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three_weeks_for_dw posts:
copperbadge posts a really eloquent argument for DreamWidth and a summation of LJ's latest awfulness--he is moving ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sam_storyteller to DW!
mumblemutter is hosting Video Killed the Radio Star, a multifandom music video challenge! Why is there not Lady Gaga fic on there yet.
synecdochic on modesty and what's wrong with it.
I wrote the following in December 2005. It's by no means a perfect or even a great paper, but I still like it for the fact that I basically wrote an exploration of the Lone Power in Diane Duane's Young Wizards books (who as a character and as a concept absolutely fascinates me) and turned it in for a grade in a college class. I would do a lot of things differently were I to write this paper now--invert the structure, most notably, and less with the generalizations (but I am by no means a philosopher)--and I've put it under two cuts to facilitate people who just want the Young Wizards discussion getting where they want to go.
three_weeks_for_dw posts: copperbadge posts a really eloquent argument for DreamWidth and a summation of LJ's latest awfulness--he is moving sam_storyteller to DW!mumblemutter is hosting Video Killed the Radio Star, a multifandom music video challenge! Why is there not Lady Gaga fic on there yet.synecdochic on modesty and what's wrong with it.I wrote the following in December 2005. It's by no means a perfect or even a great paper, but I still like it for the fact that I basically wrote an exploration of the Lone Power in Diane Duane's Young Wizards books (who as a character and as a concept absolutely fascinates me) and turned it in for a grade in a college class. I would do a lot of things differently were I to write this paper now--invert the structure, most notably, and less with the generalizations (but I am by no means a philosopher)--and I've put it under two cuts to facilitate people who just want the Young Wizards discussion getting where they want to go.
Evil, Beauty & TiantaiBeing a Modest Defense of Magic & a Little Look into Darkness
Traditional Western philosophical concepts of beauty seem to equate beauty with goodness, goodness with the divine, and rest their case. As Brook Ziporyn notes,
This Western love of dichotomies can be both useful and pernicious. While it is useful to think of good and evil, for instance, as two opposite quiddities, conceiving of them in either/or terms can also obscure certain demonstrable goods, such as (arguably) redemption. However, I believe a fuller exploration of these issues will yield some disturbing challenges to the either/or opposition, and I will end this paper by attempting to, as it were, ‘square the circle’ and argue for a re-evaluation of beauty, evil, and perhaps goodness as well.
For our purposes, we might as well begin with John Milton and his photographic description of Satan/Lucifer in Paradise Lost:
Milton equates beauty with goodness, and not-goodness (evil) with not-beauty (ugliness). As Paradise Lost progresses and Satan sinks further into evil (journeying further from God as well), he becomes less and less Lucifer, more and more grotesque, until finally he and all his followers are transformed into snakes.
Milton’s rigid either/or dichotomy concerning good-beauty/evil-ugly prevents him from having any sympathy for the devil. Satan, in an especially titanic scene, freely eschews good for ill, forever:
Traditional Western philosophical concepts of beauty seem to equate beauty with goodness, goodness with the divine, and rest their case. As Brook Ziporyn notes,
Western thought can in many senses be characterized as sharing a faith in antithetical values and making this faith a cornerstone for further ontological, ethical, and epistemological developments. The contents of this faith can be broadly summed up as What is good is not bad; what is bad is not good. (2)
This Western love of dichotomies can be both useful and pernicious. While it is useful to think of good and evil, for instance, as two opposite quiddities, conceiving of them in either/or terms can also obscure certain demonstrable goods, such as (arguably) redemption. However, I believe a fuller exploration of these issues will yield some disturbing challenges to the either/or opposition, and I will end this paper by attempting to, as it were, ‘square the circle’ and argue for a re-evaluation of beauty, evil, and perhaps goodness as well.
For our purposes, we might as well begin with John Milton and his photographic description of Satan/Lucifer in Paradise Lost:
[…] his form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and th’ excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun ris’n
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
…………………………………………………
Darkened so, yet shone
Above them all th’ Archangel: but his face
Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride
Waiting revenge: cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion (I. 591-605)
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and th’ excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun ris’n
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
…………………………………………………
Darkened so, yet shone
Above them all th’ Archangel: but his face
Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride
Waiting revenge: cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion (I. 591-605)
Milton equates beauty with goodness, and not-goodness (evil) with not-beauty (ugliness). As Paradise Lost progresses and Satan sinks further into evil (journeying further from God as well), he becomes less and less Lucifer, more and more grotesque, until finally he and all his followers are transformed into snakes.
Milton’s rigid either/or dichotomy concerning good-beauty/evil-ugly prevents him from having any sympathy for the devil. Satan, in an especially titanic scene, freely eschews good for ill, forever:
So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my good […]. (IV.108-10)
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my good […]. (IV.108-10)
But as a character remarked in the television show Earth: Final Conflict, “If the devil can’t be redeemed, we are none of us sure of our own salvation.” Although Satan’s damnation is acceptable to religious doctrine, it is troubling to a humanist viewpoint. Is it possible for him to be redeemed? If he would be redeemed, would that involve an unacceptable acceptance of evil or forgiveness of his crimes?
The framework of Tiantai Buddhism, which Brook Ziporyn outlines in his book Evil and/or/as the Good, would suggest that the answer to such questions is not necessarily “yes.” In Tiantai we may find a fruitful alternative to a rigid either/or worldview.
The most radical iteration of Tiantai thought was made in 1016 by the monk Zhili Siming when he wrote that “Other than the devil there is no Buddha, and other than the Buddha there is no devil” (13). Tiantai thought is extremely complicated, particularly in its conception of causes and effects and the nature of good and evil themselves. “The overcoming of evil is also included in the essence of evil, and this is precisely what makes it good” (242), Ziporyn writes. While this may seem strange, after a little thought it is easy to see that in the Buddhist worldview this must necessarily be so, since it is the very evil of the world which gives rise to the Buddha’s good. In this we see the juxtaposition of an evil cause and a good effect, which in Tiantai is known as ‘antagonistic seeds’ (243). While the notion of good coming out of ill causes serious problems for some Western thinkers,[1] Tiantai simply accepts the notion as self-evident.
Furthermore, while in Tiantai good and evil can be dualistically opposed to one another, Ziporyn explains that they ultimately “go together, as provisional designations made in relative distinction to one another and vanish together when provisional designations are transcended—just as when the fire destroys the bamboo, both vanish” (244). It now becomes clearer what Zhili meant when he continued in the same tract that since “the original natures of the two are merged together from the beginning, how could their manifestations be any different from one another” (13)?
In Ziporyn’s phrase, then, “the realization of good in some sense implies the ultimate fulfillment and realization of the evil” (245). Moreover (contrary to Western popular notions of the Buddha as some sort of saint), to attain Buddha-hood it is necessary not to eschew evils, including one’s own, but to experience, to practice and to contemplate them in order that they may be transcended. According to Zhiyi Tiantai, another monk, “If evils were nothing but evil from beginning to end, these [vice-ridden] people would eternally remain unenlightened. But since the Way resides within evil, they were able to become sages even while practicing all these defects. Thus we know that evil does not obstruct the Way, and moreover, that the Way does not obstruct evil” (246). As Ziporyn reiterates, “The only way this ineradicable evil and suffering [in the world] can be handled is by involving oneself in it, accepting it and adding to it some additional things that may recontextualize and transform it. Someone somewhere is always doing evil and suffering, and that someone must always be you” (275).
Still, in the fullest expression of Tiantai thought evil should be overcome (since it is a bias, like good, that must be transcended to further progress along the Way), and the method in which evil is to be over come is to realize it fully. Moreover, this realization, of evil or whatever, is an ontological good in-and-of-itself. Once evil has been realized fully, has reached its ontological telos as it were in becoming as-evil-as-possible, it can be overcome. But once evil is overcome, the status quo is not ‘good;’ rather it is a state which is good in that it lacks present evil, but not good in the sense of never-having-been-evil. It is something in between, and this something is inherently more valuable than just-good or just-evil, since these states are involved fundamentally with ignorance, and ignorance hinders one along the Way.
The framework of Tiantai Buddhism, which Brook Ziporyn outlines in his book Evil and/or/as the Good, would suggest that the answer to such questions is not necessarily “yes.” In Tiantai we may find a fruitful alternative to a rigid either/or worldview.
The most radical iteration of Tiantai thought was made in 1016 by the monk Zhili Siming when he wrote that “Other than the devil there is no Buddha, and other than the Buddha there is no devil” (13). Tiantai thought is extremely complicated, particularly in its conception of causes and effects and the nature of good and evil themselves. “The overcoming of evil is also included in the essence of evil, and this is precisely what makes it good” (242), Ziporyn writes. While this may seem strange, after a little thought it is easy to see that in the Buddhist worldview this must necessarily be so, since it is the very evil of the world which gives rise to the Buddha’s good. In this we see the juxtaposition of an evil cause and a good effect, which in Tiantai is known as ‘antagonistic seeds’ (243). While the notion of good coming out of ill causes serious problems for some Western thinkers,[1] Tiantai simply accepts the notion as self-evident.
Furthermore, while in Tiantai good and evil can be dualistically opposed to one another, Ziporyn explains that they ultimately “go together, as provisional designations made in relative distinction to one another and vanish together when provisional designations are transcended—just as when the fire destroys the bamboo, both vanish” (244). It now becomes clearer what Zhili meant when he continued in the same tract that since “the original natures of the two are merged together from the beginning, how could their manifestations be any different from one another” (13)?
In Ziporyn’s phrase, then, “the realization of good in some sense implies the ultimate fulfillment and realization of the evil” (245). Moreover (contrary to Western popular notions of the Buddha as some sort of saint), to attain Buddha-hood it is necessary not to eschew evils, including one’s own, but to experience, to practice and to contemplate them in order that they may be transcended. According to Zhiyi Tiantai, another monk, “If evils were nothing but evil from beginning to end, these [vice-ridden] people would eternally remain unenlightened. But since the Way resides within evil, they were able to become sages even while practicing all these defects. Thus we know that evil does not obstruct the Way, and moreover, that the Way does not obstruct evil” (246). As Ziporyn reiterates, “The only way this ineradicable evil and suffering [in the world] can be handled is by involving oneself in it, accepting it and adding to it some additional things that may recontextualize and transform it. Someone somewhere is always doing evil and suffering, and that someone must always be you” (275).
Still, in the fullest expression of Tiantai thought evil should be overcome (since it is a bias, like good, that must be transcended to further progress along the Way), and the method in which evil is to be over come is to realize it fully. Moreover, this realization, of evil or whatever, is an ontological good in-and-of-itself. Once evil has been realized fully, has reached its ontological telos as it were in becoming as-evil-as-possible, it can be overcome. But once evil is overcome, the status quo is not ‘good;’ rather it is a state which is good in that it lacks present evil, but not good in the sense of never-having-been-evil. It is something in between, and this something is inherently more valuable than just-good or just-evil, since these states are involved fundamentally with ignorance, and ignorance hinders one along the Way.
What ramifications would this worldview have if it were applied to Western experiences of good and evil? In part it is difficult to know since good and evil have fallen almost out of fashion in our popular culture; only fantasy writers and philosophers dare discuss them with impunity. But the very popularity of recent movie adaptations both of fantasy novels and of comic books suggests that, while it is unfashionable to talk about these concepts, modern Westerners are not so lost to morality that they dislike thinking about them and, especially, seeing good triumph over evil.
Of course, in Tiantai the notion of ‘triumphing’ over evil is fundamentally wrong-headed, as are most of the common fantasy motivations for seeking to do so. But in Tiantai at least we can see that beauty and evil are not antithetical, and from here we may be able to jump to an example which may provide at least partial illustration of Tiantai concepts in action.
In Diane Duane’s Young Wizards novels the evil beauty of the Lone Power presents a powerful challenge to the ‘either/or’ notion of evil. Mightiest of all the Powers, the Lone One created death and entropy, and exiled Itself from Its siblings’ company in the beginning. It is the task of wizards everywhere (and others) to resist It and Its tools, in Life’s name and for Life’s sake. The wizard’s traditional salutation to the Lone One is telling: “Fairest and Fallen, greeting and defiance.”
But the Lone One is not so simple as a mere villain, so much so that Nita Callahan and her sister Dairine, both wizards, are able to feel pity for It. In her first adventure Nita encounters the Lone One, looking very handsome as a red-haired young man in a three-piece suit, and sees that, although It continues to do evil, to speed up the process of entropy in the cosmos, It has long since grown weary of its role. In Tiantai terms, the Lone One has realized Itself fully, becoming as evil-as-possible, but it is prevented from transcending itself by its name in the book that contains the entire cosmos, The Book of Night with Moon. It would transcend Itself if It could, but It cannot. Nita very sensibly rewrites Its name in the Book, and opens the way for the Lone One to change.
While evil is not obviated (the wizards must continue to oppose the Lone One, for time doesn’t flow the same everywhere) and death is not destroyed, Nita’s emendation opens the way for the Lone One to choose to bring Itself back into the fold, as it were, in the person of her younger sister Dairine. Dairine’s first test as a wizard results in the opportunity for the Lone One to repent, and repent It does.
The Lone Power and the entire cosmos has transcended its old paradigm and is moving further along the path, whatever it may be; it is impossible to know save by living life. But, although the power which created entropy and death has been redeemed, its creations have not; although Nita and Dairine have ‘saved the world’ in the most ultimate sense, they are unable to prevent the Lone One from killing their mother. It is in her encounter with that Power while trying to save her mother that Nita understands the Lone One’s terrible beauty:
The light it gave at first seemed little, but swiftly it lit up all that place, and even chased the shadows briefly from the Lone One’s face…a sight that made Nita turn away—for the terror of It, to some extent, she could stand, but the beauty of It, seen together with that ancient deathliness, was difficult to bear. (WD 378)
After her mother’s death Nita realizes that there is a time to put aside death for life, and a time to not do so. She reaches an in-between and beyond state regarding her original views on the nature of existence very closely conforming to the Tiantai concept that good and evil, as facets of experience, have a positive value as forms of experience. In other words, while it was not ‘good’ in the simple sense of the term that Nita’s mother died or that the family suffered their grief for her death, her existence and the pain its end entailed was preferable to her never having existed at all or knowing the joys incumbent upon existence. In understanding and accepting this, Nita is more prepared, not less, to continue taking the fight to her enemy.
In her rejection of the either/or dichotomy, Duane is much more Buddhist than one would think, and her insistence that even pain and error are part of existence, and on balance valuable as such, seems to have more than a little in common with Tiantai Buddhism in particular. While it may be difficult if not impossible to extirpate the dualistically categorized mindset that the West is heir to, we have seen that the adoption of a holistic viewpoint with regard to good and evil, life and death, beauty and ugliness, or almost any familiar dichotomy can yield a profound new method to consider these concepts.[2] We do not have to consign ourselves to the valueless universe which Tiantai superficially seems to posit in order to transcend our categorized ways of thinking and go further along the path towards something beyond and in-between, something closer to enlightenment.
Works Cited
Duane, Diane. Support Your Local Wizard. New York: Guild America Books, 1990.
-----. The Wizard’s Dilemma. San Diego: Harcourt, 2001.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Scott Elledge. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.
Ziporyn, Brook. Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.
Of course, in Tiantai the notion of ‘triumphing’ over evil is fundamentally wrong-headed, as are most of the common fantasy motivations for seeking to do so. But in Tiantai at least we can see that beauty and evil are not antithetical, and from here we may be able to jump to an example which may provide at least partial illustration of Tiantai concepts in action.
In Diane Duane’s Young Wizards novels the evil beauty of the Lone Power presents a powerful challenge to the ‘either/or’ notion of evil. Mightiest of all the Powers, the Lone One created death and entropy, and exiled Itself from Its siblings’ company in the beginning. It is the task of wizards everywhere (and others) to resist It and Its tools, in Life’s name and for Life’s sake. The wizard’s traditional salutation to the Lone One is telling: “Fairest and Fallen, greeting and defiance.”
But the Lone One is not so simple as a mere villain, so much so that Nita Callahan and her sister Dairine, both wizards, are able to feel pity for It. In her first adventure Nita encounters the Lone One, looking very handsome as a red-haired young man in a three-piece suit, and sees that, although It continues to do evil, to speed up the process of entropy in the cosmos, It has long since grown weary of its role. In Tiantai terms, the Lone One has realized Itself fully, becoming as evil-as-possible, but it is prevented from transcending itself by its name in the book that contains the entire cosmos, The Book of Night with Moon. It would transcend Itself if It could, but It cannot. Nita very sensibly rewrites Its name in the Book, and opens the way for the Lone One to change.
While evil is not obviated (the wizards must continue to oppose the Lone One, for time doesn’t flow the same everywhere) and death is not destroyed, Nita’s emendation opens the way for the Lone One to choose to bring Itself back into the fold, as it were, in the person of her younger sister Dairine. Dairine’s first test as a wizard results in the opportunity for the Lone One to repent, and repent It does.
[…] we are going where such matters are transcended…where all his old pains will shift. Not forgotten, but transformed. Life in this universe will never have such a friend. And as for His inventions…look closely at Death, and see what it can become. […]The Lone Power rose up, slowly, like one discovering walking after a life of lameness. And Kit and Nita and Dairine all gazed, and speech left them. Nita’s eyes filled with tears as she wondered how darkness could be so bright. Lightbringer He was, and star of the morning; and like the morning star, He needed the darkness, and shone brighter in it, and made it blessed…. (SLW 470-71)
The Lone Power and the entire cosmos has transcended its old paradigm and is moving further along the path, whatever it may be; it is impossible to know save by living life. But, although the power which created entropy and death has been redeemed, its creations have not; although Nita and Dairine have ‘saved the world’ in the most ultimate sense, they are unable to prevent the Lone One from killing their mother. It is in her encounter with that Power while trying to save her mother that Nita understands the Lone One’s terrible beauty:
The light it gave at first seemed little, but swiftly it lit up all that place, and even chased the shadows briefly from the Lone One’s face…a sight that made Nita turn away—for the terror of It, to some extent, she could stand, but the beauty of It, seen together with that ancient deathliness, was difficult to bear. (WD 378)
After her mother’s death Nita realizes that there is a time to put aside death for life, and a time to not do so. She reaches an in-between and beyond state regarding her original views on the nature of existence very closely conforming to the Tiantai concept that good and evil, as facets of experience, have a positive value as forms of experience. In other words, while it was not ‘good’ in the simple sense of the term that Nita’s mother died or that the family suffered their grief for her death, her existence and the pain its end entailed was preferable to her never having existed at all or knowing the joys incumbent upon existence. In understanding and accepting this, Nita is more prepared, not less, to continue taking the fight to her enemy.
In her rejection of the either/or dichotomy, Duane is much more Buddhist than one would think, and her insistence that even pain and error are part of existence, and on balance valuable as such, seems to have more than a little in common with Tiantai Buddhism in particular. While it may be difficult if not impossible to extirpate the dualistically categorized mindset that the West is heir to, we have seen that the adoption of a holistic viewpoint with regard to good and evil, life and death, beauty and ugliness, or almost any familiar dichotomy can yield a profound new method to consider these concepts.[2] We do not have to consign ourselves to the valueless universe which Tiantai superficially seems to posit in order to transcend our categorized ways of thinking and go further along the path towards something beyond and in-between, something closer to enlightenment.
[1] Particularly our professor, who has argued that since it is almost certain that everyone is descended from at least one murderer, we should all regard the fact of our existence with sadness.
[2] Albus Dumbledore posits such a thought-experiment in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone when he declares that “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
Duane, Diane. Support Your Local Wizard. New York: Guild America Books, 1990.
-----. The Wizard’s Dilemma. San Diego: Harcourt, 2001.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Scott Elledge. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.
Ziporyn, Brook. Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-04 03:07 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-04 03:11 (UTC)Though somehow all the text came out centered? Whatever, I'm not going back into the html to fix it, it took me forever to sort out the cuts.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-04 03:16 (UTC)Have you read aWoM yet?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-04 03:21 (UTC)I was supposed to see Duane at Books of Wonder in NYC two weeks ago, but she had to cancel due to the volcano. I'm waiting to hear when the signing will be rescheduled; I'm pretty sure I won't be able to make it, at which point I will buy the book. (I did spoil myself for the final four paragraphs or so in Borders the other day, I couldn't not. I usually am one of those people who reads the ending first, I admit it.) But yeah, that is one of the things that is fascinating, that Nita so often has such an unequivocal sympathy or empathy or pity for the Lone One.
ETA: If you liked this post, I think you might enjoy this one too, from last year; I was referencing this paper when I wrote it.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-04 07:45 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-04 23:46 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-09 21:22 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-09 21:25 (UTC)