A PART OF, APART FROM
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
July 28, 2002
It was my first and only trip to the San Diego Zoo. I had three hours, and I was determined to use every minute to absorb the profiles and expressions and antics of my fellow creatures with whom I don’t exactly share the streets of Manhattan. Not that there aren’t zoos in New York City, and not that this city has never been referred to as a zoo, but the San Diego Zoo is special. Amid its expansive patchwork of climates, you’ll see lions and tigers and bears and Hua Mei, the only panda cub in the United States. If you’re really intrepid, you’ll witness 4,000 creatures, not counting the thousands of other casually clad specimens of humankind standing and staring and walking and gawking and smiling and waving and completely caught up in this kingdom of creatures with whom we inhabit this highly diverse planet. There’s only one catch for them. They’re captive. Even though their enclosures simulate their natural habitat, they really can’t get out. I guess that’s why my husband hates zoos. Not an exaggeration. Dan just can’t stand zoos, because he knows the animals can’t get out. Well, I know this too, but I go and I went, followed by a gently tugging guilt that I was staring through bars or leaning across railings atop pits that separated a giant panda from me, that ensured I could not cross over and pet the irresistible Hua Mei.
So with my penchant for seeing it all and stretching every hour to exhaustion, I covered the serpentine walks of this remarkable space and wondered if the so-called creatures of the wild don’t know something we don’t–actually, if they don’t know a lot that we probably don’t even intuit. This was a good thing to be wondering about when I stumbled upon a plaque tilted upward in the grass. Engraved on its bronze surface were the words:
"Asoka’s Law"
"India had the first conservation law in recorded history. In the third century B.C., Emperor Asoka declared his Fifth Pillar Edict," which was:
"Bats, monkeys, rhinos, porcupines, and tree squirrels are to be strictly preserved and forests must not be burned, either for mischief or to destroy living creatures."
From 262 to 239 BCE, Asoka ruled a dynasty that extended from what is now Afghanistan in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the east and from the Himalayas in the North to the area just north of Madras in the South. While he is said to have ruled harshly during the early period of his reign, Asoka had an epiphany of remorse after one particular conquest and turned to Buddhism, a way of life barely three hundred years old at the time, and he established the Law of Piety as an extension of his Buddhist practice. This law decrees that:
"A meritorious thing is the listening to father and mother. A meritorious thing is generosity to friends, acquaintances, relatives, Brahmins, and ascetics. A meritorious thing is abstention from the slaughter of living creatures. A meritorious thing is careful spending and lack of greed."
Asoka sought to extend these teachings throughout his domain. Fourteen edicts were inscribed on rocks--specifically, on immense stone pillars at distant intervals. The first edict addressed the sacredness of life and began with a decree that animals should no longer be slaughtered, either for sacrifice or for holiday feasting. These rock edicts formed the basis for his governance and are ample testament to his practice of Buddhism.
Of course, not having on-line access at the San Diego Zoo, I didn’t learn more about Asoka until much later, but my curiosity was awakened to this ancient power figure who was transformed by a seemingly sudden awareness of his own harsh and futile deeds and chose a different path whose teachings he disseminated throughout his kingdom. I suppose I could think of a few emperors in the kingdom of finance and, yes, politics, who might benefit from such an epiphany. An ethic of piety emanating from such figures? A claim that life is sacred? Well, Asoka was once brutish and arrogant. You never know.
In this season of summer and vacation and excursions into the so-called natural world, with more occasions for reverie, I think of Asoka and his hard-learned reverence for life. I think of his edict about not burning forests. How contemporary! Whim, carelessness, and a sudden lapse of awareness of their consequences are all it takes; and trees and wildflowers, bears and deer and elk and birds and porcupines and tree squirrels by the hundreds upon hundreds are incinerated–sacrificial fires unintended as such but rendered so as our mindfulness of life’s sacredness seems to burn on an altar of thousands of acres.
My colleague Gary Kowalski, minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, Vermont, challenges us to "join in a biospirituality that will acknowledge and celebrate the sacred in all life." He invites us to "learn to revere and respect the creatures who, like us, are a part of God’s beloved creation, and to cherish the amazing planet that sustains our mutual existence."
Reverence for life can emerge from our understanding of how it all began–from the myriad renditions of the Big Bang Theory to a Creation story that comes to us from the Okanogan Nation of North America.
According to the Okanogan version, the earth was once a human being. The Creator, called "Old One," made her out of a woman and declared to her, "You will be the Mother of all people.’ While this Earth woman is still alive, she has changed much. When we walk on the soil, we tread on her flesh. When we sit on a rock, we adorn her bones. When the wind cools us, we feel her breath. When we lie in the grass, we nest in her hair. If she moves abruptly, we have an earthquake.
After transforming this unsuspecting woman into the earth, Old One shaped her flesh into forms that became the inhabitants of the early world. They were people and animals both, but all could speak and had greater powers than just animals or people. Then Old One formed people and animals as we recognize them and blew into them the breath of life. They were, we are told, the most helpless of all creatures. It was in this way that "all living beings came from the earth. When we look around, we see our Mother everywhere."
To treat earth’s life as sacred is to honor our mother from whom we came. We are of her flesh, the soil in whose roots we were nurtured and grew, the soil to which we shall all return. To honor the earth is to honor ourselves, and in this common ground, all selves dissolve.
The narrative of the self is a narrative that we are hard pressed to question. Autonomy, independence, self-actualization; all are constructs that we as Americans and most definitely as Unitarians have been bred to value, even to hallow. Yet we lean into our Universalist understanding and concede that we are intrinsically connected, that we are part of the interdependent web of all being.
Is the self illusion altogether? Are we not, as the Okanogan myth indicates, the most helpless of all creatures and thus the most dependent? Is it not then an illusion that we are at the top of the charts among earth’s myriad life forms?
Think Kakadu National Park in Australia’s tropical north. Its 3.2 million acres are home to flora and fauna and wildlife in astonishing variety and lush abundance. While Aborigines have lived there for at least 25,000 years, more recent visitors traverse its waterways to view some of the earliest rock art. June to September is the dry season, the most welcoming time for tourists. During Kakadu’s wet season, December through March, the waterways are commonly flooded and well nigh impossible to negotiate.
It was on a February morning, well into the wet season, that Val Plumwood began her daytrip into Kakadu’s East Alligator Lagoon in search of Aboriginal rock art off one of the channels on the other side of the lagoon. At home in such places, since her work was to preserve them, she set off with full knowledge of the peril lurking in the form of saltwater crocodiles, the largest of crocodilian species. Male saltwaters commonly extend beyond the length of the 14-foot canoe that Val had borrowed from the Park Service. "Do not," she was warned, "go into the main river channel. The current’s too swift, and…there are the crocodiles."
Now that most of us have probably developed a sudden phobia of Australia altogether, let’s travel vicariously.
It was a day of drizzle and warm rain. Visibility was poor, but Val was intent in her search for the precious samples of this treasured art form. Hours passed as her canoe slid through the labyrinth of the seemingly endless shallow channels of the swamp. The drizzle turned to a hard rain powered by a harder wind. Yet she decided to try a deeper channel closer to the river that she had traveled the day before. Steep mud banks cropped up from the water’s edges, and she tried hard to suppress a growing sense of unease. She approached a sandbar and briefly disembarked, taking great care not to step into the water, for crocodiles are especially fond of edges. On the other side, she drew a sharp breath, for straight ahead was that larger channel she has been so adamantly warned to avoid, the East Alligator River! And then in the distance, she spotted a single immense rock balanced every so precariously on a much smaller rock. With a now intense premonition of danger, she was invaded with an acute awareness of the precariousness of human life altogether and the humbling realization that she had not sought the counsel of the indigenous Gagadgu who routinely worked with the Park Service and were generous with their counsel. Too late now.
In the balanced rock, Val had seen enough to sate her curious spirit. It was time to go home. She turned her canoe in the direction from which she had come.
A few hundred yards downstream she spotted what seemed to be a large stick. It wasn’t. Two eyes rose above water’s surface and seemed to stare right at her. They loomed closer. Steering with full force to avoid this creature whose home she realized she had invaded, she knew that an encounter was inevitable. Yet, she sought quick comfort from the rangers’ assurance that crocodiles don’t attack canoes. Wrong! The crocodile head straight toward her and slammed into her canoe again and again. With the riverbank turned to mud, her one exit to safety seemed to be the branches of a nearby tree. As she stood to leap, the crocodile rushed her canoe. Instinctively she waved her arms and shouted, "Go away!"–"Shoo!" maybe!
Just as she was crouching to jump, the crocodile leapt and fastened his jaws fiercely around her groin, whirling her into what she knew was the aptly named "death roll." This is terror in primal form. She was acutely conscious that few survived it, yet she knew also that crocodiles count on quickly subduing their prey, for their metabolism isn’t geared to a lengthy struggle. After what seemed forever, the roll was over. She stood on the river bottom, though still in the grip of his jaws. He was taking a break. She grabbed a branch, but not fast enough. Once again, twice again, he threw her into the death roll. Then suddenly, he let go. Enough was enough.
Before he could gather his energy and strike again, she leapt for the bank, that mud-packed slippery slope. Through split-second trial and error, she dug her fingers into the mud and made her way up the embankment. Once atop its rise, she was startled, amazed, that she was alive. But she was not yet home. Her trailer was many miles away, as was the park service. Night was falling, and she was severely wounded. Slowly she made her way through the thickets, calling out for help. She knew that if she were not found before morning, she wouldn’t make it.
"I struggled on," she recounts, "through driving rain, shouting for mercy from the sky, apologizing to the angry crocodile, repenting to this place for my intrusion."
Val’s bush experience kept her on course, though she was passing out periodically. Her goal was the swamp’s edge, where she would have the best chance of being heard or discovered by a ranger. Out of the dusk, she noticed what she thought was the light from a boat and called out. The light passed, but her call had been heard. A park ranger had gone by her trailer not long before, noticed it was dark, and began the search. Setting out on his motorized bike, he had heard her call and sent for a launch. It appeared in what seemed like an interminable time after she had eyed the passing light.
On the lengthy trek to the hospital, her rescuers spoke of returning the next day to shoot a crocodile. No, she said. "I was the intruder, and no good purpose could be served by random revenge."
By her own strength and will and knowledge, by the limiting metabolism of the crocodile, and by the good graces of the park service, Val Plumwood survived and has made an almost full recovery from her injuries. But it took her almost a decade to tell her story. So intent were the media on sensationalizing her encounter with the crocodile, on turning it into a "master over monster" narrative, and on downplaying the reality that a woman was not a helpless victim of a reptilian predator, that she waited until the sensationalism had worn off and she could tell her tale on her terms. It is about so much more than survival.
"Our final thoughts during near-death experiences," she recounts, "can tell us much about our frameworks of subjectivity. A framework capable of sustaining action and purpose must…view the world ‘from the inside,’ structured to sustain the concept of a continuing, narrative self… The lack of fit between this subject-center version and reality comes into play in extreme moments. … This is not really happening, [we tell ourselves]. This desperate delusion split apart as I hit the water. In that flash, I glimpsed the world for the first time ‘from the outside,’ as a world no longer my own…
…The gift of gratitude came from the searing flash of near-death knowledge, a glimpse ‘from the outside’ of the alien, incomprehensible world in which the narrative of self has ended.
Years later, Val Plumwood retells her story as "a humbling and cautionary tale about our relationship with the earth, about the need to acknowledge our own animality and ecological vulnerability." She accepts as the teaching moment of her encounter her sighting of the balanced rock. As a symbol of "the vulnerability of humankind,…. the balanced rock suggests a link between my personal insensitivity and that of my culture," she writes.
The words of the Psalmist echo:
"…what is humankind that You are mindful of us,
and the children of humankind that You care for them too?
Yet You have made us little less than the Divine,
You crown us with glory and honor.
You have given us dominion over the works of your hands;
You have put all things under our feet,
All sheep and oxen,
And also the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
Whatever passes along the paths of the sea."
(Psalm 8: 4-8, adapted, RSV)
Well, maybe the Psalmist got a little carried away. The idea that humans can be the prey of the so-called lower forms of life shatters altogether the vision of human dominion, of humans "as predators but never prey."
I think of the rock edicts of Emperor Asoka and his hard-won realization of humankind’s place in the larger world as informed by the teachings of the Buddha. And my mind’s eye moves across a suspension bridge of 2,300 years connecting Asoka’s Law of Piety and his edict to preserve lives that would certainly include that of the saltwater crocodile with Val Plumwood’s hard-won epiphany of humankind’s essential vulnerability, rendered so startlingly in the balanced rock. I linger over the lessons rising from the Creation Story of the Okanogan nation, suggesting that we honor the earth as children are called to honor their mother. I am reminded of that pastoral invitation to join in a biospirituality that recognizes and celebrates the sacred in all life.
How separate are we from the earth we inhabit? Are we at the pinnacle of the food chain, or are we fair prey, given the site and the circumstances? What wisdom do we draw from the image of the balanced rock? How vital a species are we as humankind? How accountable are we when we visit the home of earth’s fellow inhabitants without asking or most certainly, without an invitation? How welcome are we and how companionable with our fellow creatures are we when we visit a site that, no matter how hard it tries, restrains those creatures for our viewing pleasure?
Who are we anyway? Are we a part of or apart from? What do you think? Amen
Sources
The Bible, Revised Standard Version, Psalm 8: 4-8, adapted.
Humphreys, Christmas, Buddhism, Penguin Books Ltd., 1951, 94-95.
Kowalski, Gary , The Souls of Animals, Walpole, NH: Stillpoint, 1991.
Okanogan Creation Story, in World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, A Project of the International Religious Foundation, Paragon House, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1991, 207.
Plumwood, Val, "Being Prey," Utne Reader, July-August 2000, no. 100, 56-61. (Adapted from the Ultimate Journey, Travelers’ Tales, 1999.)
Ashoka's Edicts, Adapted Translation by James Couture. Found in: www.drizzle.com/~jcouture/91worldnotes/J%20Ashoka's%20Edicts%20-%20Simple.html
From the Introduction to In Asoka’s Footsteps, Dhamma in India, Nina Van Gorkom, October 1999. www.dhammastudy.com/Asoka1.html
www.sandiegozoo.org/zoo/homepage.php3
www.smcm.edu/academics/aldiv/art/webcourses/arth100/classical/maurya/mauryaintro.htm
http://gorp.com/gorp/location/australi/park/no_kakad.htm
www.flmnh.ufl.edu/natsci/herpetology/brittoncrocs/csp_cpor.htm
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