by Josef Steiff
Similarly, perhaps the rest of us become “drunk” with our very desire for drink, or cigarettes, or food, or whatever our vices may be. We would not expect even the great Holmes to be able to prevent his reason being clouded by enough alcohol, and so perhaps can understand through analogy how he, too, might become “drunk” with the desire for cocaine.
I shall leave aside the curious matter of Holmes’s apparent resistance to opium smoke in “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” Watson enters an underground opium den in the wharf district, a “low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium smoke” to the point that he can barely see through it. He soon learns that Holmes has been sitting in the thick of the cloud for many hours in disguise. Either Holmes has a unique immunity or he’s high off his noggin and makes up the Isa Whitney case on the spot to avoid yet another lecture from Watson about drug abuse.
If Aristotle is right, then we will need more than an intellectual understanding of the relative magnitude of pleasures if we are to overcome our tendency to akratic behavior. We will have to master our emotions in order to resist temptation, a process that Aristotle thinks lies in consistent practice. Thus, it is through consistently practicing not giving in to his desire for cocaine, a desire that Watson assures us Holmes never loses, that Holmes manages to wean himself from the drug. Similarly, what you and I need to do is to practice resisting our own vices, until our new behavior becomes natural to us.
The Game’s Afoot
“Here you are, doggy! Good old Toby! Smell it, Toby, smell it!” [Holmes] pushed the creasote handkerchief under the dog’s nose, while the creature stood with its fluffy legs separated, and with a most comical cock to its head . . .”
—The Sign of the Four
Mystery solved now? Not yet, though the game’s afoot and well worth the candle. At best, we have been given some telling clues. While Aristotle’s theory accounts relatively well for our experiences of akrasia (and while he has far more to say on the subject than I’ve had space to convey), much remains to be explained. Most strikingly, it isn’t clear that he ever resolves the problem that led Socrates to deny that akrasia is possible. If our goal is pleasure, and we are free to act, why would we choose to follow an emotion that we know will lead us to less pleasure? It seems to make as much sense of our hypothetical case above in which Holmes, having only music as his goal, chooses to strike himself in the face with his violin rather than play it.
How can someone as brilliant as Holmes use cocaine? Socrates and Aristotle would have been unable to agree, and philosophers still can’t agree, two and a half thousand years later. Yet weakness of will is a mystery that we can’t ignore, since we care about our own wellbeing and don’t want to sabotage ourselves by opting for a lesser good over a greater one. The mystery of weakness of the will is the only case that Sherlock Holmes needed to solve for his own sake. It is also the only case that Sherlock Holmes failed to solve. Holmes could never break his cocaine habit on his own. It was good old Watson who “weaned him from that drug mania,” not the power of his own reason and will. Let us hope that we do better on this case than Sherlock Holmes.
Chapter 27
Like Some Strange Buddha
Cari Callis
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
—The Buddha
My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.
—“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”
Sherlock Holmes has become my spiritual teacher, though it took me forty years to figure that out. Arthur—dare I be so familiar with Holmes’s literary agent?—Arthur and I had something in common; we both loved Harry Houdini. And we both had a love-hate relationship with Sherlock Holmes.
For weeks, I carried around The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes Complete Volume from Wilson Junior High Library. The weight of it felt important. Back then I equated wisdom with the size and heft of the text. The Bible. The Arms of Krupp. The Tolkien Trilogy. Shakespeare. And this equation has for the most part remained true, at least until recently when nearly all of my books suddenly became digital and weightless, and yes, there might be a metaphor here.
You see, Houdini was a trained magician dedicated to conditioning his body to create illusions, and I wanted to be like him. His underwater feat of holding his breath for three minutes while extricating himself from handcuffs and various constrictions inspired me to practice everyday in the bathtub and the swimming pool.
It was his complex friendship with Arthur—I mean Doyle—that led me down the path of reading all of Sherlock Holmes’s cases the summer I spent as a lifeguard. All that holding of my breath had paid off. If Houdini loved Sherlock Holmes then I would too.
What I discovered was that while Houdini used controlled breathing to free himself from handcuffs and locked chains, Holmes extricated the truth from criminal cases and unsolvable mysteries—both those that appeared to be foul play and those that appeared supernatural—through his awareness. His ability to find answers and solve mysteries depended upon what he saw that other people did not. In other words, Holmes was struggling to extract himself from illusion.
Watson and I were both amused by how simple his methods were once we knew them, and in “The Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes—sounding like a Buddhist teacher—instructs us, “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
The Art of Masterful Control
Almost from the beginning of our introduction to Holmes, he’s equated with Buddhism. In The Sign of the Four, he is described by Watson as speaking brilliantly “on miracle plays, on mediaeval pottery, on Stradivarius violins, on the Buddhism of Ceylon, and on the warships of the future.” Watson adds that he spoke “as though he had made a special study of it.”
Stephen Kendrick, a Parish Minister of the Universalist Church, draws on the teaching of Buddhists, Christians, and Judaism to explore the stories of Sherlock Holmes and compares the focus that Holmes uses to see things without theories or preconceived ideas to the Zen practice of Bare Attention. Kendrick notes in his essay, “Zen in the Art of Sherlock Holmes”:
That Holmes would study Hinayana Buddhism seems surprising, until one actually looks at the ancient sources of this rigorous minority branch of Buddhism. Then the attraction becomes quite clear. Hinayana Buddhism, which claims to be the oldest, most accurate account of Buddha’s teachings, presents the Buddha as cool, rational, and emotionally distant, a strict and intellectually rigorous instructor.
Now that sounds like someone we know: cool, rational, and emotionally distant. In his first short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson describes Holmes by saying, “All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen . . .”
We learn that Holmes has masterful control of his emotions. This is one of the fundamental techniques of Vipassana meditation in the Hinayana—or more commonly as it is called, the Theraveda—tradition. The main idea of Theraveda, which literally means “The Teaching of the Elders,” is to promote the “Teaching of Analysis” which is not faith based, but originates with the idea that truth of any kind must be founded on critical analysis, personal experience, and reasoning as a means of coming to wisdom. To see things as they are is the ultimate aim of Vipassana or Insight Meditation.
In the Theraveda tradition there are many methods of meditation for developing mindfulness and concentration, and there are thousands of visualization techniques in the Tibetan tradition. The technique used is less important than the end result, which allows one to gain wisdom by eliminating the thoughts which obscure it. When we’re prejudiced and subjective, it’s impossible to be objective. The whole aim of Buddhism is to see dukkha (suffering) as dukkha, for what it is, not how we feel about it.
In Insight Meditation, when observing emotion, whether it is pain, pleasure, anger, or frustr
ation, the practice is not to eliminate feeling, but to observe each emotion as it arises, recognize it’s impermanence, and not react to it. If we’re reacting and continuously justifying our reactions, those details that Holmes uses to solve his cases will elude us or worse, delude us.
“It is of the first importance,” he cried, “not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.” (The Sign of the Four)
Throughout the stories Holmes is frequently instructing Watson on how to differentiate between that which is true and that which is not by demonstrating his use of his reason and observation. When we see something and make something out of it, we can’t help but impose judgments upon it.
What “bare attention” in the Buddhist tradition means is a practice of Insight Meditation that uncovers or lays bare things as they really are. Holmes is telling Watson that he must practice not reacting to his expectations and that this will lead him to insight knowledge. He also reminds him, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” In this first short story, Doyle has already laid out for us the philosophy of Sherlock Holmes.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
—Sherlock Holmes in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”
Consider Holmes as a roommate with his nocturnal violin playing, “self-poisoner” by morphine, cocaine and tobacco, “who keeps his cigars in the coalscuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece.” This doesn’t conjure up the image of a Zen Buddhist. But perhaps there is more to the violin playing, which Watson admits he does well, but as eccentrically as all of his other accomplishments.
That he could play pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me Lieder, and other favourites. When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air. Leaning back in his armchair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether was simply the result of a whim or fancy, was more than I could determine. (A Study in Scarlet)
Perhaps Holmes uses his focus on the violin as an Insight Meditation to uncover or reveal things as they really are. By keeping his body occupied with playing, he can observe his thoughts without classifying or clarifying, but by being a witness without commentary. This is much like what Buddhists do when they are performing Walking Meditation. As Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist teacher and monk describes it,
Walking meditation is not a means to an end; it is an end. Each step is life; each step is peace and joy. That is why we don’t have to hurry. That is why we slow down. We seem to move forward, but we don’t go anywhere; we are not drawn by a goal.
Holmes isn’t focusing on what he is playing as Watson observes, he simply plays when he needs to passively register his ideas, thoughts, and concepts.
The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
—Pema Chodron, The Places that Scare You
After being “resurrected” by Doyle from his tumble over Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes appears to Watson in the street disguised as a bookseller carrying a strange book called, “The Origin of Tree Worship.” Buddhists today still worship the Bodhi tree in Sri Lanka which protected Buddha while he was meditating to gain enlightenment. Early Buddhists struggled to figure out whether or not trees could be cut down lawfully, and though it was ultimately decided that they could be, it was documented that some trees contain sacred spirits, something people in India still believe today.
Holmes then follows Watson home only to expose himself as his long lost friend come back to life. Holmes is always disguising himself and allegedly fooling Watson, although whether or not Watson is really taken in is up for debate. But one thing is for certain; Sherlock Holmes loves to dress up, and does so ten times throughout his career. In addition to being a seaman, bum, an opium addict, and a woman, he’s disguised himself as a clergyman in “The Scandal in Bohemia” and a priest in “The Adventure of the Final Problem.” He’s definitely fond of portraying himself as a spiritual seeker.
And where has he been while Watson has been mourning his demise? He confesses he’s been traveling for two years in Tibet, where he “amused myself visiting llasa, and spending some days with the head lama.” Some Sherlockians have speculated that Holmes may have used this time to become a Dharma Bum, a Buddhist initiate practicing the meditation of awareness and observation. It’s a romantic idea, and certainly inspires all of the duality that Kerouac’s life and ideals contained, in that Holmes like Kerouac was a truth seeker who was also a very flawed human being.
The Practice of Patient Attention
So how does he access his genius? Perhaps there are clues to his success in The Yoga Sutras of Pantajali. This is a Hindu text and the foundation of all yoga practice. It owes much of its origins to Buddhism, and the samadhi techniques are identical to the jhanas in the Pali canon (the scriptures of the Theraveda tradition).
The first step is Attention (dharana). Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention than to any other talent.”
Most of us have driven somewhere and been thinking about something else and then suddenly realize we’ve arrived at our destination without any memory of how we got there. When we snap out of it and realize we’ve been functioning on “autopilot,” we understand how Holmes must view his comrade Watson, who no matter how hard he tries can never quite achieve the level of attention that is indispensible to Holmes in solving his cases. Watson’s whole life seems to function on autopilot. He is constantly amazed at the details that Holmes can discern from the smallest bit of evidence. But it’s not enough for someone to be able to focus their attention on the details as Holmes does, for many times in the stories Watson tries to make assumptions based on what he observes when he focuses his attention. Inevitably, Holmes sets him straight and proves him wrong.
The prolonged holding of the perceiving consciousness in that area of the brain is meditation (dhyana). The second step that Holmes uses is to fix his attention on a visible object with a single penetrating gaze. By doing this he directs his attention on the smallest details until they reveal more of their characteristic nature to him than a single glance could take in. He focuses the laser-light intensity of his consciousness on the crime scene evidence and takes in all the details that are always overlooked by Scotland Yard. In A Study in Scarlet, he demonstrates how fiercely his attention can be focused:
“The writing on the wall was done with a man’s forefinger dipped in blood. My glass allowed me to observe that the plaster was slightly scratched in doing it, which would not have been the case if the man’s nail had been trimmed. I gathered up some scattered ash from the floor. It was dark in colour and flaky—such an ash is only made by a Trichinopoly. I have made a special study of cigar ashes—in fact, I have written a monograph upon the subject. I flatter myself that I can distinguish at a glance the ash of any known brand either of cigar or of tobacco.”
It is just in such details that the skilled detective differs from the Gregson and Lestrade type. No wonder Watson’s head is in a whirl after witnessing the ability of his friend to discern such penetrating details. A couple of paragraphs later he tells Watson,
“I’m not going to tell you much more of the case Doctor. You know a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very or
dinary individual after all.”
Was this a foreshadowing of Doyle’s friendship—and the unraveling of that friendship over this very issue—with Houdini?
Holmes next task is to direct the perceiving consciousness to illuminating the essential meaning of the problem he’s examining and to free himself from his personality and separateness. This is contemplation (samadhi). These are the moments we find Holmes sunk into his chair with a four-pipe problem or scratching on his violin struggling to comprehend the meaning of his evidence. He struggles to illuminate the truth. And none of this would be possible if he wasn’t able to relinquish all personal bias, all desire to prove himself right (like Gregson and Lestrade), and all desire for personal recognition or profit.