Author: Meng-hu

Some modern moralists say that a state or government should never be labeled as “evil” because this label obliterates accountability and moral responsibility, presumably to change or conform to the accusatory’s morality. But when Confucius recommended to serve the state when it is good and recluse when it is evil, he recognized the existential circumstance of the individual forced to make a decision. The individual must determine that the intrinsic character of the state or government will not change based on anything anyone’s service can bring about. The label of good or evil is, of course, a moral contrivance, especially given the utter ambivalence of morality in any state or government that relies on labels as propaganda. But the moralist misses the eremitic insight that the state is a contrivance and not an entity, a tool of human beings and their culture, not a moral reservoir. Accountability is itself a moral issue. The expectation that the state or society will be accountable to any high standard of morality is not something for which to wait indefinitely. All the more urgent for the solitary who must decide, and quickly.

Going out late at night (for the dog), I consciously look for the moon. The full moon is hidden among dark pines; a huge silver globe is not obscure. The moon is familiar and, as part of nature, a friend, but an enigmatic, aloof, and mysterious one. As a child I was always wary of the “man on the moon” — not the one on the moon as such but the portraits and images of the anthropomorphic crescent moon man, smiling wanly, his smug gaze reminiscent of the joker in an antique deck of playing cards, or a satyr. He still intrudes on my peaceful gaze. He interrupts solitude like a childhood phantom, perhaps a projection of some buried but restless memory. Best not to contrive a pattern in moon craters and seas, best to leave the moon to its simple mystery.

The poignancy of traditional hermit writing the world over is in the hermit’s contrast of society (cities, temples, palaces) with the freedom of the deserts, forests, and mountains. Deserts, forests, and mountains are not just symbols of the unchanging, but true habitats for a viable life of reclusion. But modern solitaries (and everyone else) have virtually lost this habitat, and with it even the symbols. The danger to the viability of life itself can be gradual or sudden: logging, mining, drilling, spoliation, pollution, dumping, poisoning, radiation. Human menaces have reduced deserts, mountains, and forests to environmentally endangered status. This has effectively reduced the possibilities for wilderness eremitism for moderns to a minimum. And government, corporations, and society would gladly eliminate privacy as well.

After many years of desert eremitism, the hermit Paul is recorded as asking a famous visitor: “How fares the world? What great cities have risen and fallen? What empire now holds sway?” Echoing these questions, we might today add: “And what desert, forest, or mountain is still viable habitat for a hermit?”

Wilderness survival books usually address emergency conditions of stranded hikers, skiers, hunters or accident victims. They focus on clothing, shelter, wood, food, the perfect knife, etc. All this can be practical but sometimes crude or full of bravado. Seldom are these books addressed to the conscious solitary. In browsing a handful of survival books, however, the fact that Alan Fry lives alone and once lived year-round in a tepee, in Canada, is notable, as is this passage from his Wilderness Survival Handbook, first published in 1958 when nobody else was making survival books a business or avocation:

When I go out from my camp on a very cold winter’s night [minus 50 degrees Celsius or -58 degrees Farenheit] to walk in the moonlight along the shore of a frozen lake … and I see the glint of moonlight caught by flakes of frost in endless sparkles over the perfect surface of snow that stretches nearly a mile away to the spruce forest bordering the distant shore, and when I look up and in the distance see a great mountain range gleaming in snowclad perfection by the light of this brilliant winter moon, when I have all this before me I all but burst with the joy of it.

In probably every culture much is made of the end of the calendar year and the beginning of a new one. But we must remember that this arbitrary assignment of days, months, and years are for convenience and have no natural necessity. Only the seasons represent more faithfully the passage of time. Herewith, part of a poem by the fourteenth-century Chinese hermit Ch’ing-hung:

The year is ending
the month is ending …
the moon lights the window the same as before
only the plum blossoms are different
but who cares
the Yangtze rolls on
the sun and moon do not slow their pace
a black dragon lurks in the clouds.

“Live in the moment” and “seize the day” are popular sayings that can easily be equated with hedonism and the left-hand tantric doctrines of India and Tibet. These sayings can create minds that do not live in but rather depend on the moment. Past and future are purposely folded into a planned, contrived “present” that obliterates consciousness for sensation, a kind of cheap mysticism of what exists in the material and is ephemeral. Being human, there will always be the temptation of delight, the burning of the candle at both ends, to quote the famous poem (Edna St. Vincent Millay). But the simplicity universal to all sages provides what is not contrived but is nevertheless real and cumulative. This suggests an attentiveness rooted in the real but not in the senses only. Perhaps the point is not to seek exuberance or ecstasy at all, so that living in the moment really is achievable in every moment not from any effort on our part but from letting everything else — everything contrived — go.

In a poem by the Chinese mountain hermit Ch’ing-hung, he recalls the day a gibbon came and took pears from his tree. The passage reminds translator Bill Porter of the story of the Taoist who took the magic peaches of immortality while visiting the Queen Mother of the West. In western lore, we may recall the golden apples of the Hesperides and, of course, the fruit of the Garden of Eden and St. Augustine’s purloined pears of youth. In the west a monster jealously guards the fruit; there is a message of despair, ignorance, and loss. Perhaps we are, with Ch’ing-hung, better to identify with the “no-mind” gibbon. I think of the “no-mind” bears, birds, and raccoons that “steal” the “fruit” — sunflower seeds — from my proffered garden and wonder at this magic.

I don’t know why they have not left but two cardinals remain, usually in the myrtle tree or bamboo, at dusk. I had removed the feeders under the roof eaves, in part because clever raccoons were climbing to the roof via a lean-to and either pulling the feeders up or knocking them to the ground. Then one day at dusk I heard birds fluttering in the myrtle and remembered the feeders. I retrieved and replenished one, hung it up, and moved away about five meters. One of the cardinals immediately flew straight for the feeder. Since then at dusk I notice the cardinal’s characteristic chirps; at dawn, too, it chirps, and I go out and hang up the feeder like a morning lantern. And though the feeder is hidden as soon as darkness falls, raccoons wax proud at having undone clipped hooks intended to foil them. Between birds and raccoons, no shortage of intelligence.
And bears. The mother and three cubs have reappeared several times lately. The cubs are tripled in size, leaving their mother looking positively scrawny. Still they travel together as a family.

Aristotle’s famous statement, “Man is a social animal,” has become emblematic of the notion of the necessity of social existence and the supremacy of politics and institutions over individuals. But what the statement itself and its proponents fail to realize is that the “social” is greater than human contrivances. Humans are part of the physical environment around them, part of the earth and seas, wind and rain, of the stars and galaxies. These, too, constitute the “social” context in which humans lead their lives. The other “social” part neglected by the proponents is the “social” relationship we have within our selves. Not so much that we are thinking beings, as Pascal said, but that we are sentient beings, and, moreover, conscious beings. From the consciousness within our minds to the farthest reaches of the universe, these are the “social” contexts in which we exist, not merely the circumscribed world of busy culture and the society in which we happen to be born, live, and die. If we are social animals, then our “society” is much greater than anything Aristotle or his followers ever imagined. The corollary, of course, is that our solitude cannot be viewed as the opposite of being social. It is social in this grand context.

What is the source of justice, or of any virtue? Is it the state, as Plato thought in his utopian period, or is it the rational faculty of human beings, as Socrates said? Is it collective historical experience that evolves a mindset of progress, or is it God conferring a divine right to whomever embraces a justifying interpretation of power? From collective experience came constitutions and declarations. From divine right and the “will of the people” come kings, potentates, and dictators. But in the end, all unnatural and contrived expressions, whether of power, divine inspiration, or seizing of opportune historical moments, are destined to pass. Humanity fails to embrace justice because it fails to comprehend that these aforementioned are not its source. Justice comes not from anything humans create. Justice comes from the universe and from nature. Justice constitutes the Way in myriad subtle expressions of nature. Evoking the empathy of human beings, justice becomes the harmony that the Way extends to existence. Society fails to perceive that “letting go” — not contriving — reveals justice. For individuals, solitude is the “letting go” of what is contrived to follow nature’s harmony, and to practice that justice that is already built into existence.