MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Modernity and the "Three Poisons"
The crass commercialism of the modern city arouses my revulsion and contempt for that sweat-shop of shameless trades run by exploiters of the compulsive lusts and appetites of others. Economic man has no wish to attain to the serene and heavenly happiness, but merely to feed his insatiable and ever-multiplied desires for sensual satiety. His short-sightedness is willing to forfeit all qualitative enrichment of living so as to gain a quick but ephemeral appeasement of his quantitative greed. For those who have failed to earn the Wish-Fulfilling Gem must console themselves with mere money. Yet in truth it is the exploiters who are the exploited: driven by their obsession to make money so as to acquire ever more specious possessions, at the same time they deprive themselves of the leisure, peace of mind, and capacity for enjoyment that alone give material goods any value. Such shrewd profiteers successfully cheat and despoil their gullible customers, only in their turn as consumers to be defrauded and robbed by fellow predators. As for their voluntary victims, the Chandogya Upanishad warns us that the Way between the opposites is as sharp and as narrow as a razor's edge. Your hedonist or playboy philosopher, devoted to licking honey off cold steel, soon discovers how long the pleasure lasts.
The Buddhist Wheel of Karma is gripped in the clutches of Mahakala Deva, the Great Black God, or Demon of Impermanence, whose blackness signifies that Time is unmanifest to the physical senses. Around its hub three symbolical beasts, a Pig, a Snake, and a Cock, chase each other, the one behind biting the tail of the one in front. These are the Sandoku, or Three Poisons, which produce the moving force that keeps the whole vicious circle endlessly revolving. The Pig signifies avidya, or Ignorance, not as a lack of information but as spiritual blindness, the dispersed mind dominated by such passions as sloth, foolishness, doubt, confusion, boredom, and self-delusion. The Cock stands for trishna, or Desire (literally "thirst"), but comprising the aggressive aspects of Ignorance, such as lust, rage, anger, greed, pride, arrogance and vainglory. The Snake symbolizes dosa, or Aversion, all such reactive aspects of ignorance as hatred, fear, hostility, envy, jealousy, spite, malevolence, and vain complaint.
One of the most cherished prejudices of the twentieth century has been that the benighted ages of faith are now happily outgrown with the childhood of the race and that, fully adult at last, we can take pride in living in a rationally enlightened period of disbelief. For it is commonly accepted as apodeictic by our contemporaries that 'Science has long since exposed religion as a superstitious survival of our primitive past'; though in truth secular science, with or without its sanctifying capital, has no competence or authority whatever to pass judgement on questions of Metaphysic, religion, or the Traditional arts. Such clever ignorance conceals from modern man the fact that he has not lost his capacity for blind belief at all: he has merely displaced it. For he still gives unquestioning credence to the false prophets of Progress, who have popularized science, politics, and economics as the three pseudo-religions of our time.
Both the Western mentor and his Eastern imitator are zealous converts to this inverse trinity as the determining 'realities' of the modern world, when in truth all three are as far removed as possible from Reality. Compulsorily mis-educated to believe that the real Metaphysical principles and powers are now exploded fallacies, contemporary man finds himself in an absurd existential position: if they had been, he and his entire world would at once have disappeared. One-eyed scepticism is just as myopic as one-eyed credulity, but it has served to provide the pretext that self-will and sloth needed for abandoning the spiritual quest and for discarding the Traditional myths and symbols, rituals and institutions. As a result, modern man has earned not Enlightenment or Liberation, but the wages of dismay, boredom, and despair. Lacking that Metaphysical or religious framework which a Tradition alone can provide, Western civilization seems everywhere to be breaking down and man to be hell-bent on one of his periodical reversions to barbarism, all the more cruel for being a sophisticated technological barbarity. The root causes of his new sub-humanity are not, as acceptable heterodoxy insists, political, economic, or social, but can ultimately be traced to the frustration of all spiritual aspirations and the need for creative work, essential for full human stature, which has been starved and stunted by the technological nightmare.
The basic problems of our predicament can never be solved by mechanical or mental contrivances and without calling on supra-human help. Political, economic, and techno-scientific panaceas have been tried many times in the past and found impossible to apply or have failed to heal the wounds of man's inhumanity, which can only be cured by divine treatment. The forethoughtful reader will already have arrived at the correlation of the Three Poisons of Buddhist doctrine with these three religious surrogates of modern man.
Scientolatry, or the idolization of Science, is inculcated by a predominantly technical education based on the outdated scientific theories and attitudes of a century or more ago and confirmed by its most recent interim hypotheses and experiments, indoctrinated as absolute truths in the lay mind by the mass media. This worship derives not from any reverence for pure knowledge but rather from that rational misapplication of scientific discoveries and inventions to industry, which has brought man such a dazzling mushroom-growth of benefits, all aimed at the abolition of his humanity. Such Technoscience is impelled by moha, or Delusion, an aspect of avidya, Ignorance or Blindness in the Buddhist sense of lack of Insight.
Cratolatry, or Molochism, is the worship of political and military power possessed by a dictator, party, or state, whether of the revolutionary Left or the reactionary Right, behind both of which the driving force is dosa, or Hatred, with its henchmen, Fear and Anger.
Plutolatry, or Mammonism, is the worship of affluence, avarice privately or corporately organized with a passionate devotion to the pursuit and accumulation of money, property, and material possessions and is instigated by lobha, or Greed, with its menials, Envy and Miserliness.
The reader will also readily observe that these three epidemic delusions of our epoch are diametrically opposed to the principles of the Great Triad, in which Man is the mediator between Heaven and Earth from which he receives his Light and Life. Secular scientism was defined by C. S. Lewis as 'the metabiological heresy' that the supreme moral good is the perpetuation of our species at the expense of all others, even if for survival humanity must be stripped of all those virtues and qualities which give it any value. This outlook is antipodal to the sacred sciences, which operated always in accord with the Metaphysical or religious principles of Tradition and so could provide contemplative supports for Man's aspiration to his paternal Heaven.
Exploitative economics, whether capitalist or communist, results in the wastage of natural resources, ecological disruption, and a devastated environment, contaminated and cluttered with technological junk. It is thus at the opposite pole to Man's traditional co-operation with the forces of nature and reverence for his maternal Earth.
Monolithic politics always seeks to liquidate or enslave the creative imagination to serve its self-perpetuating propaganda. So it is the mortal adversary of the sacramental arts, which by preserving Tradition in canonic forms and so acting as channels for divine grace, constitute the true vocations of Man.
Yet the State's oligarchy of bureaucrats, political, economic, military and technosciential, does not exhaust the list of guilty men. By default we are all party to the twentieth-century conspiracy; for through selfish convenience or supine unconcern, we tacitly condone those evils committed in the cause of material progress and choose to ignore that this can only be bought at the cost of a corresponding moral and spiritual regress.
Lest the Western reader should confuse the Pure Land teachings with Puritanism, it should be pointed out that only at this early stage of the initiatory tests and trials do the body and its animal desires and passions present dangers and temptations. So the sensual energies are provisionally condemned only as a precaution, to ensure detachment from their demands and to aid the extinction of the egoistic tendencies. Buddhist ascesis is a voluntary acceptance of limitation of the natural appetites in order to transform the animal nature, as an athlete in training will abstain from eating and drinking certain foods. But the Puritan delights in depriving others of pleasures, even more than he enjoys denying them to himself. Whereas to the Puritan all things are impure, to the Pure Land Buddhist all things can be purified, because only from the black mud grows the white lotus. Through the transfiguring power of Amida's Light, each of the Three Poisons will later be turned into one of the corresponding qualities attributed to Buddhahood. The Pig of Ignorance will be converted into the Buddha's Wisdom; the Snake of Hatred will be transmuted into the Dragon of Detachment; and the Cock of Craving will be changed to the Phoenix of Compassion. For after these potentially destructive urges have been sublimated to higher levels of consciousness, they empower the completion of the alchemical work.
But when man is cut off from all spiritual contact with Tradition, he is in danger of degenerating into a state of being, present or posthumous, analogous to the animal. Leading a life dominated by ignorance, desire, or aversion is therefore symbolically described in the Buddhist scriptures as rebirth as a pig, a cock, or a snake. Not all the bipeds to be observed walking about the world in trousers or skirts are in consequence to be considered as fully human. Some, it would seem, have only barely succeeded in achieving human embodiment, for aside from their physical resemblance to men and women, their psyches have actually been reborn as animals, gaki (hungry ghosts), ashura (antigods obsessed with aggressive violence), or even oni (demons). Some will be fortunate indeed if their next birth is as high up in the scale of existence as a decent vegetable. Even during their lifetimes, such alleged human beings as Stalin and Hitler really existed on the level of epidemic viruses, spreading their psychopathic infection to millions.
I grow indignant and censorious of the greed of money-makers and the folly of those on whom they prey but as soon as my sense of irony stings me into a realization of self-contradiction, I turn around at once and accuse myself of indulging the very hatred that I condemn, instead of standing aside with that detachment into which hatred ought to be transformed. I, too, should observe the Five Precepts enjoined on all Buddhist laymen: not to kill, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to tell lies, and not to take intoxicating drinks or drugs. But in these over-permissive, self-indulgent times, such moral injunctions can rarely if ever be kept by the will power of the individual ego without assistance from the Other Power. Repeated failure to bring about one's own apotheosis by a vertical traction on the boot-laces finally leads to the realization that morality must follow, that it cannot precede, the free gift of goodness that comes from Amida Buddha. But because the Nembutsu provides us with an ethical antidote to the Three Poisons, we should not therefore continue to swallow them, as the quotation in the poem from the Tannisho, or 'Passages Deploring Deviations of Faith', admonishes us. Although less than forty small pages in the Japanese, this is one of the world's great masterpieces of religious insight, in which Yuien-bo records some sayings of his master in Shinran's own succinct and penetrating words.