With dinner tonight I drank half a bottle of pinot grigio. Then I did up the dishes and prepared to go to bed. I took a glass of brandy with me, sat in bed for a while, and drank a second glass of brandy. I’d kind of like a third but I’m afraid of the hangover tomorrow morning. So I took two Tylenol instead, and I’m writing to you.
I spent the weekend at a non-residential Buddhist retreat. “Non-residential” means it ran from 9:00-4:00 on Saturday and Sunday but we got to go home in between. For me, that means I got to do my volunteer work Saturday night and then walk home talking with Suzie, as usual. Tonight, between dinner and the brandy, I paid bills. I hope to God I didn’t make any stupid mistakes when I wrote the checks – I’m not kidding when I say that two glasses is enough to put me away these days – but I triple-checked everything before I sealed the envelopes so it’s probably all fine.
The point of the retreat was for us to learn about the jhanas – intense states of mind brought on by highly-focused concentration, in which you experience a variety of ecstatic states and which are supposed to afford you (as a side-effect) any number of exotic psychic powers. I remember that walking on water and ESP were both on the list. (To his credit, the guy leading the retreat interpreted both of these claims in ways that made them not physically impossible.)
Anyway, during the last question-and-answer session someone asked the teacher to talk about the Buddhist precept against drinking intoxicants. (Feel free to re-read the first paragraph above and smirk.) And basically his answer was, “We’re confused enough already about the nature of reality, and about what’s going on in our lives. The last thing we need is to ingest some substance that confuses us even farther.”
I’ve heard similar answers from other Buddhists since I started meditating two years ago, and I suppose that the answer makes sense as far as it goes. But I have to wonder something. I concede that it’s not going to do me much good to drink a lot of alcohol just before I spend a lot of intense effort trying to understand the nature of reality, any more than I should get drunk before trying to solve a nasty differential equation (or pay bills … again, see above). But that’s different from endorsing a blanket prohibition of alcohol, and this for at least two reasons.
The first reason – the less interesting one – is that alcohol affects far more than just our rational intellect. It’s not merely a food that makes us more confused. Rightly used, alcohol can warm our hearts, soothe our emotions, gentle our spirits. Indeed, I have argued before that alcohol – like sex – is at least as much a spiritual pleasure as it is a physical pleasure. Buddhism is perfectly willing to allow you to take medicine when you are sick. Buddhists aren’t Christian Scientists. And alcohol can be a medicine for the soul. There must be an answer to this from the Buddhist side, but at any rate it takes some talking through.
The second reason – and the more interesting one – is that sometimes it is precisely alcoholic intoxication that leads us to truths which we have hidden from ourselves for years. Naturally this doesn’t always work. There have been writers who insist that they have to be drunk, or stoned, or otherwise high, to be able to create … and the evidence rarely bears them out. But I know for a fact that during the bad years of my marriage there were times I would get stinking drunk at night, then go out for a long walk, yell for half an hour at the stars and the night sky how unfair my plight was … and suddenly realize that I was bringing it all on myself by something I was doing. One way or another, the booze freed up my mind to see things that I hid from myself while sober. And then, once I saw them, I couldn’t go back. These drunken walks late at night had as much to do with my breaking free of my marriage as writing in this blog or fucking D’s brains out.
Even Plato acknowledges as much, in his long discussion of drinking parties in the Laws. He starts with the simple observation that people are far more likely to reveal who they really are when drunk than when sober. And from this he deduces that educators – at least those charged with training the characters of young adults – should periodically get them drunk under controlled circumstances as a way of testing who they really are. Polus, Ion, Lysis, and Charmides may all of them seem demure, retiring and respectful youths by the sober light of day: but are they really? How will they stand up to troubled times or powerful temptations? Get them drunk and then watch them, and you’ll have a pretty good idea. This is what the Athenian Stranger recommends in Book Two of the Laws and honestly he’s got a point.
In vino, veritas.
Does this insight explode the Buddhist teaching? Not really. It challenges any purported Buddhist dogma, no question about it. But always there is this caution in Buddhism that you shouldn’t cling too hard to anything, including views or teachings … and even Buddhist views or teachings. Hold everything lightly and empirically; be prepared to give up any idea when it conflicts with concrete experience. We hear this over and over. So maybe the Buddha would have recognized, if someone had posed the question to him, that sometimes alcohol has its uses … that we don’t have to give it up always, but only sometimes. That we shouldn’t cling to it the way we shouldn’t cling to anything else; but that we can use it the way we can use anything, if only we employ skillful means. That as philosophers, we should find nothing human alien to us.
Admittedly the historical man Siddhartha Gotama, charged with keeping order among all his monks, probably didn’t make exceptions to any of his rules. But, according to his principles, he should have.
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