The books of the Bible

1. The books of the Bible constitute myths of the founding of a highly idiosyncratic culture--idiosyncratic because it was monotheistic as opposed to polytheistic and because it articulated a moral vision of the cosmos. The unique relationship of the Jews to the god of the universe is articulated in many places in the Bible. As God promises Abram, later Abraham: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you. All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you" (Gen. 12.2-3).

The divine compact with Abram shows the relevance of God to human experience in general and the Jews in particular. God "will set your borders from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates" (Exod., 23.31). However, God has a condition, to wean the Hebrews away from polytheism and devote worship exclusively to him:

You shall not bow down to them [other gods] or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me (Exod., 20.5).

The mythic narrative of the Jews is problematized repeatedly in the Bible because in book after book for various reasons the Jews abandon monotheism. By the time of Hosea and Amos, the Jews have disregarded the compact altogether: "There is no fidelity, no mercy, no knowledge of God"

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conceptions. Disaffected though they might be with Western institutional religious practice and eager to enact cultural critique, they rarely understand their own religion well enough to have shaken it off by way of Zen: "This is why the displaced or unconscious Christian can so easily use either beat or square Zen to justify himself. The one wants a philosophy to justify him in doing what he pleases. The other wants a more plausible authoritative salvation than the Church or the psychiatrists seem able to provide" (Watts 24). In other words, for Westerners, Zen becomes an expression of New Age, pop-culture sensibility, not the content of zen per se. Taoist connections entered American popular culture in the 1970s, with the publication of Zukav's Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics in 1979, and Capra's The Tao of Physics in 1976. These texts deal with particle physics and atomic theory. They resonate with Taoism because atoms, held to be in constant motion, are described in Capra's text as involved in "cosmic dance" (Capra 212ff). The same dynamic is described in Zukav's text. Consider that reference in light of the fact that light is made up of material particles in motion. If that is so, light, a species of m

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