canon, most Buddhists also pray to Lord
Buddha, to a kind of superhuman person who cares and pays attention, wants the best
for each of us, who can maybe provide some special grace to help us better cope, to
be better people, to simply survive. At every hour of the day, lay people can be found
making pooja at Buddhist temples all around Sri Lanka, seeking divine assistance
in difficult times.
∞
I walked the meditation hall, back and forth. On one side was the shrine of the
Buddha. In the other direction was a blank wall, which for me came to represent
death. The seated meditators served as witnesses, judge, and jury in my trial. Back
and forth I walked—five minutes each way, each step a slow meditation, my death
in one direction, the Dharma in the other. Daily meditations on my death have long
been a part of my spiritual practice, but perhaps had become too much of a routine.
Death definitely helps focus one’s life on meaningful living and the appreciation of
small things. At fifty though, I find myself not less, but more obsessed with small
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POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
things—my fears, inadequacies, and desires. I am riddled with concerns about
pleasures, failures, insecurities, finitude, and death.
Slowly, the God/Dharma of small things began to fill my consciousness. Little
daily miracles became present to me—eating food, walking, a flower, a bird, a
person’s face, the sound of the rain, the view of the distant mountains, brushing my
teeth, removing another leech. After two days and over fourteen hours of formal
meditation—seated, walking, working, eating—my worries began to dissipate,
my senses and thoughts grew more attuned to my surroundings. Even my dreams
became part of this growing consciousness; my sleep also turned into a kind of
meditation.
∞
I do not know what to make of the afterlife. Whether it be the doctrine of
reincarnation or the notion of a resurrection, I am skeptically agnostic. I wonder
what happens to Buddhism, if we remove the doctrine of reincarnation. You have got
one life. This is it. Long or short, the only certainty is death and taxes. Of course,
I cling to life, knowledge, goodness, and beauty. And I want as much as possible,
for me and by extension for all beings everywhere (unless that being happen to
be my dinner tonight, in which case I am truly grateful for the food I am about to
receive). I want life lived to the fullest, which is probably why I will foolishly not
spend many weeks, months, or years in meditation, not yet at least. I will continue
to try to live an awakened life, to keep my passions and intellect burning, to engage
people and nature in deep dialogue, to expose myself to the drama and dharma all
around, its tragedies and triumphs, its evil depravities and simple kindnesses, its
extravagant beauties.
∞
It is five in the morning on my last day. I seat myself in the long meditation
hall, one of the last to arrive. It is raining again. Not the torrential rain of last night,
but a gentle rain, its sound falling on roof tiles and trees mixes with the sounds of
the dark jungle. The meditators are covered with their robes, only their faces are
exposed, though invisible in this dimly lit darkness. I fold my legs and adjust my
posture placing my palms together on my lap, thumbs touching. I calm my breath,
watching the gentle rise and fall of my diaphragm and my thoughts. Letting go.
Letting go. Letting go.
Time passes in this half-wake, fully present state. As the gray light of dawn
slowly arrives, I note the changing of the jungle guard, as the energetic sounds of
the nighttime amphibians give way to the equally boisterous daytime birds. Today I
will leave, much as I arrived, tangled in the Ten Fetters, but a little bit more mindful
13. ON THE ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT
141
of my condition and with a hint of something more, a no-thing-ness, that may lie
beyond or ahead, but that is somehow already and always present.
REFERENCES
Corless, Roger J. The Vision of Buddhism. New York: Paragon, 1989.
Herman, A. L. An Introduction to Buddhist Thought. New York: University Press
of America, 1983.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. “Buddhism, Ethnicity and Identity: A Problem in Buddhist
History.” Buddhist Ethics (2003), www.buddhistethics.org/10/obeyesekere-sri-
lanaka-conf.html.
. “Colonel Oclcott’s Reforms of the 19th Century and Their Cultural
Significance.” In Ralph Peiris Memorial Lecture. Mahaweli Centre, Colombo:
asyasangha.org, 1992.
Obeyesekere, Gananath, and Richard Gombrich. Buddhism Transformed. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
Robinson, Richard H., and Willard L. Johnson. The Buddhist Religion: A Historical
Introduction. Edited by Frederick J Streng, The Religious Life of Man Series.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1982.
Seneviratne, H. L. The Wo rk of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.