You make one promise to create a series on the Monkey King and then disappear for the better part of a month. What gives?
I should have known better. Journeys rarely go according to plan. While I have no worthy excuses to offer, what I can say is that the book is proceeding though the draft is extremely rough. At least, unlike the monks of Journey to the West, I’m not 10 years late, right? (probably shouldn’t tempt the metaphysical monsters, knowing my luck it might just happen).
Anyway, my hiatus has afforded me time to retool this newsletter. Instead of weekly thousand-word posts, I’m going to offer up excerpts from my writings elsewhere. Some of it will come from my morning meditations, others from writings I’ve posted elsewhere which I hope to be useful or at least interesting to you. You might still get some long-form writings here and there, but I aim to put that energy and effort into the book. The good news is that with the pressure off to publish full-on articles every week, the quality of each piece should improve.
While I don’t have a brand new 4-parter on the Monkey King ready (the chapters of my book are just too rough to publish), I did manage to find some writings of interest for those that will hopefully scratch your monkey itch":
Why the Monkey King Matters
Besides inspiring countless videogames, movies, anime (of which Dragon Ball is but one), even beyond the widespread popularity and continual resonance of the Monkey King with children of all ages, what makes the character so important to us today lies in what he represents.
While it’s doubtful whether a magical monkey was ever really born from a boulder to cause havoc all over the Aolai country of mystical China, the monkey mind is a real and oft-mentioned concept in Buddhism and meditative practices. It describes that impulsive and strong-willed part of all of us that can be very powerful and accomplish great things–like finding a home for our tribes or mastering skills that others think are magic. But it can also cause a lot of trouble if not harnessed correctly–as we shall see in the book’s later chapters.
As James and I continue our Journey to the West, I am continually struck by the similarities between the chaos caused by the Monkey King’s near-limitless ambition and the effects our collective desires to do the impossible have wrought on the real world.
What you just read was written over two years ago, when James Young and I first started our podcast on Journey to the West. You can catch the rest of the piece, and items of interest pertaining to the first 15 chapters here: JourneyToTheWestCast.com
Verbal Painting Inspired by Chapter 50 of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching)
As part of Scott Park Phillips’ new course, I’ve begun meditating on the Daodejing. I used to paint, so it isn’t totally surprising that what sprang to mind while contemplating Chapter 50, the famous passage on the terrain of death, which divides the world into three kinds of people, would have made for a pretty good painting. Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to actually paint this image with inks and pigments, so I painted it with words. It’s a little cringy, but we have to start somewhere:
We see a great peach rising into the air, below it is roots and rot.
Wispy clouds and happy trees at the top.
The land of immortals, nurturing life in Chinese gardens
Sipping tea and practicing their arts.
Long white beards, neatly-tied grey heads,
Smiling old codgers, kindly old ladies, and rosy-cheeked toddlers.
Chatting and gently laughing.As we move along this peach planet
The laughter grows harsher, more sarcastic.
The people gradually less well-kept, twitchy
Their skin less healthy, either the burnt brown of too much sun
Or the pallid hues of not enough
They take potions and pills, one pulls from a bottle with a skull on it
Then we pull back to see that the garden has become a city
Angular structures sticking out of the pink, orange flesh of this fruit.
And that city is grey, then black and brown.
Now we cross the side of this peach, so that the buildings are parallel with the horizon
We see people clinging desperately to its side, working hard to pull themselves back up and failing,
Falling.Onto the bottom half of this rotten peach planet.
Into the mass of animals and skeletons and corpses in states of decomposing,
bitterly complaining old people and youths with skulls on their jackets and tattoos
Smoking cigarettes and puffing from ventilators,
Flesh consumed by larvae and worms.
Shaking their fists at the immortal clouds above.And then we come to the point of this peach
Puckered like a sphincter
A literal cosmic joke.
For while the dead rage, they will not enter
Though they gaze into its abyss
But we dive in, and are sucked back up through its center
Rapidly rising up past the walls of the peach’s pit
On which are scribed Chapter 50 of the Tao Te Ching.We emerge from the mouth at the peach’s top,
Two rolling hills of grassy fuzz
On which children and codgers glide and dance
With tigers and rhinos.
Stabbing spears and swords
They gracefully glide past,
Unable to sink claw, horn, or blade
Into the shifting, twirling, laughing forms
Of those who truly nurture life
Far from the terrain of death.
The Work Ethic Manifesto
Ironic, I suppose, given that it’s coming from a guy who spent the last month shirking some of his commitments. Although you could say that there are two sources of good advice: those who tell you what to do, and those who can tell you what they should have done. It took me a while to build up a solid work ethic, and it didn’t come all at once.
But one morning after a particularly productive day, I came to realize that I was leaps and bounds beyond where I had once been. So I asked myself why? Productivity is like a muscle, so a huge part of it is working on it every day, but even before hitting the gym or office is the decision to do so. Seeing as how nothing in all the self-help and personal development books and videos I’d consumed could keep me consistent, I wanted to share my own thought process here. Because I happen to write manifestos for a living, that’s the form these insights took. So if nothing else works for you, maybe these words can help:
What is work ethic?
It’s your ethical approach to work,
It is metaphysics.
In the long run, it is the morality of your efforts.
It is the question of how hard you are willing to labor
How smartly you can invest your sweat.It is a question of clarity as well,
And it can only be answered through action.
Every day.
Every hour.
Every bleary-eyed, blind-splitting, dawn you ignored.
And every mind-numbed twilight that would not sleep.Those days when you cheated yourself out of an early start
And those nights when you paid the price.
But also the afternoons you could afford for your partners and your children and the child inside of you
Because your mornings were wisely spent,
So that the end of your days look back on a win.While ethic and work may seem like trivial things,
In sum, ethics become morality and works becomes a purpose.
What starts as what you do in a day,
Quickly becomes more than what you do in all your days
More even than a matter of life or death,
Work ethic is a matter of your soul.
That’s all I have for this week. Hope you like the new format. Feel free to let me know what you think, and if there’s anything you’d like me to look at for the future.
Looking forward to returning to our regular schedule!