O-doi

I've just finished reading This Island of Japon by Joao Rodriques c. 1620 account, edited by Michael Cooper, which has some good firsthand descriptions of Kyoto....

Regarding the Odoi embankment that Paul, Gordon and myself visited earlier this year, Rodrigues writes...

"Hideyoshi ordered the construction of broad, high earthworks wiht their moats around the city in the place of walls and had them all planted with large thick bamboo transplanted from different places: they entangled together and thus formed a thick bamboo wall. The earthworks to the north and south are two leagues long and one and half wide."

I like the idea of a bamboo wall composed of different kinds of bamboo. Much more fun than the ludicrous dolphin aquarium that the present city rulers have come up with! Michael Cooper notes that the earthen rampart called O-doi was begun in Jan 1591 and completed five months later. It had a circumference of fourteen miles. My question is about the word O-doi. Presumably the O refers to big.... what on earth is a doi?!

Visit to Shunkoin at Myoshinji

zen with Jeff Shore

Michael Pye on Skilful Means

SKILFUL MEANS IN BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALTY
Michael Pye

AN ORIENTATION FOR A TALK FOR THE KYOTO COSMOS CLUB, January 13th 2008

“Skilful means” is a compacted translation for a small group of expressions used in Mahayana Buddhism. Nowadays the concept is widely referred to in the English-speaking world by the Sanskrit word upāya, which however by itself just has the meaning of “means”. The longer expression “skill in means” translates the Sanskrit upaya-kauśalya. In the Chinese versions of Mahayana sutras however, especially those by Kumarajiva, the concept was conflated and used to refer to “skilfully used devices”. So “skilful means” corresponds to the Japanese Buddhist term hōben (from Chinese fangbian), which is usually explained as kōmyō na shudan (i.e. a skilfully applied means). In English the spellings skilful and skillful are both correct, by the way! My study of this concept which was first published in 1978 used the first spelling, in order to save typewriter strokes and paper.

The basic idea has two aspects. First, the buddhas and bodhisattvas use skilful means in order to express their compassion and lead living beings into the Buddhist path. These means or devices, various forms of teaching and practice, are geared to the karmic situation and the various dispositions of the living beings who are being addressed. What in one respect is inexpressible is set out in a skilfully adapted manner, so that it can be communicated and received. However, second, it is necessary for the living beings not only to benefit from these expressions of Dharma, but also to realize their inadequacy and go beyond them. Failure to do this would mean that one gets stuck, spiritually speaking, in some form of expression which is no longer a help but becomes a hindrance. Thus one of the high virtues (“perfections”) to be practised by a bodhisattva is the ability to assist others skilfully with the necessary means while at the same time being able to dispense with them. (Of course, a buddha can do it without needing to “practise” any more.) In being assisted, the living beings are in turn led into the bodhisattva way and consequently have to get used to giving up all their ladders, rafts and crutches.

This way of thinking finds extended expression in the Lotus Sutra, the Teaching of Vimalakirti and the Perfection of Insight literature. So anyone who has their own English translation/s of any of these texts might care to take them in hand. In the Lotus Sutra, chapters 2 (on “skilful means”) and 3 (the parable of the burning house) are especially relevant, but so too are the parables in later chapters and in particular the chapter on “the length of life of the Tathāgata” (appearing as 15 in Sanskrit and 16 in translations from Chinese, which are more common.) Chapters 2 and 16 are regularly recited in the Nichirenite tradition. In chapter 16 we learn that the Tathāgata (the Buddha) put on an appearance of entering nirvana in order to give living beings the confidence that such a goal might be possible. This relativisation of a central Buddhist concept is matched by the profound deconstruction of traditional terminology found in not a few other places, for example in the very short and widely used Heart Sutra.


The underlying question is: What were/are the Mahāyāna Buddhists doing with their own tradition? First, they were telling us how it is that a Buddha comes to be teaching at all. You may recall that at first his mind “inclined towards little effort”, because what would be the point of trying to explain the inexpressible to the ignorant…? But then God stepped in (Brahma). This is an old story from early Buddhism (the threefold request by Brahma, etc.) but in the Lotus Sutra it is retold (twice) in terms of “skilful means”. So it’s a kind of meditation on why and how a Buddha teaches Dharma (i.e. why there is “Buddhism”). Second, and at the same time, the Mahāyānists were finding a way to unblock hindrances which apparently had arisen in the spiritual path to liberation, in particular by removing the focus on the progress of the individual, which seemed to set up an obstructive differentiation between advanced monks and other living beings. It is often said that a bodhisattva “postpones” his (her) entry into nirvana out of compassion. But this is a distorting simplification. Since all “dharmas” and thus all living beings are “nirvanic” from the beginning, such a motivation would be self-defeating, obstructing a clear perception of the “voidness” of things, i.e. their lack of an ontologically assertable “self”. In this regard, the Mahāyānists were recovering early Buddhist teaching, with revised vocabulary.

In short, the Mahāyāna Buddhists were telling us how to understand Buddhism, and in particular they were dealing with the status of religious concepts and constructs in that religion. Their motivation was however not philosophical, speculative or academic. It was spiritual. It is in this respect that the concept of “skilful means” can be adopted and applied in other traditions also.

It is at this point I leave the “history of religions” or the history of religious ideas, and move into an area of personal interest. The concept of “skilful means” can help us to understand how other traditions work too, that is, how they work spiritually, or how they can work. It can help us to understand that there is always a variety of religious expressions and forms of teaching and practice, while at the same time none of these, not even the most cherished ones, should become obstructions or hindrances. On the contrary, all such forms, e.g. notions of “God”, need to find their due relativity.

This understanding can be applied to Christianity, I believe, and perhaps to other religious traditions as well, in so far as they have a spiritual path or orientation. In the oral presentation I discussed further the transferability of this concept to Christianity, not now as a neutral specialist in the academic study of religions, but in terms of religious orientation. This orientation may be thought of as both Buddhist and Christological. Sometimes discussed in this connection is a short passage in the epistle of Paul to the Philippians, namely 2: 5-8, where we find in a nutshell what has been called a “kenotic christology” (kenotic from kenosis, meaning emptying, because Christ is said to have emptied himself). But there is more to think about… The whole world of religious language is at stake. One might say: “Hold your hats” ... but perhaps it’s all quite obvious and you don’t need to!

© Michael Pye, Kyōto January 2008

New Blog Post from Morris

My New Blog Post
All of the educated and well-informed members of every major religion today know that their own religion is not unique. During the late nineteenth century thinkers like William James and his The Varieties of Religious Experiences, and Rudolf Ottos, Das Heilige or The Holy both demonstrated that experiences of awe, wonder, fear and/or overwhelming ecstasy appear to individuals in every society and they have been traditionally interpreted within the framework of the own religious faith and their own societies own understanding of the natural as well as of the supernatural or transcendent state of the universe. Such pioneering books appeared almost simultaneously with more social scientific and much more universal analyses of the religions of the world like Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary forms of Religious Life. Durkheim gave an exhaustive description of rites of tribes that were both manifestations of the social oneness of the tribe itself and simultaneously very religious. He analyzed the different types of religion from transcendent “mana,” or power, to the “soul” of humans as distinct from their body, to the other “spirits” independent of human beings, to totemism. He saw these as forms of “animism” and traced their origins to the immense “effervescence” brought on by tribal dancing, drumming chanting and the like that created a very different state of consciousness filled with magic. He did not conclude that all these things were in fact authentic manifestations supernatural world. Being a contemporary of Freud, he simply offered monumental description of the universality and the variety of religion in every society. His new opening up of the religious world led soon to masters of comparative religion like Mirea Eliade and his The Sacred and the Profane in 1954 and his Patterns in Comparative Religion in the 1958. These were followed soon by Joseph Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Clifford Geertz and Robert N. Bellah added to all of this monumental new data new data of their own, plus detailed anthropological and sociological theories concerning what both believers and unbelievers, aware of this new history of religion. All religions, both the most primitive and the most advanced, are a combination of two fundamental facts: a creation myth or myth of origin, and a pattern of ethical “do”s and “don’ts. Both of these arise directly out of the culture where the religion itself arises: its history, its language, its basic level of social structure (from hunter-gatherer, to farming, to urban literate, to industrial to informational societies such as ours). The myth of origin always presumes the natural world that all members see and understand—whether it is immensely sophisticated as are today’s religions, or very simple as with the hunter-gather tribes. Each culture in its own way know always the sun rises, the seasons follow each other without fail, spring comes and brings food, men and women come together produce offspring, and the sky with its combinations of planets and constellations are what the people have said they are since that people’s time immemorial. Today’s most sophisticated believers in both science and religion, such as Robert Taylor feel that the immense order, beauty and goodness of what science shows us propels many of us to faith, not necessarily in “God,” the Buddha, Brahman, or Allah, but in a great mysterious Ground of Being, or transcendent grounding and guiding divine element within the very cosmic process itself: the “process theology” of people like Charles Hartshorne and many others
A religious system which catches hold of the faith not only of its own people but soon spreads like wildfire around the planet—as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have done—do not necessarily replace the religions that were there before them. Rather usually they in one degree or another absorb segments of the older ones (as Christianity absorbed segments of Greco-Roman religions) or bind together with them, as Shinto and Buddhism in Japan have formed a religious rope of many strands that include deep elements of Taoism and Confucianism.
Some religions that early on formed close alliances with other systems such as the government and/or the military try to suppress all other religions as heretical, simply false or evil. This is what the Roman Catholic Church began to do in the ninth century, as it slowly formed the “Holy Roman Empire” where local princes governed hand in glove with local bishops and met at the top with a Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope. Islam succeeded in a very different manner but with a similar result: low tolerance for other religions, none at all. Once the pope lost his own civil authority over the papal states in the nineteenth century he tried to make up for his loss of power by declaring himself infallible in terms of faith or morals—this in spite of the fact that the Church had changed radically in both areas: it ceased to allow for the morality of slavery and declared it immoral, and it ceased to deny Galileo’s declaration that our planet revolved around the sun and not the way the Genesis declared the cosmos to be. Only recently has it accepted the fact of human evolution from lower forms of life. But this is not a sign that Christianity is false so much as it is that Christianity, like all other religions evolves.
Jesus can still be believed to be the Son of God in spite of such normal evolution in Christian faith. Only a relatively few Christians today insist that the Bible is literally true; most admit that the creation story is a beautiful myth. Analogous changes have taken place in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam. So why cannot all five of these religions and all the others as well, simply recognize the immense amount of good and truth that they actually teach and practice in common and come together in a union like the Kyoto Cosmos Club.
But people who find this of interest and would like to see how in practice, all religions do rely on faith, and each member of each religion is in fact a member of that particular religion because he or she actually does believe in faith (not because of any purely rational or empirical evidence that his faith is the most worthy of faith). But such a believer, being informed and aware, knows that others’ religious faiths, teach moral principles very similar to that believer’s own, and so can and will lead believers to being better human beings.
But how in fact do people, like members of the Kyoto Cosmos Club, who genuinely do embrace in faith almost every religion on the globe but in fact love to sit down together and eat and drink together while listening to some member present their own belief—which of course he or she is convinced is the nearest to the truth and the best?
The answer to that question will come from the Archive of Kyoto Cosmos Club’s three years and over twenty-five meetings. It is this Archive that we are coming close to finishing and it will be posted here on our blog site. We invite your comments on this effort. Is it stupid? Silly? Impossible? Or a major step towards peace in our ever-shrinking little planet? We will be sending our rough drafts of what we have been able to remember about the contents of each present’s ideas. We ask that these presenters, correct any errors, add any important elements left out, and send it back to us.
Finally—and very importantly—we ask all future presenters to give copies of his or her notes used, when the presentation is actually given, to the President Morris Augustine. He will, aftr writing up a piece for the Archives, sent it to the presenter for any additions or corrections.

Morris's Review of Charles Taylor's Presentation

Professor Charles Taylor has written what is certainly the most important book about religion and spirituality in our world today. His work, A Secular Age, gives a history and a very detailed description of how our own age has become a secular one. It won the world’s most prestigious prize for a work on religion—the Templeton Prize, worth 1.5 million dollars in 2007, and marvelous to say, it also won the 2008 Kyoto prize, worth 0.5 million dollars, which was presented at the Kokusai Kaikan in northern Kyoto on November 10. I attended his lecture the following day, and his Workshop the next day, Nov. 12., and was able to meet him and speak briefly with him during a coffee break. Since we of the Kyoto Cosmos Club have devoted two of our monthly meeting to discussions of A Secular Age I believe that it is worthwhile reporting on his lecture and workshop and my meeting with him.
During our May Kyoto Cosmos Club our member, Gordon Maclaren gave his presentation on the first three Parts of Prof. Taylor’s mammoth book—those three Parts are actually the contents of his 1999 Gifford Lectures. The first point Taylor makes is to define what he means by the word, “secular”. He says it has three meanings: 1) The first is “public spaces . . .allegedly emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality. . . economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational…” However, this in no way presumes that God or religion is not present. In fact it simply means that Church and State, etc. are separated. 2) A second meaning does indeed imply “a falling off of religious belief and practice, of people turning away from God and no longer going to Church.” 3) Taylor himself prefers a third meaning that is closely related to the second, but also connected to the first. “ The change I want to define and trace [in this book] is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God to one in which faith . . . is one human possibility among others.”
Taylor’s genius in these “Parts” of the book is to simply but very carefully and in great detail trace how Europe and American went from almost universal believe in the early Renaissance where every natural event from storms to droughts, to floods, to fertility of both fields and living creatures were direct—almost magical—acts of God, to the rise of science from Galileo to Newton and onwards where slowly these things were seen as natural events, even while belief in God was never questioned. He shows how the Protestant Reformation broke the strangle hold on doctrine and morality held by Pope and allowed religious people to begin to be free to think for themselves. From St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas eight hundred years later, Christians relied on the ancient Greek philosophers from Plato to Aristotle and “baptized” their notion of the immaterial soul as the seat of reason and natural truth. But Part Two shows us how Protestant brought Christian faith and morality into existence as “disciplines”. The “natural law” had been basic to Aquinas, but now people like Locke and Descartes saw it as coming primarily from the human mind—Cogito ergo sum”. It was truly natural and voluntaristic: people had to want to do these things. Divine Providence still oversaw everything and urged Christian behavior but God did these things from far away. The notion of God as winding the natural cosmic clock as a mechanical thing, and men as slowly understanding through science what makes it tic and more and more exactly how it tics.
Part Three, The Great Disembedding, tells the story of how science and philosophy in the seventeen and eighteenth century slowly disembedded the sacred from the cosmos. Democracy beheaded sacred kings, and made the people themselves to be sovereign. At first, as Kant taught, the phenomenal world of mathematics and mechanics, explained things, but Kant was convinced that the divine noumenal was still there behind it all, overseeing it all in a sort of deistic manner. Slowly, however, after the French Revolution threw out the Church and its Cardinals and Bishops as the other half of the divine order of king and Church, a religious vacuum began to grow in Europe. In America it was for religious as well as for political reasons that the U.S. Constitution declared that religion and politics as well as other non-religious cultural systems should be separate. Religion therefore remained a positive element during the ensuing century and a half, but in North American too, religion slowly began to lose out to science as the important mode of understanding the ultimate nature of reality.
I, Morris Augustine, offered a presentation on the next part of the book during our June meeting. Taylor explains that he felt that many important aspects of the “secular age” and how it came to be was not adequately dealt with in his Gifford lectures, so when he decided to publish them he added and additional two more Parts, and they were made up of Chapters 12 through 20, plus an Epilogue. Chapter 12, The Age of Mobilization, deals with the very wide range of changes and developments that occurred after the French and American revolutions. First, he notes how secularism in the third sense of people ceasing to go to Church, even in the “new world” of the Americas. On the other hand he takes note of a secession of “Great Awakenings” that brought back religious fervor, especially in the New World. A third sign of mobility took place in the 1960s. He deals with the phenomena of the hippies, “free speech movements” and the anti-Vietnam movements. Then there was the “death of God” movement; it got its start at the time of Friedrich Nietzsche and then Dostoevesky’s Notes from the Underground in the mid and late nineteenth century. A new wave of the same sentiment and thought took place with the rise of the existentialist movement so that in the twentieth century one saw not only blatantly anti-religion writing of Jean-Paul Sartre, but even Christian theologians who saw the old God of the Old and New Testaments to be more or less dead, but Christianity still vibrant via a large wave of de-mythologization in the light or our new understandings of nature of the cosmos and the evolution of life on our planet. All this was seen as a coming to head of the ideas launched by John Locke and Decartes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of Rousseau’s The Social Contract in the eighteenth century and finally the revolt of Karl Marx against the excesses of labor abuses during the Industrial Revolution, followed by the founding of the anti-religious Communist Party by Lenin and its victory in Russia at the time of the First World War—which party promptly demonstrated that a religionless party would not only not cure the ills of abuse, but foster a whole new set of them, especially under Stalin.
Chapter 13, The Age of Authenticity, deals with the rise of a new wave of literature, typified by Marcel Proust and Rilke, but also with a new understanding of Emile Durkheim’s notion of the anthropology of religion. Clifford Geertz and his friend Robert N. Bellah brought fourth a notion of a neo-Durhheimian motion of religion as a type of symbolic but sui generis truth; this was similar to the notion of Thomas S. Kuhn that even scientific truth literally changes and develops. Kuhn’s notion was developed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chapter 14, Religion Today, dramatizes the difference the above new insights made in modern religion. In both Protestant and Catholic theology the slavery became immoral—even though not apparently accepted in the Scriptures, whereas usury of taking interest on money lending ceased to become sinful and became an essential part of accepted economic systems. Many other rejections, such as the 77% of Catholics who simply rejected Pope Paul VI’s declaration that any form of birth control was immoral. The New Age of Religion has arrived, and included Christians and Buddhists coming to recognize that they were in a sense brothers and sisters.
The last major segment, Part Five, The Conditions of Belief, centers around the notion launched in Chapter 15, The Immanent Frame. Since magic and various kinds of supernatural beings like demons, angels and the like have lost their hold on most educated and informed people Christians of the “Latin West” live, today in the “Immanent Frame” of the world that science has slowly revealed to us. This by no means excludes the existence of God as in some way the creator or the immanent driver of this cosmos, but it has had the effect of leaving most people in Europe and more and more in America no longer feeling that Church attendance is importance, and has left vast numbers if not the majority of people simply without any religious believe at all, or at least with anything more than a vague sense of some indefinable transcendent Ultimate. Taylor explains that he felt that many important aspects of the “secular age” and how it came to be was not adequately dealt with in his Gifford lectures, so when he decided to publish them he added and additional two more Parts, and they were made up of Chapters 12 through 20, plus an Epilogue. Chapter 12, The Age of Mobilization, deals with the very wide range of changes and developments that occurred after the French and American revolutions. First, he notes how secularism in the third sense of people ceasing to go to Church, even in the “new world” of the Americas. On the other hand he takes note of a secession of “Great Awakenings” that brought back religious fervor, especially in the New World. A third sign of mobility took place in the 1960s. He deals with the phenomena of the hippies, “free speech movements” and the anti-Vietnam movements. Then there was the “death of God” movement; it got its start at the time of Friedrich Nietzsche and then Dostoevesky’s Notes from the Underground in the mid and late nineteenth century. A new wave of the same sentiment and thought took place with the rise of the existentialist movement so that in the twentieth century one saw not only blatantly anti-religion writing of Jean-Paul Sartre, but even Christian theologians who saw the old God of the Old and New Testaments to be more or less dead, but Christianity still vibrant via a large wave of de-mythologization in the light or our new understandings of nature of the cosmos and the evolution of life on our planet. All this was seen as a coming to head of the ideas launched by John Locke and Decartes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of Rousseau’s The Social Contract in the eighteenth century and finally the revolt of Karl Marx against the excesses of labor abuses during the Industrial Revolution, followed by the founding of the anti-religious Communist Party by Lenin and its victory in Russia at the time of the First World War—which party promptly demonstrated that a religionless party would not only not cure the ills of abuse, but foster a whole new set of them, especially under Stalin.
Chapter 13, The Age of Authenticity, deals with the rise of a new wave of literature, typified by Marcel Proust and Rilke, but also with a new understanding of Emile Durkheim’s notion of the anthropology of religion. Clifford Geertz and his friend Robert N. Bellah brought fourth a notion of a neo-Durhheimian motion of religion as a type of symbolic but sui generis truth; this was similar to the notion of Thomas S. Kuhn that even scientific truth literally changes and develops. Kuhn’s notion was developed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chapter 14, Religion Today, dramatizes the difference the above new insights made in modern religion. In both Protestant and Catholic theology the slavery became immoral—even though not apparently accepted in the Scriptures, whereas usury of taking interest on money lending ceased to become sinful and became an essential part of accepted economic systems. Many other rejections, such as the 77% of Catholics who simply rejected Pope Paul VI’s declaration that any form of birth control was immoral. The New Age of Religion has arrived, and included Christians and Buddhists coming to recognize that they were in a sense brothers and sisters.
The last major segment, Part Five, The Conditions of Belief, centers around the notion launched in Chapter 15, The Immanent Frame. Since magic and various kinds of supernatural beings like demons, angels and the like have lost their hold on most educated and informed people Christians of the “Latin West” live, today in the “Immanent Frame” of the world that science has slowly revealed to us. This by no means excludes the existence of God as in some way the creator or the immanent driver of this cosmos, but it has had the effect of leaving most people in Europe and more and more in America no longer feeling that Church attendance is importance, and has left vast numbers if not the majority of people simply without any religious believe at all, or at least with anything more than a vague sense of some indefinable transcendent Ultimate.
On November 12 I met Professor Charles Taylor, one of the three winners of Kyoto Prize; I met and spoke with him briefly during an intermission to his Workshop. Taylor had begun his lecture by a brief biography. He had majored in philosophy at McGill University and then went on to the Ph. D. in Philosophical Anthropology on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger were chief influences, but they were always seen in the light of his Catholic faith. The mind-body complex became the center of his interest for a time: was the “soul” really a separate entity from the human brain, as had been presumed since Plato and Aristotle and baptized by the Christian Church? This dilemma was part of his first major book: The Stages of the Self. Soon religion in our secular age became the center of his interest and was the heart of his Gifford Lectures in 1999 and his A Secular Age in 2007.The remainder of his lecture centered on his ideas concerning place of the spiritual in today’s secular world.

The Workshop consisted of a brief introductory talk by Taylor followed by comments on A Secular Age and his comments from a panel of Japanese professors from major universities in Japan. The centers of Taylor’s brief introductory talk was what he called the “Stadial Theory” regarding the development of cultures, and the development of religion in these cultures. It is generally agreed among anthropologists that early humans proceeded from the hunter-gather stage, through the agricultural stage and on though the industrial age and now the information age. Taylor agued against the “subtraction theory: that once one stage has moved into the next it leaves behind the former stage. . He also argued against the “ Linear Theory” whereby the human race goes in a straight line from one of these stages to the next. Hence he argued that religion was by no means dead in the secular age, but that it had developed very new forms of many kinds. Many of his panel of professors took basic issue with his insistence that religion could really have a place in the new “Immanent Frame” of the scientific understanding of our cosmos and of the human brain. Taylor never argued in his responses to each of the panelists. Rather he apologized that his explanations were poor and his writing less than clear and easily misunderstood.

My golden change came to meet him personally during a coffee-break at the Workshop. We talked about his pages in the book that won him both the Templeton Prize and the Kyoto Prize: A Secular Age. Our brief discussion focused on New Age Religion, and what he had written on this subject on pages 495 and 520. This is the last part of Chapter 13, The Age of Authenticity, and Chapter 14, Religion Today. The Age of Authenticity focused on the 1960s with such things as the Free Speech movement, the Sexual Freedom movement, and the Anti-Vietnam War movement that raged not just in Berkeley, CA but all over the U.S. especially on university campuses but in the streets as well--in Germany (the Red Army), in France, in England and in many other countries as well.

But what Taylor notes is that this was a period of a New Age in the Catholic Church and well as many of the Protestant churches but in Buddhism and Hinduism as well. The Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council declared, that every human being and every country should have freedom of religion and freedom of conscience as well. The Council's Declaration on Non-Christian religions declared that all religions must be respected for the vast amount of truth and high moral teachings that each contains. The Protestant World Council of Churches has already declared much the same thing. Major Protestant and Catholic theologians went much further and many began to have close links with various sects of Buddhism and Hinduism and began a series of major encounters together. Professor Taylor agreed that this phenomena too were a part and parcel of New Age Religion.

In the U.S. Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago launched the “Call to Action” movement which continues today. But it has gone far beyond the Bernadin's original vision. It sees birth control not only as not bad but a necessary thing, recognizes the right of homosexual love between consenting individuals, and their marriage. It also has a rather large number of married priests, as well as a small number of woman priests as well. Its annual meeting in Milwaukee draws thousands of Catholics from every State. European Catholicism and Protestantism have similar movements. So Professor Taylor agreed that New Age Religion take many forms. Of course New Age Religion has brought back forms of witchcraft, shamanism, polytheism and many other forms. Basically New Age religion, we agreed, often has "belief but not community" Taylor quotes Robert Bellah as saying that "nothing ever really dies" in the many ages of religious evolution that has always proceeded in a non-linear fashion.

I invite the comments of both members and anyone else. These will be judged as to suitability and decency and published on our blog-page.

Morris Augustine, President

Hello to our new bloggers! Here is how the Kyoto Cosmos Club got started, according to the Archive which I hope to post in its entirety soon. Please let us hear your comments.
An Archive of the Kyoto Cosmos Club’s Meetings

The First Meeting, October, 2005
The Kyoto Cosmos Club was founded in 2005 by a group of teachers, scholars and artists. It happened almost by accident—but turned out to be a very happy one. Some ten scholars, mostly Professors at local universities or doctoral candidates or post-doctoral researchers—philosophers, theologians, physicists and mathematicians or teachers of literature and languages—had been meeting every few weeks to discuss things like the and the nature of our cosmos as the Hubble Telescope was showing it to us; we talked of “matter and energy” and ended up with super-string theory and the like. Ultimately we agreed that our marvelous universe was not just a mystery, but also a “Mystery”. How facts and theories like the above impact our religious faith was also central for us. All of the members of this initial group just happened to be religious, but they were from many different religions and were “religious” in many different modes. We were mostly Buddhists or Christians of one sect or denomination or the other, but some of us seemed to lean towards a more “New Age” take on their own faith in some sort of a transcendent dimension to things.
One Sunday evening in October of 2005 about ten of us met at Morris Augustine’s home in Iwakura—Kyoto’s northernmost suburb, to enjoy a little food and drink, and each other’s company, and to view the DVD, ”Star-Gazing”. This is a marvelous series of the earth-orbiting Hubble telescope’s pictures; they are put together with a detailed explanation of precisely what these magnificent “things” in the sky that we were beholding actually were, or seemed to be. And we were assured that what we were seeing was perhaps less than half of what was there, since Black Holes and Dark Matter seemed to surely be part of the “picture”. We were all clearly “egghead” types, though that included an artist and a poet or two, but we were all left in an almost childlike wonder.
Before we parted we all agreed to meet in a month and discuss a book that someone had brought along: The Universe Story, by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. It had exactly the aroma that suited us: it was both a cosmologist’s story of the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, and also an account of the evolution of life on our little planet. And most fascinating of all for our particular little group, the book presented a picture of the evolution of religion in all of the human societies over more that 5,000 years: all that have left us some record of themselves.
Before the evening was over we had decided we should meet regularly, around once a month, at least during periods when universities were in session in Japan. We would sit down to together for a leisurely meal in friendship and mutual respect of each other’s very different religious beliefs, and invite as many other kinds of believers as would care to join us. Without really realizing it the Kyoto Cosmos Club had been born. Most of us were familiar with notions of religion described in Rudolf Otto’s, The Idea of the Holy and in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. We knew, or were convinced, that in some way or another all religions were born from the same transcendent Source or Ground of being. We also know that both the World Council of Churches and the Catholic Second Vatican Council—to choose only two Christian groups from among the thousands of groups and individuals who have done similar things—have declared that all religions were to be revered and respected as containing much truth in both moral and doctrinal matters.
This brief Archive of the nature and content of our discussions will give the reader a clear idea of the nature of our organization and the dates of meetings and the sources used to ground each meetings presentations and discussions. Some of the dates, however, have proved impossible to verify and so the accounts below may contain some small errors in this regard.
The Second Meeting, November, 2005: Morris Augustine Leads an Introductory Discussion of The Universe Story, and of the Notion of “The Anthropic Principle”
The same came together once again, and a few new ones. We were a very international group: Of the three mathematicians, all doing post-doctoral research at Kyoto University; two were Italian, Davide Guzzetti and Leonardo, and one was Austrian, Andreas Bender. Our Philippina, Nieves Godenez, was in the process of finishing her Ph.D. in International Relations at Kyoto University. Dr. Matheus Roris Cruz, a medical doctor from Brazil, was working on a Ph.D in Gerontology and Kyoto University, Dr. Michael Lyons was a physicist from Scotland and Canada, and Dr. Jonas Chianu from Kenya, was doing research in Agricultural Economics at Kyoto University.
Three officers were elected: Morris Augustine as President, since he held two doctorates particularly suited for the job: one in theology and the other in History and Phenomenology of Religions. Professor William Reis, Professor of Linguistics at Doshisha Women’s University, had managed to practice both Zen Buddhism and his original Quaker and Anglican beliefs simultaneously for some time, just as Augustine had combined his Catholic and Zen practice. Professor Paul Kelly of Kansai University of Foreign Languages was elected Secretary. It was decided that these three men would serve also as the Council of Advisors for our new creation; they would decide on appropriate answers to questions such as qualifications for membership or any disputes that might arise.
During our leisurely meal we talked about the both The Universe Story the “Anthropic Principle” but we felt no need to come to any conclusions about either. The latter, Anthropic Principle—held by many scientists but rejected by many others—holds that if the Big Bang’s explosion had taken even very small fraction of a second longer or shorter than it did, then the necessary carbon and hydrogen would not have been made in the explosion of later stars and so human and other forms of life at least on our planet would have been impossible. For most subscribers to the Anthropic Priniciple this strongly suggests a transcendent guiding “Force” behind the evolution of our cosmos and our own little planet.
Towards the end of our meeting we decided to discuss the problem of whether or not belief in “God,” gods, or the Transcendent that goes by many other names is just a matter of Freudian or Marxian illusion, somehow consciously or unconsciously trigger by the human brain. Or maybe there might be a less incredulous explanation from the point of view of current science of the structure of the brain. Two books, one pro- and one contra-God were suggested for our perusal.