Religion: Ex-Commissar v. the Yogis

In his famed 1945 essay, The Yogi and the Commissar, Author Arthur Koestler contrasted their ways of coping with the world—the commissar trying to change his environment, the yogi trying to change himself. Having qualified as an expert on the commissar’s way of doing things (he resigned from the Communist Party in 1938), Hungarian-born Author Koestler, 55, journeyed to India and Japan last year to investigate the yogi’s. He came back with a cargo of provocative conclusions that are causing controversy in Britain around his new book, The Lotus and the Robot, to be published in the U.S. next spring. His main conclusion runs counter to longstanding, if vague, Western intellectual belief in the East’s great spiritual superiority. Says Koestler: “To look at Asia for mystic enlightenment and spiritual guidance has become as much an anachronism as to think of America as the Wild West.”

Giggling & Mysticism. Barrister Christmas Humphreys, longtime head of the British Buddhist Society, counters that Koestler cannot talk about Zen from the outside as if it were a religion or a philosophy, when it is nothing less than enlightenment. Critic Cyril Connolly, while praising the book, suggests that Koestler has the “metaphysical shortcoming” of not being able temperamentally to deny the existence of the physical world. But Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung surprisingly praises Koestler’s “needful act of debunking, for which he deserves our gratitude.”

Author Koestler, born a Jew but now a “seeker after truth” without religious affiliation, reports: “I started my journey in sackcloth and ashes, and came back rather proud of being a European.” He descended from his plane into the fetid air of Bombay—”I had the sensation that a wet, smelly diaper was being wrapped around my head”—and picked his way through a series of visits with what he calls “contemporary saints.” There was white-bearded Vinoba Bhave, marching through India in tennis shoes, seven days a week, year after year, persuading the rich to give their land to the poor. Koestler rather admired him, but doubted his final effectiveness. When the fervid hordes who follow him got out of hand, Koestler observed, Bhave “gave an astonishing display of saintmanship,” zigzagging through the crowd at a trot, pushing and shoving them into awed order.

Mystic Krishna Menon (no kin to India’s Foreign Minister) distressed Koestler with his custom of inviting his followers to reap the spiritual benefits of listening to “the bathroom noises of the Swami’s morning toilet.” Anandamayee Ma was nearly 63, but she looked like “a gypsy beauty in her forties.” She played constantly with her beautiful toes, and disconcerted Koestler by giggling and writhing while she delivered her spiritual wisdom to a rapt audience.

Prodigious Detour. Koestler dwells lovingly on some of the more incongruous (to Westerners) aspects of Yoga, including the “painful [Hindu] obsession with the bowel functions, which permeates religious observances and social custom.” Like many a Westerner before him, he was impressed with such yogi feats as reversing peristalsis to take in fluids through the anus and urethra, but was depressed by the far-out theories that went with them—such as that the sperm (bindu) is stored in the head and should be prevented from leaving the body at all costs. The result, says Koestler, is that a large number of Hindu men “suffer from what one might call spermal anxiety.”

Samadhi, the trancelike bliss that is the yogi’s goal, is for Koestler the closest thing possible to death, and the practice of Yoga is “a systematic conditioning of the body to conniving in its own destruction, at the command of the will, by a series of graduated stages.” Koestler erroneously thinks that the “Christian ascetic mortifies his body to hasten its return to dust.”* This, he holds, at least has the merit of directness over the yogi’s “prodigious detour. He must build up his body into a superefficient, super-sentient instrument of self-annihilation.”

Asleep or Awake. Japan was no wet diaper, but “a scented bath which gives you electric shocks at unexpected moments.” Many of the shocks came from Zen Buddhism, which Koestler feels makes sense in Japan’s rigidly conformist social structure. “Taken at face value and considered in itself,” he writes, “Zen is at best an existentialist hoax, at worst a web of solemn absurdities. But within the frame work of Japanese society, this cult of the absurd, of ritual leg-pulls and nose-tweaks, made beautiful sense. It was, and to a limited extent still is, a form of psychotherapy for a selfconscious, shame-ridden society, a technique of undoing the strings which tied it into knots.”

The object of Zen is satori (enlightenment), and Koestler thinks this is the opposite of Yoga’s aim, samadhi. “Samadhi is the elimination of the conscious self in the deep sleep of Nirvana; satori is the elimination of the conscious self in the wide-awake activities of intuitive living . . . To make the point quite clear: literally, samadhi means ‘deep sleep,’ satori means ‘awakening.’ Mystically, of course, ‘deep sleep’ means entering into Real Life, whereas the Awakened one ‘lives like one already dead.’ But cynically speaking, it is less risky and more pleasant to choose the Zen path—to live in Nirvana rather than be dead in Nirvana.”

Intuition v. Reason. In Japan, Koestler observed, the techniques of Zen “show remarkable psychological insight and produce some equally remarkable results.” But the results are far from remarkable when Zen is exported overseas and seeded among Western intellectuals with an entirely different cultural background. “They tried hard to obey its command: ‘Let your mind go and become like a ball in a mountain stream’; the result was a punctured tennis ball surrounded by garbage, bouncing down the current from a burst water main.”

Arthur Koestler’s own Western approach to things reveals itself in his complaint that Zen has little to offer to “the moral recovery of Japan.” Actually, the concept of morality or immorality, good or evil, does not exist in Zen; enlightenment, rather than making the world a better place to live in, is the goal.

Koestler has no patience with the self-deprecating habit of contrasting a contemplative, spiritual East with a crass, materialistic West. The difference, he says, is not between spirituality and materialism but between Western philosophy—love of wisdom—and Eastern “philousia” (from the Greek word ousia, meaning essential Being), which “prefers intuition to reason, symbols to concepts, self-realization through the annihilation of the ego to self-realization through the unfolding of individuality . . .

“Thus the hubris of rationalism is matched by the hubris of irrationality, and the messianic arrogance of the Christian crusader is matched by the Yogi’s arrogant attitude of detachment towards human suffering. Mankind is facing its most deadly predicament since it climbed down from the trees; but one is reluctantly brought to the conclusion that neither Yoga, Zen, nor any other Asian form of mysticism has any significant advice to offer.”

* Orthodox Christian asceticism is designed to subdue the body rather than hasten its death.