I’ve read the materials the Archbishop pointed me to in response to my criticism of his Op-Ed piece in the NYT, and I think I understand his thinking (better).

In the original transcript of his NYT interview, he says:

The dignity of human life. You never violate it.

Hmmm…sounds good so far. He calls this “foundational,” But then:

Whether it’s the creation of embryos for embryonic stem cell research or abortion, are violations of the dignity of human beings, from our perspective. And you can never justify it.

Suddenly, he’s shrunk his whole emphasis on human life down to those who are less than zero years old. What about people killed in war? Well, it turns out that

You can sometimes justify going to war. You may think that the Iraq war is horrible, but there may be sometimes when you can justify [going to war]. It doesn’t have the same moral weight.

Couldn’t be clearer. The life of the child dying in the Iraqi bombing raids just isn’t worth as much as that of the frozen embryo. Sorry about that! Some things are more foundational than others!

This is a perverse viewpoint not supported by anything in scripture. But the real problems start when the archbishop combines this with his peculiar notion of the separation of church and state—something he called, if you recall, “dangerous” and “dishonest”. It’s not enough just to believe something and conduct your life in accordance with your beliefs, but you must, not should but must, on pain of perdition, also vote for politicians who agree that people that disagree with you should be thrown in jail. God wants that.

Somehow it sounds better when cloaked in soothing words such as

…the importance of our faith having a substantial impact on our public life, whether it be the generosity of our giving or the public policy we embrace in our speaking, or the positions we take in running for office or voting.

I see. Voting for Presidents who will appoint Supreme Court Justices who will throw raped teenagers in jail for getting an abortion is right up there with “generosity of giving”.

Archbishop Chaput has managed to take two radical errors of thought—that some lives are worth more than others, and that separation of church and state should be abolished—and combine them in a particularly pernicious way.

Perhaps he should consider the recent report that abortions, which went down under Clinton, have now gone up under Bush. The reason: the dismal Bush economy. Chaput must be proposing that instead of electing someone who can improve our economy, we should elect someone who will make all the girls get coat-hangar abortions in back alleys.

Apart from the merits of his position, one wonders if His Eminence has given any thought to the long-term effects of his unwise outspokenness, which will be to discredit Catholic thought in the context of the American political process, and to discourage Catholic politicians from running at all.

PS. The Archbishop responded to the comments above with a polite message:

Thank you for your reflections.
+cjc

Humans have an built-in tendency to see “agents” behind phenomena. This is hard-wired evolutionarily into our brains, as a survival mechanism: our cavemen ancestors were able to deal with a predatory beast more effectively by imputing agency to it, assuming it had a “plan”, namely to try and eat them.

It is this same adaptation that then causes man to imagine supernatural agents behind the weather, victories over neighboring tribes, winning the lottery, or human life and death.

Furthermore, the human brain has developed evolutionarily to best remember differences and exceptions and oddities. So oddities such as agent-deities who are humans but can fly, or animals who can talk, are easily retained within our individual and cultural memories.

Such is the theory developed by Scott Atran in In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. I don’t recommend the book for a casual read; it’s pretty heavy going. But Atran has an incredibly detailed knowledge of both human religion and evolution, and the book is filled with great insights, if somewhat turgid in places.

I don’t believe Atran discusses my own theory about belief in the afterlife, which although commonly attributed to the human need to be comforted, is actually related to the rudimentary consciousness found even in animals that lets them imagine the existence of something that has gone out of their sight.

I personally would have preferred if Atran spent a bit more time looking at peak experiences and human growth patterns and telling us about their evolutionary bases.

In any case, this book provides a highly convincing explanation of why humans believe in religion. In his next book perhaps Atran can propose ways to wean our race off this illogical, counterproductive addiction.

I’ve just obtained new Dogen translations, by Eido Shimano Roshi, of the Zen Studies Society in New York, and Charles Vacher. They’ve done Uji, Bussho, Yuibutsu Yobutsu, and Shoji.

These books are beautifully produced. Their version of “Uji” has the entire text hand-written by a 17th century monk on facing pages, and the other volumes have equally beautiful calligraphy throughout.

The translation itself, though, follows the faithful, literal approach, which has the disadvantage of resulting in English which is often unnatural and occasionally incomprehensible.

The New York Times reported that Alex Rodriguez’ “performance coach” is working with Alex to reduce the number of thoughts he has per day. Most people, he says, have 2-3,000 (that works out to about three per minute, in case you were wondering), whereas highly trained professional athletes get rid of negative and useless thoughts, reducing their total daily thought count down to 1,200 or so. And they hold each thought longer.

I’m sure Dogen would agree that this seems very logical so far, but I still have two questions. First, how do the athletes reduce their thought count? And second, exactly how do you define a “thought”?

Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 commission and it was her (I think) who used the phrase “hair on fire” to describe the level of urgency the intelligence community felt during the summer of 2001 about the domestic terrorism threat. “Hair on fire” will undoubtedly become one of the most popular phrases of the year.

A well-known Zen aphorism (coming from where?) also uses this phrase, telling us to “meditate as if your hair was on fire.” When I first heard this, I automatically assumed that it referred, in the same sense that Condi used it, to the level of urgency with which you should practice. But that seems kind of strange—meditating urgently. Eventually I came to the conclusion that “head on fire” in Zen probably means something quite different: namely that you should meditate in such as a way as to make your head feel like it is on fire.

I’ve put up my translation of Dogen’s Uji in MS Word, HTML, and PDF formats. In English it’s called “Some Moments”. This is Dogen’s exploration of what time is.

I’ve spent a great deal of time on this over the last several months, but still don’t feel the level of confidence that I do about my other translations. Something is just not clicking. Basically, this essay is hard. I feel that this translation is somewhat in the nature of a draft. I hope that I can come back to it sometime with a deeper understanding and do a final translation.

At the same time, I think my translation may be more accessible and convey more than previous translations which is why I’m taking the libery of putting it up.

Introduction to Bob’s translations of Dogen.

This note is an introduction to my translations of Dogen. For those who don’t know, Dogen was a medieval Zen teacher who founded the Soto school in Japan, as well as writing prolifically.

The main page is here.

I’ve translated three “fascicles”, as they’re called, of his major work, called “Shobo Genzo”:

1. Genjo Koan (“The Present Issue”), available here in HTML format
2. Bendowa (“Dialog on the Path of Devotion”), available here in PDF format, here in MS Word format, and here in HTML without footnotes
3. Uji (“Some Moments”), available here in MS Word format, here in HTML format without footnotes, and here in PDF

What qualifies me to translate Dogen, even though I have no training in medieval Japanese? First, I am a translator with long years of experience in the fundamentals of translation: understand the original to the maximum extent possible, including what it says between the lines; then take great care in creating the most fluid possible target-language rendering. I know modern Japanese thoroughly, and have studied medieval Japanese. And then there’s the fact that I’m willing to spend excessive amounts of time working on a single paragraph or sentence, if necessary.

So what’s the problem with all the existing translations of Dogen into English, of which there are many, often up to half a dozen for the more popular fascicles, often authored by revered Zen masters and learned scholars? Well, when I started reading Dogen, in English translation, I found I simply could not figure out what they were trying to say. They just didn’t make any sense. It seemed to me less like a problem with my ability to understand what Dogen was saying, and more the fact that the English words just didn’t really seem to mean anything sitting there on the page, disconnected.

So I started translating Dogen by accident, when in my frustration I got my hands on a book containing the original text as well as a modern Japanese translation. Then I started playing around—what would be the best way to translate that? Before I knew it, I was on my way to translating “Genjo Koan”.

Translating is an art, and a balancing act; there is no single “correct” or even “best” translation. The majority of existing translations have leaned heavily towards the “faithful” or “literal”. For example, one translation advertises itself as “adher[ing] closely to the original Japanese”. The same author (Nishijima) says “”I like the translation from which Master Dogen’s Japanese can be guessed”. But wait a minute—a native English speaker is never going to be able to guess Master Dogen’s Japanese, right? In theory, the “literal” approach reduces the risk that the translation will end up being something that the translator just invented, and lets the reader connect the dots. In practice, it’s often just an abdication of responsibility to figure out what the original text really means, or to work with the English until it reaches a point of actual readability, or, in most cases, both. The result is often mechanical and fragmented.

Someday, Dogen should be translated into colloquial English. My approach, however, is to maintain a relatively formal tone, retain most (not all) of the Buddhist imagery and terminology, but put great emphasis on clean, flowing English.

I hope you enjoy my translations. Please show your support for them by donating.

Ladder Days is a movie about Mormonism and being gay, set right here in our very own West Hollywood. It’s a little predictable and formulaic, but also funny and touching. I especially liked the part where the gay missionary’s own dad is the church official in charge of the church “court” where the missionary is booted out of the church.

Definitely worth watching. I also loved the soundtrack. Steve Sandvoss is especially good as the missionary, the New York Times praising him as “…giv[ing] Aaron a dignity, sweetness and humor that do a great deal to redeem the clichés built into his character.” IMDB gave this movie a rating of 6.8, but that was biased downward by a lot of “1” (lowest) ratings, presumably by Mormon homophobes, who are predictably bashing the movie without having even seen it.

I just learned about a Christian practice called lectio divina, and immediately sensed that there is much in common here with Zen koans. Lectio Divina is a practice of slow scripture reading, followed by meditation and prayer. I was especially struck by the comment on one web page on the topic that “our own lives are also fit matter for lectio divina.”

Drs. Hwang and Moon, the Korean researchers who recently succeeded in cloning human stemcells, said that their success was due partly to the “Zen-like” ability Easterners have to sit perfectly still for 10 hours in one spot while manipulating the eggs, almost like a meditation.

Of course, Dr. Hwang also attributed part of their success to the fact that Korean fingers are so dextrous due to use of slippery metal chopsticks since childhood.