Why Buddha Touched the Earth

Rough draft of an early chapter:

Note: newer version here.

Shamans and Priests

Sometime in 2007, it is estimated, the human race passed an important but little noted milestone. For the first time, more human beings lived in industrialized urban areas than in farming villages. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jan/17/society.pollution] Agriculture is no longer the primary occupation and vocation of the human species.

This is remarkable because the history of human civilization revolves around agriculture. It's how and why we settled into permanent settlements that became villages and towns. And this has had a tremendous impact on religion, from fertility rituals to ancestor worship. (Village elders were the ones who had the knowledge to keep the crops growing; and if the older you got the wiser you were, why should this stop at death?)

But, our recorded history is only a small fraction of our existence as a species. Deep cultural and religious patterns persist from our hunter-gatherer days, before we settled down.

Joseph Campbell noted that religious practices can be broadly categorized into the Paleolithic ("old stone age", hunter-gatherer), individualistic, shamanistic, paths of the forest and wilderness; and the Neolithic ("new stone age", agricultural), group-oriented, priestly, paths of the village. ["The Symbol Without Meaning", collected in The Flight of the Wild Gander]

In primitive hunter-gatherer societies, there was no real specialization. There might be some division of labor by age and gender, but every member was a pretty much a full master of their culture and technology. Most significant to our purpose, anyone could go on a "vision quest", seek to be opened to new states of consciousness. Some might be more talented at it than others, just as some might be better hunters or better warriors, but the basic technique was available to all.

One obtained a vision not by apprenticeship or appointment, but through one's own efforts and sacrifice, one's own experience of relationship with the gods or ancestors or spirits of the land.

Because they are based on individual experience, these shamanic paths don't have much in the way of fixed dogma.

In contrast, as humanity settled into farming villages after the Neolithic revolution, life and society became much more complex. It wasn't possible for one person to know how to make all the tools, and know the methods of planting and harvesting and preparing all the crops, and breeding the animals, and how to build the buildings that defined a town - and also know the skills for fighting the neighboring town who's inhabitants were always trying to raid your towns fields - and know how to organize all the specialists who had all this knowledge and the laborers who did the grunt work. Specialization arose.

Religion became the domain of a designated class of priests, who came to their positions by the choice of other priests, not by their own experience. Ritual evolved from individual vision quests to elaborate group activity, consuming a large part of a society's energy. It became a way of binding the community together, of resolving the individual to his or her existence as a fraction of the whole.

In some cultures the shamanic path of direct mystical experience was heavily suppressed. In others, some space was left available to it, but only within tightly defined social boundaries. For example, for centuries the Catholic Church has carefully confined people who had mystical inclinations to monasteries; the isolation of these institutions is not just to focus the meditations of monks, but to protect ordinary parishioners from the idea that they might directly experience God and put the priests out of work. (This is true also to some degree of convents and nuns, but there are also gender politics at work.)

We previously encountered the question, if "religion" means "to reconnect", just to what are we reconnecting? Here we can see two different answers. In shamanistic cultures, the goal was to reconnect the individual to the "spirit world". In priestly cultures, the goal has mostly been to keep the individual bound to the community.

In these farming societies, people who wanted to experience and investigate spiritual issues firsthand would often have to leave town, head out into the forest or the desert, to get away from the priests and their socially regulated religious experience. As this practice was well developed in classical India, we might refer to this as the "yogic" path: seeking the shaman's direct mystical experience, in the context of (and to some degree, in opposition to) a priestly culture.

It was in keeping with this model that the Buddha headed out to sit under a tree, that Jesus went out into the desert after his baptism by John, that Thoreau went to live in the woods by Walden Pond.

It's not deep wilderness or total isolation that is necessary - Thoreau's cabin was just outside of town, and the Buddha spent time with local children during his stay under the Bo tree. While the presence of "natural" surroundings, of trees and wild animals, is helpful and pleasant, it's not strictly necessary to this part of the quest. What's needed is an environment that separates us from our social imprints. The "nature" that we are really seeking is our own unconditioned natures, apart from the expectations and pressures of our culture.

Taoist sages, for example, would often look for students in traveler's inns, seeking people whose separation from their home village made them open to considering new ideas. It's the same drive that sends so many of us on long journeys to "find ourselves".

But even now, as we enter a whole new phase of human culture, our mainstream religious institutions and practices remain rooted in the Neolithic tradition, in the hierarchical, conformist, dogmatic, priestly path.

And it's left us a mess.