Triple Quote: On Being Who You Are

On the Necessity of Becoming Aware of the Personas that Society Imposes Upon You…and Letting Go of Them.

This is a longer version of the triple-quote format we have often used here. It is, like a previous entry, a mix of quotes from separate lectures by Alan Watts. The only original commentary is the synthesis offered at the bottom, in italics.

So then, in the normal life of India — which is not a hunting culture, but a settled culture — there are priests, but there is something beyond the priest. That is to say, when a man or woman has fulfilled his or her life in the world of society, it’s the normal thing to do for a person to quit their status in society and become what’s called a “forest-dweller.” That is almost, you see, to go back to the hunting culture. They divide people into two classes: gṛhastha, which means “householder,” and vānaprastha, which means “forest-dweller.” And the older people all hand over their occupations and positions to their children, and go into the state of vānaprastha or become a śramaṇa, and go outside the stockade — I’m speaking metaphorically; they sometimes do actually, they sometimes don’t — and become a nobody. They give up their name — that is to say, the label which designates who they are in terms of caste or class. They become unclassified people. That’s why, strictly speaking, you see, Hinduism and Buddhism are not religions. You can classify the religions. You can say: what’s your denomination? Baptist? Methodist? Catholic? Presbyterian? Episcopalian? Quaker? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you see? But strictly speaking, a vānaprastha, a śramaṇa, has no label. He is an unlabeled bottle.

• Alan Watts, Thusness, Extended Seminars Collection.

…There are two great currents which have thoroughly molded the culture of China, and they are Taoism and Confucianism. And they play a curious game with each other.

Confucianism is not a religion. It’s a social ritual and a way of ordering society, so much so that the first great Catholic missionary to China — Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit — found it perfectly consistent with his Catholicism to participate in Confucian rituals. Because he saw them as something of a kind of national character as one might pay respect to the flag, or something of that kind, in our own times.

So Confucianism is an order of society and involves ideas of human relations including the government and the family based on the principle of what is called in Chinese rén (仁) …this word means “human-heartedness.” That’s the nearest we can get to it in English. And it was regarded by Confucius as the highest of all virtues, but one that he always refused to define. It’s above righteousness and justice and propriety and other great Confucian virtues, and it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good arrangement — including not only our virtuous side, but also our passionate side, also our appetites in our waywardness.

Confucianism has been one of the most successful philosophies in all history for the regulation of governmental and family relationships. But, of course, it is concerned with formality. Confucianism prescribes all kinds of formal relationships: linguistic, ceremonial, musical, in etiquette, in all the spheres of morals, and for this reason has always been critted by the Taoists for being unnatural.

Roughly speaking, you see, the Confucian way of life is for people involved in the world. The Taoist way of life is for people who get disentangled…If you want to go through the regular lifestyle of the United States, you go to high school and college, and then you go into a profession or a business, and you own a standard house and you raise a family and you have a car, or two cars, and do all that jazz. But a lot of people don’t want to live that way. And there are lots of other ways of living besides that. So you could say that those of us who go along with the pattern correspond to the Confucians, and those who are Bohemians or bums or beatniks or whatever, and don’t correspond with the pattern, they are more like the Taoists.

Because the Taoist is really — actually, in Chinese history, Taoism is a way of life for older people. Lao Tzu, the name given to the founder of Taoism, means “the old boy.” And the legend is that when he was born he already had a white beard. So it’s sort of like this: that when you have contributed to society, when you’ve contributed children and brought them up, and you have assumed a certain role in social life, you then say: now it’s time for me to find out what it’s all about. Who am I ultimately behind my outward personality? What is the secret source of things? And the latter half of life is the preeminently excellent time to find this out. It’s something to do when you have finished with the family business.

Of course one can study the Tao when very young. Because it contains all kinds of secrets in it as to the performance of every kind of art or craft or business or any occupation whatsoever. But it does — in China, in a way — it plays that role of a kind of safety valve for the more restricted way of life that Confucianism prescribes.

• Alan Watts, Taoist Way, Philosophies of Asia.

Japanese culture was, as you may have noticed, extraordinarily ritualistic. There is a right way of doing everything: a good form, a proper style. And nowhere is this more apparent than in such practices as the tea ceremony, or arranging flowers, or knowing how to dress, or knowing how to organize a formal dinner. The punctiliousness, the skill of these people in doing these things, is quite remarkable. But in the same measure as they are very skillful at doing this things, they’re very worried about it. The whole question, for example, of bringing presents to somebody else: have they given us more than we’ve given them? Did we remember this occasion? Did we remember that occasion? These weigh very heavily on the Japanese soul. The debt which you owe to your parents, the debt which you owe to your country and to your Emperor: immeasurable, infinite debt — never can be paid. All these weigh very heavily. And therefore, in Japan — until the sort of breakaway of modern youth, with its westernized ideals — this is a very nervous culture, concerned about whether one is playing the ritual correctly. A culture like that needs an outlet, needs a safety valve, needs a way out of this thing. And Zen provides just that.

• Alan Watts, Buddhism as a Dialogue, Japan Tour 1965.

In these three quotes, Watts describes how in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions, there exist strict societal expectations, codes, norms, rituals and rules which seek to impose order on society and on individuals. Individuals conform to, identify with, and become constrained by these roles, rules and expectations, SIn many, if not most people, this creates an intense sense of anxiety, weight, pressure and confinement…even if they don’t realize it at the time.

It is no coincidence then that it was within these cultures that the primary philosophies to address such unease — Ways of Liberation — arose.

But, as Watts notes, it is often only those in the later stages of life who are able to liberate themselves from the opinions, expectations, and demands of others and of society. It is often only once people “leave society” in a sense — either physically, economically, socially, or culturally — that they are able to be who they truly are, whom they wish to be. This can be witnessed in the regrets shared by terminally ill patients who consistently describe caring far too much and spending far too much time on the wrong things, on things that at the end of their lives they deem not to have been as important as they thought they were at the time.

Perhaps we all truly need Tyler Durden’s reminder that, “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.”

So, imagine that you knew today was your last day and ask yourself, how much time are you spending conforming, playing the role set out for you? What are you spending so much time caring about that you shouldn’t be? How much of your life are you spending doing things that won’t actually matter to you in the end?

Have you even thought to ask yourself these questions?

It is a tragedy that many people spend most of their lives confined under this structure, being someone they are not and focused on things they are told to care about, only freeing themselves toward the end of their lives. It is a greater tragedy that some never do so, that some never find themselves at all.

Here’s hoping you might find a way.

-LM