Jesus Christ. Messiah. Lisan Al Gaib. Dude.
Raise your hand if you’ve seen Dune 2. Keep your hand up if you’ve read the New Testament. Keep your hand up if you’ve been obsessed with the writings of Leo Tolstoy. If your hand is still up, then you might be Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. If they were still alive today. Tolstoy took a stance of radical love later in his life that influenced all forms of non violent protest that we are familiar with now. Where did this stance come from? The source of eternal life, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Yet he approached the life and teachings of Jesus in an experimental way, by removing the miracles, the divinity and the mysticism from the gospels.
I read A Confession in which Tolstoy admits his total lack of the will to keep living, and the book is framed as a way to make a logical argument against his own suicide because if he can find no reason to live then why should he. The thrust of the novella is beautifully summed up in the parable he details:
There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them.
Leo Tolstoy – A Confession
Facing the inevitability of his own death, the decreasing pleasure he gets from living every day life, and the inability to forget about the futility in which he now exists he comes to the conclusion that not serving any further purpose he may as well die but admits that he is too cowardly to do it. He tries to find a way to overcome the suffering when he remembers that he gets a glimmer of existential joy whenever he considers how he felt when he had faith in God. It was a matter of course, perhaps even the trend for intellectuals in Tolstoy’s time to be atheist, or to at least accept that religion was not a rational endeavor. Yet he makes the claim that he was at his most happiest when he believed and that this faith in itself could be the key to finding his will to live. He tries to return to the Russian orthodox church in earnest only to find himself disheartened and confused by the dogmatic and empty ritualistic acts that plague the sermons. Tolstoy decides that he must cut away the cruft that has accrued over the centuries since the crucifixion and get back to the very soul of Christianity which are the teachings of Jesus Christ. This is where the novella ends, with a promise that after years of research he will come back with his findings. He delivers this in a following book, The Gospel In Brief, which is itself a smaller piece of a larger work in which he reinterprets the four gospels of the New Testament, stripped of all superstition. Admittedly I did not see his existential crisis ending with a renewal in religious faith. I understand where Tolstoy is coming from though because his conceptualized idea of faith is akin to the Christian idea of the spirit. Then as Jesus teaches his disciples, eternal life can only be found through the spirit not through the flesh. In the parlance of the fable, all the honey in the world will not save you from being eaten by the dragon because the mistake is serving the flesh to save the flesh, in essence making yourself more delicious for the dragon to enjoy. One should serve the spirit to save the spirit which would allow Tolstoy to lift himself right out of that well and enter in the kingdom of Heaven, eternal life or as I like to think, existential purpose and fulfillment.
Now that I’ve put that out there I want to state that I myself am not religious, and I don’t believe in any literal sense the scripture writ in the gospels. Jesus never sat down and wrote his thoughts into words, the gospels were written around 60 years after his death. Not only that but the canonical gospels are only a subset of the many that were written which the budding Christian church decided were the most suited to be canon. Even the canonical gospels don’t always line up with each other either. So we must tackle these religious sources for what they are, unverifiable accounts of the life and teachings of a man which may be more literary creation than historical figure. This is of course supreme blasphemy according to the church. The funny thing about heresy is that it only matters to you if you abide by the institution that declares it such. The greatest Christian institution: the Roman Catholic church is a military hierarchical framework originating via the Nicene Creed. It was created as such to protect Christianity as a religion and to standardize the creation of theology, the greatest misstep I think in the history of Christianity as a philosophy. Because in doing this, they wiped out the most anarchic of Jesus lessons: the rejection of dogma in favor of belief. His words are simple, yet the institutions that sprang up in his wake continually complicate them in favor of maintaining the idea of religious divinity and disseminating this power into a purported chain of command that starts with the pope. Yet Jesus was a teacher of the poor, disavowed the rich and powerful and held that men are more important than all religious ceremonies. The catholic church then, and any offshoot from its inception, is itself a heretical organization.
Therefore I can get to the real business of Jesus, which is interpreting his philosophy in a way that applies to humanity not divinity. As I read The Gospel In Brief I could not help but make continuous connections to other great teachers of life. So much so that I thought Lao Tzu and The Buddha must have been pen pals with Jesus while he was in the forest coming up with his ideas. I kid, but Eastern influences must have been present in the time of historical Jesus, there’s very little evidence to suggest there was any direct contact but the similarities in some of the lessons is striking. Firstly there is Jesus’ role as an ascetic. The Jewish fasted before the time of Jesus but the biggest difference is they fasted to commemorate events or to perform a sacrifice as dictated in the Old Testament. Jesus not only willingly gave up food, but went so far as to say food is not necessary:
He who fulfills the will of the father shall always be satisfied and knows neither hunger nor thirst
He upends the paradigm choosing instead to not look at fasting as a sacrificial act but as a display of the will of the spirit, a supreme act of self control. The Buddha also recommended his followers to fast as a way to detach from the need of food and sustenance which would arouse suffering. He practiced extreme fasting for a time before giving it up in favor of the middle way yet he did so with the realization that one does not need as much material food as they think and that one’s power over the mind is one of the greatest tools against suffering. So on one hand we have the food of the spirit (service to the Father, the origin of life) surpassing the need for food of the flesh. On the other hand we have the removal of the attachment to food by our willpower. The two concepts seem inevitably entangled to me. Moreover Jesus taught generally that needs of the flesh chain us to dying by the flesh. His concept of eternal life, as being removed from any sort of fleshly desires could be read as another version of the eightfold path of buddhism which aims to remove all attachments to any concept or materialism that stop us from achieving enlightenment and exiting the cycle of death and rebirth, aka eternal life.
Next we have Jesus’ radically nonviolent stance. As he famously states:
If anyone strikes out your tooth on one side, turn him to the other side. If you are made to do one piece of work, do two. If men wish to take your property, give it to them. If they do not return your money, do not ask for it.
Jesus reinforces his belief that resisting evil is itself a mechanism of evil, hence the only means to do away with evil is to not only to willingly suffer, but to give more than the actor against you would take. This form of “generous” victimhood is a means to highlight that the things that victimize us do so at our own volition. Here we have a smattering of the stoic concept of “Amor Fati”, love thy fate. Jesus encourages his followers to love their fate by multiplying its effects. The buddhist concept of right thought, right conduct, and right effort all apply to this situation, because Buddha also taught the ancient concept of Ahimsa, nonviolence towards all living things. Jesus’ method of multiplying those violent or evil acts against us can be seen as the inversion of the buddhist belief that life is suffering. If you throw yourself on the sword instead of resisting against the sword then no action can be taken against your will and therefore you cannot suffer by the spirit. This also has moral implications because by increasing the acts performed in your detriment, you are increasing the evil done in the short term however there can be no moral victory against a non-violent resistor and in our modern times in particular, in which all actions are surveilled and criticized, the moral victory is the everlasting one.
Lastly Jesus preaches that the kingdom of heaven, contrary to popular culture, is timeless, cannot be seen, and is not physically present anywhere. He says that it exists on earth and can be entered at any time provided you access the origin of all life, the spirit.
Understand that, if man is conceived from heaven, then in him there must be that which is of heaven
Rather the kingdom of heaven is part of us because we are created from it. We lose touch with it and Jesus’ lessons act as the shepherd that reconnects us to our divine origins. This concept is striking in its similarity to the words of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. The tao, for the uninitiated is the eternal and limitless substance from which life springs, and life returns:
The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.
The tao represents the unlimited potential from which humanity is made. In the Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu describes how being more like the tao improves our lives because the closer we are to the origin of life then the closer we become to realizing the perfect life, or perhaps as Jesus would say, the everlasting life. Jesus refers to “the father” as this origin of the spirit. The father is one with the kingdom of heaven and traditionally he has been identified as the Abrahamic God that created the earth, and gave Noah his purpose etc. But what if it wasn’t the same God? What if Jesus never meant that the father was an actual person or deity but a force, origin, or an immutable aspect of human nature like the tao? He certainly alludes to the fact that his father cannot be known, nor can the origins of his own birth be verified because the light that illuminates knowledge cannot itself be illuminated. Similarly Lao Tzu describes the tao:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.Darkness within darkness.
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
The gateway to all understanding.
Here he states that although we can try to describe the tao, give it a shape and a name, we are incapable of ever actually understanding it or knowing it. By naming it we create a lesser version of it in our minds, similar to Plato’s theory of forms, we can only reach approximate knowledge via an imperfect understanding of the infinite tao from which all life springs. Jesus seems to think similarly of his Father:
You have understood that understanding proceeds from the Father into the world and returns from the world to the Father.
Lao Tzu and Jesus reasoned that trying to define something intrinsically unimaginable robs it of its power and purpose. Rather they all preached that keeping this unfathomable barrier in mind while accepting that it is a part of us is instrumental to being at peace with ourselves. The Buddha and Jesus also both believed that maintaining strict beliefs and expectations were fundamentally damaging to our internal lives. Siddhartha famously encountered the four sights which (eventually) awakened him to the four noble truths of suffering. Jesus understood similarly in his meditation out in the wilderness. He states in the gospels that that the temple of God lives in the hearts of men who love each other, taking care to illustrate that no physical sacrifice, place of worship, or ritual can bring you closer to eternal life and speaking harshly to the orthodox who upheld these values for their own sake due to their attachment to scripture. According to the buddhists, once you remove all attachments you will achieve the state of enlightenment which will allow you to exit the cycle of rebirth. Enlightenment, eternal life, entering the kingdom of heaven, returning to the Tao: these all sound like the same concept to me.
So it seems there must have been some dialogue between east and west at the inception of Christianity. But whether these are all teachers that borrowed from each other or whether they all possessed the clarity of mind to arrive to similar conclusions doesn’t matter. Religions have sprung up in the place of teaching to try and control the power that comes with sanctity. Yet holding the words of our teachers as unimpeachably sacred is damaging to the whole endeavor of human progress. Jesus knew this which is why he taught that belief supersedes actions. Correct belief gets at an objective center of morality, but correct actions leaves room for the false teachers to bear ill fruit in the realm of subjectivity. This is the true power of Jesus’ words, because even if you do not believe in the christian church or have ever heard of Jesus, are part of a Satanic cult, or are born on a different planet if you do as he commanded and always, and to the end, love each other then you are a disciple of Christ without ever realizing it. It is this concept which propelled Tolstoy from suicidal ideation to passionate living. The connection to these truths which have been realized over and over throughout history saved him in spite of the obfuscation caused by the religious theology that paradoxically try to protect them.