nine billion names
This whole past week (except for Monday), I've had the pleasure to attend dharma talks by Venerable Thubten Chodron (visiting from Sravasti Abbey in Washington State) at both the Tai Pei Buddhist Centre in Lavender (teachings on Shantideva's A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life chapter 3, "Full Acceptance of the Awakening Mind"), and the Buddhist Library in Geylang ("Creating Peace in our Daily Life"). She's also leading a two-day workshop (back at Tai Pei) on the Yoga Method of Chenrezig today and tomorrow, and we (Janet, her dad, and I) will be leaving for that soon.
I've talked here about Chodron before, mostly in relation to her books Open Heart, Clear Mind and How to Free Your Mind, and how her writing has clearly explained some very complex concepts about Buddhism to a Western audience. Janet was the one who brought me to the dharma, but Chodron has been instrumental in helping me to understand it through her books (Dealing with Life's Issues: A Buddhist Perspective, a brand new dharma book available for free distribution, was released in time for her visit this week, and I'm looking forward to it). In person, she's a radiant and calming presence, still and collected and almost always smiling; her knowledge and wisdom are impressive in their depth, and she's just as good at explaining things verbally as she is on paper.
The first time she walked into the temple and we all stood up to greet her, I actually had butterflies in my stomach; reading her books and listening to her teachings had given me an idea about her, but I'd never seen her in person until now, and I had a bit of a fanboy moment, even if just to myself. She has a quiet unintentional charisma that is reinforced by patience and willingness to talk with people; she's ended every talk this week with Q&A, and continued speaking with people after the talk was over. I can see why so many people have requested the teachings from her.
Because of the talks this week, I've gotten a little behind with things; I owe a revised review of Bangkok Haunts to Niall at Strange Horizons, and need to get going on reviews of Not Flesh Nor Feathers and Little Brother, not to mention work on the n*vel. If I owe you an email, please be patient; I'll get back to you soon.
I also haven't been keeping up with the f-list as much, although I did note the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, and the many encomiums of him in the blogosphere and worldwide press. He was an incredible influence in science fiction, one of the masters of the Golden Age (along with Asimov, Bradbury, Vance, Pohl, and Heinlein), and he continued to write until just a few days before his death. His biggest influence on me was in the film version of 2001, which even to me seems a bit odd as he was primarily a prose writer, but I have never ever forgotten scenes from the movie, scenes that resonated at a deep level; when I got my first non-8088 computer back in college, and was able to program the sound files, my error message was "What are you doing, Dave?"
I've noticed in some of the posts about his life and work that people have been mentioning "The Nine Billion Names of God" as a story that was influential and important to them. It was written in 1953 and was the winner (in 2004) of the retrospective Hugo Award for Best Short Story for the year 1954. I hadn't read it before, so I clicked over and did so. And I was surprised that for such a smart and forward-thinking man, Clarke got an astonishing number of fundamental things wrong.
Go on and read it if you haven't already. It's pretty short, so it won't take long.
Back? Good.
So in short, the story is about a Tibetan lama traveling to New York and contracting a hardware firm to install a Mark V computer in Tibet that will list all the nine billion true names of God; up until this point, they've been doing it by hand, but the computer (running thousands of calculations per second!) will naturally be able to do it faster. Two Westerners from the company install the computer and its electromatic typewriters (ur-printers) at the lamasery and run the program. Three months later and it's almost finished, and the Westerners decide to skedaddle before the end, because it's been revealed that after the last name has been typed, there will really no point left for the universe to exist, and God will just wind things up; as their plane departs, they look out the window at the moment when the program will have finished, and see the stars begin to wink out.
On a story level, it's very well done. Point of view shifts around a bit, and the characters are pretty flat, but it's an intriguing premise, and the payoff is well set up in advance. I like that six years before China invaded Tibet (causing the Dalai Lama to flee to India), Clarke was interested enough in the area to write a story set there; I don't imagine Tibet was much on the minds of American writers during that time, so good on Clarke for promoting awareness of the region.
However, the major fundamental problem with the story is that Buddhists do not believe in God.
In Buddhist cosmology, there is the Buddha, the bodhisattvas, and the devas (demigods), but there is no such being as the Judeo-Christian/Islamic creator God who brought the universe into existence. When Buddhists prostrate themsleves to a statue of Gautama Buddha or Avalokiteshvara (aka Kwan Yin or Chenrezig), they are not praying to a deity who can hear them and grant their requests; they are instead thanking them for delivering the precepts, and keeping their image in mind so as to assist in attaining enlightenment. It's about honor, not obeisance.
So why would Clarke have Buddhist monks (and they are absolutely Buddhist monks, as opposed to monks of a different religion: they come from Tibet (although, if the lama at the opening of the story is any indication, they're also fluent English-speakers), they live in a lamasery, and they wear robes) want to write down the nine billion names of God? Is this a confusion with Hinduism, and the supposed nine million gods of that pantheon? Or was it just an assumption on Clarke's part, that monks are monks, and that Catholics and Jesuits and Buddhists must worship the same creator being?
Or, if I give him the benefit of the doubt, what else could it have been? The monks could have been compiling this list of nine billion separate nine-letter words that were something other than the true names of God, but to what end? We see the result of the Mark V's labors, in that at the end of the listing/recitation, the stars wink out of the sky, indicating that the entire universe is disappearing. But why the deception?
Once again, there's the question of motivation. Buddhist monks dedicate their lives (and their future incarnations) to the benefit of all sentient beings, either through enlightenment and attainment of nirvana (wherein they can manifest in many forms in order to be of aid and comfort), or through becoming an arhat and remaining in samsara (cyclic existence) to spread the dharma and teach others how to reach their own enlightenment. They're all about compassion and loving-kindness, but wiping out all of existence by listing nine billion words (names or otherwise) is pretty much the opposite of this.
So what do y'all think? From my cursory Google searches, it certainly appears that "The Nine Billion Names of God" is one of Clarke's best regarded short stories, so there are undoubtedly other interpretations than mine. Please share your views. I'm definitely not trying to slag the guy off right after he's died and left an open wound in the sf community, but it does interest me that this particular story, which was celebrated with a retroactive Hugo Award, could have such fundamental flaws in it.
I've talked here about Chodron before, mostly in relation to her books Open Heart, Clear Mind and How to Free Your Mind, and how her writing has clearly explained some very complex concepts about Buddhism to a Western audience. Janet was the one who brought me to the dharma, but Chodron has been instrumental in helping me to understand it through her books (Dealing with Life's Issues: A Buddhist Perspective, a brand new dharma book available for free distribution, was released in time for her visit this week, and I'm looking forward to it). In person, she's a radiant and calming presence, still and collected and almost always smiling; her knowledge and wisdom are impressive in their depth, and she's just as good at explaining things verbally as she is on paper.
The first time she walked into the temple and we all stood up to greet her, I actually had butterflies in my stomach; reading her books and listening to her teachings had given me an idea about her, but I'd never seen her in person until now, and I had a bit of a fanboy moment, even if just to myself. She has a quiet unintentional charisma that is reinforced by patience and willingness to talk with people; she's ended every talk this week with Q&A, and continued speaking with people after the talk was over. I can see why so many people have requested the teachings from her.
Because of the talks this week, I've gotten a little behind with things; I owe a revised review of Bangkok Haunts to Niall at Strange Horizons, and need to get going on reviews of Not Flesh Nor Feathers and Little Brother, not to mention work on the n*vel. If I owe you an email, please be patient; I'll get back to you soon.
I also haven't been keeping up with the f-list as much, although I did note the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, and the many encomiums of him in the blogosphere and worldwide press. He was an incredible influence in science fiction, one of the masters of the Golden Age (along with Asimov, Bradbury, Vance, Pohl, and Heinlein), and he continued to write until just a few days before his death. His biggest influence on me was in the film version of 2001, which even to me seems a bit odd as he was primarily a prose writer, but I have never ever forgotten scenes from the movie, scenes that resonated at a deep level; when I got my first non-8088 computer back in college, and was able to program the sound files, my error message was "What are you doing, Dave?"
I've noticed in some of the posts about his life and work that people have been mentioning "The Nine Billion Names of God" as a story that was influential and important to them. It was written in 1953 and was the winner (in 2004) of the retrospective Hugo Award for Best Short Story for the year 1954. I hadn't read it before, so I clicked over and did so. And I was surprised that for such a smart and forward-thinking man, Clarke got an astonishing number of fundamental things wrong.
Go on and read it if you haven't already. It's pretty short, so it won't take long.
Back? Good.
So in short, the story is about a Tibetan lama traveling to New York and contracting a hardware firm to install a Mark V computer in Tibet that will list all the nine billion true names of God; up until this point, they've been doing it by hand, but the computer (running thousands of calculations per second!) will naturally be able to do it faster. Two Westerners from the company install the computer and its electromatic typewriters (ur-printers) at the lamasery and run the program. Three months later and it's almost finished, and the Westerners decide to skedaddle before the end, because it's been revealed that after the last name has been typed, there will really no point left for the universe to exist, and God will just wind things up; as their plane departs, they look out the window at the moment when the program will have finished, and see the stars begin to wink out.
On a story level, it's very well done. Point of view shifts around a bit, and the characters are pretty flat, but it's an intriguing premise, and the payoff is well set up in advance. I like that six years before China invaded Tibet (causing the Dalai Lama to flee to India), Clarke was interested enough in the area to write a story set there; I don't imagine Tibet was much on the minds of American writers during that time, so good on Clarke for promoting awareness of the region.
However, the major fundamental problem with the story is that Buddhists do not believe in God.
In Buddhist cosmology, there is the Buddha, the bodhisattvas, and the devas (demigods), but there is no such being as the Judeo-Christian/Islamic creator God who brought the universe into existence. When Buddhists prostrate themsleves to a statue of Gautama Buddha or Avalokiteshvara (aka Kwan Yin or Chenrezig), they are not praying to a deity who can hear them and grant their requests; they are instead thanking them for delivering the precepts, and keeping their image in mind so as to assist in attaining enlightenment. It's about honor, not obeisance.
So why would Clarke have Buddhist monks (and they are absolutely Buddhist monks, as opposed to monks of a different religion: they come from Tibet (although, if the lama at the opening of the story is any indication, they're also fluent English-speakers), they live in a lamasery, and they wear robes) want to write down the nine billion names of God? Is this a confusion with Hinduism, and the supposed nine million gods of that pantheon? Or was it just an assumption on Clarke's part, that monks are monks, and that Catholics and Jesuits and Buddhists must worship the same creator being?
Or, if I give him the benefit of the doubt, what else could it have been? The monks could have been compiling this list of nine billion separate nine-letter words that were something other than the true names of God, but to what end? We see the result of the Mark V's labors, in that at the end of the listing/recitation, the stars wink out of the sky, indicating that the entire universe is disappearing. But why the deception?
Once again, there's the question of motivation. Buddhist monks dedicate their lives (and their future incarnations) to the benefit of all sentient beings, either through enlightenment and attainment of nirvana (wherein they can manifest in many forms in order to be of aid and comfort), or through becoming an arhat and remaining in samsara (cyclic existence) to spread the dharma and teach others how to reach their own enlightenment. They're all about compassion and loving-kindness, but wiping out all of existence by listing nine billion words (names or otherwise) is pretty much the opposite of this.
So what do y'all think? From my cursory Google searches, it certainly appears that "The Nine Billion Names of God" is one of Clarke's best regarded short stories, so there are undoubtedly other interpretations than mine. Please share your views. I'm definitely not trying to slag the guy off right after he's died and left an open wound in the sf community, but it does interest me that this particular story, which was celebrated with a retroactive Hugo Award, could have such fundamental flaws in it.