Categories
- Arts
- asia
- Banking/Finance
- beauty in the world
- Books
- Cities
- competition
- Culture & Commerce
- Current Affairs
- Demographics
- Design
- Economics
- Education
- Film
- Food and Drink
- Fun
- Future
- Games
- Health and Medicine
- History
- Industry
- Innovation
- Leadership/Mgmt
- Malaysia
- Manufacturing
- marketing
- marriage
- Music
- People
- Psychology
- Public Policy
- Religion
- Science
- Search
- Singapore
- Sports
- Stats & Math
- Strategy
- Television
- Travel
- U - Academic
- U - Endowment
- U - House
- U - IP
- U - Strategy
- U - Tech
- Web/Tech
- Weblogs
Recent Posts
- ST: More men are eschewing off-the-rack shirts for ones that are made to measure
- interesting movie reviews - roger ebert
- Song: Sun Equals Fun
- NY TImes: How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work
- ST: Not enough sleep?
- ST: Keep track of your kid
- ST: Non-discrimination in Singapore? Not so, Prof Koh
- ST: More execs cycling to their CBD offices
- ‘The missing piece in a smart government’
- FT: Coding
May 2012
Categories
- Arts
- asia
- Banking/Finance
- beauty in the world
- Books
- Cities
- competition
- Culture & Commerce
- Current Affairs
- Demographics
- Design
- Economics
- Education
- Film
- Food and Drink
- Fun
- Future
- Games
- Health and Medicine
- History
- Industry
- Innovation
- Leadership/Mgmt
- Malaysia
- Manufacturing
- marketing
- marriage
- Music
- People
- Psychology
- Public Policy
- Religion
- Science
- Search
- Singapore
- Sports
- Stats & Math
- Strategy
- Television
- Travel
- U - Academic
- U - Endowment
- U - House
- U - IP
- U - Strategy
- U - Tech
- Web/Tech
- Weblogs
Search Me!
Analyze Me!
April 09, 2012
February 24, 2012
January 31, 2012
September 29, 2011
FT: Lunch with the FT: Shi Yongxin
September 9, 2011 5:17 pm
Lunch with the FT: Shi Yongxin
By Jamil Anderlini
With my iPod headphones plugged in, the abbot of Shaolin keeps his expression perfectly neutral as his eardrums are assailed by the thumping beats of the Wu-Tang Clan.
“I don’t get it,” says Shi Yongxin in his heavily accented Mandarin, after politely listening to the pioneering 1990s rappers from the New York borough of Staten Island who, in homage to kung fu movies of the 1970s, described themselves as coming “straight from the slums of Shaolin”.
More
On this story
- Lunch with the FT Toby Young
- Video Putting the cash into kung fu
- Lunch with the FT Diego Della Valle
- Lunch with the FT Amanda Staveley
- Lunch with the FT Angelina Jolie
We’re sitting in the restaurant of the Shaolin Temple, a Unesco world heritage site nestled in a wooded valley in the shadow of Mount Song in China’s central Henan province. This small monastery is the 1,500-year-old cradle of Zen Buddhism and the spiritual home of kung fu, where for centuries the temple’s monks have practised martial arts so they can uphold justice in society and cultivate their own search for enlightenment. Outside in the warm sunshine, tourists wander the temple grounds and watch incredible displays of strength and acrobatic kung fu, performed at regular intervals by the world-famous fighting monks.
It’s hard to imagine a place less compatible with the violent tirades of one of hip-hop’s greatest ensembles. But I’m trying to explain to his eminence that, even though he is unaware of the Wu-Tang Clan, many people who came of age in the west in the 1990s first heard about his temple from songs such as “Shaolin Worldwide”, and lyrics such as:
The Jedi, only use the Force if ya force me
Shaolin What? Don’t get it f**ked up and cross me
Rappers gettin’ stuck for actin’ stuck up and flossy
“People tell a lot of tall tales about the Shaolin Temple,” the abbot says with the composed demeanour of the deeply religious. “They are not familiar with and don’t represent the real history of Shaolin, the Shaolin culture or the inherited essence of Shaolin.”
If this sounds accurate in the case of RZA, Ghostface Killah, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan, it is also a criticism that many in China have levelled against the abbot himself. The 46-year-old is a highly controversial figure. Since he became, in 1999, only the 30th monk in the temple’s long history to be ordained a full abbot, he has faced relentless attacks for accepting expensive gifts and for commercialising the ancient temple. For those who denounce him through the Chinese internet, the abbot’s initiatives are a sad reflection of society’s crude materialism in a country where, in the past few decades, the crumbling of communist ideology and the rush for wealth have left a spiritual and moral vacuum.
Buddhism is the dominant religion in China, with as many as 300m believers across the country. Like other forms of Buddhism, Zen emphasises letting go of worldly cares and working towards enlightenment through meditation and practice of the Buddha’s teachings, which include a ban on harming any sentient beings. As its home, and the centrepiece of many kung fu novels and films, the Shaolin Temple has become an integral part of Chinese popular culture. In fact, it is probably one of the most famous global brands to have come out of China in any industry, thanks in no small part to the abbot, whom Chinese media have dubbed the “CEO monk”.
VIDEO
To see a video of the Shaolin Temple and the abbot, go to www.ft.com/shaolin
The temple’s business ventures include investments in its famous globetrotting kung fu performance troupes, renting out the Shaolin name for films, cartoons and stage productions, and an early stage investment in a possible line of traditional Chinese medicines. It has also sent monks to set up more than 40 Shaolin kung fu and meditation centres in countries across North America, Europe and elsewhere, but the abbot says these and most of Shaolin’s other “cultural activities” barely break even. Instead, he says, the vast majority of the temple’s “few dozen million renminbi” in annual income comes from tickets sold to the roughly 2m tourists that visit the site every year. The temple keeps 30 per cent of the ticket revenues and hands 70 per cent over to the local government.
The temple has registered its trademark across the world in an attempt to stop people from using its name to promote concepts that do not fit with its Buddhist precepts. But the main battleground is in China, where intellectual property protections are weak and companies making everything from soft drinks and chopsticks to electrical machinery and buses have appropriated the Shaolin brand. Even liquor producers and makers of pork sausages have taken the name, despite the fact that strict Zen Buddhism prohibits the consumption of meat and alcohol.
The overwhelming number of infringements and the weak protection offered by China’s justice system mean it is simply not worth going after every offender, but the abbot is optimistic that things will change for the better eventually. “Now if we are to engage in a lawsuit to protect our rights, we will have to spend a lot of money and time and the result will not necessarily be satisfactory,” he says. “Once Chinese citizens are like western citizens, in an environment where the awareness of law is firm, people will naturally abandon using the name of Shaolin Temple.” I’m struck by how similar his vocabulary is to that of a typical Chinese chief executive.
Nevertheless, he explains, the creation in 1998 of the Henan Shaolin Temple Industrial Development Company, saw the temple become the first Chinese religious group to register a trademark for its name, “We’re using legal and commercial means to protect our intellectual property, protect our brand and protect our own inheritance,” he says.
The temple has been destroyed and rebuilt many times since it was established in the fifth century and, following the communist victory in 1949 all of its surrounding farmland was confiscated and redistributed among the masses, leaving the monks with no way to feed themselves. In the disastrous cultural revolution of 1966-1976, the monks who remained at the temple were beaten, persecuted and forced to disperse, but when the terror ended some returned and set about reviving their traditions, including the practice of kung fu.
Since his arrival at the temple in 1981, aged 16, the abbot has dedicated his life to its restoration and revival. I get the feeling he has had to make many compromises in order to protect and promote his monastery and its heritage. But, as he points out, the Vatican is a multinational corporation with its own bank, and Shaolin’s annual income doesn’t even put it in the top 100 on the list of richest temples in China.
We wish everyone could lead a simple life and not chase luxury lifestyles in the way the awful nouveau riche do
“We don’t have much savings in the bank but there is a lot of grain stored in the barn, enough for two years, so if there is a disaster in society the Shaolin Temple could hold out for two years or so,” he adds. It is an astonishing insight into the historical legacy that has forced him to hone his business skills.
The menu for our lunch has been arranged by the temple’s veteran chef, and as our waiters arrive with the first dish – a delicate selection of vegetarian morsels called “three treasures to welcome guests”, made from baked bran, pickled radish and dried tofu – the abbot’s phone rings and he reaches into his flowing crimson gown to retrieve a buzzing Samsung mobile. He politely dismisses the person on the other end of the line and I notice his immaculately manicured fingernails and also that his earlobes are unusually large, a physical trait that in China is said to indicate competence and bring good fortune and riches.
As the bowls keep coming, the abbot is careful to point out that he normally eats very plain food. In fact, that morning I had been allowed to attend dawn prayers and join him and his monks for a hearty meal of rice porridge, vegetables and steamed buns, served by trainee monks who couldn’t have been more than 10 years old. At that meal, the abbot sat with the others on wooden benches in silence as they scoffed down their food in less than 15 minutes.
Having spotted his phone, I decide now is the time to ask him about his penchant for gadgets and expensive gifts, including a Volkswagen SUV and an iPad he is often seen using in public. “The Volkswagen is worth less than Rmb 1m [£98,000] and it was given to me by the local government because we have brought them a lot of profits,” he tells me with only the slightest hint of exasperation breaking through his Zen composure. “We attract a lot of visitors and students so the government awarded me a car to encourage me to do a better job.”
He says the iPad and other gadgets are all gifts from devotees but that he tries to use such things until they are broken and unusable before replacing them. “I’m not doing what I do for other people but for society, for the masses; it’s not for me personally or for the local government but if there is a need in society or among the ordinary folk, then I should do what I can.”
Samadhi restaurant
Shaolin Temple,Henan Province, China
‘Three treasures to welcome guests’: with bran, pickled radish and shredded dried tofu
‘Vegetarian shark fin soup’: with pumpkin and bean flour noodles
‘Rose salad roll’: spring rolls with melon, radish and vegetarian ham
‘Floating fragrance in a Buddhist pot’: with cabbage and tofu
‘Blossoming smile of enlightenment’: with fried eggplants, tofu, vegetables
’Buddha jumps over the wall with Zen in his heart’: oily soup with ginseng, mushrooms, wolfberry
Set menu price: approx £80 per person
(After negotiations that lasted almost an hour, I was allowed to pay the bill, as per the rules of the Lunch with the FT. This was a breach of Chinese etiquette but the transgression was eventually forgiven)
We tuck into a dish of cabbage and shredded dried tofu with the delightful name of “floating fragrance in a Buddhist pot” but I notice that the abbot is hardly touching his food. The mention of his dealings with the local government is an illustration of the difficult relationship in China between organised religion and the officially atheist ruling Communist party. The Chinese government only recognises five official religions – Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism – and requires that these be organised into institutions supervised by “patriotic associations”, in turn supervised by the State Administration for Religious Affairs and the Communist party’s United Front department.
Other world religions, such as Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism or Baha’i, are not recognised by Beijing, and nor are countless underground Catholic and Protestant “house churches”. The government tends to tolerate much of this “unofficial” religious activity as long as it is a private matter, but any hint of political organisation will bring a crackdown.
The Shaolin abbot doesn’t need to worry about this. He has been a member of the National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, since 1998 and vice-chairman of the official Buddhist Association of China since 2002. Ordinarily, the abbot and other senior monks at the temple will decide who can be ordained as a monk and the temple will then register them with the provincial religious affairs bureau. But the position of abbot must be directly authorised by the religious affairs authorities, almost all of whom are atheist Communist party members.
I ask his eminence why he thinks he was chosen and his answer is simple: “Because I am obedient. I’m willing to donate myself and serve the people.” To “serve the people” is a traditional communist slogan that regularly trips off the tongue of party bureaucrats. He explains that this subservience of religion to the state has always existed in China and in many other countries as well. “Throughout history it is the same: religion must respect the emperor, respect the government. If a religion doesn’t respect the government, it will have difficulty surviving,” he says. “We have to rely on the government to publicise and promote us. The government has a lot of power and it’s difficult to promote ourselves without it.”
There he goes again, speaking like an executive from a global marketing firm.
As the waiters place a fried eggplant and tofu dish called “blossoming smile of enlightenment” in front of us, I ask him how he responds to the critics who say he is too fond of mixing the sacred and the profane.
“Our aim is to promote Buddhist culture, to baptise human souls and purify people’s minds,” the abbot says. “What we have done so far [in terms of commercialisation] is actually quite conservative because we don’t want to get too mixed up in the affairs of society or over-exploit Shaolin Temple.” He describes how a proposal in 2009 by the local government to list the temple on a domestic or international stock exchange was abandoned after he and the other monks voiced strong objections.
On the abbot’s instructions, the flow of dishes has slowed and most of his plates have been cleared without him tasting more than a spoonful or two. Throughout our lunch it feels as if he is trying to convince me that he is not the materialistic villain he is often portrayed as in China. More than once he mentions the fact that he and each of his monks live a plain existence, normally surviving on just Rmb 7 (70p) per day.
His explanation of the pressures he faces in a modern Chinese society is, however, persuasive. “We hope we can improve the bad atmosphere of modern society through the influence of the Shaolin Temple; over the years we have seen society pollute the earth and overexploit resources and people’s desires continuously grow,” he says. “We wish everyone could lead a simple life like us monks and not chase after famous brands and luxury lifestyles in the way the awful nouveau riche in our country do.”
One of the last dishes is laid in front of us and the abbot breaks into a beatific smile in appreciation at the irony of its name. It is a vegetarian version of “Buddha jumps over the wall”, an oily soup that usually includes meat and seafood and is supposed to taste so good that it can tempt even devout monks to jump the monastery wall and renounce their monastic vows.
“See, that shows you how open and sympathetic Chinese Buddhism is,” he says. “In other cultures or religions, if somebody used this kind of name for such a sacrilegious dish there would be a huge fight.”
Coming from a religion where monks who have sworn not to harm sentient beings wield swords and practise cracking skulls with their fists, this too is persuasive. For the abbot, temporal dealings – including business – appear merely a necessary diversion on the path towards enlightenment.
Jamil Anderlini is the FT’s Beijing bureau chief
Timeline: A brief history of the Shaolin Temple
AD495 Shaolin Temple (literally “temple in the forests of Shaoshi mountain”) is built by Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei dynasty as a place for the Indian monk Batuo to live, translate Buddhist scriptures and preach to his followers.
AD618-907 A band of 13 Shaolin monks is reputed to have saved the life of the future Tang dynasty Emperor Li Shimin. When Li took power, he showered favours, land and wealth on the temple and it experienced a golden age.
1368-1644 During the Ming dynasty, the temple houses more than 3,000 monks. It declines under the Manchurian Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
1928 Chinese warlord Shi Yousan attacks the temple and a fire rages for 40 days, destroying nearly all relics and records. Despite having been looted, burned and destroyed many times over the centuries, the temple has only been abandoned – briefly – in the seventh and tenth centuries.
1950s-1970s The temple’s lands are seized during the communist land redistributions and most monks driven away. During the cultural revolution that follows, the handful of monks who remain are beaten and persecuted or forced to renounce their vows.
1981 Shi Yongxin, born Liu Yingcheng, arrives at the Shaolin Temple to train as a monk.
1987 Begins running the temple after the previous abbot’s death. In 1998, he is selected as a representative to the National People’s Congress, China’s rubberstamp parliament.
1999 Ordained as the temple’s abbot.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
September 22, 2011
Economist: Malaysia
Banyan
Ethnic politics makes Malaysia’s transition to a contested democracy fraught and ugly
Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition
SKYSCRAPERS and lampposts in Kuala Lumpur are still festooned with flags left over from independence day festivities at the end of August. Fittingly, this week they were shrouded in the annual “haze” of smog from forest fires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Malaysia’s politicians are not in the mood to celebrate nationhood and unity. Rather, with an election in the offing, everything is a chance for political point-scoring.
That includes independence itself. One huge banner in the centre of the capital shows the country’s six prime ministers since the British left in 1957, with the incumbent, Najib Razak, in the foreground, gazing into a visionary future. All six hailed from the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which has led the “Barisan Nasional” (BN) coalition government ever since 1957. Some opposition politicians now complain that the official narrative of Malaysia’s history ignores the role of non-UMNO freedom fighters. Since the most recent general election, in March 2008, the opposition has had a real chance of winning power. For the first time since independence in 1957, the BN lost its two-thirds majority in Parliament that allowed it to amend the constitution on its own. No longer a one-coalition state, the opposition argues, Malaysia has to rethink its own history.
- The Libyan dilemma
- Bloody Wednesday
- Slow movers
- Not all smiles
- Visa procedures
- »The haze and the malaise
- Correction: Mohan Peiris
Related topics
The next election is not due until 2013. But, out of tradition and political calculation, Mr Najib is expected to call it earlier—and to win it. Some think it could come this year, after a generous government budget in October. A crowded calendar of regional summitry makes that awkward, and Mr Najib has other reasons for delay. Since he took over in 2009, he has launched a plethora of initiatives to improve Malaysians’ lives and a “Performance and Delivery Unit” to implement them. Results take time.
Three factors, however, argue for a hasty dash to the polls. The first is that Mr Najib, who took over UMNO and the prime ministership after the BN’s unprecedentedly poor showing in 2008, still had an approval rating of 59% in a recent survey. That is well below his initial popularity, however, and he will not want to mimic Britain’s Gordon Brown in delaying too long before seeking his own mandate. Second, economic storm clouds are gathering in the West. Malaysia’s economy is still growing at over 4% a year, but is vulnerable to a downturn in external demand.
Third, the opposition coalition is in some disarray. Its figurehead, Anwar Ibrahim, is on trial for sodomy, illegal in Malaysia, and many expect him to go back to jail soon, as he did (for the same alleged offence) in 1998. He is a divisive figure. But without him, there is no obvious opposition candidate for prime minister. The president of his party is his wife, and its most impressive politician is his 30-year-old daughter, Nurul Izzah. The other components of the coalition are the Democratic Action Party, which draws its support from the Chinese minority, and an Islamic party known as PAS, whose religious conservatism alienates many liberal Malays. So there is even talk of a revival of the prime ministerial ambitions of Razaleigh Hamzah, a veteran UMNO rebel, as an opposition rallying point.
The government helpfully provided another rallying point with its cack-handed crackdown on an NGO-led protest in Kuala Lumpur in July calling for electoral reform. Mr Najib has since agreed to a parliamentary committee to look into the demands, which are mostly unexceptionable: to clean up voters’ lists, allegedly swollen with “phantoms”; to extend the election-campaign period, at present just seven to nine days; to tighten up the postal-vote system; and so on. But he has not agreed to postpone an election until after the committee has ruled.
Whatever technical reforms are made before the next election, it will still be dominated by the original sin of ethnic discrimination set out in the country’s 1957 constitution. This was designed to allay the fears of the majority ethnic-Malay population of being marginalised by Chinese and Indian minorities, which now make up respectively 23% and 7% of the population of 28m. Perks, much extended after race riots in 1969 (still often referred to in Malaysia as if they happened yesterday), gave Malays privileged access to public-sector jobs, university places, stockmarket flotations and government contracts.
Both government and opposition talk of dismantling these privileges, which have contributed to corruption and large-scale emigration. Mr Najib has indeed started tinkering with Malay privileges, much to the outrage of the UMNO right and a vocal Malay-rights ginger group known as Perkasa. Ibrahim Ali, Perkasa’s front man, argues that, with the Malay vote split, the minorities have disproportionate electoral power, to which the mainstream parties pander.
Malay power
That is nonsense. As elections loom, it is the Malay voter whose opinion matters, and he is assumed to resent any effort to curtail his privileges. And that means that both coalitions have to resort to defending the indefensible: a system in which families that have lived in Malaysia for generations are told to tolerate discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, to bolster allegedly fragile racial harmony. Malays and minorities alike lament that the races are living increasingly separate lives—studying in different schools, eating different foods and going to different parties. The divide is further widened as more Malays, who, constitutionally, are all Muslims, become religiously conservative.
The Malaysian malaise stems from the congruence of two seemingly conflicting trends. One is the healthy development of pluralist competition in a system that had seemed stuck for ever in an UMNO-dominated quasi-democracy. The other is the sharpening of ethnic and religious dividing lines. It is alarming that, instead of seeing competitive politics as a way of bridging the ethnic divide, too many Malaysian politicians see the ethnic divide as a way of winning the political competition.
from the print edition | Asi
July 28, 2011
June 25, 2011
May 01, 2011
Economist: Religion
This is a printer friendly version of the page. Go back to the website version »
Religious studies
Tentatively, scientists are asking: exactly what is religion, and what is it for?
Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition
RELIGION is ubiquitous but it is not universal. That is a conundrum for people trying to explain it. Religious types, noting the ubiquity (though not everyone is religious, all human societies have religions), argue that this proves religion is a real reflection of the underlying nature of things. Sceptics wonder why, if that is the case, it comes in such a variety of flavours, from the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church to the cargo cults of Papua New Guinea—each of which seems to find the explanations offered by the others anathema.
To bring a little scientific order to the matter, researchers taking part in a multinational project called Explaining Religion have spent three years gathering data on various aspects of religious practice and on the sorts of moral behaviour that religions often claim to govern. The data-collection phase was wrapped up at the end of 2010, and the results are starting to be published.
At the moment, most students of the field would agree that they are still in the “stamp collecting” phase that begins many a new science—in which facts are accumulated without it being clear where any of them fit in. But some intriguing patterns are already beginning to emerge. In particular, the project’s researchers have studied the ideas of just deserts, of divine disapproval and of the nature of religious ritual.
One theory of the origin of religion is that it underpins the extraordinary capacity for collaboration that led to the rise of Homo sapiens. A feature of many religions is the idea that evil is divinely punished and virtue is rewarded. Cheats or the greedy, in other words, get their just deserts. The selflessness which that belief encourages might help explain religion’s evolution. But is the idea of universal just deserts truly instinctive, as this interpretation suggests it should be?
To test that Nicolas Baumard (then at Oxford, now at the University of Pennsylvania) used a computer to check people’s reactions to a modern morality tale. Dr Baumard’s volunteers read about a beggar asking for alms, and a passer-by who did not give them. In some cases the pedestrian was not only stingy, but hurled abuse at the poor man. In others, he was skint and apologetic. Either way, he went on to experience some nasty event (anything from tripping over a shoelace, via being tripped up deliberately by the beggar, to being run over by a car).
The question asked of each volunteer was whether the second event was caused by the passer-by’s behaviour towards the beggar. Most answered “no”, the assumption being it was the shoelace, or the beggar’s foot, or the car. But Dr Baumard also measured how long each volunteer thought about the answer—and he found that when the passer-by had behaved badly to the beggar and then suffered an unrelated bad incident, volunteers spent significantly longer thinking about their answers than when the passer-by had behaved well, or the beggar had tripped him up deliberately.
Dr Baumard’s interpretation, though he cannot prove it, is that the volunteers were indeed making a mental connection, during this extra thinking time, between the passer-by’s actions and his subsequent fate. In other words, they were considering the idea that he was getting his just deserts, dished out by some sort of universal fate.
That interpretation will require a lot of further testing. But it tallies with a second result from the project, which looked at the idea that God is always watching you.
To investigate this, Dr Baumard teamed up with Ryan McKay of the University of London and Pierrick Bourrat of the University of Sydney. Together, they checked whether subtle cues about being observed had an effect on people’s behaviour.
In this case they invited their volunteers to rate the acceptability of two acts—keeping the money from a lost wallet and faking a résumé. Half the volunteers were given the task written on a piece of paper which also included a picture of a pair of eyes. The other half saw an image of flowers with their instructions. The upshot was that those who saw the eyes rated both misdemeanours as more serious than those who saw the flowers.
Again, that proves nothing. Prying eyes need not indicate a supernatural watcher, and people are well-known to have their consciences pricked when they are under non-divine scrutiny as well. But it does indicate a mental process that religious ideas of a judgmental, omniscient god would be able to tap into.
To explore that idea further, Dr Bourrat joined forces with Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland. Together, they pored over the World Values Survey, a poll of 87 countries that asks respondents, among other things, about their religious beliefs and the acceptability of a range of infractions, from littering to adultery. The upshot of Dr Bourrat’s and Dr Atkinson’s analysis was that people whose religion includes an omniscient, judgmental god (Christians, Muslims and so on) regard the whole range of such transgressions more harshly than those, such as Buddhists, whose religion does not. (Agnostics and atheists think like Buddhists.)
The ideas of just deserts and of the nagging of conscience are both, in essence, private to each brain. But a third religious idea that might foster co-operation is very public indeed. That is the idea of shared rituals.
Psychologists distinguish two types of long-term memory. One, semantic memory, records things consciously learned without first-hand experience—history lessons at school, for example. The other, episodic memory, records memorable events from a person’s own life.
Harvey Whitehouse, also of Oxford, thinks these different ways of remembering are harnessed by what he sees as two distinct aspects of religiosity. The doctrinal religious mode, as he dubs the first of these aspects, favours frequent but not particularly exciting rites that allow large bodies of teaching to be stored in a person’s semantic memory. That explains Friday prayers in Islam, or daily mass for the more enthusiastic sort of Catholic.
The second aspect—the imagistic mode, in Dr Whitehouse’s terminology—relies on rare but highly arousing events that are etched into the episodic memory by dint of their emotional salience. In principle, these could be either cheerful or unpleasant. However, since depths of trauma are recalled more vividly than heights of euphoria, religions should, in his view, prefer the former. Which, indeed, they do.
In one particularly grisly rite of passage, for example, young men belonging to Australia’s Aranda tribe are first circumcised and then pinned face down as several of their elders bite the initiate’s scalp and chin as hard as they can, before slitting his urethra with a stone blade. That is the sort of thing you are not going to forget in a hurry. You are also going to feel a strong affinity with those others who have gone through it, and perhaps a certain disdain for those who have not—a solidarity-building exercise, then, if ever there was one.
To test his prediction about there being two basic types of ritual, Dr Whitehouse recruited the assistance of Dr Atkinson. Together, they compiled a database of 645 rituals from 74 cultures, drawing on the Human Relations Area Files, a large collection of ethnographic material. They rated each ritual’s frequency and the level of arousal involved. As predicted, though low-arousal rituals are more common than high-arousal ones, there is a tendency (see chart) for ritual behaviours to cluster at either end of the arousal spectrum.
The next step is to enlarge the trove of data further—in particular by adding historical information to the contemporary sort already in it. The researchers may also extend their net to non-religious rituals, from hazing by army special-forces groups, to the intoning of corporate hymns. This is the aim of a follow-up to Explaining Religion, which is due to begin in earnest later this year. It will bring together anthropologists, archaeologists, evolutionary psychologists and historians, and will trawl though 5,000 years of history, recording rituals as it goes.
So, even though Explaining Religion did not actually achieve its rather ambitious eponymous goal, it has found some promising avenues of investigation, and led to that great desideratum of science, more research. Most importantly, though, it has opened to disinterested investigation an area of human behaviour that all too rarely sees it. That alone is worth celebrating. Happy Easter (or other Spring fertility festival of your choice).
from the print edition | Science and Technology
This is a printer friendly version of the page. Go back to the website version »
Early religious archaeology
Whatever happened to the Hebrew Christians?
Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition
THE fate of the Jews who followed Jesus is one of the puzzles of the history of monotheism. The New Testament has much to say about a related issue: the dilemmas faced by Jesus’s non-Jewish adherents. There was a hard argument about how much, if any, of the Jewish law and custom such converts should keep. But when it comes to followers of Christ who were Jewish by culture and religious practice, the evidence is hazier. Such people clearly existed: the Epistle to the Hebrews, a deeply enigmatic section of the New Testament, is addressed to those who were steeped in the lore of the Jewish Temple, and wondered how the self-sacrifice of their crucified Master related to the animal sacrifices of their ancestral faith. Then there is a handful of references in other texts to Christians who fled eastward from Jerusalem before the Roman-Jewish war of 66AD. One account speaks of an exodus towards Jordan, after the Christian bishop, James, was attacked in the Temple courtyard.
The subsequent history of the Hebrew Christians has been obscured by centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, and by Jewish resentment of Christianity. By the fourth century, a ferocious Cypriot bishop was describing a group of people whom he deemed heretics because they kept the Mosaic law—but who were also loathed by fellow Jews because of their belief in Christ. As in so many conflicts, people who straddled the divide upset both sides.
All that helps explain the excitement generated in recent weeks by the emergence of a collection of lead codices, which might, if they are genuine, throw light on the missing links in Christian and Jewish history. Some 70 or so ring-bound “books”, with up to 15 leaves each, are said to have been found, along with other artefacts, in a cave in Jordan, near the place where the Hebrew Christians seemingly took refuge.
They are now in the possession of an Israeli Bedouin, but the government of Jordan has claimed ownership, saying they came to light on Jordanian soil a few years ago. Amid much confusion, the objects’ keeper asserts that they have been in his family for a century. Ziad al-Saad, head of Jordan’s antiquities department, has said this could be the biggest find since the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. David Elkington, who is writing a book about the lead “books”, backs Jordan’s claim, saying it offers the best chance of ensuring the artefacts are open to scholars. An Oxford laboratory, after testing one of the codices, believes the lead might be 2,000 years old.
Two British authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philip Davies and Margaret Barker, have argued, after seeing images, that the codices—and their possible Christian link—should be taken seriously. But a dissonant voice has come from Peter Thonemann, an Oxford University historian who was shown a photograph of a copper engraving, apparently found along with the lead codices; what he saw, at least, was a crude forgery, he insists. But so far, no scientific authority in a position to judge has seen more than a fraction of the objects.
If they are authentic, the lead objects tell a teasing Judeo-Christian story. There is writing in an ancient script, Paleo-Hebrew, which was used by Jews largely for ceremonial purposes. The writing is mostly indecipherable; it may be in code. The imagery features the Jewish feast of Sukkot, which is both a harvest thanksgiving and a celebration of the Jews’ sojourn in Egypt. During this festival, celebrants brandish palm fronds (bound up with willow and myrtle) in one hand and a lemon-like fruit, the etrog, in the other. This is familiar Jewish material, but some may ask what it has to do with Christianity.
A good question. In various forms, most Jewish festivals found their way into the Christian calendar. Imagery and language from Sukkot occur at many moments in the Christian year; in the stories of Christ’s birth, baptism, transfiguration, and most obviously at Palm Sunday, when Christians wave palms (or in Russia, willow twigs) to commemorate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. In Christian commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, it is stressed that Sukkot was associated with the advent of the Messiah and with the coming of all nations to worship in Jerusalem. So images of Sukkot would be dear to the heart of Hebrew Christians.
None of that proves a Christian connection. The imagery might also be consistent with an alternative theory which was aired in the Jewish Chronicle, a British weekly: that the codices belonged to forerunners of the mystical tradition which became known as Kabbalah. But by stirring a discussion about the resonance of certain images to Jews and Christians alike, the lead objects have refocused attention on a deep but contentious commonality.
from the print edition | Books and Arts
This is a printer friendly version of the page. Go back to the website version »
Easter
Holy fires and calendrical quibbles
Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition
A regular Wednesday dateRELIGIONS have a rum relationship with calendars. They invite people to enter a reality that transcends all the limitations of time, space and finitude; yet faiths are often disputatiously obsessed with pinning down the precise moment at which certain cosmically important events occurred or should be celebrated. Christian quarrels over the date of Easter are a perfect example.
Both the Western and Orthodox Christian churches use a complex system, based on the spring equinox and the lunar cycle, to compute the date when the resurrection of Jesus Christ (and the rites that follow and precede it) should be marked. But the methods of calculation are different. This year, as last year, Western and Eastern Christians happen to agree; but the Easter dates can be as much as five weeks apart.
That can pose problems in places where Orthodox and Western Christians rub shoulders. One lot may be holding lively Paschal celebrations while the others are observing a Lenten fast. And even a common Easter date can pose difficulties, for example at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem where six Christian communities jostle for space: Catholics who wish to visit Christ’s tomb on Easter Saturday must turn up extra-early (at 5.30am) because of security measures for the exuberant Orthodox Holy Fire ceremony a few hours later.
Only in a handful of places do Easter celebrants alter their own arrangements to take account of their neighbours. Finland’s Orthodox Christians mark Easter on the Western date. And on the Greek island of Syros, a Papist stronghold, Catholics and Orthodox alike march to Orthodox time. The spectacular public commemorations, involving flower-strewn funeral biers on Good Friday and fireworks on Saturday night, bring the islanders together, rather than highlighting division.
Could the wider Christian world ever converge on a single date? It seems unlikely. An Orthodox calendar reform of 1923, which aligned Christmas and other fixed festivals with the Western dates, led to a deep division within the Christian east; the Russians, Serbs and some conservative Greeks refused to go along. Many Orthodox are wary of any changes that could cause more splits within their ranks.
If the movement for a common, or permanently fixed, Easter date ever gains ground, a Cambridge University professor, Colin Humphreys, has made a proposal. Using a mixture of literary and astronomical sources, he thinks the actual date of crucifixion was April 3rd in the year 33AD. That places the last supper (which he thinks happened on Wednesday, not Thursday as traditionally believed) on April 1st, and the resurrection on April 5th. So, he is asking, why not celebrate Christianity’s defining event on, or as near as possible, the day it happened?
from the print edition | International
February 08, 2011
January 23, 2011
FT: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Review by AN Wilson
Published: January 7 2011 22:02 | Last updated: January 7 2011 22:02
 |
| Representatives of the Catholic, Buddhist and Muslim faiths at a prayer rally, Manila University, October 2007 |
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, by Karen Armstrong, The Bodley Head RRP£12.99, 224 pages
The religious slanging match that divides the media of the western world – Dawkins v Creation, Allah v Hitchens, however you like to define it – disguises the actual state of play in the world at large. Many regular attenders at synagogue or church are agnostic in belief. And many non-practisers of a faith recognise the truth and sagacity of the greatest religious texts of the world.
Karen Armstrong, who has been a Roman Catholic nun, and then a non-believer, and then a sort of theist, is now an ambassador for all that is best in the great religions of the world. She is a guide for those who want to be more compassionate without subscribing to some of the more arcane doctrines and propositions of organised religion. She quotes with approval the Dalai Lama’s saying: “Whether a person is a religious believer does not matter much. Far more important is that they be a good human being.”
Lately, Karen Armstrong won a prize from TED, the lecture and conference organisation committed to “ideas worth spreading” (the letters stand for technology, entertainment and design). Now, with the help of those who could be called, in a benign sense, the usual suspects – Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Rabbi Julia Neuberger et al – Armstrong has launched her Charter for Compassion. This book is a distillation of 12 steps that readers can follow to become more compassionate persons and hence, it is to be hoped, the moulders of a more compassionate world.
No decent person could quarrel with that, surely, and so we set out with eagerness on Armstrong’s 12-fold path towards enlightenment. The Buddha, it will be remembered, began his path to cure the world’s pain by donning a mendicant’s robes and leaving his grieving parents. Tolstoy likewise donned a peasant’s smock, Francis a beggar’s rags and Gandhi a loincloth. Followers of the Armstrong way are given the more prosaic injunction: “As an initial step, it might be helpful, as a symbolic act of commitment, to visit www.charterforcompassion.org”.
If this provokes a smile, so too will the author’s occasional lapses into management jargon. We are urged to “think outside the box” and to remember that all great religions “put suffering at the top of their agenda”. And true, there is something a little absurd about such figures as Armstrong and the Dalai Lama flying around the world to conferences and book launches as a way of promoting wisdom.
As Armstrong reminds us, Greek tragedies began as collective religious experiences. By the end of the Oresteia, Aeschylus hopes we will have moved from the tribal-based cult of revenge to a polis-based, civilised respect for the law. Obviously, we modern readers can gain some wisdom from reading these plays in paperback but it is an experience different from witnessing the tragedies in an amphitheatre in 420BC.
The individualism that Armstrong’s do-it-yourself approach releases is surely cause for rejoicing. Gratefully aware of the riches of Buddhism, the Greek tragedians or the Hebrew scriptures, she does not want to make us into Buddhists, Athene-worshippers or Jews. She speaks with quiet eloquence to those of us who will never feel able to “believe” in the way that our ancestors believed.
Indeed, seeing the bad behaviour inspired at times by organised religion, we would often rather side with the unbelievers than be like that. But we recognise, partly thanks to Armstrong, that we do all wish to lead more compassionate lives, and these old sages can help us.
Armstrong has tried to devise a way of conducting what Socrates called compassionate discourse. This does not mean, as she reminds us, “trying to bludgeon other people to accept our point of view”. (I’d like to add: maybe the way of wisdom abandons any “points of view”, especially opinions that relate either to the unknowable, such as theology, or to other people’s sex lives). Armstrong more simply wants us to call to mind our common human nature.
In one of his notebooks, Henry James wrote six words: “Be kind, be kind, be kind.” That great man, who was in some ways a bit silly and a bit snobbish, surely achieved his aim. He was kind, and he was wise, and he had no obvious religious views, not even views as mild as those of his equally lovable brother William.
Armstrong ends her book by remembering the Iliad; she calls to mind the nobility of Achilles who, after much hatred and fighting, hands over the dead body of Hector to his grieving father Priam. Maybe part of our turning over a new leaf and resolving to be more compassionate would involve making a resolution to read more Greek literature. And (not that Armstrong mentions him) more Henry James.
AN Wilson is the author of ‘Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II’ (Arrow)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
Recent Comments