Nidahas

Dur­ing this rainy sea­son I revis­ited two old favourites: Sid­dhartha by Her­men Hesse and Small Gods by Terry Pratch­ett. The two pro­tag­o­nists, Sid­dhartha and Brutha, despite the vast gulf of time and space – inter­gal­lac­tic in this instance – that sep­a­rate them, share a sim­i­lar quest which they per­sue with almost fool­hardy zeal. In their con­fi­dence, courage and mis­takes, I find inspi­ra­tion. Their sto­ries are poetic and soul-stirring in their unique ways.

And then I also encoun­tered the stun­ning bril­liance of Joseph Heller in Catch-22. The story of Yos­sar­ian, the anti­hero of this emo­tional roller­coaster of a novel, reflects the hor­ri­ble strug­gle of a rebel who defies glo­ri­fied social norms and tries to remain sane among mad men. His quest is of a less noble nature. Non­the­less, in its uncom­pro­mis­ing real­ity, no less rel­e­vant to us. Through his sheer human­ity, Yos­sar­ian seems to be closer to us than Sid­dhartha and Brutha.

Sid­dhartha

It’s easy to see the attrac­tion of Sid­dhartha to a Bud­dhist monk. For one thing, he is an admirer of the Bud­dha. But he is no fol­lower of the Bud­dha. A fiercely inde­pen­dent, intel­li­gent and arro­gant young man, Sid­dhartha, unlike the other his­tor­i­cal Sid­dhartha who he meets in Jeta­vana, keeps tak­ing side alleys and wastes many years of his life before reach­ing his goal. In his igno­rance, Sid­dhartha seems to be closer to us than the Buddha.

Even closer to us, per­haps alarm­ingly so, is Govinda, Siddhartha’s child­hood friend. Govinda is Siddhartha’s shadow, devoted to him and always look­ing up to him for guid­ance. Yet, the encounter at Jeta­vana changes every­thing. Govinda’s faith stands in stark con­trast to Siddhartha’s ready scep­ti­cism. The way their lives unfold after sep­a­ra­tion is reveal­ing in the way their dif­fer­ent atti­tudes affect their practice.

With half of a smile, with an unwa­ver­ing open­ness and kind­ness, Gotama looked into the stranger’s eyes and bid him to leave with a hardly notice­able gesture.

“You are wise, oh Samana.”, the ven­er­a­ble one spoke.

“You know how to talk wisely, my friend. Be aware of too much wisdom!”

The Bud­dha turned away, and his glance and half of a smile remained for­ever etched in Siddhartha’s memory.

I have never before seen a per­son glance and smile, sit and walk this way, he thought; truly, I wish to be able to glance and smile, sit and walk this way, too, thus free, thus ven­er­a­ble, thus con­cealed, thus open, thus child-like and mys­te­ri­ous. Truly, only a per­son who has suc­ceeded in reach­ing the inner­most part of his self would glance and walk this way. Well so, I also will seek to reach the inner­most part of my self.

I saw a man, Sid­dhartha thought, a sin­gle man, before whom I would have to lower my glance. I do not want to lower my glance before any other, not before any other. No teach­ings will entice me any more, since this man’s teach­ings have not enticed me.

I am deprived by the Bud­dha, thought Sid­dhartha, I am deprived, and even more he has given to me. He has deprived me of my friend, the one who had believed in me and now believes in him, who had been my shadow and is now Gotama’s shadow. But he has given me Sid­dhartha, myself.

Brutha

Dulan intro­duced me to the Dis­c­world series dur­ing our early Vesess days. Small Gods remain my favourite of the series, closely fol­lowed by Thief of Time, again par­tially because of the Bud­dhist allu­sions, espe­cially in the form of Lu-Tze, the enig­matic his­tory monk. The entire book is a sus­tained unre­lent­ing satire on orga­nized reli­gion. A ‘reli­gious’ man admir­ing this thor­oughly unre­li­gious book says as much about the rad­i­cal nature of early Bud­dhism as it does about Terry Pratchett’s insight­ful creativity.

Bud­dhists don’t pray to a God. At least, not explic­itly. Unfor­tu­nately, though, it hasn’t pre­vented the Bud­dhist teach­ings from being sub­jected to the same inevitable changes that affected the Church of Great God Om.

“Right,” said Om. “Now … lis­ten. Do you know how gods get power?”

“By peo­ple believ­ing in them,” said Brutha. “Mil­lions of peo­ple believe in you.”

Om hes­i­tated.

All right, all right. We are here and it is now. Sooner or later he’ll find out for himself …

“They don’t believe,” said Om.

“But-”

“It’s hap­pened before,” said the tor­toise. “Dozens of times. D’you know Abraxas found the lost city of Ee? Very strange carv­ings, he says. Belief, he says. Belief shifts. Peo­ple start out believ­ing in the god and end up believ­ing in the structure.”

“I don’t under­stand,” said Brutha.

“Let me put it another way,” said the tor­toise. “I am your God, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll obey me.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now take a rock and go and kill Vorbis.”

Brutha didn’t move.

“I’m sure you heard me,” said Om.

“But he’ll … he’s … the Qui­si­tion would-”

“Now you know what I mean,” said the tor­toise. “You’re more afraid of him than you are of me, now. Abraxas says here: ‘Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Cer­e­monies and Build­ings and Priestes and Author­ity, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed.’”

“That can’t be true!”

“I think it is. Abraxas says there’s a kind of shell­fish that lives in the same way. It makes a big­ger and big­ger shell until it can’t move around any more, and so it dies.”

“But … but … that means … the whole church … ”

“Yes.”

Yos­sar­ian

Yossarian’s dilemma is best summed up in these few paragraphs:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which spec­i­fied that a con­cern for one’s safety in the face of dan­gers that were real and imme­di­ate was the process of a ratio­nal mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more mis­sions. Orr would be crazy to fly more mis­sions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yos­sar­ian was moved very deeply by the absolute sim­plic­ity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respect­ful whistle.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

Yos­sar­ian saw it clearly in all its spin­ning rea­son­able­ness. There was an ellip­ti­cal pre­ci­sion about its per­fect pairs and parts that was grace­ful and shock­ing, like good mod­ern art, and at times Yos­sar­ian wasn’t quite sure that he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good mod­ern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby’s eyes. (p. 46)

In his insight­ful analy­sis of Catch-22, Ven. Bod­he­sako wrote:

Indeed, in a world in which “men went mad and were rewarded with medals” — p.16 — who is sane, save he who would escape from that world? This is Yossarian’s dilemma, the “vile, excru­ci­at­ing dilemma of duty and damna­tion” (p.136): he doesn’t want to be in the war. He doesn’t want to die. “He thirsted for life” – p. 331. For Yos­sar­ian the enemy is not the Ger­mans, or at least not only the Ger­mans. “‘The enemy,’ retorted Yos­sar­ian with weighted pre­ci­sion, ‘is any­body who’s going to get you killed …’” And because of this “mor­bid aver­sion to dying” – p. 297 – men shrink from him and regard him as crazy. Clevinger is such a one. “You’re crazy!” Clevinger shrieks at Yos­sar­ian on p. 16; but later (p. 75) we are told that the patri­otic and ide­al­is­tic Clevinger was a dope “who would rather be a corpse than bury one”; and finally (p. 103): “Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his phi­los­o­phy.” And yet, by the very fact of being part of such a world one can­not be com­pletely sane; and to be not com­pletely sane is to be not sane at all. But if one tries to escape is that not then evi­dence of a spark of san­ity? Per­haps so; but the prob­lem is that when we try to escape we dis­cover that we can’t: every effort to free one­self from (in Bud­dhist terms) involve­ment with crav­ing, aver­sion, and delu­sion or (in the novel’s terms) the war – every effort appar­ently brings one back to the same dilemma, and results only in mak­ing the prob­lem more urgent (and per­haps also more evi­dent), as will be rec­og­nized by any­one who has ever tried to extir­pate the root of crav­ing, and failed. Is it not mad­ness, then, to try to escape?

And yet, if to do noth­ing is regarded as less insane, still that too does not lead to dis­en­gage­ment from a mad world. This is the very crux of Yossarian’s dilemma, and ours as well: a dilemma illu­mi­nated in expe­ri­ence by the effort to prac­tice the Buddha’s Teach­ing and in fic­tion by Yossarian’s effort to escape from the war.

There lies the beauty of Catch-22. Yossarian’s story is the story of us.