Metis, Episteme, Empathy and Embodied Wisdom-Intellect

There is no such thing as a swole Buddha, I used to argue. The very act of getting swole involves a deep sense of embodiment, but the Buddha as we are supposed to wrestle with him is a disembodied concept. You have to disembody the Buddha anywhere you see him, the koan goes:

When you meet the Buddha, kill him

(This little koan has a very different meaning to the CCP than it does for others)

To me now, this koan says “Every time you find you idolize something, take it off of the pedestal.” Which, like many tenets of Buddhism seems like a bit of a recipe for depression.

Koans, Buddhism, meditation are all entering the mainstream, or what the Ribbonfarm folks who loved Seeing Like a State like I did, would call episteme. Episteme sits in opposition to metis, which is an embodied, and I would argue, ritualized wisdom with a lot of cruft to loudly signal that one is following the ancient, ritualized wisdom.

As episteme swallows up more and more wisdom from the periphery we get a lot of what I would call deracinated wisdom. Ideas about eating vegetarian might make a lot of sense in a lush place like India, with incredible amounts of arable land, many growing seasons and a whole system and culture of metaphors and understanding about the natural environment around. It is not a surprise that vegetarianism even within South India drops off when you move towards marginal lands where the lentil-rice crop basket doesn’t do as well. To truly understand if some wisdom is meant for you, you have to apply it and feel whether it works for your body, in this environment at this time. Being a vegetarian in Boston is logistically very difficult and will push your body to extremes it may not be able to handle. Learning the limits of the intersection between your body, your principles and your current location is exceedingly hard to do. For me at least.

We get piecemeal ideas that improve our overall wisdom, often from people we ‘see ourselves in’. It is much easier to hear wisdom from people you identify with, and TV shows often do this for me. I overidentify with many characters and learn cautionary tales from their life lessons - their deracinated wisdom leaks into mine. I find myself often questioning the pursuit of my desires because some character did that and it ended up bad for them. This is actually very disembodied wisdom though. I am not a character in a TV show with exaggerated personality attributes. I am just a human being, and whatever situation I am in…ultimately no one can judge that. Not even me.

I need to go try things out for myself and see if it works. I’m all episteme even in my wisdom, and little metis. If I can just get the intellect to quiet down for a bit, maybe I can go make some mistakes and learn from them, be shaped in body by them. Maybe even become a kind of swole, embodied person, even if I am not a Buddha. After all, seems like people seek to disembody that guy pretty quickly.