Asian Religions, page 29
As a result of all these factors, religious texts as texts – as words expressing meaning – cannot do the job that texts are “supposed” to do (to give information) and in fact can be deceptive and counterproductive as tools for instruction. Of course they are important as foundational materials, and they can give us insight into values and attitudes that are perennial and long-lived, but only with the benefit of interpretive work and contextualization. In this book I have quoted scriptural materials as illustrative of beliefs, values, and practices, not as their definitive expression.
A better substitute – if our goal is to understand religions as living traditions – is to read biographies, local histories, personal essays and autobiographies, and fiction. In my undergraduate courses I have found that novels and films are the most effective means for conveying the lived experience of religious life. They inspire the “sympathetic imagination” that is at the heart of cross-cultural understanding, and they are more readily comprehensible, more evocative, and more fun to read or watch. I employ a mix of “high-brow” and “low-brow” works, so this is not a critically sophisticated list; the following books and movies are especially useful for seeing religion as it is actually lived and practiced in Asian cultures.
Shusaku Endo, Deep River, and John Dalton, Heaven Lake
Most of my students are Bible-belt Americans who were raised in theologically and socially conservative Catholic or Protestant households. I recommend two novels about Christians in Asia. A classic is Deep River9 by the Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo (遠藤 周作, 1923–1996), a story about four Japanese travelers to India, all struggling in various ways with questions of faith and loss. Osamu seeks to pacify the spirit of his wife, who has recently died of cancer; Kiguchi wishes to arrange a penitentiary rite for comrades he lost in Burma during the war; Numada visits a bird sanctuary, believing that his pet bird died so that he could live; and Mitsuko searches for her lover Otsu, who has dedicated himself to the Catholic priesthood though he himself is overwhelmed by spiritual doubt. The novel also portrays Hindu practices sympathetically and the “magic” of India, as well as its poverty and hardships, from a Japanese perspective.
John Dalton's Heaven Lake10 – a prize-winning first novel published in 2005 – takes his young American protagonist from a small town in Taiwan, where he has been posted as an evangelical missionary, to the western reaches of northwest China, on an odyssey that is both spiritual and physical – in fact, both for Taiwan and for the People's Republic, it serves as an entertaining Chinese travelogue. Torn between the demands of faith and the yearnings of adolescent love, Dalton's characters evoke traditional depictions of “Americans abroad” in a way that does justice to the complex meeting of the familiar and the foreign. Dalton's four years as an English teacher in Taiwan and his extensive travels through China give the descriptive passages detail and authenticity. Though the book does not deal with Chinese religions per se, its themes of spiritual doubt and intercultural conflict are provocative and expertly drawn. This is a very good novel.
Though Endo's novel begins with doubt and ends with faith and Dalton's protagonist moves in the opposite direction, both books are complex explorations of personal encounters between Christians (both Asian and Western) and non-Christian Asians.
Michio Takeyama, Harp of Burma, and R. K. Narayan, The Guide
Christian missionaries play a minor but significant role in Harp of Burma by Michio Takeyama (竹山 道雄, 1903–1984).11 Set in Burma in the last days of the Pacific War, the novel describes the physical and spiritual odyssey of a Japanese soldier who disguises himself as a Buddhist monk in order to carry out a final mission to rescue a band of soldiers from a final, fruitless battle. It is when he sees a funeral rite carried out by Anglican missionaries that he commits himself fully to Buddhist renunciation, vowing to bury the Japanese dead scattered across the Burmese countryside before he returns home. Corporal Mizushima, faced with the Sisyphean task of pacifying the souls of thousands of abandoned corpses, exemplifies an ideal of self-sacrifice that his fellow soldiers can barely understand. The novel creates probing contrasts between the simplicity and pacifism of the Burmese on the one hand and the aggressive militarism of industrial modernization on the other. Takeyama demonstrates that patriotism is often most heroic when contrasted with colonialism and militarism. Regarding Mizushima's transformation from military scout to wandering monk, the novel depicts a profound story of religious conversion, in which the hero authentically becomes what he had first only pretended to be.
The theme of the “pretender” is explored by the Indian writer R. K. Narayan (1906 – 2001) as well, in his satirical novel of a reluctant holy man: The Guide.12 The Guide takes an obvious con man, who provides advice and solace to a village beset by poverty and drought as an itinerant guru, and suggests that, in spite of his undeniably selfish nature, he “becomes what he pretended to be.” Whether or not Raju undergoes a genuine transformation is left to the reader's interpretation (and relates well to Hindu ideas of ignorance and enlightenment) – but in the eyes of the villagers he is a savior. Far from making the villagers appear ignorant or gullible, Narayan gives them a profound dignity of their own, overcoming the manipulative cynicism of their charlatan priest. One of the virtues of the novel as a teaching aid is that it takes us through the four ashramas (Hindu stages of life) of the main character, from student to householder and ultimately to holy renunciant, in a way that is both humorous parody and creative reinterpretation.
Set side by side, Harp of Burma and The Guide are effective introductions to the theme of renunciation as well as to that of appearance versus reality in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, through the eyes of complex, provocative characters in Corporal Mizushima and the “holy” Raju. In addition, both novels explore the meaning and value of religion at both a personal and a social level, respectfully yet unsentimentally. They are superb novels.
As for feature films related to modern India, two contemporary women directors are recommended for their lush and provocative films: Mira Nair (b. 1957) and Deepa Mehta (b. 1950), especially the latter's Elements Trilogy: Fire, Earth, and Water.
Wes Anderson's film The Darjeeling Limited is a thoughtful, funny tribute to the Western search for spiritual awakening set in India. Vikram Gandhi's documentary film Kumaré, about a young Indian American pretending to be a spiritual guide in the southwest United States, addresses the same themes with humor and pathos. Both films would make for an effective topic of comparative conversation with The Guide.
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Siddhartha is one of the best known Western novels treating Asian religious themes, and it is a standard “source” for introductory courses in Buddhism.13 Once a high school text for “world literature” classes, Siddhartha tells the story of the spiritual journey and awakening of a solitary seeker who experiences every dimension of life in its totality, rebelling against both parental and religious authority. Alternately immersing himself in wealth, sexuality, ascetic renunciation, and holistic oneness with nature and the cosmos, Siddhartha finds awakening in the fullness of personal experience. Critics argue that the protagonist is little more than a doppelgänger of the author, Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), relating a romanticist fantasy of self-exploration in an oriental world. Despite misgivings, however, I use it in my Asian religions classroom. Aided by a symposium printed in Education about Asia in 1997,14 I challenge students to critique the novel in relation to what they have learned about the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. For example:
Why does Hesse have two separate characters, Siddhartha and Gotama the Buddha? What prompts Siddhartha to leave the Buddha?
What is the significance of Siddhartha's being a “Brahmin's son”? What are the Brahminical values, as portrayed by Hesse? For what reasons did Hesse not create his protagonist as a Ksatriya's son?
What are the major steps in Siddhartha's path of self-discovery? What are the important lessons he learns along the way? What is the thematic significance of the reversal of order in Siddhartha's experience (from asceticism to hedonism) from that of the historical Buddha (from hedonism to asceticism), and how does this impact the spiritual teaching of the novel in relation to the spiritual teachings of the Buddhist tradition?
What are the main “religious” or “spiritual” messages of Siddhartha? Are these messages in accord with the teachings of the Buddhist tradition? Do the spiritual lessons of the novel more closely parallel Theravāda Buddhism or Mahāyāna Buddhism?
What are the potential problems with using this novel to introduce Buddhism to Western students?
Films of Bae Yong-kyun (b. 1951) and Kim Ki-duk (b. 1960)
A complete course on Asian religions would include independent treatment of religion in Korea. It is missing from my course, and from this book. Though they cannot compensate, two of the best new films on Buddhist themes are by the Korean directors Bae Yong-kyun and Kim Ki-duk. Poignant, beautifully filmed, with story lines that capture the draw of Zen (Korean Son) Buddhism to the modern generation of urbanites and global citizens, either film complements the study of Buddhism in Asia:
Bae Yong-kyun, “Why has Bodhi-dharma Left for the East?” (, Dharmaga tongjoguro kan kkadalgun) (1989);
Kim Ki-duk, “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring” (, Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom) (2003).
Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West and Robert van Gulik, The Haunted Monastery
It is difficult to find Chinese novels that are explicitly religious, reflecting the fact that religion is conceptually indistinct from other elements of Chinese culture. But two novels work well in the Asian religions classroom.
For a classic novel that brings the magical mythology of Chinese religions to life, there is no substitute for the sixteenth-century Monkey or Journey to the West (西遊記, Xiyou ji), translated in full by Anthony Yu, or by Arthur Waley in a very serviceable abbreviated version in one volume.15 Ostensibly retelling the tale of the retrieval of the Buddhist canon from India and its transmission to China by the monk Xuanzang (玄奘, “Tripitaka,” c. 602–664 ce), the novel is an imagistic and energetic introduction to the fantastic visions and supernatural powers of Chinese religious heroes, from Sun Wukong (孫悟空), the Monkey King, to his companions Zhu Bajie (猪八戒, “Pig of the Eight Prohibitions”) and Sha Wujing (沙悟浄), the Sand Monk. Historically, Journey to the West is among the first non-European novels in the modern sense of the term (one of the “four great novels” of the Ming Dynasty), but it illustrates the universal and timeless lesson that the “journey of the heart” is more arduous and rewarding than any physical journey, no matter how perilous it might be.
An accessible companion to Monkey is Ang Lee's Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), a tribute to the rousing martial arts novels of the director's youth. With its evocative imagery, the interplay of human resolve and supernatural power, and themes of Confucian righteousness and Taoist magic, Crouching Tiger is a marvelous cinematic treatment of the myths and legends that inspire the stories of the gods. For the imagery and feel of Chinese religion, it is more immediate than scholarly anthropological studies of Chinese temples and their gods.16
Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) was a Dutch customs officer who devoted his retirement to academic research and creative reconstructions of Chinese historical sources. He was especially enamored of the “arts of the bedchamber” and compiled an illustrated history of Chinese sexuality in the late imperial period, with a separate book of print reproductions.17 He also wrote a series of novels depicting a Tang Dynasty magistrate named “Judge Dee” – novels based on Chinese operas and plays composed in the Yuan Dynasty about the same semi-legendary figure. Van Gulik's novels are entertaining, if a bit simplistic in their narrative form, and students love them. My favorite is The Haunted Monastery,18 where Judge Dee solves a string of kidnappings and murders that he encounters at a Taoist abbey in which he (along with his three wives) has taken refuge during a storm. Using his deductive reasoning and thoroughly materialist skepticism regarding the ghosts and spirits said to haunt the monastery, Judge Dee exhibits his Confucian biases in defeating the evil Taoist abbot and thwarting his nefarious plans. The novel plays upon traditions of Taoist sexual rites and puts Confucianism and Taoism in creative opposition; Dee is a model Confucian gentleman, and his discomfort with Taoist ritual, sexual, and dietary practices is both informative and amusing.
Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes, and Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
I recommend two novels that focus on very different aspects of Japanese religions: Zen and contemporary new religious movements.
Thousand Cranes is a brilliant novel about the psychological costs of cultural decline, and especially about the impact of modernity on traditional norms and practices, by the Nobel Prize winning writer Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成, 1899–1972).19 As the tea ceremony loses its traditional meaning and significance and becomes merely an occasion for interpersonal manipulation, the possibility of healing and redemption – as represented by the “girl with the thousand crane handkerchief” (and symbolized by the traditional belief that any illness could be healed by folding a thousand origami cranes) – is irretrievably lost. Exploring themes of the inheritance of wrong (“the sins of the fathers …”), male sexuality, purity and pollution, the novel is written in the spare style of traditional Japanese poetic expression. It is a commentary on the loss of religious meaning in the modern world, and on the clash between tradition and modernity, against the backdrop of the Pacific War and Japan's post-war search for meaning.
An excellent complement to Thousand Cranes is a film by Jūzō Itami (伊丹 十三, 1933–1997), The Funeral. The movie begins with the death of the elderly father of a fashionable television actress who, with her philandering husband in tow, attempts to carry out the seven-day rites of a traditional Buddhist funeral. With scenes of the family watching a “how-to” video on funeral etiquette, children's impatience with the seemingly endless rites of sitting and chanting, the interference of numerous aunts and uncles in varying degrees of inebriation, the sudden arrival of the husband's hysterical mistress, and the widow's tender expressions of thanks for the family's presence, the film takes us on a journey from modern self-indulgence to traditional dignity and repose. A hilarious and touching film, it treats the same issues of religious disengagement seen in Thousand Cranes in a completely different style.
With 1Q84, the contemporary novelist Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, b. 1949) returned to writing in his native language after a series of novels written in English. 1Q84 (in Japanese pronounced the same as the numbers 1-9-8-4, and thus a play on themes in George Orwell's novel) is a work of magical realism against the backdrop of Japan's “new religions.”20 Murakami himself wrote a journalistic work of non-fiction about Aum Shinrikyo and the sarin gas attacks of 1995,21 and 1Q84 evokes the same intrigue (with murders and kidnappings parallel to those of the Aum extremists), but in a way that is strangely sympathetic to a magical view of life that supersedes all worldly judgments. Epic in length, wonderfully descriptive, haunting in its imagery and psychological depth, 1Q84 creates unforgettable characters struggling with questions about the meaning of life in an increasingly secularized and materialistic world.
Notes
1 Robert G. Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
2 A.C. Graham, trans., Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters, and Other Writings from the Book “Chuang-tzu” (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981).
3 Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).
4 Dominic Graham, Hindu Scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
5 Donald S. Lopez, Buddhist Scriptures (London: Penguin Books, 2004).
6 Kazue Yamada, The Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004).
7 William Theodore de Bary, Donald Keene, George Tanabe, and Paul Varley, Sources of Japanese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
8 To give just one example, I have found it best to supplement readings from Hindu scriptures with a guidebook: Barbara Powell, Windows into the Infinite: A Guide to the Hindu Scriptures (Fremont, CA: Jain Publishing Company, 1996).
9 Shusako Endo, Deep River (深い河, Fukai kawa), trans. Van C. Gessel (New York: New Directions, 1994).
10 John Dalton, Heaven Lake (New York: Scribner, 2005).
11 Michio Takeyama, Harp of Burma (ビルマの竪琴, Biruma no tategoto) [1946], trans. Howard Hibbett (Clarendon, VT: Charles Tuttle, 1966).
12 R. K. Narayan, The Guide (New York: Viking Press, 1958).
13 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha [1922], trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: New Directions, 1951).
14 The symposium can be accessed at http://www.asian-studies.org/eaa/Siddhartha.htm. See in particular the essays by Robert Mossman (“Siddhartha still works”) and Catherine Benton (“Teaching Indian Buddhism with Siddhartha – or Not?”).
15 Anthony C. Yu, ed., and trans., The Journey to the West [1983)], rev. edn. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Wu Ch'eng-en, Monkey: Folk Novel of China, trans. Arthur Waley [1943] (New York: Grove Press, 1970).
16 An effective introduction to modern Chinese culture can be found in another set of Ang Lee's films. For a vivid sense of conflicts between Confucian family values and the impact of both modernization and globalization on relationships between parents and children, Ang Lee's Confucian fatherhood trilogy is as poignant, touching, and well crafted as any of the films in Lee's brilliant directing career. These are modern films without explicitly religious themes, but they are a great introduction to Confucianism as a cultural practice. The films are Pushing Hands (推手, 1992), The Wedding Banquet (喜宴, 1993), and Eat Drink Man Woman (飲食男女, 1994).
