About a year ago or so, Your Humble Blogger happened on Volume One (Kapilavastu) of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha, and enjoyed it, in a disorienting way. That was when I was living in a town with a really remarkable library (for a town its size); I didn’t expect to see a copy of Volume Two: The Four Encounters at the local library, or even the local library of the next town over. Well, and it was at the next town over, a town about the same size as Williamsburg, VA, and I may have to revise my opinion of its library. It’s nice to discover that these affluent but smallish towns are supporting good libraries with fairly wide-ranging shelves. I mean, my local town has the library I would expect, with a good(ish) children’s section but an adult section dominated in non-fiction by biographies and in fiction by mysteries. I mean, I like biographies and mysteries, but I also like to come across things in a library that are outside my usual interests.
But I wasn’t going to write about libraries in this note, I was going to write about religions. More or less. It’s been my philosophy for some years now that humans live by stories, and that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our world largely determine how we do pattern-matching and so what universe we perceive. In particular, our religions are, in some way, the fundamental stories about the world, the stories to which our perceptions bind themselves. For me, for instance, the main story of my religion, and therefore of What the World Is Like, is that we were once slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. I’ve discovered, then, in myself, a tendency to match patterns to that sort of optimistic pessimism, or whatever I call it: that things will work out badly, but that it’ll be all right somehow. My Christian friends (the ones I’ve spoken to about it) pretty much have as their base story that the Lord loved the world so much that He gave His only Son to it, to die for all mankind, that they might live. This leads, in them, to a certain kind of idealism, a certain pride, a certain sympathy for martyrs and sacrifices.
Of course, not all Jews take the Exodus as their core story, nor do all who do take the Exodus as their core story interpret it the same way, and thus match the same events to the same patterns. There are Jews for whom the Holocaust is the defining story of what the world is like (and there are interpretations of that, too, from Six million of us were killed and the goyim did nothing to we were spared from the camps to guard against genocide), and there are Jews for whom the Binding of Isaac is the defining story, and I suppose there are some for whom the Purim story is at the core, Lord help them. There are Christians for whom the Jesus story is about the King of Kings born in a manger, and there are Christians for whom the Jesus story is about Peter crucified upside-down. But on the whole, our religions are the stories we tell ourselves about what the world is really like. And because the world is so complicated, we perceive the world that is like the stories.
So one of the things I have never really understood about Buddhism is what, about the Buddha story, appeals to so many people. I mean, I don’t find the Jesus story compelling personally, but I do understand what about it is inspiring and moving. But my near-total ignorance of the Buddha story means that I am pretty much outside the whole thing. And that’s frustrating to me, as lots of people that I quite like do find it compelling. So as I’m reading Mr. Tezuka’s comics, I’m keeping an eye out for how the world would look to someone who thought that this story is how the world looks. I can’t say I’m there yet, but then I’m only on Volume Two.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.