Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Photo: Detail of the A-bomb dome in Hiroshima.

Probably an odd reading choice for South-East Asia, but I've always wanted to catch up on the classics I missed in my misspent youth...

After having read about the origins of Buddhism, it was interesting to turn to a book that deals so heavily with the development of Christianity, albeit in a way that was terribly controversial on publication in the 1780s.

The whole thing being a bit massive, this was an abridged version that only came to under 700 pages, but which had most of the first three volumes intact.

If being a tourist here in Bali makes me feel like a member of the idle rich, reading Decline and Fall while sitting on a patio drinking fresh papaya juice and local coffee felt incredibly decadent, as if I were one of those effete youths on Grand Tour so often described in novels about the decline and fall of the British empire.

I'm carrying on the classical theme with Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is a more obvious choice for transformative journeys...

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Photo: samurai armour in Matsuyama castle.

This vast novel by Haruki Murakami was my companion for most of my time in Japan. I was on my third reading when I finally, reluctantly, gave it up in Kyoto in exchange for some new material.

It's fascinating, absorbing - and despite multiple readings I don't understand it enough to say much about it except you should read it too. It's probably bad to make comparisons but the obvious one in my mind is Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, for the sweeping breadth and for the way that political and domestic history are intertwined; and for the surrealism. But this is Japan, not South America, and the comparison only goes so far.

It's about a young man abandoned at the bottom of a well, about his marriage and the strange machinations of his wife's family; it's about the atrocities committed by Japan before and during WWII, and the terrible fates that awaited the individuals that carried out the orders from on high, as well. It's about strange connections between strangers and the cost of letting go of reality in order to be able to heal.

I think it's probably a lot about the "soul" of modern Japan, except that I feel too ignorant to really understand; but happily the ignorant can feast on the book anyway. Ah, I am going to read so much once I come back to settle somewhere with a bookshelf and a library card again...

Siddhatta vs. Siddhartha

Photo: Jizo at a Shinto shrine in downtown Kyoto.

Before I left on my trip, one of my preparations was to stop at a used book store to let serendipity help me choose what to read at the beginning of my trip. Pulp Fiction on W. Broadway happened to have a good Asia non-fiction section, and the first of the books I ended up reading was Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha (titled: Buddha).

I had already read her very interesting A History of Myth and listened to her TED talk on compassion, so I was looking forward to it. I ended up reading the whole thing in the first few jetlagged days, so that it was caught up in the early fog of arrival. Then I read it again more slowly midway through the trip (I read each book I bought at least twice before finally getting some new ones in Kyoto!).

I don't really know much about Buddhism, so rather than trying to offer a critique of the book I can just say that it really awakened my interest, making me want to read more fully about the history of Buddhism as it developed as a religion. It also made me want to explore more fully the gaps that lie between the official history and theology of a religion and the understanding that believers have; and the distance between how it's practiced by monks and by laypeople. Despite also not knowing much about Hinduism, I'd had the same feeling when I had the chance to take a religious studies class about it at university. The teacher strongly believed in the importance of studying practical Hinduism with equal weight, rather than sticking solely to the textual tradition, and I really absorbed that attitude. The little that I know from listening to people who practice Buddhism gives me a really different idea than what I took from Armstrong's version of Buddha's teachings.

Japan is the only Buddhist country I've visited so far, and it's a fascinating and unique one, given the deep and longlasting syncretism with native Shinto practice. That's a whole post (or lifetime of study) in itself, and even looking just at Buddhism in Japan shows such a huge variety of sects and beliefs in monastic practice, let alone about how most Japanese feel about or understand Buddhism. I am excited to travel soon to Vietnam and to see Buddhism in a totally different context (not without syncretism of its own, of course).

Something else that I found myself thinking of as I read this book, was another book I studied at university in a German lit class - Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. (Armstrong's book is mostly based on the Pali canon and so she uses Pali spelling rather than Sanskrit, so I am making a distinction between Hesse's Siddhartha and Armstrong's Siddhatta). Leaving aside the whole problem of cultural imperialism and Hesse's appropriation of Indian tradition (and noting that Armstrong too is a Western interpreter of Eastern tradition), I remembered my visceral reaction to the book when I read it at 19. I HATED it. The contrast of noble Siddhartha with fleshy Kamala made my skin crawl. The whole thing just seemed like typical male self-indulgence - sure, subsist on the food that the women prepare and donate to you, and adopt their sons into your sanghas, but be sure to point out to them their inferiority, their hopeless trappedness in samsara BECAUSE YOUR CULTURAL LAWS WON'T ALLOW THEM TO ESCAPE IT.

While Armstrong's depiction of Buddha isn't quite as creepy as I remember Hesse's being, she does point out the misogyny in the Buddhist tradition, wherever it originally crept in. Women could only be admitted as nuns subservient to the monks and following an additional set of rules; and in a whole large branch of Buddhism today there are no nuns because it is now viewed as impossible to fulfill those conditions.

In her broader discussion of the Axial age in which both Hinduism and Buddhism developed, she points out that along with the new spirituality came a new and more crippling misogyny, which is something that tends to keep me from identifying with any religion I've ever heard of, however impressive some of it other aspects are. The question of why those two strands developed together near-simultaneously in discrete parts of the world is a fascinating one. I do find it hard to get past what seems to me like clear hypocrisy antithetical to a true state of enlightenment. But of course that's just my lesser feminine self speaking!

To complement the history, I also picked up a book on Buddhist practice by the Dalai Lama. Even though I'm not going to Tibet I thought it might help provide more context for mostly Buddhist South-East Asia. I can't say that I feel any closer to enlightenment, but it was certainly an interesting text to read and ponder.

All of it a bit moot of course, in Hindu Bali.