Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

Just so I have it, I'm posting my comment to a blog entry at:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/07/22/deathly-hallows/
The blog and the comments are very good reading too.

# NeoLotus on Jul 31st, 2007 at 11:31 am

Since everyone else has done a great job of commenting I only have a few things to add from a non-Western cultural point of view.

The scene when Harry goes to meet Voldemort in the forest to allow himself to be killed reminded me of the scene in “Shogun” when Blackthorn is about to commit seppuku but is then reprieved. It is also, to some extent, reminiscent of the scene in “The Last Samurai” when Katsumoto is dying and says of the cherry blossoms that “they are all perfect.” Charles Taylor’s review of “The Sorcerer’s Stone” is spot on in regards to these stories being deeply rooted in the here and now. Just the act of breathing is a miracle that is thrown away in our daily lives until we know how few breaths are left. Harry’s recognition of this, whether Rowling knew it or not, is very Buddhist in its syncretism with East Asia.

For those who keep insisting that something “otherworldly” or “sublime” must somehow be part of this story, well, people see what they want to see unless they have learned to see what is. I truly believe that Rowling is showing how none of that is necessary in order for good and evil to exist in the world. As Dumbledore says at the end of Chamber that it is our choices that determine who we are when Harry so desperately wanted to be in house Gryffindor rather than house Slytherin. Voldemort exemplified all that is evil by killing Harry’s parents. For what?

And in the explanation of Voldemort’s life in Half-Blood Prince, we see that it was the events and circumstances of his life that created the monster he eventually became. And in Buddhist (karmic) fashion the hallmarks of house Slytherin were of a propensity to cruelty and indifference born from a wizard who thought himself superior to others. As the recipient of that legacy born from the most egregiously authoritarian circumstances of Tom Riddle’s mother and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father…..well, one does not need Satan to explain the stupidity that humans are capable of. All that is needed, as Mencius says, is for there to be a lack of empathy and commiseration for a human to not be a human. Dr. Gilbert during the Nuremburg trials bears this out when he realizes that evil is the absence of empathy. The creature under the chair at the end of The Deathly Hallows shows precisely what a life born without the benefit of and without the capacity for love and empathy looks like.

If there is indeed a God, what people need to understand about it is that it is not the name or the book or the words that matters. What matters is whether we follow what God (if there is one) etched in our hearts about liking kindness over cruelty. The Malfoys, Narcissa particularly, makes that point very deeply at the beginning of The Half-Blood Prince when she begs Snape to save her child’s life. Bellatrix provides the counter-point to emphasize those who do not know what to truly value in the time we have been given between birth and death. The curt nod of Draco on the platform in the epilogue is the recognition that his own son would not exist had it not been for the defeat of Voldemort.

In the end, this story is in fact a morality tale stripped of unprovable dogmatic belief systems in favor or the more practical realities of living in the here and now and what we do with the time we are given. It will provide the surest method of critical judgement for a whole generation of children (and perhaps some adults) to know whether a doctrine is worthy of following or not.

Think about that the next time you vote. (My apologies. I just had to throw that in there.)