The Monster Inside of You. Week 7: The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Dhammapada

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.

This week I tackled the Epic of Gilgamesh and also The Dhammapada. Gilgamesh was written in approximately 2000 BC, the oldest known story in the world, and is about 1500 years older than anything I’ve read to date. The Dhammapada is the oldest writings of the Buddha, from approximately 450 BC, which is a lot more in line with some of the other things I’ve been reading. I think it’s important to note the relative ages of these works and know how they fit together.

Gilgamesh was an actual, historical king of a Mesopotamian city called Uruk, around 2750 BC. The poem tells the story of how he angers the gods and then makes a best friend from a former wild man, Enkidu. They go rampaging, killing beasts for the sport of it, and that angers the gods. Enkidu is cursed and falls ill. When he dies, Gilgamesh is heartbroken and goes in search of a cure for his own mortality. He fails in that quest. Here are a few of my take-aways:

• The style of writing feels extraordinarily primitive to me. There is something very, very basic about the story, and many times it feels like it’s written with the mindset of a sixth grade boy: lots of graphic talk about sex and body parts, and lots of bloody killing. Until the last part, there wasn’t much nuance and there wasn’t a lot of reflection on anyone’s part.
• The Flood story is well-described here, lending credence to an actual, world-changing flood taking place at some point in history. The narrative of it is very interesting, especially the description of a square “boat” constructed and filled with pairs of animals.
• Book X is much more thoughtful than earlier sections. Gilgamesh is mourning his dead friend, searching for ways that he himself might become immortal. But the only immortal human tells him:

Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savor your food, make each of your days a delight, bathe and anoint yourself, wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace. This is the best way for a man to live.

• And that’s what it comes down to. Man will always and forever struggle with his mortality. We have and we will. The oldest and most enduring story is about the oldest and most enduring question.
• There is just not a lot of man-woman romance in these old stories. Only Penelope and Odysseus come to mind in the last few weeks. Here, Enkidu is seduced by the temple prostitute but there’s not much more mention of women than that. I was actually surprised to see a wife mentioned in the quote above!

The Dhammapada reminded me very, very much of The Analects of Confucius (Week 4). Books of aphorisms are very hard to read in big chunks, as I’ve already noted. It’s more a matter of scanning, trying to see how things fit together, if there are over-arching themes. I have a few thoughts here as well:

• Some of these sayings of Buddha are good sense, and we saw them in Confucius, and we see them in Proverbs. A wrongly-directed mind will do to you far worse than any enemy; a rightly-directed one will do you good.
• All the talk of “emptying” and forgetting the self is bleak to me. It’s a completely different mindset from the Greek philosophy I’ve read until now. It’s not Stoic; it’s a kind of blankness, a rejection of self but not an embrace of anything else as far as I can tell. 

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