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Stuart came up to me excited about a book he had just read, explaining an Asian philosophical system.

“It was written in the 16th Century,” he tells me. “By a Buddhist monk in southern China. It is a largely forgotten offshoot of Mahayana Buddhism, with a heavy dose of Taoism, a bit of Tantric Buddhism thrown in, and just a touch of Vedantic philosophy, although heavily filtered by Confucianism.”

“Sounds like quite a jumble,” I said.

“Maybe, but it’s really interesting.” The things Stuart finds interesting is extensive, and doesn’t always translate.

“It’s known as the ‘Way of the Seven Effluents,’ although it is sometimes called the Seven Exudations.”

“Seven?”

“Yes,” he says. “It’s always fun finding the way so many Asian religions, or philosophies like to number and count. Like so many Scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. They had the Seven Deadly Sins and the Nine Rings of Hell, but in India and China they counted up the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path and the Five Ranks, The Four Invisibles, the Four Dharma Realms, the four Varnas and the thousands of numbered sub-castes, the Eight Immortals, the Four Moods of poetry and art.”

“It can get quite bizarre,” I said. “I remember reading the Kama Sutra when I was in college and it numbered all the possible coital positions, as if they had been catalogued by Linnaeus. We’re confusing several religions and philosophies here, of course — India, China, Tibet, Japan — but there does seem to be a shared cultural compulsion to count and divide.”

“It shows up everywhere,” Stuart said. “Like Lao-tzu wrote: ‘The five colors will blind sight; the five sounds will deafen; the five tastes will spoil the palate.’ Number, number, number. Have you ever tried to read any of the Upanishads? Lists and divisions. It can be overwhelming.

Well, Hsing Tao has his own list,” Stuart continued. “He lists the seven substances produced by humans which exit the body to enter the world. They each have a function for the proper ordering of the body and its organs, and a function in the larger world they enter.”

“These are actual things?” I asked. “Or are they like the subtle substances of Eastern philosophies, the seven chakras — real but not corporeal?”

“No, they are quite real, quite ordinary, really. Interesting you should mention the chakras, because there is some similarity with the effluents, although not strict. Actually, kind of vague.

“But they are — starting from the bottom of the body, quite literally — feces, urine, semen, sweat, saliva, mucus and tears.”

“What about ear wax?” I said.

“Not a part of this system,” he said. I’m sure there are other possible exudations, but these are the seven.”

“So far, the thing that stands out is how male-centric this system is. It includes semen, but not milk. Does Hsing Tao not recognize the other half of humanity? And what about the monthlies? Do they not count as an ‘exudation’?”

“I’ll get to that. But it is true. Still you should remember that most thought systems worldwide either don’t take women into account at all, or place women in some lower position. Let’s not be so proud about ourselves. Did you see the recent study that showed that medical trials almost never take account of women’s bodies, but study only men, as if women were somehow aberrant. But Hsing Tao does make allowances for women. I’ll get to that in a moment.”

“OK, please go on. Tell me about them.”

“Simply put, feces eliminate the waste of the body; urine keeps the body isostatic; semen is for reproduction; sweat regulates body temperature; saliva renders dry food digestible; mucus moistens the air we breathe; and tears regulate the pressure of internal emotions.”

“As opposed to external emotions?”

Stuart was not put off by my sarcasm. “Yes,” he said. “Emotions, according to Hsing Tao, are a substance that can expand inside the body, rather like a full stomach, and when the pressure inside is too great, in times of great sorrow or joy, the pressure equalizes through weeping. It is really a very mechanistic philosophy, at least for an Asian system.

“It is a machine, sort of, which processes food into feces and the leftovers must be eliminated. But here is where the public functions of the exudations comes in: Collected ‘night soil’ fertilizes the crops for all of us.

“Hsing Tao is quite forward looking when it comes to pee. Most of us tend to think of kidneys cleaning the blood of toxins, but the most important renal function is to keep the water pressure inside our bodies even. For Hsing Tao, you drink to keep the body from drying out, and you urinate to keep things evened out, so the body does not become turgid.

“Saliva turns solid food, with the help of the teeth, into semi-liquid chime that we swallow and digest. It is also used to solemnize oaths. This is something that seems to happen around the world in most cultures. We spit in our hands or spit on the ground to seal the deal or punctuate a curse. Thus, a public function for an otherwise personal substance.

“Mucus is a bit trickier. For Hsing Tao, it moistens air so that when we breathe, we do not dry out our insides. This is also part of the process of isostasis. Lungs must not dry out, or they will get leathery, according to the book.”

“Fine, but what about women? Surely a philosophy cannot allow only men to populate its street corners.”

“Most Asian philosophies see the introduction of opposites as a product of maya, or illusion. Just as in Galatians, the apostle Paul says that in Christ “there is neither male nor female,” in Hsing Tao, the ultimate reality is neither male nor female, but as in the Tao Te Ching, “The unwrought material, when divided and distributed, forms vessels,” or in the world of phenomena, the one divides into the many and as it arises from the void, humanity divides into male and female.

“In the third chapter, or sutra, or whatever you want to call it — the third canto — the author makes the equivalence between semen and milk. They both bring forth life, semen from the male, milk from the female. Both necessary for the propagation of the species.”

“And, of course, semen is usually rather milky.”

“You mock,” Stuart says, “but in fact, Hsing Tao makes this very point. He seems to think that they are the same thing, but one endowed with maleness and the other with femaleness, and therefore a mother’s milk cannot inseminate another woman.”

“This is all very weird. But there is still another body output you haven’t mentioned. And it seems rather important. Certainly more than mucus.”

“You mean the menses. I’m afraid Hsing Tao doesn’t count that among the exudations.”

“A notable omission.”

“For us, yes, but for Hsing Tao, the expulsion of monthly blood is not a simple product of body function, like the others, but a physical embodiment of a spiritual conception. It’s not like any of this is, by modern terms, scientifically defensible, but in his scheme of the cosmos, the monthly cycle is the work of the gods — or the void — and when a woman is not pregnant, the spirit invested in her has no fetal body to enter and so is expelled and it takes blood with it.”

“I’m not sure why this doesn’t count, though, as another exudation. Why is it not included? Why are there not eight — or for that matter, nine — exudations?”

“What? You want any of this to make sense? What religion or philosophy you know of makes any sense at all? Any of them breaks down at some point. Humans try to regularize the world and make sense of it, when none of it makes sense, at least not in any way the human mind can surround.”

“Then why bring it up in the first place?”

“I like to see different ways the world can be organized, the way we have fought against incoherence, found patterns where none exist, insisted that somehow, it all makes sense. Every schema breaks down at some point. Every ideology is provisional, ever solution a transition.

“When we look back through the history of ideas, what we see is constant change, or rather, constant replacement of currently accepted ideas by ideas that seek to clarify the obvious shortcomings of the previous. People like to think that this change, like the change in art styles, is propelled by mere fashion, but really, it is dissatisfaction with the version we were born into and an attempt to fix it. But the fix is always just as partial as the inherited belief.

“I like to see these earlier ideas as all equally true, in some sense, out of a humility that our current understanding is finally the right one. The four humors? The four elements? All previous creation myths? All some version of the partial truth. And so, I think of Hsing Tao.”

Stuart went on. “In this sense, at least. It feels as if we are always trying to alleviate the internal pressure of our bodies, or our feelings. The human being is expansive and the body cannot easily accommodate the fullness. So, if we see Hsing Tao as metaphorical rather than medical, there is truth in his philosophy. I know, when I have an idea, I can’t wait to let it out.”

“So, I see,” I said. “You have forgotten the most important ‘exudation.’ The one for which you are the patron saint.”

“What is that?” Stuart had a quizzical look on his aging face.

“The thing your body most expresses are words. Words words words. Speech is also something that leaks from the body. And perhaps, in your terms, the most important pressure valve for that internal build-up. Which leads me to the obvious.”

“Which is?”

“That there is no book. No ancient book of Asian philosophy. This is all a figment of your imagination. A great joke you play with yourself. You made up Hsing Tao, didn’t you?”

“Caught me.”

Bursting joy’s grape

July 14, 2019

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“What gives you joy?” asked Stuart. “I don’t mean what do you EN-joy, but truly fills you up with an uncontrollable emotion, maybe brings you to tears?”

I thought about this for a moment. It seems different things at different times set off the buzzer.

“That’s a fuzzy question,” I said. “Joy is one of those words that covers a whole basket of things. Like ‘love.’ Everyone means something different by it.”

“In this case, I guess, I mean something that fills you up, as if emotion will burst you open. This is very different from pleasure or happiness. Originally it meant ekstasis – a moment when you stand outside your ordinary self, and feel a connection to something bigger than you.”

“That’s a tall order,” I said. “How often does it even happen?”

“Maybe I’ve made it sound too grand,” Stuart said. “Sure, there is the big transcendent blast, but it can happen in smaller doses, too. The big ones are life changing, but the smaller ones carry you through an hour or two of rising above the ordinary.”

“As long as we leave love out of it, and theology, too, then I guess I get most joy from the arts: Music, dance, painting. Odd moments when I’m reading poetry and a line or idea takes off and I become emotional. It can make me weep uncontrollably.”

“Billy Blake said, ‘Excess of joy weeps.’”

“Of course, only when the performance is good — or not just good, but exceptional. Other times, I enjoy them, but those times that are transcendent are rare, but necessary.”

“Necessary?”

“Yes. Just going to the symphony every week is fine, or to a play, or the ballet. But if once in a blue moon a performance doesn’t reach beyond that and pierce the essential innards of my psyche or soul or emotions — I don’t know what you call it — then it’s hard to justify the expense of buying the tickets. It’s that nearly-never performance that makes all the others worthwhile.”

“Anything else?” he asked. “I mean being an esthete is fine, but what about non-artistic things?”

“Certainly. Love has elevated me like that, although more often when I was young and an idiot. Now, it is seeing someone I love feel joy that raises my heart. When I was young and with the woman I was nuts over, seeing a breeze blow the hem of her skirt or the wrinkles of her eyes, or even the ridges of her knuckles would send shivers through my being. That was transcendent.

“Now the thrill comes from cooking for someone I care for and seeing them enjoy what I have prepared. That actually gives me something of the same feeling.”

“Interesting,” said Stuart. “Because I have this theory…”

Here we go, I thought. Buckle up.

“… this theory that people are roughly divided into those who are what I might call ‘sensualists’ and those we might call ‘activists.’ There are other classes, too: There are the depressives who never feel that elation we call joy.

“This came to me when I asked Genevieve this question. Although playing viola with the orchestra is her job, nothing gives her greater pleasure in her off-hour time than playing quartets with friends, or accompanying on the piano as another friend sight-reads a sonata. Sitting in and playing music with others is for her the ultimate in joyfulness.”

“I recognize that,” I said. “Carole felt the same way about playing four-hand piano. The two players meld into a single entity in the music. It gave her deep pleasure. She often asked me to play recorder while she played piano. I usually declined: I did not get the same thrill she did, perhaps because I had no real talent for it. I did once sing Gutte Nacht from Winterreise as she accompanied. You would not have wanted to hear me, but it made her happy and that made me happy.”

“Yes, well, that is the activist, the one who gets joy from doing. But I thought of you, on the other hand. You observe. You watch. Your joy comes from seeing a well-performed ballet, or the rich gray-purple in the background of a Renaissance painting. It is the sensual side of things that fills your sails.”

“I never thought of myself as a sensualist,” I said. “I’m too dull and academic. But I see your point. It is through my senses that I apprehend the transcendent. Looking, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling: These are all real portals into the reality of the cosmos. And it is seeing them, like the stars and Milky Way in a truly dark night sky, that gives me a sense of something bigger and beyond myself.”

Stuart smiled. “That is exactly what I mean by ‘joy.’ It can be found in the sense of how you are connected to things outside your self. What I call activists, in this sense, are those who find that experience in caregiving, or hiking in nature, or playing music with others — something outside, bigger and more important. The sensualists are seeking the same, but find it in metaphor, in what they see and hear. The Beethoven symphony that is a metaphor for the struggle of life, or the Balanchine choreography that does the same for the dance of the cosmos.”

“When I see a great dance performance,” I said, “I feel in my own muscles the twisting and flexing of the dancers’ muscles. Hell, in a particularly good and athletic performance, I can feel it in my own body so much that I need liniment the next day.”

“Iris Murdoch once said we always seek out ways to ‘unself.’ Usually, we are stuck in our egos, which is a boring place to be, claustrophobic, anxious and lonely. We want to know there is a bigger place to be, in which we are a puzzle piece that fits a waiting empty spot. What is more, that puzzle is vast, extending to the ends of the cosmos. It what we feel when we magnify, like Mary in the Magnificat — ‘Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est’ — and extend our being out to the night sky and the bright pin pricks there.”

Aldous Huxley wrote that humans have “a deep-seated urge to self-transcendence. I know what Stuart was talking about. I have often felt it, even in an unguided universe.

“Yet, there are those who don’t feel joy, or at least, when I ask, they seem puzzled, not sure what I mean by the word. These are people, I think, who either don’t have the gene for joy, or who are depressed and squeezed flat, or who have not yet found their capacity. Surely they had it when they were children: Kids seem to drink directly from a fountain of joy. Joy requires a certain lack of self-consciousness, an openness, even to make yourself goofy or admit to emotions that others may not feel.

“Depression flattens the world out — talk about the flat-earth people — and the …”

“Well,” I interrupted, “what does it for you? You always have these theories, but they are never directly about you. What gives you the giddies?”

Stuart talks a lot, but seldom about himself. There is always something held back, as if his jibber-jabber were a way of shielding himself.

“I dunno. Let me think. I’ve gotten old — we’ve both gotten old — and can look back on a long history of sorrows and joys, both those I’ve caused and those I’ve been dealt. I have to say that the sources of joy have changed radically over those years. It used to be I felt most awake and alive when I found a new lady love to dazzle me, but after three mangled marriages and …”

Here, he looked toward the sky and sort of bit his lip as he used his fingers to count.

“Seven, yes, seven significant other relationships, the blush of that first encounter has gone. Now I’ve been with Genevieve for eight years and I feel I’ve finally settled in, and I have found that I sometimes can watch her sleep next to me and feel that sense of magnification, expansiveness, joy, just in seeing her, and feeling that we are joined as co-puzzle pieces.”

“So,” I asked, “is that activist or sensualist?”

“Maybe I need to rethink this,” he said. “There is something passive, not active in this sort of joy, but neither is it sensual. There is joy I find in simply its ‘is-ness,’ the fact of it, the actuality and not theoretical. The ‘is-ness.’ That’s the best term for it.”

“God tells Moses, ‘I am that I am.’ But you don’t need a deity for that to be true. The cosmos is that it is.”

Stuart looked at me. “I remember Joseph Campbell talking about a newborn bawling, and that it is its way of proclaiming a joy that says, ‘I exist,’ or, as you have it, ‘I am that I am.’ Perhaps we’re finally getting to the bottom of this.”