Weekend Literary Supplement: "Digging Your Own Well", Part Twenty

Immortals and Realized Men

Daoists who are of a “New Age” or religious orientation will often talk about “Immortals” or “Enlightened Sages” who have either conquered death or at least have manifested magical powers. This idea has existed for a long time, as it stems from the Shamanistic roots of the broad movement. But as a practical philosophy I would suggest that people need not accept that there are such things as magical powers or immortality in order to be a “real Daoist”.

So let's look at how one of the key Daoist thinkers, Zhuangzi, viewed life and death.

Master Chuang's wife died. When Master Hui went to offer his condolences, he found Master Chuang lolling on the floor with his legs sprawled out, beating a basin and singing.
“She lived together with you,” said Master Hui, “raised your children, grew old, and died. It's enough that you do not wail for her, but isn't it a bit much for you to be beating on a basin and singing?”
“Not so,” said Master Chuang. “When she first died, how could I of all people not be melancholy? But I reflected on her beginning and realized that originally she was unborn. Not only was she unborn, originally she had no form. Not only did she have no form, originally she had no vital breath. Intermingling with nebulousness and blurriness, a transformation occurred and there was vital breath: the vital breath was transformed and there was form; the form was transformed and there was birth; now there has been another transformation and she is dead. This is like the progression of the four seasons---from spring to autumn, from winter to summer. There she sleeps blissfully in an enormous chamber. If I were to have followed her weeping and wailing, I think it would have been out of keeping with destiny, so I stopped.”

(Zhuangzi, “Outer Chapters”, “Ultimate Joy”, Sect 2, Mair trans.)

There is an important insight in Daoism that involves life and death. But it isn't a secret that only very groovy people are allowed to hear. Instead, its one of those insights that is relatively easy to find, but only a certain type of person is willing to listen to.

Master Lieh was on a journey and was having a meal by the side of the road. There he saw a hundred-year-old skull. He pulled away the weeds and pointed at it, saying, “Only you and I know that you have never died and that you have never lived. Are you truly distressed? Am I truly happy?”

(Zhuangzi, “Outer Chapters”, “Ultimate Joy”, Sect 6, Mair trans.)

Liezi can say that the skull has “never died” and “never lived”. That's because human beings don't really exist. They are actually only theoretical abstractions. All of us die, and we could end up dried bones on a roadside. But is the bone the man? Hardly. Indeed, is the infant the man? When you die, there is no “you” left to give a hang about being dead. No more than there was anyone to be concerned about before you were born.

And think about this. Modern psychology has proved beyond a doubt that what we call “memory” is to a large degree fiction. Our minds aren't tape recorders that keep everything on a permanent record. Instead, they are like data compression files that record a few salient elements of the past and then use our imagination to reconstruct it when required according to various protocols. This explains the phenomenon of “false memory syndrome”. It also explains why eye-witness testimony is so notoriously unreliable.1 What we remember is---to a disconcertingly large extent---fiction! What we experience of life are odd fleeting moments of self-awareness, an anticipation of what the future may bring, plus a largely fictional understanding of the past.

Look carefully at life and you don't find individuals that have lives, let alone people who are immortal. Instead, what you find is a process.

In seeds there are germs. When they are found in water they become filaments. When they are found at the border of water and land they become algae. When they are found at the border of water and land they become plantain. When the plantain is found in fertile soil it becomes crow's foot. The crow's foot's roots become scarab grubs and its leaves become butterflies. The butterflies soon evolve into insects that are born beneath the stove. They have the appearance of exuviae and are called “house crickets”. After a thousand days the house crickets become birds called “dried surplus bones.” The spittle of the dried surplus bones becomes a misty spray and the misty spray becomes mother of vinegar. Midges are born from mother of vinegar: yellow whirligigs are born from fetid wine; blind gnats are born from putrid slimebugs. When goat's-queue comples with bamboo that has not shooted for a long time, they produce greenies. The greenies produce panthers; panthers produce horses; horses produce men; and men return to enter the wellsprings of nature. The myriad things all come out from the wellsprings and all re-enter the wellsprings.

(Zhuangzi, “Outer Chapters”, “Ultimate Joy”, sect 7, Mair trans.)

Zhuangzi is having fun with the science of the day, but the point he is trying to make is that if you look at life what you see is a complex booming, buzzing series of changes. That is the Dao and the Dao is all there is. We tie ourselves in knots worrying about entities that are mere intellectual abstractions.

There are no “immortals” because there really are no “mortals”. There is just the an endless series of transformations, which Daoists call “the Dao”. A “Master”---if you want to use the term---is simply someone who's figured this out to some extent. Sometimes they can find someone what wants to hear what they have to say, and sometimes that person actually understands what they are being told. But usually no one wants to hear what a “Master” has to say, so she just goes on with her life. There is another term that is sometimes used instead---one that I like much better than “Master” or “Immortal”: “Realized Man”. Someone who has figured out the Dao is a “Realized Man”---but mostly he is just another guy who has gained some insight into what life is really like.

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On a more practical note, it is important to understand why it is that people might think that some Daoists actually became immortal or developed super-human powers. At various times in human history the average lifespan has been a lot shorter than what we take for granted now. Consider a time in ancient China when life wasn't very good. Peasants lived short lives because they wore their bodies out by hard, brutal labour. And wealthier people who lived in cities tended to die because of the diseases that were endemic because of bad sanitation. (It's only in the 19th century that the population of large cities became self-reproducing. Before that, disease deaths always out-paced births and to keep the population stable there had to be a constant flow of people from rural areas moving in to balance this out. Consider the fact that even Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died in a cholera epidemic!)

Contrast this with the life of a hermit in some wilderness area. Isolated from other people, he wouldn't have been exposed to infectious diseases. And not being a peasant, he was able to avoid damaging his body through over work. Finally, being someone concerned about long life, he would have tried to have a varied diet and balanced exercise. Some of these folks probably would have been able to live to the immense age of seventy or eighty years! In a world where most people are dead by age forty and at sixty you are a very old man, someone in their eighties would be considered a magical being! Now if someone saw one of these rare oldsters, they would have talked about it. A game of “telephone” would have ensued and before long, people would have heard stories of mysterious “ancient immortals” who inhabit the mountains.

Similarly, if someone spends their time looking at the world around them and thinking about what they see, they might have noticed some interesting facts. Pass these facts onto other disciples, and eventually a body of “magical powers” can get built up. For example, for centuries religious leaders have “wowed” naive followers through ritual fire walking. Well, it turns out that even though glowing coals are very hot, they have a very poor rate of conductivity. This means that if someone walks barefoot on them, the perspiration on the soles of the feet are able to protect them from damage. (If someone put an iron railway spike in the fire---which has excellent conductive power---and people stepped on it, their feet would be terribly burned.). Now that people understand the science, fire walking is routinely used at conventions of scientific skeptics and business training seminars where there is no attempt to suggest magic is involved.

This is what my teacher used to call a “circus trick”. There are lots and lots of them and they are all based on either scientific principles that are poorly understood, or, out-and-out fraud. For ancients they were an excellent way of “gulling the rubes” in the neighbourhood of the hermitage. At the very best, this sort of thing would teach them to leave you alone. At the worst, it was a way of getting some economic support for your lifestyle. (Many “hermits” actually had people providing food and clothing---some even had servants.) Again, something unexplained would probably be spread through word of mouth and get exaggerated as it went from person to person. A circus trick eventually became a miracle.

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Most people really want to believe in there being “something more to life”. When they contemplate the horror and misery that many of us have to live through, they want there to be some sort of redress or balance in some future existence. Others find themselves in such drab, boring lives that they want to believe that this is just an illusion that covers something far more interesting. But these hopes don't make any sense at all---even if we assume that they have some basis in fact. For example, even if there was such a thing as reincarnation it really doesn't make our lives here and now any better. This is because it doesn't really matter if in a previous life I was the Emperor of China if I cannot remember it. And even if I did, the memory would only serve as a contrast to the blah, humdrum quality of my present 21st century existence. The same can be said about going to heaven after death, which is ultimately not much more than a specific type of reincarnation. As for there being a secret, amazing reality hiding behind normal existence, as Bishop Berkley pointed out, “esse est percipi”, or, “the essence of something is how we perceive it”. That is to say that if something “walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck”, etc---we should just accept that it is a duck instead of hypothesizing a lot of other things that no one can sense. And, as I wrote before, if the past is mostly imagination and the future mere anticipation, we only exist for the fleeting instant of awareness called “NOW!”. And if we only exist now, what does it mean to say that you live a long, short, or, immortal life?

Realized men do not know any tremendously groovy things that are hidden the rest of us. Instead, they are people who have the courage to see and accept the truths that are in front of all of us all the time.
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1Oh, if only someone would explain this fact to the criminal justice system!

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!