Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary Hardcastle (best novels for beginners .TXT) 📗

on Foulness” (asubha kammatthana). The paintings illustrate the various uses of corpses as objects for contemplating impermanence. Following the great Theravadan philosopher Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga text (“Path of Purification”), the artist rendered decaying corpses in rather comprehensive stages of dismemberment and putrification. According to Buddhaghosa, staring at a bloated corpse will be particularly useful to me if I’m feeling overly attached and arrogant about the shape and morphology of my body. If instead I’m feeling snobby or bigoted about my skin’s color or complexion, I should focus on the livid corpse that ranges from green to blue-black in color. Or, if I mistakenly feel that my body is my own, I am to rectify this error by meditating on a worm-infested corpse (puluvaka). As Buddhaghosa explains, “The body is shared by many and creatures live in dependence on (all parts and organs) and feed (on them). And there they are born, grow old, and die, evacuate and pass water; and the body is their maternity home, their hospital, their charnel ground, their privy and their urinal.” Buddhist “mindfulness” (meditational awareness) about the body is being aware of its transience, its brevity, its fugacity. The physical body is slowly macerating, and to try to hold onto it or recompose it is a pipe-dream.

The single issue that invited comment from film reviewers when Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life was released was its wallow in the grotesque. One exclaimed that the film’s “ramshackle bouts of surreal physical comedy—a clotted mass of frenzied bodies, debris, mud, and gore—induce feelings of revolt and despair.”53 In light of the film’s critique of transcendentalism, however, this reviewer got it just backward. Far from despairing, the Pythons aimed to smash the deceptive veneer of puritanical snobbery that devalues the flesh and overvalues the invisible spirit. Like Buddhism, Python asks us to “say yes” to our true nature, filled as it is with impermanence and unpleasantness. At first this may seem jarring and disturbing, but in the long run it is preferable to self-deception through figmentary transcendent reality.

Buddha’s rejection of a permanent transcendental soul is known as the anatta, or “no-self ” doctrine (and the companion doctrine that rejects the idea of a permanent God is called paticca samuppada, or “dependent arising,” because it denies the need for any transcendent uncaused cause). The most important Buddhist critique of the transcendental soul finds place in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. It is the idea that belief in unseen, eternal, and divine realities ultimately distracts us from our own humanity. Transcendentalism dehumanizes us by feeding selfish craving. If we embrace a worldview that pivots on the idea that we will attain immortality, then we are going to be overly concerned with our soul’s protection and its future fate. We become more concerned with saving our own souls than valuing and attending to the needs of those around us. Simply put, belief in a soul and a heaven of blissful happiness actually makes you less ethical in this life.

The rejection of souls, heaven, and God, does not lead, as so many critics contend, to bleak egoistic nihilism. Many transcendentalists foretell a gloomy picture without the security of otherworldly meaning, predicting rampant hedonism (pure pleasure seeking) or nihilistic apathy. The Buddha disagrees and thinks that these life patterns are to be avoided as much as otherworldly dogmatism. The extremes, excesses, and general sufferings of the hedonist strategy and the nihilist strategy are revealed in the film.

Terry’s Jones’s Mr. Creosote, for instance, is the giant embodiment of the crass pursuit of sensual gratification. After gorging himself on multiple servings of food and wine at a fancy French restaurant, his unchecked desire for the pleasures of chocolate puts him over the edge. Though he claims he can eat no more, Cleese easily seduces him with a single, small, “vaffer-thin” chocolate mint. Mr. Creosote then begins to inflate and he soon explodes, showering the restaurant in his blood and entrails. Obviously, such hedonism and self-gratification is not an appropriate fall-back for those who reject transcendental metaphysics and ethics. Nor is it appropriate to give oneself over to despair or indifference. The folly of that is illustrated in the movie’s gruesome portrayal of a liver transplant. After Graham Chapman starts the bloody business of removing this poor chap’s liver in his dining room, his partner, Cleese, chats up the man’s wife (Terry Jones in drag) in the kitchen. Cleese asks if she too would give up her liver, but she replies, “No . . . I don’t want to die.” Cleese perseveres and introduces her to Eric Idle, who steps out of her refrigerator and commences a musical tour of the sublime immensity of the universe and the tiny insignificance of her life:

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving

And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,

That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,

A sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,

Are moving at a million miles a day

In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,

Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding

In all of the directions it can whizz

As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,

Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed

there is.

So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure

How amazingly unlikely is your birth

And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space

Because there’s bugger all down here on earth.

“Makes you feel so sort of insignificant, doesn’t it?” Cleese and Chapman ask. “Can we have your liver then?” She gives in—“Yeah. All right, you talked me into it”—and the two doctors set upon her with their knives.

Just as Mr. Creosote succumbs to sensual overindulgence, this housewife opts for a groundless underindulgence. Just because she realizes she lives in an almost infinitely