i’ve been crawling through walter ong’s Orality and Literacy for a while now, savoring it a few pages at a time. this is one of many luxuries being out of carleton has provided (though the tradeoff, that i have to wear business casual for 40 hours a week, has me wishing i could go back.)
one thing that has alternately amused & frustrated me is Ong’s focus on western scriptures and literature. i suppose it’s only to be expected - he was a jesuit priest and his book was published in the 80s. but my rudimentary knowledge of buddhist history gives me the sense that the development of this religion both tests and demonstrates for ong’s ideas.
the historical buddha lived sometime around the 5th century BC. we don’t know for sure, because nothing was written down. for four hundred years, the sayings of the buddha were maintained through recitation. the role of monks was always to maintain the teaching of the buddha for as long as they could. as the religion developed, becoming institutionalized and state-sponsored under the ashokan empire, its practices of recitation grew more sophisticated. no one monk could recite the entire canon - instead, it was scattered among many monks.
the stability of recitation that buddhists achieved meant that sutras could be effectively treated as texts. this enabled a kind of abstract analysis that ong associates with textual study, and resulted in the creation of the abhidhamma. where the sutras are essentially colloquialisms, the abhidhamma are the product of sustained, systematic philosophical thought. they take the teachings which were orally situated in the lifeworld of siddartha gautama and render them abstract, infinitely applicable, replicable. but this philosophy is still essentially oral in character: its written form isn’t treatises and arguments, but summaries and lists - what ong might call a memory aid.
once the scriptures get written down and buddhism develops into a more literatre religion, shit gets WILD. this is the origin of mahayana buddhism: the greater vehicle, which states that there are an infinite number of buddhas and bodhisatvas teaching in an infinite number of universes which are eternally going through cycles of growth and decay, anyone can write a new sutra and say it was revealed to them by a buddha, and so on and so forth. essentially: an already fruitful culture of oral abstraction, given widespread literacy and prosperity (and cultural contact with hellenism), rapidly blossoms into something bold and strange.
but even before this blossoming was the doctrine of impermanence. it’s pretty straightforward, as far as doctrines go: there is nothing permanent. everything material is subject to change. (the corollary being: don’t get too attached to what you’ve got.) as a metaphysical position it seems closely linked to, specifically, the transience of the spoken word. Ong attributes Plato’s philosophy of permanent metaphysical forms giving rise to our physical world to his literacy, but the illiterate religions of south asia took a different route
text isn’t as stable in 2016 as it was in plato’s day. the digital word can change when you’re not looking at it; it is produced and discarded on a whim. the physical referent for the word isn’t ink held on paper - it’s a sequence of stored charges that can only be interpreted by an elaborate device. we have very suddenly come into this paradigm, where written language can be treated with the disposability of spoken language. it has brought us to this churning boil of an election; who knows what other repressed demons it will bring forth.
