discipline and the dragon
The body of the dragon concentrates energy in its sinuous curves, and coils and uncoils to move along more quickly. It is a symbol of all the potential with which form can be charged, a potential that never ceases to be actualized. . . . The dragon is a constantly evolving creature with no fixed form; it can never be immobilized or penned in, never grasped . . . . it is the very image of an energy that diffuses itself through space, intensifying its environment and enriching itself by that aura.
— Francois Jullien, The Propensity of Things1
What if this were a description of a university professor?
“Discipline, in its etymological sense,” the Oxford English Dictionary tells me, “as pertaining to the disciple or scholar, is antithetical to doctrine, the property of the doctor or teacher; hence, in the history of the words, doctrine is more concerned with abstract theory, and discipline with practice or exercise.”
This etymology provides a loose pair of indicators that might help lead toward a becoming-dragon of the university professor. I want to call these “beginner’s mind” and “practice.” You hear the first when the OED puts discipline in the hands of the disciple or the scholar and doctrine in the hands of the doctor or teacher. You hear the second when it puts discipline at the service of practice or exercise, and doctrine in the service of supporting a rigid structure of abstract theory.
“In the beginner’s mind,” as you may already have heard Shunryu Suzuki observe, “there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” “Our original mind includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.”2
The university might then reassume the shape of the universe for which it was originally – however little it may now seem to contain of it – named [Ù61]. How far can I go towards my original mind? As far as Baruch Spinoza?
Spinoza, whose first published words, the aptly named “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,” described the recovery of his beginner’s mind:
After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile, and I saw that all the things which were the cause or object of my fear had nothing of good or bad in themselves, except insofar as my mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, capable of communicating itself, and which alone would affect the mind, all other being rejected — whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy to eternity.3
Intellectual practice as the communication of sustainable joy.
Is that how most of us university professors these days can answer the question: “What are you working on?” Is that how I can answer it? When was the last time I heard, or delivered, a conference paper on the topic? Spinoza, I remember, turned down a university professorship to remain a lens grinder, partly supported by his friends.
With beginner’s mind, I see again, as when I was a child, the ways in which the universe itself naturally assumes the teaching and research functions of the university. Like with the Peruvian farmers Wendell Berry observed. Rather than gridding their entire fields from fence row to fence row, replanting year after year any few of the hundreds of varieties of potatoes they already know, rather than saturating the earth with their wisdom, these farmers have disciplined themselves, restrained themselves and so, in the wild margins between their fields, there among the weeds, every year, something new grows, something that withstands the pests or droughts which have destroyed the known and the given.
“The hedgerows are marginal areas,” Berry writes, “little thoroughfares of wilderness closely crisscrossing the farmland, and in them agriculture is constantly renewing itself in direct response to what threatens it. This network of wilderness threading through the fields serves the Andean farmer as a college of agriculture and wilderness station. . . . Set thus in the light of a truly healthy agriculture, our land-grant college complex may be seen less as a symbol of our agricultural success than as a symptom of our failure.”4
Despite hundreds of years of accumulated experience, these farmers approach every season, every planting, every harvest, with beginner’s mind open to possibilities, open to the new [Ù13, 62]. Disciples, in this way, of nature itself, they make of the universe a university capable of truly touching the flow of life, of being jolted and moved by the new. And in so doing they sustain themselves and a world of increasing diversity that sustains them and their children in turn.
So that is beginner’s mind, the part of the etymology of discipline that emphasized the disciple. But you could probably already see the importance of practice –- the second element I said I found in this etymology — to the discipline of the Peruvian farmers.
“Labor,” Marx wrote, “is the living, form-giving fire. It is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time.”5 The world of things flows continuously. Labor names this property and so names an essential element of the universe. Intellectual labor must align itself with these flows, attuned to an ongoing process – to a practice – more than a specific product.
Jullien again on shi: “Because it implies no dissociation between practice and theory, [shi] never becomes detached from its initial strategic meaning and always helps us to think about the processes to which it is applied from the perspective of how to use them. Since the principles of dynamism are fundamentally the same across reality, the word shi can serve equally well in the analysis of nature and in the analysis of history; in the field of political management and in that of artistic creation.
Reality always presents itself as a particular situation that results from a particular disposition of circumstances that is, in turn, inclined to produce a particular effect: it is up to the general, and equally to the politician, the painter, and the writer, to avail himself of the shi . . . so as to exploit it to its maximum potentiality.”6
I learn to play “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on the banjo not by grasping the entire song at once, but by repeating hundreds of times each of the thirty-odd eight note rolls that comprise the song. Then my fingers know the song, even if I don’t and never do. Julio called it participation [Ù16, 46].
Go back to Peru. An element of the durability of their agriculture, Berry points out, is the indispensability of practice or exercise. Whatever they discover in their little wildernesses, Berry writes, “has already been tested in the circumstances of the farm itself, and its worth or worthlessness proven.”
Or listen to Suzuki speaking of right Zen practice: “I do not feel like speaking after zazen. I feel the practice of zazen is enough. But if I must say something I think I would like to talk about how wonderful it is to practice zazen. Our purpose is just to keep this practice forever. This practice started from beginningless time, and it will continue into an endless future. Strictly speaking, for a human being there is no other practice than this practice. There is no other way of life than this way of life. . . . When you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life.”7
When Suzuki says that for a human being there is no other practice than this practice, I take him to be saying that to the degree that we practice mindfulness, to that degree we fulfill our humanity, whether or not we’ve ever sat on a meditation cushion, and whether or not we accept or propound an exclusively intellectual argument for mindfulness. Conversely, to the degree that we permit forces in and outside ourselves to disrupt our practice of mindfulness we are allowing ourselves to be cheated of our full humanity.
Genuine, enduring discipline inevitably entails practice, is rooted in conditions and oriented toward action. Henry Ford, in a little newspaper column called “What is education — Cargo or Motive Power?” says “You may fill your head with all the ‘facts’ of all the ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact-box when you get through.
The point,” Ford concludes, “is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity. A man may be very learned and very useless. Any college professor will tell you that.”8 Do your practice, your exercise. “So – stand up, run, jump, move, dance! Like the body, the mind needs movement, especially subtle and complex movement.”9
Intellectual labor in and for the universe, and not just for the university, is practice. Practice takes discipline. Discipline takes beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind prepares us for action. Beginner’s mind makes available to us again a world of things that can drive, shape, and improve our practice and our products, provided that practice is focused and restrained – or, in other words, disciplined.
The Tao te Ching once again, “Better stop than fill to the brim./Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt./Amass a store of gold and jade, and no one can protect it./Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow./Retire when the work is done./ This is the way of heaven.”10
Etymology, as I’ve been exploiting it here, is nothing more for me than one of the forms of activity that discipline takes in my field of passion: language and literature. Etymology isn’t for me a search for origins, at least not origins that become restrictive rules for usage, ways of judging rigor from error. Etymology entails a mindful perusal of the variety of things any given word has done and therefore could be made to do again.
To be sure, it has for me a kind of ethical facet in that it involves a respectful study of a thing – a word – the better to become intimate with its history, as you might with a good friend. In this sense, etymology is a way of eluding a kind of authoritarian or dictatorial fetishism that is and demands a conformist acceptance of a thing as given today, ripped from the matrix of its process of becoming.
With language, it seems especially inhuman to indulge in such fetishes. So I slow down and pause over a word, to play especially among its roots, looking under the rocks of “obsolete” and “poetic” or “technical” usages, where we’ve sometimes misplaced the most stimulating among the possible uses of a word. I wander then, perhaps I err, but I also discover and invent.
1 Francois Jullien, The Propensity of Things, Trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1995), p. 151.
2 Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1996), pp. 21-22.
3 Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza, “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect” in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume One, Trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 7.
4 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986), p. 178.
5 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 361.
6 Francois Jullien, The Propensity of Things, Trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1995), p. 260.
7 Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1996), p. 47-48.
8 Henry Ford, “What is education – Cargo or Motive Power?,” Ford’s Ideals (Dearborn: The Dearborn Independent, 1921), p. 146.
9 Michel Serres Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, with Bruno Latour, Trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 107.
10 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Vintage, 1997), 9th poem.