The Mystic & The Monk: The Art of Letting Things Alone

Thomas Merton, Zhuangzi, and Why I Left Broadcast Journalism

Transcript

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It's story time with Mitch Chesrich. Today's story The Monk and the Mystic The Art of Leaving Things Alone There once was an old man in China a very long time ago, a man well known for his wisdom, a man who shunned the hustle and bustle of daily life. He lived in a tiny hut high in the remote mountains. One day, while this old man was fishing in the Pu River, two government officials hiked up the steep mountain to meet the man and present him with a declaration stating he had been chosen prime minister of the nation. Kingdoms throughout China had been at war with each other for years, and the people yearned for the leadership of an elder to bring tranquility back to their lives. The old man stared into the river after hearing the news, saying nothing. After a long pause, he said I once heard there was a sacred turtle whose shell possessed every color of the earth three thousand years ago. It was worshipped by the prince and wrapped in the best garments. Its shell, long after its life, remained on the shrine for three millennium, embraced in a cloud of divine smoke from a nearby incense burner. For thousands of years the turtle was revered. The old man looked back at the river and tested the line of his fishing rod. The soundscape filled with running water splashing against the shore's rocks, and larks and the trees above singing the songs of yesterday. Respectfully, the government officials waited until the old man spoke again. But tell me is it better to give up one's life so that your shell may be worshiped for all time? Or better to live as a turtle dragging its tail in the mud? The ordinary turtle, said one official. The other followed, it's better to be a turtle with its tail in the mud. Then go home, said the old man, and leave me to drag my tail in the mud. That's one of many stories about Zhuangzi, an ancient mystic considered one of the progenitors of the Taoist philosophical tradition. He lived in the fourth century BCE, a time remembered as the Warring States Period, a time in which the mighty Zhou dynasty was in collapse after an eight hundred year rule. Many states fought each other for supremacy then. Out of this, the Qin dynasty was formed, and for the first time China was unified. Qin is where we get the word China. But Zhuangzi lived in a time when chaos still reigned, as it did for his predecessor in the Taoist tradition Lao Zu. Unlike Lao Za, who suggested in the time honored work the Tao De Qing, that it is a wise person who is in accord with the Tao who should lead the nation and embrace to a limited extent politics. Zhuangzi said it was better to leave politics alone. Laozi taught that one who leads with a light touch finds all will settle into harmony. He was no authoritarian. But Zhuangzi only saw corruption in politics, the corruption that resides in all our hearts unlocked by the desire for power. For Zhuangzi, it was better to live as a turtle dragging its tail in the mud than reach the exalted state of leader of the people. After covering politics for many years, I recognize well this conundrum. Those best suited to lead lack the ambition and ego to do so. I pretend in saying this to be a man of authority with thirty years of political reporting, but all of us know this is true. Those who rise above the ranks are willing to do whatever it takes to get there with sharp elbows and expedient slogans. It's the way of politics. It was that way two thousand years ago in Zhuangzi's time, and that way in our time too. It's no coincidence, your ideal leader never becomes one. For Zhuangzi, ambition invites anxiety, enity, and corruption. He, nor do I, think this will change. It's what led to humans conquering the world, and will lead to their downfall too. My reading of Zhuangzi philosophy is that there is always an equal amount of what humans judge as good and evil in the world. It's the way of the world. When you push to bring the good in one place, the evil grows elsewhere, and where there is evil, the good inevitably grows. Good and evil define each other. For Zhuangzi, such ethical notions of good and evil are human constructs only and are entirely dependent on the view of who is judging. Is the hawk that snatched the pigeon for a meal evil? To the pigeon it is. But the hawk must eat too. Chattel slavery has seemingly been eradicated from the world, and that is undeniably good. But how many of us feel the slavery in the minerals that create the supercomputer in our pockets? I'm reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote about slavery in Haiti. The sugar they raised was excellent. Nobody tasted blood in it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, unlike Chuangzi, did involve himself in politics and was a prominent vocal supporter of the abolitionist movement. He called John Brown a martyr when John Brown in his day was considered a terrorist in polite society. Zhuangzi taught you couldn't cure the world, because there was nothing to be cured. It will be as it has always been, though maybe with different theatrical masks and stages. The best you can do is to live in accord with the Tao, to live with things as they are, and control what you can control, namely you. There is great wisdom in this, for to live with a sense of peace requires one to accept how things are. Tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes are unescapable realities. The gentle soul of your affection does not love you back is too. Your uncle, who never once talked about politics, is now a raging MAGA supporter. Try to convince him otherwise only emboldens him. I learned about Xuangzi through a college course on Chinese philosophy I took thirty years ago. We were assigned the book The Way of Chuang Zhu, translated by Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton wrote Xuangzi as Chuang Zhu. I have moved across the country too many times to still have that same copy of the book, but in my heart and now on my computer, I have never lost it. I love that this book's so called translator was Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk who lived in a monastery in Kentucky in the middle of the twentieth century. Translator is not the best word for him, though. He did not speak Chinese fluently, nor could he read classical Chinese text. He relied on other translations of the ancient text and on others who he knew that could read it. But more than that, he relied on his own experience as a solitary monk in searching for God through silent contemplation and meditation, the same way Zhuangzi searched for the Tao. Merton wrote in the introduction of the book The whole teaching, the way contained in these anecdotes, poems, and meditations, is characteristic of a certain mentality found everywhere in the world, a certain taste for simplicity, for humility, self effacement, silence, and in general a refusal to take seriously the aggressivity, the ambition, the push, and the self importance which one must display in order to get along in society. In the nineteen sixties, Thomas Merton was active in the anti war and anti nuclear proliferation movements. He lived the activist life, always traveling, always riding, always speaking to groups of people, and always pushing to create a better world. Until one day, he stopped and returned to his monastery to live the inner life. This was around the same time he was working on the way of Chuang Zhu. It's easy to believe Merton was influenced by Zhuangzi's teachings of letting things alone. According to Merton's telling, Zhuangzi said, I know about letting the world alone, not interfering. I do not know about running things, letting things alone, so that men will not blow their nature out of shape. In complete silence, his voice will be like thunder. His movements will be invisible, like those of a spirit, but the powers of heaven will go with them. Unconcerned, doing nothing. He will see all things grow ripe around him. Thomas Merton died at the age of fifty three by electrocution. Some speculate he was murdered, but there's little evidence to back that up. I'm fifty three now, as I read this. Thomas Merton and Zhuangzi have weighed heavily on me in recent years as I have felt disillusioned by my work as a media broadcaster. Every day for years I talked about what I and others perceived as the ills of society with the hope to make things better. But underneath that, there was also a desire to be successful and renowned too. I wanted to give the appearance that I was pushing for a better world, perhaps that I was trying to save the world, when in fact all I ended up pushing was my name. I have come to feel the media is playing a detrimental role in modern life, that media is turning people against each other. I'm guilty of this too, and so are consumers of media, the listeners, the readers, the watchers who ultimately decide what they are given by what they consume. We devour media that is edgy, scandalous, and that makes the most scurrilous headlines. It's akin to the rubber necking effect on the highway. There's a car crash on the side of the road, but it's not blocking traffic. Yet traffic is impeded as cars slow so drivers can take a good look at what happened. It's natural to do so as we look at tragedy so to avoid it. Or more likely to click on a link about a tragedy or downfall that's emblazoned with a screaming headline than the story that is measured and responsible. It's easy as media makers to get trapped into it because we need clicks, views, readers, and listeners to justify what we do. I rarely felt good about it, but there were times I brought a show to air with a guest who was going to give the red meat I knew the audience desired. To not do so jeopardized my own audience numbers and my own livelihood. Now, I'm mostly proud of the work I did. Nothing is ever 100% altruistic or self-serving. It's usually somewhere in between. My biggest desire, or at least I wanted to believe, was to inspire people to learn. To me, that's public broadcasting at its very best. And I did that sometimes. Most of the time. But not all of the time. I have seen the media destroy the best minds of my generation. I've seen neighbors, brothers and sisters, and old friends suddenly hate each other, not for what has happened in their own lives or families or neighborhoods, but over the stories they learn from the media. Two neighbors who've hardly traveled far hold disdain for one another over the other's view of what is happening somewhere they have never been. It's as though reality is no longer what is happening right in front of us, but the stories we consume in the media. And we have our different medias that tell different stories, and the version of the story I know is right, and the version you know is wrong. You are evil. No, you are evil. No, you are a pedophile. We fight over these stories we've been told through the media as though they're from some holy book and a new religious war. I see people close to me, unable to sleep because of what is happening in the news and not over what is happening right where they are. They are miserable even though an objective look at their life and reality makes it appear things aren't so bad. Of course things aren't always so simple either. I had to step away and be like the turtle with its tail stuck in the mud. And so I did. Perhaps as Thomas Merton was inspired by Zhuangzi, I was inspired by Thomas Merton. I left broadcast media because I needed to focus on the realness of my own life, in my own body, in my own house, and in my own neighborhood and day-to-day world. I needed to hear the stillness of my own room at five in the morning, with only the sound of a clock ticking. I am capable of seeing tragedies around the world as regrettable but ultimately out of my control. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans only knew what was happening in their small part of the earth. Now it's as though I know more about what's happening thousands of miles away than just outside my door. I've come to think we're not suited to know and care about all the sorrows in the world. We can't take it all on. To do so only ensures to become inured to it all, including the very suffering just in front of us. So I desire to let the world be and settle as it will because it will settle as it will anyways. But it's hard to do. Sometimes what happens in the news creeps into your life. I have found I can't turn away when my very neighbors who serve me sandwiches in the afternoon or keep my apartment building running smoothly, or cut my hair, or clean my home are deeply afraid of federal agents snatching them off the streets. I'm unable to find peace when my tax dollars go towards wars raging on the other side of the globe. It's hard to find true peace knowing, no matter how small, that I'm connected to another suffering through the act of my representatives and tax dollars. That's the rub and the realization. Finding peace within oneself means allowing others to find peace too, allowing others to follow their own nature and let things settle as they will. I'm against my country being in war, not because I'm altruistic, but because I can't find my own sense of peace as long as I'm connected to another's suffering. Zhuangzi's philosophy of letting things alone means letting things alone. The universe is like a raging river flowing through time, and we are but a tiny vessel, able to make small adjustments here and there, but unable to change its course. There is only so much we can do, but let's do that much. Well, I am a contradiction, and so are you. And that does it for story time. Leave a note and follow if you like. Until next time, be well.