“Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about 10 pages; the majority to zero pages.” - Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
We can learn many important lessons from classic literature. They are the most valuable signals which survived after stressors filtered out the noisy data over time. Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas are two of the longest and most influential novels I have read recently. We can learn many parallel lessons from Books 1 and 2 of Musashi and Volume 1 of The Count of Monte Cristo.
In these beginning volumes, both Musashi and Edmund Dantes went through tragic events that compelled them to start their hero’s journey. Themes of karma, lonely suffering, delayed gratification, and existentialism ran throughout both novels. Both experienced wrongful accusations of crimes, separation from love interest, solitary confinement, impending death, meeting of the mentor, and the start of their independent adventures. What they learned from solitude, death, and their mentors were similar, but their reactions toward love and revenge couldn’t be any more different.
The attitudes toward love and revenge reflected the differences between Buddhist Japanese and Christian European culture. At the start of Musashi, Otsu was engaged to Matahachi, Musashi’s friend, and didn’t fall in love with Musashi until she saw him endure unjust suffering at the hands of Matahachi’s mother, Osugi. Osugi blamed Musashi for taking Matahachi to war and not bringing him back. She also thought that Musashi manipulated Matahachi to run off with another woman so that he can get with Otsu. To uphold family honor, Osugi vowed to kill both Musashi and Otsu personally. While on her mission for revenge, she constantly invoked the name of bodhisattvas, family honor, and filial piety. To Osugi, her mission for revenge wasn’t personal, but a righteous religious mission to slay demons. Yet every time she attacked Musashi and Otsu, they pitied her for being an old woman and empathized with her love for her son, so they did not seek revenge against her.
For Dantes, revenge was personal. At the start of The Count of Monte Cristo, Dantes was engaged to Mercedes. When he met his rival Fernand, he was naive and cordial, and even invited him to the wedding feast. He was ignorant of how Fernand and his fellow sailor Danglars conspired against him and how Villefort convicted him until years later. The shocking revelations came during his worst sufferings in prison, and that eventually pushed him to plotting the most intricate revenge secretly over many years. Dantes’s secretive, personal, and experiential revenge contrasted with Osugi’s public, familial, and ideological revenge.
Otsu easily switched lovers initially, but remained committed to Musashi afterwards despite all the suffering, loneliness, and dangers she endured. Mercedes was already engaged to her true love Dantes initially, but after 18 months of suffering and loneliness, she broke down and settled for Fernand, whom she loved like a brother. Both of them vowed to die with their lovers, but ultimately Otsu was able to follow through for over a decade, while Mercedes was unable to endure the loneliness after 18 months. Perhaps this is because Otsu was able to occasionally get news regarding Musashi, while nobody had news of Dantes and assumed that he died in prison.
Early in Musashi, Takuan the Zen monk told Otsu, “Why, when we could live out our lives in a flower-filled paradise, do we all prefer to weep, suffer, and get lost in a maelstrom of passion and fury, torturing ourselves in the flames of hell? I hope that you, at least, won’t have to go through all that.”
He then advised Otsu on love and marriage, “‘Marry thyself to the truth’ means that you shouldn’t become infatuated with a mere mortal but should seek the eternal.
“There is something I known for certain. Applied to your life, wedding honesty means that you shouldn’t think of going off to the city and giving birth to weak, namby-pamby children. You should stay in the country, where you belong, and raise a fine, healthy brood instead.”
Passion and suffering go hand in hand. When you ride the waves of nonduality, you have to experience the highest highs and lowest lows. That was the path Otsu chose and committed to when she became infatuated with Musashi. To Otsu, there was absolutely no other man who could substitute Musashi and she was willing to wait for him forever.
To Mercedes, no man could substitute Dantes… but Fernand was already like family and aggressively pursued her constantly. After Dantes was arrested, Fernand went off to war, and Dantes’s father died, so Mercedes had nobody left. When Fernand returned from war, Mercedes was overjoyed to see a familiar face, and Fernand seized that opportunity to marry her. But even at her wedding, she missed Dantes.
Dantes and Musashi also had very different views on love. Dantes was publicly in love with Mercedes from the very start. He corrected his employer, “She is not my mistress, she is my betrothed.” He also made it clear to everyone that he yearned to see Mercedes as soon as possible and the wedding day was the happiest day of his life until it got disrupted. In contrast, Musashi avoided questions about Otsu, in fact, it took him years to confess his love to Otsu. He would often intentionally avoid Otsu, because he felt that she would tempt him off the Way of the Sword. For Musashi, it was more important to become the greatest swordsman than to settle down and live happily.
“Even her great love for Musashi—a love for which she would have sacrificed anything—was incapable of holding him. She knew what his purpose in life was, and why he was avoiding her. She had known since that day at Hanada Bridge. Still, she could not comprehend why he considered her a barrier between him and his goal. Why should his determination be weakened by her presence?”
Musashi sought to avoid both love and revenge to refine his swordsmanship. Both were distractions. For Dantes, love and revenge were strong motivators that defined his actions. Love and revenge must go hand in hand. Rene Girard has explained in mimetic theory how mimetic desires lead to mimetic conflicts. The Buddhist method of giving up desires also allows you to avoid mimetic conflicts.
“It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy.” - Warren Buffett
Even before his arrest, Dantes felt that his passionate happiness was too good to be true. He felt that happiness is undeserved prior to completing his hero’s journey.
“The truth is,” replied Dantès, “that I am too happy for noisy mirth; if that is what you meant by your observation, my worthy friend, you are right; joy takes a strange effect at times, it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow.”
Danglars looked towards Fernand, whose excitable nature received and betrayed each fresh impression.
“Why, what ails you?” asked he of Edmond. “Do you fear any approaching evil? I should say that you were the happiest man alive at this instant.”
“And that is the very thing that alarms me,” returned Dantès. “Man does not appear to me to be intended to enjoy felicity so unmixed; happiness is like the enchanted palaces we read of in our childhood, where fierce, fiery dragons defend the entrance and approach; and monsters of all shapes and kinds, requiring to be overcome ere victory is ours. I own that I am lost in wonder to find myself promoted to an honor of which I feel myself unworthy—that of being the husband of Mercédès.”
There’s a bittersweetness at the peak of your happiness, because you know that it will be all downhill from that point. And that you never know if someone jealous is out to ruin your happiness. Perhaps that’s why, as Takuan remarked, “we all prefer to weep, suffer, and get lost in a maelstrom of passion and fury, torturing ourselves in the flames of hell.”