Sagehood

Recently, I participated in a weeklong retreat at MAPLE with a group of extraordinary people, who came together to dialogue about a meta-curriculum for an ecology of wisdom practices. That is quite a mouthful, so let me make it simple with bullets:

• we want to know how to help more people become wise, in a time where wisdom is sorely needed
• we believe that wisdom can be best increased in the world through an ecology of practices that, like an à la carte menu, can be tasted by, and tailored to individuals and groups to meet them where they are, and provide opportunities for them to grow into their own wisdom modality(s). ¹

In these dialogues, I was reckoning with the different ways we were talking about wisdom. Who were the wise ones we thought about when speaking? For example, is there a difference in how you think about wisdom when thinking about Socrates or when thinking about Laozi? Was Jesus wise in the same way as Confucious? or Confuscious wise in the same way as Siddhārtha? Are shamans and tantric healers wise? If so, in what ways that are common to all wisdom teachers, and if not, in what ways are they distinctly wise?

This is not the question I want to exhaust. It is merely preamble. What I want to say is that the kind of wisdom I am most attracted to, is what I will call “sagehood.” Sagehood is a class of wisdom that can be traced to Daosim, Chan Buddhism, and Neo-Confucian thought. ² Shamanism is adjacent to the Daoist traditions, but I want to say that shamans belong to the category of “crazy-wisdom”, the energies of which are mastered by the “truly wise” sages. There is a sense in which the energy “has” or “takes over” the Shaman, whereas the Sage has “taken on” or “taken in” that energy as part of their repertoire. IOW, you might see a sage performing like a shaman, but you will not see a shaman speaking like a sage. We might say that the shaman is transmitting energy, whereas the sage is transmitting wisdom--- although these are not exclusive terms, and obviously the highest sages combine both.

This tension between the shaman who dances with energy, and the sage who dances with speech, was present in the anti-language period in Chinese philosophical history. As Chad Hansen ³ puts it, the central issue was between performance-dao and *discourse-dao, *and argues that “Daoism begins when the performance-dao--- the precise course of action being aimed for--- becomes a focus of theory. ⁴

I want to say (and I think Hansen might agree) that the sage inhabits the fault-line between *discourse-as-action *and course-of-action; where the meaning here is that discourse, when rightly paired with energetic transmission, is itself a course-of-action, rather than a form of propositional, interpretive, explanatory, or meaning-making speech. The words themselves are less like meaning-packets, and more like projectiles, or surgical tools. They are chosen in situ to accord with the student’s particularities. This suggests that the sage is working with *immediacies, temporalities, *and contingent specificities. This helps us deliminate the difference between the western version of a wisdom stack, which is associated with “principles”, “universal goods”, “values”, or “virtues.”

In this new SEEDS series, I would like to make the case for the Sage, as an exemplar of wisdom, and Sagehood as the *kind of wisdom we need today. *Looking forward to your comments.

Further Resources

• Original Content Material