Thoughts on Buddhism

[Angrboda]

Scientists would be hard-pressed to find and interview feral children who've been reared in a cultural vacuum to probe for aspects of quasi-religious thinking. In reality, the closest we may ever get to conducting this type of thought experiment is to study the few accounts of deaf-mutes who, allegedly at least, spontaneously invented their own cosmologies during their prelinguistic childhoods. In his book The Child's Religion (1928), the Swiss educator Pierre Bovet recounted that even Helen Keller, who went deaf and blind at nineteen months of age from an undiagnosed illness, was said to have instinctively asked herself, "Who made the sky, the sea, everything?"

Such rare accounts of deaf-mute children pontificating about Creation through some sort of internal monologue of nonverbal thought-thought far removed from any known cultural iterations or socially communicated tales of Genesis - are useful to us because they represent the unadulterated mind at work on the problem of origins. If we take these accounts at face value, the basic existential problem of reasoning about our purpose and origins would appear not to be the mental poison of religion, society, or education, but rather an insuppressible eruption of our innate human minds. We're preoccupied with why things are. Unlike most people, these deaf-mute children - most of whom grew up before the invention of a standardized symbolic communication system of gestures, such as American Sign Language (ASL) - had no access to the typical explanatory balms of science and religion in calming these bothersome riddles. Without language, one can't easily share the idea of a purposeful, monotheistic God with a naive child. And the theory of natural selection is difficult enough to convey to a normal speaking and hearing child, let alone one who can do neither. These special children were therefore left to their own devices in making sense of how the world came to be and, more intriguingly, in weaving their own existence into the narrative fabric of this grand cosmology.

In an 1892 issue of The Philosophical Review, William James, brother to the novelist Henry James and himself arguably the world's most famous psychologist of his era (some years later, he would write the classic Varieties of Religious Experience), penned an introduction to the autobiographical account of one such deaf-mute, Theophilus Hope D'Estrella. "I have Mr. d'Estrella's permission," James tells us, "to lay before the readers of The Philosophical Review a new document which is most interesting by its intrinsic content.” For uncertain reasons (perhaps literary), D'Estrella writes of his early childhood in the third person, but it's indeed a remarkably eloquent and beautifully composed piece of work. Born in 1851 in San Francisco to a French-Swiss father he never met and a Mexican mother who died when he was five years old, D'Estrella grew up as an orphan raised by his mother's short-tempered best friend -another Mexican woman who, judging by her fondness for whipping him over the slightest misdeeds, apparently felt burdened by his frustratingly incommunicative presence. With no one to talk to otherwise, and only wordless observations and inborn powers of discernment to guide his naive theories of the world, D'Estrella retreated into his own imagination to make sense of what must have been a very confusing existential situation. For example, he developed an animistic theory of the moon that hints at the egocentric nature of children's minds, particularly with respect to morality:

He wondered why the moon appeared so regularly. So he thought that she must have come out to see him alone. Then he talked to her in gestures, and fancied that he saw her smile or frown. [He] found out that he had been whipped oftener when the moon was visible. It was as though she were watching him and telling his guardian (he being an orphan boy) all about his bad capers.

D'Estrella writes also about his notions of the origins of natural objects and events in the world-namely, the sun, the stars, the wind, and the ocean. In these observations we see something like a natural creationist bent, one that reflexively imbues objects in the world with pragmatic functions and clear purposes:

One night he happened to see some boys throwing and catching burning oil-soaked balls of yarn. He turned his mind to the sun, and thought that it must have been thrown up and caught just the same - but by what force? So he supposed that there was a great and strong man, somehow hiding himself behind the hills (San Francisco being a hilly city). The sun was his ball of fire as a toy, and he amused himself in throwing it very high in the sky every morning and catching it every evening.

He supposed that the god lit the stars for his own use as we do gas-lights in the street. When there was wind, he supposed that it was the indication of his passions. A cold gale bespoke his anger, and a cool breeze his happy temper. Why? Because he had sometimes felt the breath bursting out from the mouth of angry people in the act of quarreling or scolding.

Let me add as to the origin of the ocean. One day he went with some boys to the ocean. They went bathing. He first went into the ocean, not knowing how it tasted and how strong the waves rolled. So he was knocked around, with his eyes and mouth open. He came near to being drowned. He could not swim. He went to the bottom and instinctively crawled up on sand. He spit the water out of his mouth, and wondered why the water was so salty. He thought that it was the urine of that mighty god.

It's worth cautioning that D'Estrella would have been about forty years old when he wrote about these early childhood experiences - experiences that were retrospectively given voice by a mind that had since learned language. In fact, by the time he authored these personal accounts, D'Estrella had become an accomplished artist and was employed as the drawing instructor at the unfortunately named California Institution for the Deaf and Dumb.

The Belief Instinct, Jesse Bering