I have always been taught that childhood is not an exemplary state of being. Rather, it is a hurried stage for becoming, a gestation inside of our respect for our elders, who we believe to be wiser because of their experience. College students on the precipice of adulthood especially look to imitate adults. We applaud “adulting.” We spurn the childish.
In my Major East Asian Religious Texts seminar last year, I encountered Daoist and Buddhist philosophies that taught me differently. Far from inadequate, the childlike state is seen as an ideal. Children are closer than others to being an Uncarved Block: not a blank slate, but a way of effortlessness. It is the idea that things in their original simplicity carry natural power. Action occurs, paradoxically, without any forced action at all. An easy harmony can fall into place, and one can cultivate compassion and courage.
Seeing life reframed in this way, I felt bewildered: that I had been inching forward on an infinite tightrope, and all of a sudden, earth surrounded my feet. Like a child, I wanted to play! What had I missed in my fret to become?
By the time I came home from college in March, I had forgotten about this feeling. I read Camus and went about my way just as he wrote: at the exact tempo of the plague, with dreary perseverance. Then, “Avatar the Last Airbender” appeared on Netflix. ATLA is an animated show wherein child heroes save the world from imperialists. These heroes include Avatar Aang, the only one able to master all four elements. I binged all three seasons in a golden spell.
ATLA reminded me of the Eastern spiritual texts I had once read. I pulled my seminar notebook off my bookshelf. I smiled at a lousy sketch of a cosmic lineage of Buddhas and thought of the Avatar’s endless rebirths. I saw a note about the light which beams from between Buddha’s eyebrows toward the Eastern part of the universe. It was like Aang’s glow in the Avatar state. The show relies on such influences from South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The Avatar itself is an idea from Hinduism.
One passage in particular made me rethink Aang’s character. Manjushri is asked in the Lotus Sutra to name “any living beings who, by earnestly and diligently practicing [a] sutra, have been able to attain Buddhahood quickly.” He responds: the Dragon Princess, supernaturally powerful at only eight years old. Onlookers cannot believe it! Most take “immeasurable kalpas” to achieve enlightenment. How could a child do so “in the space of an instant”? It was not despite her youth, but because of it: She had fewer years to learn the ways of the world and thus less to unlearn.
In Mahayana philosophy, all beings share an “original enlightenment.” We are already enlightened before we learn anything. In fact, life often makes us less enlightened. So while Western philosophy teaches us that our ideal selves come with time, age, and experience, the Dragon Princess and Aang instead return to their childlike state. When Aang meditates or practices yoga, that is his return to original enlightenment.
ATLA’s creators probably made Aang 12 years old because of the children’s show market, not Eastern philosophy or religions with similar teachings. But for me, seeing original enlightenment in ATLA is useful because the world of empire depicted in the show so mirrors our own — and it was the traits of a child that helped save that world. Can they save ours?
In the West, Enlightenment is understood as an Age of Reason, a reckoning with serious matters in serious ways. Perverse systems must be taken seriously. Yet, this philosophy alone has too often meant that the ethos of sophisticated knowledge outweighs simple values, and logic outweighs care. The cost is a collective confusion about who we are. Paradoxically, today’s taboo on the childlike — the wisdom of our natural selves, the honest facing of what brings us joy and what makes us suffer — may have become yet another form of repression.
Children recognize wrong not by the rule of law or the beliefs of the “experienced,” but by the feeling in their bones. They do not “wait” to gain experience before confronting problems. They do not protect “tradition,” or promote “innovation,” rather than enact (or abolish) the obvious. The Uncarved Block has made me reconceive my adulthood and the legal binary that created it. It’s made me realize that though adults should be respected for their experience, they have often been schooled into systems which children see shot through with nonsense.
The effect resembles the folktale of The Emperor’s New Clothes: a naked emperor parades through town, in what he has been told is clothing invisible to the stupid. Except for a child, who shouts that he is wearing nothing at all, the crowd showers him with applause.
ATLA’s childlike ideal is life-affirming. It runs contrary to Western emphasis on the accumulation of experience alone, to the model of a linear life with growth in one direction. Instead, it shows us a model for returning to Eastern ideas of original enlightenment. It attests to what even Locke observed: there is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men. It shows us that we can be less like an arrow, and more like Sokka’s boomerang — we can finally embark home, to the child hero patiently waiting within us.
“To think like a child is to have a mind that is open and untainted and neither overly complicated nor distanced from existence by a systematic view of life,” one scholar writes of Eastern philosophies. In this enlightened sense, to be childlike is not the same as being childish: Aang, for example, got frozen in an iceberg for 100 years because he ran away from his responsibility. ATLA’s child heroes have plenty to learn.
Yet, as they learn, their childlike self remains. They remain serious about important things — love and loyalty, bravery and virtue. They also remain silly, with individual senses of drama and delight: Aang zooms around on a ball of air, Sokka trips on cactus juice, Katara scolds them both. Their expression remains free, with a natural humor found in Eastern spiritual texts, too. As I watch these heroes save the world, being childlike itself feels exemplary. And now that I’m twenty years old, I have a lot of unlearning to do.
Winona would like to thank Professor Ryūichi Abé for his teachings and her sister Michaela Guo for her childlike honesty.
Image Credit: Photo by Robert Collins is licensed under Unsplash