Professional Wrestling and Confucian Li

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A classmate of mine recently raised a question: why do religious rituals change over time and how can we tell if those changes are good or bad? He also proposed a potential solution: the use of the Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean, "You might be required to alter the method or meaning of a sacrament to meet conform to new circumstances, but taking it too far will ruin the point of the ritual in the first place. And I wonder if learning how to navigate that line is an act of spiritual virtue."

I have recently been thinking about the Confucian equivalent, the Doctrine of the Mean, as a potential answer to the problem. Confucius, who is famous and perhaps infamous in his desire for people to honor rituals, was critical of rituals which didn't accomplish their goal, were inappropriately used, or did more bad than good.

Here are some relevant quotes to give you some Confucian grounding. The first quote is Confucius criticizing a family for misusing a ritual. The second is him allowing for changes to rituals based on human needs. The third is him expressing how important he finds ritual. The fourth is his expression of the Doctrine of the Mean.

3.1 The Ji family had eight ranks of dancers perform in the court of their family compound. Confucius said of this, “If one can tolerate this, one can tolerate anything!”

3.4 Lin Fang asked about the root of li. The Master said, “An important question! In li it would be better to be frugal than to be extravagant. In funeral ritual it would be better to be guided by one’s grief than simply to attend to the ritual stipulations.”

6.27 The Master said, "Once an exemplary person has studied broadly in patterns and constrained them with ritual, indeed he will never turn his back on them."

6.29 The Master said, The Central Mean in conduct is where virtue reaches its pinnacle. Few are those who can sustain it for long.

I am not a fan of Means-As-Dogma. When folks use, "the answer is always somewhere in the middle," as some sort of cosmic truth-seeking technique it often leads to false equivalencies (the concept of opposites is fraught, "What's the opposite of a fork?" and sometimes the in between makes things worse, "How can we compromise with these racists?"). However, I do believe being guided by the mean is a valuable concept when combined with the Aristotelian principle of practical wisdom.

When practical wisdom is applied to the Doctrine of the Mean it essentially is... being able to make a pro/con list or a decision grid or otherwise make a choice while also knowing its consequences. The Doctrine becomes a heuristic which doesn't say, "The center of two arbitrary edges is always the best," but rather, "Everything has pros and cons, oftentimes extreme solutions have many cons, so keep those in mind; check your biases when you're making a decision because there may be invisible cons that you must make conscious."

How does this apply to spiritual rituals?

People do rituals. Rituals usually have goals and practices. The ways we do rituals have pros and cons. For example:

Ritual: The Bachelor Party

Goal: have a hoot and a half with your pals before you get married.

Practices: going out and getting drunk, going to a strip club, playing poker, drunkenly rambling about how much you care about your buddies, saying "this is your last night of freedom," etc.

Pros: it can be pretty fun, it offers some men who are uncomfortable being emotionally expressive an opportunity to talk about how much they care about their friend, these sorts of parties are good for the economy because they cost $$$.

Cons: it sometimes sends the message that marriage is intrinsically unfun, sometimes dudes make mistakes during the party, some grooms get pressured into doing the party even though they don't want to (because it is a tradition).

Rituals also have facilitators. Usually, all participants are facilitating some aspect of it, but there is usually one or a handful of primary facilitators. In this case, the Best Man.

The Best Man of practical wisdom, informed by the Aristotelian golden mean, is aware of the pros and cons of the Bachelor Party. He would love to accomplish the goal of making sure his best pal, The Groom, has a great night with his pals. However, when he plans the evening he does everything he can to facilitate the pros and mitigate the cons, both by changing the traditions (he knows The Groom doesn't want a stripper at the party and The Best Man is a respectful friend who wouldn't force the issue) and by making modifications (he makes a plan with the Bridesmaid to have their party intersect with the Bachelorette Party so that the Bride and Groom can be with each other in a fun context, eliminating the "marriage is a bore" messaging of the Bachelor Party).

He also knows when to keep traditions. Getting turnt is a classic tradition of the Bachelor Party and it definitely has its consequences, but the Best Man of practical wisdom makes the informed choice that the social lubricant is of great benefit and the hangover will heal within a day; he buys everyone a nutrition shake as a hangover cure for tomorrow.

When I have facilitated spiritual rituals I have done my best to act in a similar manner. All spiritual rituals are guided by the Confucian principle of Li: the appropriate following of ritual protocol towards achieving the goal, maintaining the headspace needed for rituals to be engaged with appropriately, and adapting the ritual, if needed, in beneficial ways.

Here are two major ways to fail at Li:

1) Do it by rote, no direct engagement with the material. It's an empty prayer of a hungry child, asked to bless the food *quickly.* It's a gross strip club that nobody wants to be in, but we're stuck here out of obligation.

2)We, out of practical reasons, drop an aspect of the ritual and don't follow the standards without replacing it with something which will still allow us to accomplish the goal.

When 2) occurs it... Breaks the kayfabe. Kayfabe is a concept from professional wrestling which can be described as the feeling of everyone knowing something is fake, but still holding an emotional and mental headspace that the thing is real. When a wrestler's tag team partner swings in at the last second to rescue their pal we cheer and get excited even though we know it was scripted. Fake or not, I enter into a similar mindset when engaging with spiritual practices. 

In wrestling, kayfabe gets broken when a wrestler obviously half asses something, has some particularly bad acting or maneuvering, mentions a non-relevant aspect of the wrestling business, and so on. This doesn't happen often, professional wrestlers are masters of Li.

In spiritual practice, in my experience, kayfabe gets broken when we flinch at a practical issue ("how divinely important can this be if we're not gonna bother going through with it, really?") or when, like, someone's cell phone goes off in the middle of something important. There are many spiritual practitioners worse at Li than The Undertaker and John Cena.

In my personal circles I'm known as the dude who will push to complete a ritual even when practical issues come up. My soon-to-be-wife spent some time living on a Navajo reservation as a kid, her stepdad was Native American, and this led to me getting an opportunity to participate in a traditional ceremony out in the woods. Part of the night had my friend and I hiking in the dark, up a hill and through a creek. We were required to make it up to a waterfall which was further up than we expected. The water was freezing, the climbing was tough, and my friend begged to turn back, but I refused to quit and I didn't let him go either. I was already aware of the nature of kayfabe-breaking and didn't want to let it happen, he was dealing with some important emotional issues and my instinct said this would be helpful to him.

When we finally made it up to the waterfall the spiritual experience became about pushing past pain and fear to get to something beautiful. It had a huge emotional impact on my friend and it became a central aspect of his personal narrative when he ended up asking out his now-fiancée. Note that I also made an adaptation to a potential ritual practice: we didn't climb the waterfall because it would have been far too dangerous.

Li can do a lot of good.

In Confucianism there is another concept, wu wei, "effortless action," as it is usually translated. Wu wei is trained over many years and after much practice. It is the ultimate form of practical wisdom, where the actor is able to rely on their vast experiences and knowledge to take the exact action needed in the moment without having to overthink or sit down and make a pro/con list. They are adaptable when it is needed, they are headstrong when it is needed. Our rituals go best when they are facilitated by someone who is moving with wu wei. I personally experienced that feeling the night we hiked to the waterfall.

When we look at how rituals have changed over time we get to ask pretty deep and complex questions about the rituals' goals, practices, and the pros/cons of how the rituals are done now vs. then. The only way to fully grasp this is through a combination of analysis and experience: thinking through the rituals, trying them out, experimenting, and designing ones which best achieve your goals. When we engage with ritual with the concepts of the Doctrine of the Mean, Li, and Wu Wei in mind it gives us a chance to optimize our spiritual experiences and best connect to Tian, Confucius's word for Heaven and The Divine.