Post #80: The Art of Living

29 Nov. 2023

“We must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life, that the art of living is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts. Who ever succeeded in draining the whole cup with grace?”

—C. G. Jung, “The Stages of Life”

The art of living means different things to different people. To many, it probably conjures up a vivacious and resourceful sort like Zorba the Greek—an example that Jung too might accept, though with a few added accents and shifts in psychological and spiritual emphasis. The term is often employed to characterize the way of the Stoics, and S.N. Goenka uses it in a comparable sense to describe life on the Path, in order to avoid the sectarian and intellectualizing associations of calling the Dhamma either a religion or a philosophy.* Common to all uses is a sense that to turn living into an art means to bring a measure of beauty and order to the chaos of life,** a touch of vivifying grace, an element of nobility.

What such an art is not and can never be is a science built around non-negotiable formulae, nor a mere exercise in obedience and submission—but rather an irreducibly creative activity, whatever place there may also be for reverencing one’s teachers. It can be learned and perfected, but not forced into definite forms, and it remains inescapably individual even if every art has its rules. There is a playful and spontaneous element to it, but also an implied discipline. At its pinnacle, among true masters, it will appear easy and effortless, the natural and spontaneous doing without ado that the Tao Te Ching celebrates, but only after much practice and refinement has given it the smoothness that a stone gets from aeons of water trickling over it. There should be something deeply inspiring about seeing non-ado done right, yet the edifying example can stand as an invitation only, not a command to anyone.

An art, if it is to be more than a regimen, is something one may share, but not impose on others. It has its authorities, its great heroes and celebrated idols, but even so, all who practice it remain their own masters. There are maps to consult and models to emulate; but finding and making one’s way still remains a responsibility that no one can take over or take away. As the Buddha kept reminding his students, all the way to his last days, to follow the Teaching is to go on walking the Path step by step, taking refuge in oneself and the laws of nature, not to be forever appealing to supposed higher powers and authorities in hopes that they might relieve the creaturely burden of having to work out one’s own salvation day by day, in a spirit of diligent self-reliance. (A central theme throughout the Pali Canon, see especially the Kalama Sutta, Dhammapada 12.4 (160), “You are your own master, who else?” and Digha Nikaya 16.2.26, “Make yourself your refuge.”) Faith is precious on the Path and prayers have their place, but not as substitutes for practice, or pleas for deliverance at second hand.

Art can aim high, or it can aim low, or it can seek to combine the two. By its nature, it is as much at home in the upper as in the baser chakras; at its best, it speaks to all of them at once and brings them into working harmony. Jack Kornfield recalls (in the opening pages of his Path with Heart) how, after years of pushing his way up the chakras almost by force, he realized how much he had been neglecting their more earthy foundations. He then spent decades working his way back down, to the heart, to the mid-point, to the sexual organs and the other more primal functions of the body. All these, for a practice to be truly integrated and the art of living to flourish most fully, need to be given their due. Revulsion at being “born between urine and feces” is the stuff of neurosis, as Freud wryly observed in chapter IV of Civilization and Its Discontents, and the suspicion that spiritual practice is no safeguard against such mental disequilibria is strengthened by the fact that the pronouncement is commonly attributed to a saint, no less, namely St. Augustine of Hippo. (Ram Dass observes in his reflections on the “Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path” that none of his neuroses ever went away either—“not a single one”—though he adds that they have become more manageable with the years, those “shmoos.”*** Much food for thought there is in that one…)

True, there is also sublimation, of the sexual functions particularly. That too can be a fine way to practice, for those who are called to it. But an aptitude for celibacy is not given to everyone (as St Paul famously allowed, though wishing that others were more like him (1 Cor. 7:7)); to force it upon yourself when it does not suit your temperament is an invitation to complications even greater and more troublesome than those which dating and sex will invariably bring into your life. That there is much vexation to be found in the ways of the flesh will be as readily admitted by its champions as by its detractors; what the latter must reckon with, if they would seek to evade this elementary dimension of mammalian existence, is all the trouble we usually invite with our attempts at escaping from life’s fundamentals. Perhaps it can be done, at a price; but the cost of too much repression is no joke, and we would do well to heed Plato’s sage counsel (Republic IX, 589) that the hydra must be tamed gently, lest cutting off its heads only induce them to grow back more numerously and fiercely. The molting snake in the Sutta Nipata that I have alluded to several times before points in a similar direction (see Posts #9, #55, #73).

Brought to perfection, the art of living might even reconcile what appear mere opposites in ordinary life—attaining to a joyfulness in the moment that does not get unduly enamoured with the passing show, a caring enthusiasm (as per the previous post) that remains unattached, a passion that is dispassionate at the same time. A tall order, certainly, as our epigraph stresses from the outset; but then why should it surprise us to hear that what is most beautiful would also be most difficult to accomplish, not least because in its highest expression it must also become so natural as to appear effortless and almost childlike again in its seasoned simplicity.

*As in the title of the print edition of Goenka’s ten-day discourses, edited by William Hart (see Post #7).

**Golo Mann’s tribute to Schiller comes to mind once more (see my preface to the print edition of Posts 1–30, and #20): “He knew that to tell a story even about something that really did happen will always require a measure of poetic creativity, because it cannot possibly be grasped as it occurred in its formless infinity. Whoever wishes to narrate anything must do so beautifully, putting his own self forward while shaping words into rhythms in order to banish the dragon of chaos for a while.” In a similar spirit, a passage at the outset of the Durants’ Lessons of History, where they write that history becomes art “by establishing meaningful order in the chaos of materials.”

***In Spiritual Emergency, edited by Stanislav and Christina Grof (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1989), pp. 171–87.