Why Buddha Touched the Earth

A rewrite of the chapter previously titled "Shamans and Priests"

Industrial Strength Shamanism

From the windows of trains speeding through rural Japan, you see that the hillsides are covered with forests. Some scars are visible - areas cut down to the bare ground, or even where part of a hill has been covered in cement to prevent collapse - but it look as if Japan's strict development laws have done much to protect wilderness in such a crowded nation.

When I decided to hike into the woods near the Tekishin Zen center in Kameoka (just outside Kyoto), however, I was in for a shock. I found that what appeared to be forest was straight rows of trees, an artificially replanted area with no undergrowth. When I climbed a hill, instead of soil under my feet the rocky side had been covered in plastic netting to prevent erosion.

In the decades since World War II, Japan has undertaken a tremendous reforestation effort. This is a praise-worthy endeavor, and the rest of the world can learn much from the Japanese example. But the deforestation that makes it necessary is a stark illustration of the toll heedless industrialization can take on the landscape - and on the culture. If this can happen in a place where the forest religions Shinto and Buddhism dominate, in a land where individual rocks and trees are seen as objects of veneration, what of Europe, with its desert-religion Christianity, that directs men to go and subdue nature?

The Industrial Revolution first got underway in England, and so it was England that first experienced the consequences - both positive and negative. It is no coincidence that England played a key role in the history of the modern Pagan movement.

The Revolution was both made possible by, and responsible for, deep changes in English society, changes that displaced millions of people, and made cheap labor available to the new industrialists. It brought into being a whole new chapter in human existence, a change that began about two and a half centuries ago.

We are still living through this change, and - assuming we survive it - it will take centuries more to play out. It is a change whose magnitude can be compared only to the Neolithic revolution, to the dawn of civilization itself, when we settled down from hunting and gathering to live in villages and towns to be farmers. From our perspective in the middle of it, it's hard to see clearly, to name it accurately, but we might call it the change from Man the Farmer to Industrial Man. And just as the establishment of farming communities created a new social structure that called for new religion, so this change will require a new spiritual outlook.

The story of this change begins in Europe, centuries before the start of the Industrial Revolution, with the end of the Middle Ages. To see how significant it was, we need to look not at the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, not at the intellectual life of rulers and artists and philosophers, but at the changes that had the greatest impact on the common people - changes in farming production.

In medieval Europe, the basic unit of society and of economic production was the manor. In this system, peasant farmers worked their own assigned strips of farmland, but they also had access to common areas of pastures and woodland. These common areas were vital to the system, allowing peasants to feed domesticated animals and to gather firewood.

At the close of the Middle Ages, English landlords began a practice of "land enclosure", in which these common areas were privatized. As a result it became difficult or impossible for many tenant farmers (and the village artisans who served them) to make a living. The result was the development of "cottage industry", the beginning of a large number of people being involved in labor other than farming.

During the Eighteenth century, with the beginnings of the industrialization of agriculture, yields rose, fewer farmers were needed, and the process of enclosure accelerated greatly. Millions of people were displaced, and thus a large body of cheap labor was made available for the first industrial mills. [Greer p. 446]

What would the Industrial Revolution have looked like without a large body of people, made desperate by a political process favorable to the greed of landlords, for the industrialists to put to work? Might we have developed a more humane and less exploitative technology right from the start? We can only speculate.

The displaced crowded into cities looking for work, but the cities lacked the infrastructure to handle the influx - no sewers, unpaved streets, crowded and rickety housing. And the work lacked any satisfaction - rather than craftsmen skillfully producing finished goods, or farmers proudly producing food to feed their families and their villages, workers were machine-tenders, engaged in repetitive, mind-numbing tasks, replaceable cogs in the industrial machine.

By 1850, half the population of Britain had moved from farming villages to industrialized cities. [Greer, p454]

This is remarkable because, up until this point, the *entire* *history* *of* *human* *civilization* revolves around agriculture. We settled into permanent settlements that became villages and towns, specifically to work the land. This "Neolithic revolution", when we became farmers, was more than a change in how we produced food. It wrought huge changes in human culture, including religion. 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 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, religion was shamanistic and egalitarian - 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 or became a shaman not by apprenticeship or appointment, but through one's own experience of relationship with the gods or ancestors or spirits of the land. Because they are based on individual experience, while they have mythology, 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. Campbell notes that it's around this time that complex geometric figures - mandalas - make their appearance in artwork, reflective of the geographic order of cultivated fields and of the social order of the village.

Religion became the domain of a designated class of priests, who came to their positions by the selection 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 part of the whole rather than as a fully autonomous being.

As civilization developed, 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.)

The Neolithic social structure, the culture of the farming village, began to break apart with the Industrial Revolution. That cracking has accelerated and spread. Sometime in 2007, it is estimated, the human race has a whole passed the point that England reached around 1850. 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. And so, agricultural religion, meant to tied to farming village together is no longer enough.

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 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 left his palace to enter the forest, 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": an change in environment makes possible a change of mind.

Just so, as British society was radically altered by the changes of the Industrial Revolution, as the mandala began to crack, there were openings for new ideas. Among intellectuals and artists, there were three main threads of thought that emerged in reaction. We have Romanticism, particularly in poetry, looking to the past (in idealized form) for solutions; we have an increase in interest in the occult and in secret societies, trusting in hidden or untapped capabilities of humanity to see us through; and we have an interest in other cultures, particularly in Eastern religion and philosophy and in the societies of the American Indians.

These threads were not isolated from each other, but intertwined to a remarkable degree. Together they pointed at an individual sort of spirituality, following more the way of the shaman than of the priest - a sort of "industrial strength shamanism" that could draw from both the most primal and ancient aspects of human existence, and also from the understanding of the natural world that was the product of the Enlightenment.

In the mid 1800s, Japan was undergoing radical changes of its own. As the United States and other Western powers pried open Japanese society for commercial and geopolitical ends, some Japanese leaders came to believe that Japan must be unified and industrialized if it were not to be overwhelmed - as had already happened to China. They would beat the Western imperialist industrial powers by joining them.

To this end, they sought to restore the Emperor to power, at least as a figurehead. Certain aspects of Shinto, the native pantheism of Japan whose name means "way of the Kami (`gods' or `spirits')", were twisted to turn his role from that of high priest to living god. This aberration would last for several generations, coming to a head seven decades later as the U.S. and Japan struggled for colonial control of the Pacific: the attack on Pearl Harbor, the horrors of the Pacific theater of World War Two, and the first atomic bombings.

Only now is Shinto beginning to recover from this distortion.

Shinto is important to our quest because it is an ancient nature-centered religion that has survived in an industrial culture. It's origins are lost in pre-history, probably dating back to early hunter-gatherer and fishing cultures.

Writing, and thus history, came relatively late to Japan. They were brought to Japan by envoys from China, who also brought Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism; so trying to determine what Shinto looked like before this influence is a tricky business. But for them to have become as well-mixed as they did, there must have been remarkable compatibility right from the start.

Shinto has definitely influenced and been influenced by Buddhism, having (mostly) peacefully co-existed with it in Japan since the 6th century A.D. (Though Zen would come much, much later.) There are often Shinto shrines on the grounds of Buddhist temples, and during the New Year's celebration you can see many people at Buddhist temples carrying _hama-ya_ (sacred arrow) talismans that they just obtained at the local Shinto shrine.

Today there are Shinto shrines in shopping malls and train stations; in the Bentenchoo neighborhood where I lived, I often passed by a small shrine outside of a metal working shop. Industrial-strength, indeed.

While Shinto has its priests, it has also always had a place for the direct, individual spiritual experience of the shamanistic mode. As Grand Master Motohisa Yamakage of the Yamakage sect put it [The Essence of Shito, p.51],

"Shinto, then, has no founder, no doctrine, no commandments, no idols,
and no organization. What it does have are ambiguous characteristics
like sympathy and silent experience. This is the very reason why it
has often been considered a non-religion by Japanese scholars as well
as foreign intellectuals. Japan's unique historical circumstances and
cultural background explain the development of Shinto at the intuitive
rather than overtly intellectually level."

These "ambiguous characteristics" are just what is found in contemplation of the natural world, and are just what is so badly needed today. These internal experiences are hard to express in words but are much more satisfactory to basic human needs than the doctrines of organized religion.

Shinto shrines do not hold regular devotional services. Unlike churches or synagogues or mosques or even Buddhist temples, they are not built around any sort of meeting hall. While people congregate for festivals (usually of agricultural origin) and special celebrations, most of the time adherents visit to pray or perform rituals individually. There's no Shinto equivalent of a Catholic mass.

I had the unique opportunity to observe a Shinto priest in Nara teaching a group of acolytes - the instruction was all about the minutia of ritual, and not at all (so far as I could tell from my limited understanding) about belief or catechism.

If you ask several Shintoists about their beliefs you will get widely varying answers; in this it has much in common with the contemporary Pagan movement. Dr. Jean Herbert of the University of Geneva was one of the few Westerns to make a deep study of Shinto: he noted "I met over one thousand Shinto priests and Shintoists, and I never heard the same words from each of them. In Shinto, people don't talk in the same pattern. They neither need nor are obligated to talk in the same fashion." [The Essence of Shino, p.40]

Yet - again, in a manner similar to Paganism, "...when I linked everybody's sayings together, I can see one philosophy and one set of philosophical principles emerging. We cannot say, then, that Shinto is underdeveloped."

Its development, though, is not in the realm of doctrine but in that of deep psychology, in matters of the spirit - in the development of a powerful and beneficial relationship for the individual with his or her self, and with the Universe.