The Blackberry Walk

Apologies for the rather lengthy hiatus, I've been in Japan on an excellent holiday. Just last week I was in the land of The Rising Sun, the Mecca of all anime fans, on my very own Hajj, and found myself walking around Osaka aquarium. Of all the things I saw on my trip, the aquarium was the one that was the greatest pleasant surprise. You see, I'm not typically a fan of aquariums (Aquaria?), in part because my birth-given soft spot for animals is unusually callous, and in part because I find them to be for the most part unimpressive. I'm sure the scale and the complexities of running such a large facilities are immense, and that managing the temperatures and environments for each tank is no small feat of study and experience; but I just don't usually get much out of them. Unlike any aquariums I've been to before, however, Osaka aquarium appeared to be curated. Like a museum, it was laid out to have a message. The message of a UK aquarium, in all our naval-gazing, can only muster a megaphone-ringing message of environmentalist propaganda, without any subtlety nor finesse. The Japanese have, thankfully, not forgotten that these finer exhibitions for popular consumption can have a nuanced and compelling message, and can make you feel something (Ken Clarke's Civilisation is a good example of a well-curated British work from the past with the masses in mind). At first I thought the exhibit was inspiring certain thoughts within me on accident; then, once I had reached the end of the exhibition, there was a short haiku, reading back to me my thoughts. Albeit, reading them back to me in a Buddhist framework, as one would expect, rather than in a Christian framework. In this article, I'll give voice to some of the thoughts the aquarium inspired in me, and I'll try to tease apart this at first small, yet in time seismic divide between the two doctrines. To summarise my thoughts on the aquarium as succinctly as possible, I'll transcribe a short poem I wrote whilst I was there:

Vanity of vanities, All is vanity. Do the fishes understand, As they swim around the aquarium, That they are aimless - That there is nowhere for them to go? That I do not know. For I too often swim Around like one of these fishes; Listening to my base instincts, My higher instincts, And my demons. But man can be greater, Higher, more noble, than a fish. For man was created in God's image, And can become like Him. That is man's greatest treasure.

Going around the main exhibit of Osaka aquarium, you circle around the main tank, descending with each rotation, much like a helter skelter. The main exhibit is a great cylinder, a massive enclosure, housing fishes small, large, and their famed whale sharks. How intelligent these sharks are, I know not, but they circle and circle around the tank endlessly. Do they realise they circle so? Do they remember where they last were? Do they mind? My aim is not to evoke pity, merely a sense that there is a deep aimlessness to their actions. Even if they were in the sea, what else would the whale shark do? Swim, eat, sleep, reproduce - all to what end. Is the whale shark then in captivity not only in the aquarium, but in the wild also? The whale shark must have instincts like us - in that sense we are both animals - but does the whale shark realise the futility of yielding to one's instincts? Probably not - in that sense man is different to most animals. This self-reflection of never finding closure and never finding contentment in our instincts, is arguably the most important of human discoveries. In a sense, we are nought but animals seeking animal pleasures without it. "All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full", as the Book of Ecclesiastes writes. Nature in of itself can never bring contentment. Just as the instincts of the whale shark lead him in circles, so too do my instincts lead me running around chasing after the same passions of the flesh, so too the water cycles from the mountains to the sea only to evaporate, condense and precipitate upon the mountain once more. And so too are the seasons. Winter becomes Spring, becomes Summer, becomes Autumn, and becomes Winter once more, ad nauseum, forever and ever, without completion. And I believe it to be a good way of describing the natural world: the natural world is the Realm of Seasons. It is where we are without fulfilment, for no success or change will ever bring everlasting happiness - a 'happily ever after' - however much we idolise it so. And idolatry it is, to worship natural things. In Japan we passed many sacred rocks and sacred trees to be worshipped, and each shrine is the residence of a kami where the kami are fed, as if the god were tamed within its walls. Across the ancient near-East and Mediterranean you see great pillared buildings to house idols where gods have been sequestered and tamed also. These forms of idolatry are fundamentally materialistic, and don't seek out a higher transcendence. The idols worshipped are in a sense weaker than men; 'they have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see', and yet are relied upon for good harvests, success in war, and with love. But it is perfectly natural to worship idols. It is a practice common from the Aztecs to the Arabs to the Ainu, and is one of the great passions of the flesh. We fool ourselves into thinking the passions are all lower, like gluttony and sexual immorality, but many of the passions are seemingly more complex and higher, like idol worship and, most centrally, pride. All of these passions of the flesh exist within the Realm of Seasons - within the natural world - and send us round and round like the whale shark from earlier. Driven by this life-instinct, by this Freudian eros, what will set us free from this endless gyre of mere Darwinian life? To my knowledge, there are only two creeds which stare into this thanatotic abyss: the Buddhist creed, and the Christian creed. Every creed can be best understood by its most extreme, yet acceptable, end: through their monks. And perhaps to the chagrin of some regular readers, I will be recycling a favourite Chesterton quote to illustrate this.

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.

Both the Christian and the Buddhist reject the Realm of Seasons, albeit in the very different ways. The Buddhist, as Chesterton describes, closes his eyes and looks inwards, attempting to overcome every passion of the flesh through meditation and dissociating himself from that sense of the passion. The Buddhist will attempt to never let a passion control him - but that does not mean he can be without passions. The Buddha found the middle way between hedonism and asceticism, which was to detach and tap out from the dichotomy all together, and not be fooled by the illusion, the maya of pleasure. In essence, it is to not let the passion trick you into 'happily ever after' thinking. The Christian, conversely, overcomes the Realm of Seasons not through cultivating personal strength - although one will attain personal strength as a result - but through faith in God to guide and in a sense slowly take over the individual. God's plan for man through the Resurrection, as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15, is for man's soulish bodies, which are contaminated with passions of the flesh, to be replaced with spiritualish bodies which are not. And that process begins, albeit slowly and never to completion, in this life by following God's law, slowly unshackling ourselves from servitude to sin through His help. Here, through Hope (faith in the Resurrection) we lose any need for passions to give us a 'happily ever after', for all fulfilment will be in the Resurrection; therefore, if we are patient (and pass the marshmallow test) no pleasure in this life can tempt us. Both of these creeds reject the Realm of Seasons because they reject that man is made for this world. For Buddhists, existence as a human is in of itself suffering, and something for man to escape - being placed in this world to the Buddhist is a kind of curse; whilst for the Christian, man was made for this world, but through the fall, man is now at odds with it. For the Christian, man was made for the world which is to come after the Resurrection. If man were purely of this world, as many a Darwinist today would argue, we wouldn't feel so separate and at odds with it. For whatever reason, 'the ear is never filled by hearing', and there is a great dissatisfaction in our hearts. The whale shark in the large fish bowl never completes his journey, but neither does his cousin in the Pacific. Only through the Hope in our creeds can we find that final completion, that telos, that our hearts yearn for. For we weren't given this instinct for no reason: every instinct will have its total fulfilment.