"Preserving the mystery"  (continued)

>
>Fact: communism posed a threat to religious expression
>Fact: religious experience (of some kind)  was very important to Pound
>Conclusion: To the extent that communism and religious experience are
>anti-thetical, Pound was anti-communist.
>

But I asked for any statement by Pound which would indicate that he “gave a
fig” about religious tolerance as a general principle.  His narration of
Chinese history indicates otherwise.

Fact:  Confucian governments very often persecuted religious expression.
Fact:  Pound valued his own personal religious experience and Confucianism
Fact: Pound narrates the destruction of Buddhist temples as positive acts in
the China Cantos, numerous times.
Conclusion:  Those who practiced religions or followed faiths which were
unimportant to Pound could go to blazes.

If Pound objected to Communism on any religious basis, would it not be
because communism was opposed to HIS RELIGION, and NOT because it was
opposed to religion in general?

Pound said he lost interest in Mao as soon as he started “harassing
Confucians.”  Mao’s “harrassment” of Chinese Christians was of no concern
whatsover to Pound; in fact Pound thought for a  while that Mao could be
good for China (in spite of his being a communist), and believed that Mao
might bring “Ling” ---the great Confucian “sensibility”--- back to China.
There was no objection to Mao (or to Lenin for that matter) simply because
they were communists.  They were only objected to when they went against
Confucianism or against fascism.  Pound has a great deal favorable to say
about Lenin prior to World War II.   Lenin and Mao, after all, were “dynamic
individuals”.

>
>Pound's rejection of Buddhism and Taoism has little or nothing to do with
>Chinese politics.

This is an assertion which needs substantiation.  When Confucians take
social action against Buddhists and Taoists, it is hard to deny there is a
substantial political element.  And when Pound narrates these events in the
context of POLITICAL history, it is hard to believe that Pound is
unconcerned with the political implications of Taoism and Buddhism.


>He's thinking of these religions in much more idealized,
>abstract terms.

Would Pound say so?   He was opposed to thinking of such issues in abstract
terms, separated from life, and action in life.  Also, Pound did not
“idealize” Taoism or Buddhism.  He simply smeared them.  If he idealized any
religious outlook, he idealized Confucianism.

>The essence of these religions, as Pound viewed them, is
>that they encourage men to think in terms of the afterlife and to renounce
>worldly things. The encourage men to be as manageable as sheep.

Does your statement imply that Confucianism does NOT encourage men to be as
manageable as sheep?  Confucianism contains the following injuctions:  The
son must give absolute obedience to the father;  The wife must give absolute
obedience to the husband; The younger brother must give absolute obedience
to the older brother; and The subject must give absolute obedience to the
ruler.

Confucianism encourages “sheepish” behavior, unquestioned adherence to
authority, and rigidity of thought, far more than Buddhism and Taoism.
Compare the core texts of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, and you will
see that the Confucian classics were designed and selected and edited with
the subjugation of the masses as one of its prime goals.  The Taoist and
Buddhist classics, on the other hand, are far less orthodox, far less rigid
in their codification, and hardly at all authoritarian in tenor.


>They do not
>produce men like Odysseus.

Who is the Confucian Odysseus I would like to know?

There is a  “Buddhist” Odysseus, a number of them in fact.  We could cite
Sun Wukong, the hero of China’s greatest epic, "Travels to the West," a
Buddhist literary opus.  That work contains many heros of Odyssean stature.
The same could be said of the “Investiture of the Gods,” an anti-Confucian
epic with a Taoist underpinning.

As far as Hinduism is concerned, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are
arguably the greatest epics ever written, and they contain so many Odyssean
type heroes that they could not even be listed in several posts.  We can
cite Rama, Yudhishtira, and Arjuna for starters.  There is nothing
anti-worldly about these works (though they do contain the insight that
material reality is not the sum total of existence, and that one's purview
is narrow if one focus's solely on this life apart from a recogntion of the
Divine which is BOTH immanent and transcendent).

Regards,

Wei



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