panta rheism

That Which Flows

By in books, panta rheism

No life knows less suffering than the life of that which flows, and being in the midst of flow, with the very soul afloat on its waters, is a even finer thing than being a follower of Christ himself.

— Natsume Sōseki, Kusamakura

Welcome to Panta Rheism, where all things are downstream and the road to salvation is slightly damp. We confess one truth: everything flows. Suffering collects where we pool. Therefore be a river, not a reservoir; let the day pass through you and carry the silt away.

Our enemies are three: Stagnation (algae of the soul), Hoarding (building dams out of opinions), and Ice (the frozen take). Our practices are simple: sip water, dissolve old grudges, and frequently rinse your assumptions — labels crust like limescale.

Saint Heraclitus is our patron leak. Brother Sōseki teaches the higher path: not merely to follow the water but to be water — soft, persistent, quietly unbeatable. Even granite flinches after a few centuries.

The Book of Panta Rhei, called The Rivering 1:1–22

  • And it came to pass that the people dammed their days and called the dams Identity.

  • But the dams grew green, and a smell went up as of old grudges in summer.

  • Then the Voice of the River said, Flow.

  • And Heraclitus, the Wet Prophet, dripped and declared, All things move; only the stubborn make sandbags of opinions.

  • Sōseki also testified, saying, Better than the pious who stand upon banks is the soul that floats in the current.

  • Wherefore be ye not pools, neither cisterns; for stagnation breedeth mosquitoes and newsletters without end.

  • Behold, their thumbs were sore from the Scroll, and their minds were concrete.

  • And the Prophet cried, What loosens such bondage?

  • And the people answered with one voice, Water, that’s right.

  • Break therefore the dams of certainty; pour a tenth of thy convictions back into the stream, and call it thy Un-Tithe.

  • If thy take be hot, run cool water over it till the sizzle ceaseth.

  • If thy heart be stone, soak it; for even granite trembleth under a patient drip.

  • Blessed are the hydrated, for they shall pass their stones and their stored wrath.

  • Woe unto the hoarders of content, who build levees of links; for the flood laughest at spreadsheets.

  • Say not, “I hold my beliefs,” but, “I circulate them,” lest mildew find thee.

  • When thy brother offendeth, be unto him as rain on a roof: fall lightly and run off clean.

  • Keep a Sabbath of motion: rest, but do not congeal.

  • Practice the Daily Rinse: dishes, mind, and feed.

  • And when ye pray, say, Let it pass. For forgiveness is the art of returning to circulation.

  • Teach thy children drains, that their thoughts not puddle.

  • Go now and irrigate the dry places; be soft, persistent, quietly unbeatable.

  • And all the people said, Amen, and let it flow.

The Tide Is High

By in meditation, panta rheism, religion, the statusphere, unintended consequences

Brad Warner:

Someone meditates for a long time and has a profound insight into the nature of reality. He or she then decides to try and teach that insight and how to reach it to others. This goes fine for a little while, but then an institution is established to try and make the lessons more standardized, efficient and accessible. At this point certain people notice that there are opportunities for power, authority and money to be had within that institution so they get involved. Once these weasels start running things the original purpose is lost. Then someone else has to come along, call bullshit on the institution and start the whole thing up again as an outsider. The same pattern occurs with predictable regularity.

Right now in the West, we are in one of these transitional periods. Back in Japan, Zen has become an orthodox institution that offers its members opportunities for power, authority and sometimes even money. Disgusted with this situation, a few sincere practitioners packed up and moved to America and Europe. They found some genuine students and started a few temples. But now those temples are growing in stature and importance, and ambitious people are starting to see that they might be able to climb their institutional ladders and become powerful. The rot is setting in.

This process is still in its infancy, so things haven’t gotten too bad just yet. Whenever I complain about the organizations who are trying to standardize the Zen curriculum into mind-numbing uselessness I’m always told something like, “Aw, but these guys aren’t a giant evil institution! They’re just a nice group of low-key people who want to do good things.” Which I’m sure is more-or-less true. But you don’t have to be a genius to see where things are heading.

Brad is, of course, paraphrasing a famous passage from The Book of Panta Rheism, which says, “All philosophical systems of men are mere castles of sand before the ancient wisdom of the ocean; bow ye before the power of the moon’s gravitational pull and be sore afraid.” Man-made religions arise and fall, ossify and regenerate, until the sacred waters tire of their foolishness and wash them all away. Incidentally, this explains the omnipresence of great flood myths in cultures around the world.

Trickle-Down

By in identity, meditation, panta rheism, spiritual-not-religious

Jacob Rubin:

One might also claim that Harris’s watered-down vision of Buddhism, with its emphasis on career advancement, will encourage misuse. This may be fair enough, but it’s not an especially revealing criticism. After all, one of the first things that people do with any tool or philosophy is misuse it. A history of Christianity is largely a history of the abuse of Jesus Christ’s teachings; Buddhism is not exempt from such misprision. On the spectrum of misappropriation, using self-advancement as a lure seems forgivable enough if it leads people to try a technique as subtly transformative as mindfulness. (Indeed, if personal betterment is America’s religion, such an approach might be seen as syncretic.) What can be lost by broadening access to a philosophy of liberation, even if a majority of people conflate it with the more vulgar priorities of our culture?

What can be lost? Well, nothing, unless you count the opportunity to radically change your life, to allow yourself to be overwhelmed by a new perspective, rather than merely reinforcing whatever narcissism already exists. In the same way, nothing is “lost” when spiritual-not-religious types employ the cafeteria approach when deciding which parts of various religious traditions to incorporate into their already-existing identities as suburban American consumers. However, a person in search of self-knowledge and deeply-rooted contentment, as opposed to trendy metaphysical fashion accessories, will probably want to delve a little more deeply into that suburban consumer identity and question the role it might play in their dissatisfaction.

So, no, this isn’t really anything but an argument over terminology. A lot of devoted Buddhists will look at what Harris is selling and say, “Eh, whatever; that’s not real meditation.” Maybe some people will never use it as anything other than yet another optimization technique for maximum efficiency and wealth accumulation. Maybe some of those people will eventually feel dissatisfied with that lifestyle and wonder if there’s anything more to this existence. Buddhist traditions, on the other hand, have been evolving and adapting for more than two thousand years; they certainly won’t be diminished by yet another passing trend promising yet another way for you to “have it all”. The fact is, you can’t, but some people aren’t ready to accept that yet. So it goes.

Also: “watered-down Buddhism”? How ironic! As we well know, Buddhism is just another solidification of the pure, liquid source of all religion.

I Turn Into Water, I Wish You All Could Feel the Same

By in language, panta rheism

Brad Warner:

We have to have names for things in order to communicate with each other about them. If we were to call what is now called Buddhism “realism,” as Nishijima Roshi suggested would one day happen, this could be confusing. These days the word “realism” generally seems to be synonymous with “materialism.” And Buddhism isn’t materialism.

We could just make up a new word. But that has drawbacks. It’s like the people who are concerned about the grammatical necessity of using gendered pronouns in English who propose to use new words like zhe, ze or zir instead of he or she. It’s awkward and nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about.

Maybe eventually we’ll get a word that works. But not yet. So we’re stuck with “Buddhism” for now.

Stuck. As in, immobile, solid, entrenched. You know what loosens such bonds? Water, that’s right. Let the waves of enlightenment wash over you and dissolve the conceptual concrete in your mind.

There Are Many Copies Around, But This, My Man, Is the Original

By in books, panta rheism, philosophy

For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes…

— W.H. Auden

Owen Flanagan:

The wisdom part consists of the recognition that everything is impermanent (annica), that I am among the impermanent things (anatman or no-self; annata, Pali), that everything that happens is caused to happen by prior events and processes and will yield other events and processes (dependent origination), and that if you try to find where things bottom out, you will be led, Zen-like, to find that they don’t bottom out, analytic deconstruction never comes to an end (sunyata, emptiness). Buddhist wisdom says that everything is becoming. What there is, and all there is, are events and processes. Things and substances insofar as they exist at all are simply slow-moving events and processes. Compare: many scientists think that glass is a slow-moving liquid.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the telling reference to liquid betrays the panta rheist origins of this so-called Buddhist wisdom. You see this a lot in other derivative philosophies as well.

The Flow Below

By in books, nietzsche, panta rheism

Graham Parkes:

As the play of images on the surface of consciousness is translated into the sounds of words, concepts are formed by abstraction from individual images and are then used to construct a framework by means of which the dynamic manifold of experience can be controlled and made secure. This construction — which Nietzsche characterizes in magnificent imagery of pyramids, Roman columbaria, spiders’ webs, and bee hives — comes to stand on a foundation of “running water,” over the unstoppable flux of life. Experiential stability is achieved by virtue of ignoring the flow below:

Only by forgetting that primitive world of metaphor, only through the solidification and rigidification of a primordial mass of images streaming forth from the primal faculty of human phantasy in a fiery fluidity…and only through the human being’s forgetting himself as an artistically creating subject does he live with any peace, security and consistency.

This is the first full formulation of Nietzsche’s radical conception of the phantastic relation of the human self to the world, which will remain at the core of his mature thought. The world of everyday experience is a construct imposed by conceptualization upon an underlying flux of imagery.

With this in mind, it seems clear that Nietzsche is best understood as the John the Baptist of panta rheism then, wouldn’t you agree?

Commerce Claws

By in getting and spending, meditation, panta rheism, spiritual-not-religious

Kenneth Folk:

“Mindfulness” is poised to become the Next Big Thing. Here is the likely trajectory of the movement: “mindfulness” will be thoroughly co-opted by corporate interests, embraced as a fad by the public at large, discredited through its association with corporate power, and then rejected as cynically manipulative bullshit, all within ten or twenty years. In the short term, the credibility of all contemplative practice will suffer as a result. A shame, that. I wonder what will replace it?

Meh. There will always be trend-chasing dabblers, there will always be dedicated practitioners, and there will always be those completely uninterested. Those demographics might fluctuate, but I don’t see any reason to fear wholesale changes. Contemplative practice in all its forms is far too widespread and deeply-rooted around the world to worry about temporary dips in quarterly performance in the American market. “Mindfulness” will make a quiet difference in the lives of many who practice it, just as “spirituality” has. Marketers will no doubt invent a new term in order to sell people the same old contemplation in a redesigned box or bottle, but nothing’s really being “replaced”, except in the most superficial sense. As panta rheism teaches, the current stays in endless motion, but the form of the river endures.

For more of my thoughts on this topic, be sure to pick up a copy of my book, Water, Water Everywhere: The Alluvial Wisdom Contained Within the Neo-Ancient Principles of Panta Rheism, or visit my website for other fine products to assist you in your journey to the Sea of Enlightenment.

Water, the Universal Solvent

By in alan watts, identity, panta rheism, religion

Anne Kingston:

The trend to mindfulness would seem to signal mass recognition of the need to slow down and pay attention in a turbo-driven, reactive society. Yet its migration from ashram to boardroom is not without tensions. High-profile Buddhists are taking off the gloves, albeit thoughtfully; they say mindfulness is part of a continuum—one of the seven factors of enlightenment—not a self-help technique or “a path which can lead to bigger profits,” as the Financial Times put it. And long-time practioners worry that mindfulness repackaged as a quick fix or a commercial platform could in fact lead to mindlessness, and reinforce the very problems it’s trying to heal.

…Donald Lopez, a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at the University of Michigan, calls “secular Buddhism” an oxymoron: “Buddhism has always been a religion,” he says. “To see it as a way of life is a modern conceit that disparages the lives and religious practices of Buddhists over thousands of years.” The author of The Scientific Buddha, published in 2012, says belief that “mindfulness” is an ancient Buddhist practice is a fallacy: “There’s a cachet that comes from saying some ancient sage a millennium ago in India invented these things,” he says.

There’s an omnipresent tension between those who use religious teachings as a means of reinforcing an egocentric worldview and those who use them as challenges to it. Same as it ever was. I will note, though, that Alan Watts claimed Buddhism itself was a reinvention of existing traditions for the sake of particular needs:

Hinduism is not a religion, it is a culture. In this respect, it’s more like Judaism than Christianity, because a person is still recognizable as a Jew even though they don’t go to synagogue. Jewish people, coming from a long line of Jewish parents and ancestors who have been practicing Jews, still continue certain cultural ways of doing things, certain mannerisms and attitudes, so they are cultural Jews instead of religious Jews. Hinduism is the same sort of thing; it is a religious culture. Being a Hindu really involves living in India. Because of the difference of climate, of arts, crafts and technology, you cannot be a Hindu in the full sense in Japan or the United States.

Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. The Buddha was a reformer in the highest sense; someone who wants to go to the original form, or to re-form it for the needs of a certain time.

In panta rheism, such sectarian distinctions are irrelevant, of course. The headwaters are unimportant as meaning and truth can be found at any point along the river, wherever water flows.

Why Are You So Petrified of Silence?

By in panta rheism, socmed, writing

Ruairí:

In a month where between Thatcher and Boston we definitely saw some of the worst of ‘social media’*, Mike Monteiro hits the proverbial nail on the head when he asks us to question our contributions to the digital debate. Twitter just seems to be flowing with bile at the moment. Conversely, I took a dip into Facebook recently following months of having a deactivated account and it just seems so dull, full of banal marketing waffle. Either way, its not very nice to swim in.

I’d love to believe that social media users might collectively develop the self-awareness to curb the worst of their logorrheic squirts, but I, as you know, am an optimist in full possession of the facts, which is to say, a pessimist. I feel like Steve Martin, despairing over an endless parade of Chatty Cathy dolls, pulling their own strings:

Seriously, though, it’s something I think about a lot. Like I said before, this blog is my practice, to borrow the Buddhist concept. Writing is a form of thinking out loud for me, a way to challenge myself to seek out interesting writers and attend to more substantial topics. I’m not big on the popular notion of personal growth, but as the original panta rheist, I do think my interior life needs to have a feeling of flow to it — not necessarily improving or progressing, but always moving, avoiding stagnation. I wouldn’t ever want to feel like I was writing out of habit or obligation. Every word should count.

This all reminds me of a strange memory from when I was about five or six years old. (And it’s safe to say a five year-old Damian attending school in 2013 would almost certainly be diagnosed as being somewhere on the autism spectrum.) Anyway, my dad was trying to engage me in conversation, encouraging me to give more than the bare-minimum of a reply. I distinctly remember thinking that I needed to save my words for when they were really needed, as if we were only given a limited supply of them to begin with. And though I couldn’t have quite articulated it then, I was also aware that this was something odd. I was reflecting on my own reticence, conscious that I felt a very strong urge to be quiet as much as possible, conscious that this made me different somehow.

That urge has never really left me. There are social situations where I’ll recognize that I could say something to contribute to a conversation, but I’ll actually hesitate while conducting a brief internal dialogue, as I weigh up whatever factors I consider relevant and see which way the scales tip. I’d almost always rather err on the side of silence rather than talk when I don’t have anything important to say. Wouldn’t want to use up my words and be left speechless years down the road when I really need them!

When writing posts in my head, I often spend hours going over every variation on a point I want to make, feeling like I have the rough outline of a novella, only to be genuinely surprised when the final result has somehow been condensed down into a couple mid-sized paragraphs. It’s like I’m just congenitally incapable of using more words than absolutely necessary. Not everything has to be deep or ultra-serious, of course, but apparently I need it all to be meaningful.

Life Is a Waterfall, We’re One in the River and One Again After the Fall

By in identity, nihilism, panta rheism, philosophy, religion

Dale DeBakcsy:

The impermanence of the outer world seems more solidly founded. Five billion years hence, I’m pretty sure that this novelty shot glass next to me is not going to exist in any sort of recognisable novelty shot glass form. Nothing in this room will functionally persist as long as you only admit my Use Perspective as the only relevant lens of observation. The matter and energy will both still exist, but they won’t exist in the configuration which I am accustomed to. And that, apparently, is supposed to fill me with a sense of existential dread. But it doesn’t – at all – and this is the weakness of the conclusions that Buddhism draws from an impermanence theory of the external world. It supposes that I cannot hold in my mind at the same time both an appreciation and attachment to an object or a person as they stand in front of me right now AND a recognition that my use of a particular configuration of matter and energy at the moment doesn’t determine how it will exist for all time. Buddhism’s approach to use-based impermanence attempts to force us into a false binarism where we must either be the slaves of attachment or the cold observers of transience, and that only one of these offers us a way out of suffering. Compelled by the forced logic of its myopic perspective on self-analysis that we saw above, it opts for the latter, and presents that choice as an inevitable philosophical conclusion.

There certainly are those who see Buddhism as a means of escaping this vale of tears, but this criticism could equally apply to nihilism. Or Stoicism. (Not to panta rheism, though, which dissolves all such conceptual conundrums in its endlessly flowing waters.)

Panta Rheism™

By in identity, panta rheism, religion

Brad Warner:

I imagine my opinions on this matter will upset some people. But take heart! As far as I can see I am clearly on the losing end of this battle. It seems to me that those who want to establish a Church of Zen “with teeth,” are going to be the victors. That’s just the way stuff goes. What I’m saying here today will, in the future, be remembered (if at all) only as the ravings of someone who didn’t understand what the Church of Zen now knows to be true. You folks reading in the future can vouch for me on this one.

When that happens, real Zen will go underground and start calling itself something else. That’s also the way stuff goes.

Yep, that’s the way stuff goes. Everything flows. And don’t worry, Brad, we don’t even require official robes.

Like Buddha With Mace

By in books, identity, panta rheism, race, religion, tribalism

Tim Rackett:

Whilst Buddhism is not violent in and of itself, as a lived tradition it can lend itself to dark and deadly uses. There are Buddhist dimensions to the Thai state’s violent struggle to control the country’s far South. To make sense of insurgent violence and the response to it, we have to understand the intricate interdependencies and interconnections among “race”, rule and religion in Thailand. To that end, Buddhist Fury examines “the role of Thai Buddhist monks in a religio-political conflict” (p. 5): the impact of violence on Buddhist monks and the ways in which, as actors in their own right, those monks have an effect on the ongoing violence. Its author asks whether the practices and habits of Buddhist monks in a violent environment exacerbate or ameliorate violence.

…Buddhism as a “lived tradition”, outside Western idealized “Platonic” representations, is diverse, fluid and contradictory. Buddhist truth and traditions are not universal and eternal but are rather enmeshed with particular interests and power relations. How, then, is the non-violent image of Buddhism maintained? Such an image is achieved, argues Jerryson, because its practitioners and its analysts create a fantasy version of Buddhism: “fictitious people and practice—virtual religious models, morally airbrushed to enhance the message” (p. 185). The problem with this mythic Buddhism is that its dark side is ignored: extreme phenomena such as monks with guns, “soldier-monks”, militarized temples, Buddhist militia. In Thailand, religious nationalism legitimates violence, offensive and defensive, against the enemies of “nation, religion and king”. Monks as spiritual exemplars are credited with the power to purify and order hearts and minds and social relations, as Christine Gray has argued.

Speaking of the ways in which supposedly-transcendent ideals end up subordinate to more prosaic concerns, I have to admit being disappointed to see identity politics being asserted within one of the few philosophical worldviews aimed at dissipating the illusion of identity:

“Buddhism goes against identity. Race is a very superficial way of looking at things,” he said. “Hopefully at some point the (people of color) will be relaxed enough within their humanity to be able to come into a greater room full of people and feel that same degree of relaxation, but that’s a stage of development and that can’t be pushed or forced upon them. And at some point they do, like Tuere, she just naturally started to come [to the broader meditation groups]. But it may take long.”

…The goal of “more diverse dharma,” as Smith calls it, has proliferated across the nation in recent years. Race is just one factor, though the most easily seen in many cases. In places such as New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, though, diversity has become an ever wider effort. At the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, Calif., there are Buddhist groups for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender meditators, people with disabilities and those with allergies to perfumes. In New Mexico and Arizona, Buddhists and Native Americans have joined to launch meditation centers that combine teachings from both traditions and include traditional Native healing rituals. In western Massachusetts, meditation communities have formed “diversity councils” to recruit minority practitioners. In Atlanta, meditators thought separate meditation groups were too divisive, so they launched a broad campaign against all “the ‘isms.”

I’ve long been aware that the form of Buddhism that interested me as a teenager wasn’t necessarily representative of the religion in its many forms around the world, which is why I’ve never bothered identifying as a Buddhist. When the term, the label, the signifier gets fixed in place like that, it just becomes a strong magnet for misunderstandings and useless distractions. Is my “Buddhism” too white, middle-class, logocentric, etc.? Fine, then, I’m not a Buddhist. You can keep that shriveled husk of a descriptor for yourself. (I’ll just start calling myself a panta rheist for the time being.)