The Monk, the Mystic and the Mosquito: Disease as a friend to humanity

Chapter 6 of Science Revealed

‘Ka ga imasu!’ I complained, as the monk led me into a sparsely decorated temple hall. ‘There are mosquitoes!’

‘Imasu ne,’ he said sagely. ‘Indeed, they exist’, but I wasn’t getting any sympathy from him, nor any smalltalk. He bade me sit down in lotus facing the wall and picked up the ‘kindly stick’, a wooden rod used to strike Buddhists on the shoulder if they become distracted. He lit a stick of incense, and I began to settle as he paced loudly behind me — teku teku teku, a pause as he turned, then teku teku teku as he paced back again (Japanese has great onomatopoeia, and teku teku is the sound of footsteps).

For a few minutes, it was just the footsteps, the wall and myself (though the existence or otherwise of the latter is a matter for contemplation). Then we were joined by a whine.

I could hear the mosquito meandering leisurely across the temple, a pregnant female seeking proteins as her accomplice patrolled, ready to strike if I moved. Teku teku teku… Pause… Teku teku teku. She landed on my neck, where I could almost feel the weight of her body as well as the prick of her hungry proboscis. There are hundreds of types of mosquitoes and Japan has its fair share, including tiny, barely audible ones, long spindly fiends who stab through your jeans, and pretty zebra-striped ones. She sounded like a particularly loud species, a big, slow-moving blood-tank adapted to temple life in symbiosis with the kindly stick and an ecosystem where dinner sits still.

Unable to slap at her without completely disgracing myself (whatever that may be), as well as my country and foreigners generally, I tried to concentrate on the koan, or Zen riddle, the monk had given me at our previous meeting: ‘Meaning is no meaning’. I had chosen to train at that temple specifically because it was of the Soto lineage where koan are not used, and I suspected that riddles would not help me break the links of dependent origination. My mind is full of questions, but I can’t imagine pondering one of them constantly for years to the exclusion of everything else. The renegade Soto monk had given me one anyway: ‘Meaning is no meaning’. It meant precisely nothing to me, so I directed my focus towards the wall in the orthodox Soto manner in that first session. Since then, however, spring had sprung to life with a chorus of insects, and my concentration was one-pointed on the one drinking my blood. Teku teku teku.

I tried to concentrate on the koan, or Zen riddle, the monk had given me at our previous meeting: ‘Meaning is no meaning’. It meant precisely nothing to me

In Zen practice one sits with the eyes half-open at the edge of the internal and external worlds, so I could follow her movements as she speculated around my face and forearms, and as she descended to settle on my wrist. There she sat, motionless as the Buddha, as I squirmed within and without. Teku teku teku. How ever did Shakyamuni Buddha’s tradition of sitting meditation arise in the mosquito-infested Indus Valley? Perhaps there is more wisdom in the whirl of the Dervish. Teku teku teku. Is the incense there to help keep the little bastards away? I remembered a mosquito I had pursued for over an hour in Mexico some years previously, to capture alive for a blood sacrifice, and considered the turn of the wheel of karma. Teku teku teku. Could I bring a mosquito net next time?

Countless tense breaths later she disengaged, and I breathed a mindful sigh of relief. My attention returned to the wall and I really began to concentrate, one hand resting in the other, tips of the thumbs touching. She buzzed around for a moment and landed on the base of my thumb. The root of suffering is desire, as everyone else in the temple knew perfectly well, but this insatiable little hungry ghost had a lot to learn! Teku teku teku. What impertinence, to bite an acolyte three times, including at the one spot where a tiny adjustment of the hand mudra would bring her oblivion. A modicum of self-restraint might be more appropriate in the temple, for the Buddha of Compassion’s sake! Teku teku teku.

What a riddle you pose, little sensei! The first Buddhist precept forbids taking life, but I have taken no precepts. The fourth noble truth is to meditate upon the paths, and you disturb my meditation. The 9th-century master Linji Yixuan said that if you meet the Buddha on the path, kill him, but what of the mosquito?¹ If the Buddha is everywhere, as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche taught, then is he not also in the mosquito supping at my hand, vexing me on my path to liberation?² Am I to kill her, then? If skilful action is that which prevents suffering, am I not perhaps even compelled to? What could it all mean? Meaning is no meaning! The rabbis were debating in the temple as the mosquito supped… teku teku teku… and supped… teku teku teku. I waited for the monk’s footsteps to pause… teku teku teku… and unleashed the one-pointed devastation of my Shaolin Buddha finger.

Squish…

… teku teku teku…

…smack.

It is a relief when the kindly stick strikes. Also called the silent yell, the stick reminds you where you are and what you are doing. The pain in the legs evaporates. The story in your head disintegrates. With my nemesis now a satisfying smear, I finished the session in peace, enjoying the beatific bliss of annihilation.

Twenty minutes later, I sat rubbing my aching legs as the monk chain-smoked cigarettes in less formal monkish get-up than before. I asked why he used a koan in a Soto temple. He ignored my question and asked what Japanese food I liked. I questioned him about how to deal with mosquitoes. He asked what sports I play. He was either being very Zen or very Japanese, or both. Almost every time I met a new Japanese person, whether a kid in the school corridor or the section chief at a formal introduction in City Hall, precisely those two questions would be asked of me. Adults almost invariably follow up with, ‘Do you like saké?’ and sometimes a conspiratorial chuckle.

Often Japanese monks seem more like civil servants than holy men, and the position passes from father to son. I once asked a pupil if he wanted to be a monk like his father. He explained that he wanted to be a baseball player, but if he didn’t make it then he would become a monk.

The monk before me seemed pleased that I liked cycling. ‘Do you like saké?’ he asked.

Japan is one big koan sometimes, with everyday banalities that tug at the stitches of the tapestry in your head. Despite the Buddhist precept to avoid drink and drugs that befuddle the mind, I have been in the company of very drunken monks — once after a lecture on Tibetan Buddhism, where they slurred and boasted until their Tibetan red-faced drunken master stumbled into a taxi. The minute he left, nearly everyone there reached into their robes for their cigarettes (having denied themselves temporarily out of respect for the Rimpoche whose teachings discourage smoking).

Yes, I like saké. How about you, do you like saké? I like cycling. And I like Aikido. I do not like football. I like sushi, but I do not like octopus sushi. Meaning is no meaning. I do not like mosquitoes. How about you?

Everyone hates mosquitoes, but mosquitoes love us. They look upon saints, sinners and Jehovah’s Witnesses without distinction, looking beyond the skin to the treasure within. Mosquito-sensei has a lot to teach us, more than cuddly bunny rabbits do, and more than the Archbishop of Canterbury does. Where they exist, these ankle fetishists serve as a very persistent reminder of our place in the universe and the food chain. We might imagine, to our continuing frustration, that the cosmos revolves around us. The mosquito knows we are here to satisfy her.

We might imagine, to our continuing frustration, that the cosmos revolves around us. The mosquito knows we are here to satisfy her.

I briefly had a job in a part of the rainforest of Chiapas where the mosquitoes formed a cloud around me wherever I went, and infants seemed to cry continually until they become accustomed to the onslaught. My lessons were accompanied by a slow, constant round of applause as the students slapped at their parasites. The teacher who ventured there before me fled within a week of arriving, and she was Mexican herself, but I stuck it out for three weeks, swelling into a big red itchy mess. Scratching merely turns the wheel of suffering and samsara, and if you are really unlucky you might end up with a bacterial colony eating into your flesh. An itchy bite teaches the virtue of non-action. Turn the mind to another object, and it will pass, eventually, like everything that arises.

Unless, of course, you get malaria.

Malaria is more than just irritating; claiming several lives per minute, this parasite is one of the biggest killers on the planet.³ Yet, like the mosquito, the disease has its place in the grand scheme of things. As well as producing the oxygen we breathe, the rainforests where malaria is endemic shelter half of the planet’s species, and attempts to develop them had always been doomed to feverish failure — at least until World War II, when battle commenced in the bloodstreams of soldiers fighting in the tropics. Two principal weapons were developed against malaria: the prophylactic chloroquine, and DDT, the world’s first pesticide. The war unleashed a chemically enhanced Bigfoot, opening inroads for logging, farming, mining and settling beyond the new frontier. The WHO Global Malaria Eradication Programme began in 1955, speeding up the rate of destruction, and by 1962, 1% of the Brazilian Amazon had been cleared.⁴ Today 20% is lost, and over half of the Nepalese forest has been lain waste.⁵

Today 20% of the Amazon is lost, and over half of the Nepalese forest has been lain waste. Malaria protected us from ourselves for millennia.

Malaria protected us from ourselves for millennia. Today it kills more than ever before, but humanity continues to proliferate spectacularly, generating 80 million new souls per year.⁶ The plague spreads to the detriment of most other species, and is more parasitic than either mosquitoes or malaria.

Order arises organically in the world, and we lay meaning on top of that. Malaria kills. I don’t like malaria. Malaria is bad. I like chloroquine. Chloroquine saves lives. Chloroquine is good. I don’t like mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are bad. DDT kills bad. DDT is good… or is it? It soon became clear that DDT travels up the food chain and kills more than just mosquitoes. By 1972, when DDT was banned in the US, the iconic American bald eagle had dwindled to only 500 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states, and peregrine falcons had been entirely eradicated from the Eastern states.⁷ Numbers have since started to recover, but DDT is still used in many countries, including Brazil where I edited this very chapter in a rainforest shack, swiping at the mosquitoes buzzing around me.

I don’t like mosquitoes; but that is my problem, not the entire biosphere’s. Mosquito-sensei held us in an irritating balance for aeons, and we scratched our way out. We are inextricably linked to the rest of the planet, some of which troubles us but is still part of us. Meaning is fleeting; it changes as quickly as we change our minds. When we manipulate the world around us according to the theories we impose upon it, the damage can last for aeons. Attempts at pest control in earlier times involved importing predators, and so the mosquitofish, the common starling and the cane toad were all introduced to Australia. The logic was solid, even algebraic (if X is bad, and Y kills X, then Y is good). But the rest of the eco-system was not factored in. All three invaders out-competed native species, driving many to extinction or onto the endangered list.⁸ The cane toad plague is still advancing unchecked across Australia, decimating cane beetles and starving the species that once ate them. Their toxic secretions poison predators as well, and they carry salmonella.

Cane Toad

Other invasive species have been similarly disastrous. Back in the 1890s, a German rude mechanical living in New York was moved by poetic sentiments to import birds mentioned by Shakespeare, including 60 common starlings.⁹ The flock grew to 200 million, and its sweet song is heard today throughout the continent, silencing indigenous species wherever it goes and destroying crops en masse. A short-sighted British rationalist decided to cultivate Nile perch for fishing in Lake Victoria in the 1950s, and by 1980 it had taken over 80% of the lake’s biomass and wiped out over a hundred competitors.¹⁰ Also in the 1950s, the African honey bee was introduced to Brazil. Again, the logic was solid from a limited perspective, because it makes plenty of honey in hot weather — but once again, the rest of the ecosystem was obliterated by hubris. African bees hybridized with local bees (oops!) and the highly aggressive ‘killer bee’ that resulted has proliferated all the way to Florida, Texas and California, with more than 1000 fatalities.¹¹

Today’s environmental meddling has shifted to a higher level. Biochemists have turned their cataracts towards the genetic code, but how much do the experts actually know about genetics? The Human Genome project investigates only the DNA sections called ‘sense’. The other 90% is called ‘nonsense’ or ‘junk’, because it doesn’t mean anything to biochemists; they assume its role is purely structural. We are left with a parts list that codes for proteins, but no instruction manual. Scientists have very little idea how proteins are put together or how the order of expression changes in such a precise and responsive manner. Even so, they feel confident enough to release their creations from the lab, assuring the public that their dispersal can be controlled.

I’m not a molecular biologist, but I do know that plants are essentially well-evolved DNA dissemination machines. As a historian, I also know that the assurances of scientists promulgating prestigious technologies are worth next-to-nothing. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the transgenic grasses and other species escaped. They also hybridized, and are out-competing their unmodified cousins in the wild.¹²

The new frontier in genetic science also allows us to filter out unwanted foetuses, and one Indian study revealed that 73% of expecting couples would consider termination if their baby was going to be born deaf.¹³ Thalassaemia, Down’s syndrome and autism can all be detected well before birth; what deviation from the norm is next up against the wall? I had the pleasure of teaching a ‘special needs’ class in Japan, but the students were the real teachers, being natural, impulsive, friendly and generally very happy — the exact opposite of normal teenagers. Are we looking at a future with no people sufficiently abnormal to see through the dry dust of etiquette, no autists with Buddha-like concentration? Could humanity be rationalised at the embryonic stage?

73% of expecting couples would consider termination if their baby was going to be born deaf.

Rationalism has been rationalising society since the 17th century, when the incarceration of the insane began, along with paupers and others who didn’t meet the standards of the Age of Reason. Before that, the village idiot was often considered closest to God. ‘Raiseth thou a cry against madness? By thy life, thou shalt have need of it,’ warns the Talmud.¹⁴ The merry madness continues in Corinthians, where ‘the foolishness of God is wiser than men’.¹⁵ There is a rich tradition of holy madmen in Europe, including St. Sabas who spent the day in a dungheap, St. Andreas who drank from puddles and slept naked outside with the dogs, and St. Simeon who threw peanuts at the church congregation and dragged around a dead dog.¹⁶ ¹⁷ St. Francis himself preached in his birthday suit.¹⁸

My friend the psychiatric nurse often hears lines like, ‘You know, time doesn’t exist’, which is certainly worth bearing in mind. Neurotics are often intelligent, obsessive pattern-seekers who think outside the parameters of normal assumptions. ‘If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm,’ wrote William James, ‘it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of requisite receptivity.’¹⁹ My beloved granny, who had periodic stays in mental institutions and six rounds of electroconvulsive shock treatment, used to take me on her knee and tell me all about the races on other planets, what they traded between themselves, and the messages they send to us. My parents weren’t very happy about it, but my first Fisher-Price alternative cosmology protected me from the heavy shades of the rational universe that teachers, newsreaders, and other right-thinking people tried to peddle to me later. Meaning is no meaning.

The label ‘insane’ depends entirely on where one draws the lines, and even professionals draw carelessly. In one study, a professor sent students to eight mental institutions across the US, where they each mimicked madness with only one symptom: they claimed to hear the word ‘thud’.²⁰ All were diagnosed and admitted, and despite the plants explaining that the ‘thud’ had ceased immediately after admission, the average period of incarceration was 19 days.

One hospital challenged the professor to send more, and he accepted the challenge and specified the month. The staff declared that 20% of 193 applicants that month were frauds, though the professor had sent none at all. Humiliated, professional psychiatric bodies concluded that the problem must be human error, so questions were designed to diagnose disorders. The completed questionnaires were tested out, and detected mental disorders in over 50% of normal Americans.²¹

Mental disorders, psychedelic experiences, and other excursions beyond the veil are very rarely dangerous to anything except our collective faith in the status quo. Bizarre ideas and compulsions question our assumptions regarding reality, and that is why they are policed. According to R. D. Laing:

The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from ‘reality’ than many of the people on whom the label ‘psychotic’ is affixed.²²

Statesmen are not the only threats at large, and neither are killer bees nor the honey-monsters breeding them. Short-sighted rationalists of all persuasions carve up the world like a gang of necrophiliacs sawing up a corpse. Physicists create technology that generates nuclear waste for their great-grandchildren. Businessmen suck with all their might on the breasts of the goddess, oblivious to her pained expression. In the rationale of the market, it makes sense to pulp ancient Tasmanian forests for Japanese serviettes, or to batter and fry Atlantic cod to the edge of extinction.

Meaning matures as the picture unfolds, and bias is intrinsic to language and programmed into our neurobiology, where Bacon’s idols and the gods of coercion distort the shadows on the wall. The world outside of the cave is more nuanced than observers shackled within can possibly imagine, and in any interaction with it a degree of fear and awe might be in order, but we have moved into an era of unprecedented and reckless rationalism. Decisions with implications for millions of people and millions of years are made based on the narrow slice of existence that decision-makers take into account. At best, that can only be a rough sketch of the world; at worst it is a paranoid hall of delusions or buffet table of opportunity.

Short-sighted rationalists of all persuasions carve up the world like a gang of necrophiliacs sawing up a corpse.

In Tibetan Buddhist funeral rites, the cycle of birth and death is honoured by leaving monks’ corpses on the top of towers for carrion-eaters — though these days they rot slowly as there are not enough vultures. The DDT tragedy was repeated with Diclofenac, a livestock drug that proved to be toxic to vultures. When it was introduced in the early 1990s the population plummeted by over 95%, and animal carcasses lay rotting all over the subcontinent.²³

Once again in 2008, the World Health Organization embarked on a massive anti-malaria program, spraying insecticides inside houses and infusing them into freely distributed mosquito nets. This philanthropy kills other insects besides mosquitoes, which impoverishes the whole food chain, and there is almost no research into the health effects for humans sleeping under the nets. Malaria deaths have dropped dramatically, but will they keep dropping? The first eradication program nearly wiped out malaria in Sri Lanka — but not quite. After a historic low of 17 cases recorded in 1963, a generation that had grown up unexposed and without developing immunity was victim of a massive resurgence, with over a million cases in 1970.²⁴ The WHO rejoined battle again, with estimates that the programme would cost $2 to $8 billion per year until… teku teku teku… until further notice, because even WHO directors admitted that malaria can’t be eradicated, ‘at least until some scientific breakthrough makes eradication more realistic.’²⁵ ²⁶

Meaning is no meaning, but with all the irritation and buzzing around our heads, do we have the patience to sit still and meditate on the riddle before settling on the answer? How many slaps from the kindly planet do we need before we fix our dreadful posture? Can you hear footsteps approaching across the temple? … teku teku teku… The kindly stick is raised to strike, my fellow initiates, but upon whose neck will it fall? … teku teku teku… The itch is intensifying, but can we remain still, and keep our minds and bodies in check? … teku teku teku… Can we solve the riddle? … teku teku te…

…ku.

This is chapter 6 of Science Revealed, available on Psychedelic Press here. Read about other meditations on the benefits of disease with respect to Coronavirus in And Then Came the Virus.

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