Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577319221
Publisher: New World Library

There was a young man who said, “Damn!

For it certainly seems that I am

A creature that moves

In determinate grooves.

I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram!”

So that idea of the iron rails, along which the course of life goes, is absent in the East. And that accounts for a certain humanism that is very present in these cultures. The people in the Far East, and particularly in China and Japan, never feel guilty. They may feel ashamed because they have transgressed social requirements, but they do not have the sense of guilt that we generally equate with sinfulness. They don’t feel, as with the idea of original sin, that you are guilty because you owe your existence to the Lord God — or perhaps you were a mistake anyway! They don’t feel that. They have social shame, but not metaphysical guilt, and that leads to a great relaxation. You can feel it, if you’re sensitive, just walking around the streets. You realize that these people have not been tarred with that terrible monotheistic brush that gives one the sense of guilt.

Instead they work on the supposition that human nature, like all nature, although it consists of the passions as much as the virtues, is essentially good. In Chinese the word un means human-heartedness, or humanness, but not in the sense of being humane out of a kind of necessity, but of being human. So when I say, “Oh, he’s a great human being,” I mean he’s the kind of person who’s not a stuffed shirt, who is able to come off it, who can talk with me as a person, and who recognizes that he is a rascal, too. And so when a man, for example, affectionately calls a friend “you old bastard,” this is a term of endearment, because he knows that “the old bastard” shares with him what I call the “element of irreducible rascality” that we all have.

So then, if a person has this attitude, he is never going to be an overbearing goody-goody. Confucius said, “Goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue.” Because the philosophy of the goody-goody is, “If I am right, then you are wrong, and we will get into a fight. What I am is a crusader against the wrong, and I’m going to obliterate you, or I’m going to demand your unconditional surrender.” But if I say, “No, I’m not right, and you’re not wrong, but I happen to want to win. You know, you’ve got the most beautiful temples and I’m going to fight you for them.” But if I had done that, I would be very careful not to destroy the temples.

However in modern warfare we don’t care. The only people who are safe are in the air force, because they are way up there. The women and children will be gone, because they can be frizzled with a Hiroshima bomb. But we in the plane will be safe. Now this is inhuman because we are fighting for idealogy instead of for practical things like food, and for possessions, and for greed.

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