Ten Old Masters

In a way, we�re sorry. What we had really wanted to do was talk about our ten favorite painters. Then we got to thinking that it should be the ten painters whose stock is currently highest, who are most in vogue in a crudit�s-and-hired-bartenders way. (Whichever, you�d have heard about Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Vel�squez, and Manet, all notably absent here.) Then we realized that, if you were anything like us, what you really needed was remedial work, not a pajama party or a year in finishing school. So, here they are, the ten greatest�we suppose that means something like �most seminal��painters of all time. GIOTTO (GIOTTO DI BONDONE)

Now, What Exactly Is Economics,and What Do Economists Do, Again?

Economists are fond of saying, with Thomas Carlyle, that economics is �the dismal science.� As with much that economists say, this statement is half true: It is dismal.

An equally helpful definition of economics was offered by American economist Jacob Viner, who said, �Economics is what economists do.�

More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that economics concerns itself with the use of resources. It is about changes in production and distribution over time. It is about the efficiency of the systems that control production and distribution. It is, in a word, about wealth. This alone should be enough to engage our attention.

Over the past several decades, economics has experienced a substantial surge of interest and notoriety. Suddenly economists have found themselves not only studying wealth but also enjoying it. This is largely a result of their relationship with politicians. Where once rulers relied on oracles to predict the future, today they use economists. Virtually every elected official, every political candidate, has a favorite economist to forecast economic benefits pinned to that official�s or candidate�s views.

Besides, even if being in a position to feel on top of current events doesn�t constitute a sufficient lure, people still want to be able to understand why their neighbors are all rushing out to buy mutual funds. Not that, as contributor Alan Webber is about to show, the economists are necessarily ready to tell them.

Remedial Watching

A Whirlwind Tour of British Poetry

Don�t even think of unpacking. Just wash out yesterday�s socks, then prepare to get a grip on six hundred years of poetry in motion. GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Bifel that in that seson on a day,

Classical Music for the Disconcerted

Ten paradigmatic works, offered as a map for the ear by contributor Jon Pareles.* JOSQUIN DESPREZ:

Philosophy Made Simplistic

Philosophy is the study of everything that counts, just as those ancient Greeks, who were as interested in the structure of matter and the existence of God as they were in the nature of good, always said it was. Today, though, what with the pressures of specialization (not to mention the glut of Ph.D.�s), the physicists have walked off with matter and the theologians with God, leaving the philosophers either to go on pondering �What is good?� or to become computer programmers. Don�t tell them that, though; they still think they have the last word on anything that falls within one or more of the following five areas of classical philosophical investigation:

Logic: What�s valid, what�s invalid; what can profitably be argued and proven, what can�t; how to test a categorical syllogism; how not to keep making silly mistakes all the time. Or, as Tweedledee says in Through the Looking Glass, �Contrariwise, if it was so it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn�t, it ain�t. That�s logic.�

Ethics: Which actions are right and which ends are good. Moreover, does the rightness of actions derive from the goodness of their consequences? And while you�re on the subject, is the virtuousness of a motive to be inferred from the rightness of the actions that it tends to prompt? Also, is it less bad to shoplift from Kmart than from the corner hardware store even though the salesperson at Kmart explained the fine points of home rewiring to you and the guy who runs the hardware store doesn�t know a switch from a socket? And other more or less practical aspects of human conduct.

Aesthetics: Beauty and art and taste, standards and judgments and criticism, Aristotle and Oscar Wilde and Sharon Stone. Why do we like what we like? Does art per se exist, or is it just patches of color and hummable tunes and words in a row? Is the point of a work of art that it be representative of something, or that it express its creator�s identity, or that it engage its audience? And is there a relationship between what�s beautiful and what�s good?

Epistemology: Do we really know anything and, if so, what? And how do we know it? And how do we know that we know it? And how do we know that we know that we know it? etc. Note: Ever since Wittgenstein (see page 329), formal philosophical inquiry has been centered less on classical epistemology and more on language, less on the question �How do you know?� and more on the question �What do you mean?�

Metaphysics: The big one: The search for (and ransacking of) ultimate categories, with its goal an understanding of the all-inclusive scheme of things otherwise known as the world and of the part man plays within it. Past discoveries have included existence, essence, time, space, God, self, and cause. Stay tuned. But don�t hold your breath: A lot of philosophers now characterize metaphysics as �overpoetic� and �prescientific.�

What You Need to Know Before

Herr Doktor, What�s Wrong with Me?

Somebody�was it Freud or one�s freshman-year roommate?�defined a �neurotic� as a person who could neither love nor work, but who was still, nine days out of ten, able to get around. In other words, whatever trouble he or she may be having with unresolved anxiety, guilt, or revulsion, a neurotic remains capable of coherent speech, good manners, tasteful outfits, and what psychologists�or was it one�s freshman-year roommate?�call reality-testing.

The neurotic (unlike the psychotic, about whom more in a minute) is not out of his mind. If anything, he�s too much in it, condemned to try to use his neurotic symptom (the obsessive-compulsive�s ritual hand-washing, for instance) as an outlet for the least objectionable part of an objectionable impulse and, usually, as a barrier against the enactment of the rest of that impulse as well. Where do these objectionable impulses come from? Childhood sexual wishes, mostly, some as early as in-crib masturbation and feces smearing, some later and directed against one�s parents, nearly all of which proved painful or unwieldy and were repressed, that is, chased out of consciousness and �forgotten.� As if all that weren�t enough, the fledgling neurotic�s libido�his sex drive and primary energy source, lying inside him, as Freud pointed out, like so much crude oil�regresses, finding safer, more manageable satisfactions in an earlier, less intimidating stage of sexual development.

Don�t take it personally. This one-two punch is the fate of almost everybody, and it generally connects with us in mid-Oedipus complex, just when we�re trying to catch the bus for kindergarten. But not everybody has to deal with it all over again later. That chore falls to the adult for whom adult-style goings-on� or the lack of them�have become so painful, so unwieldy that he reinstitutes the long-dormant repression-and-regression process. Tied to a period and a pattern in the past, with things going badly now, he repeats, or acts out, over and over and over again, the trauma he can�t �remember.� As Freud once sighed, �Today, neurosis takes the place of the monasteries, which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.�

Like cancer and AIDS, the other mythic diseases of the century, neurosis is a grab bag of ailments, syndromes, and prognoses, with a complex causation closely linked to individual susceptibility. Reach in and you�re likely to pull out one of the following, quaintly divided here, as they were in Freud�s day, between the �transference� and the �narcissistic� varieties.

The transference neuroses, also known as the classical neuroses, were the ones Freud thought psychoanalysis could actually cure. They include:

Those Old-Time Religions

Have you ever noticed how prophetic revelation seems to give some people a new lease on life at about the same time others their age are gearing up for midlife crisis? Buddha, Jesus, and Zoroaster all got the Message when they were hovering around thirty, a birthday that signals middle age in any culture where people start begetting as teenagers. True, Muhammad was forty when he first chatted with the Angel Gabriel, but then Islam as a whole was a late bloomer. So to those of you who find, after scanning the great faiths outlined here, that the monotheisms of the West and the polytheisms of the East all leave you cold; that you can�t really get behind karma, nirvana, yin and yang, the Holy Trinity, or separate dishware for meat and dairy; and that you�re as depressed and alienated as ever, our advice is: Stay loose and keep your eyes fixed on the heavens.

JUDAISM

14 million believers, mostly in Israel and the United States.

It�s c. 1700 B.C.E.(Before the Common Era, a designation considerably less irritating to Jews than the Christian b.c., Before Christ). Heaven is crowded with divinities of the moon, sun, stars, trees, and irrigation, as well as with various celestial dog-and-pony acts. Enter, below, a Sumerian named Abraham, who insists that there�s only one God and all the rest are wannabes. Acting on direct orders from this God, whose name is Yahweh (but for pete�s sake, don�t say it out loud), Abraham has packed up his kin and his kitchen utensils and relocated to the Promised Land, on the other side of the Euphrates, thereby earning his entourage the name �Hebrews� (from an ancient word meaning �the other side�) and establishing an exhausting pattern of Jewish migration that will repeat itself for the next four thousand years. Pleased with Abraham�s obedience and general salt-of-the-earth comportment, Yahweh promises him offspring galore (Abraham is ninety-nine at the time), along with rights to the Promised Land�a place called Canaan, later renamed Palestine, after the Philistines, who occupied part of it�in perpetuity. The agreement is oral but binding; it simultaneously marks the debut of monotheism in the world and sows the seeds of future unrest in the Middle East.

But all that�s family history. Judaism as a more or less coherent religion didn�t really get rolling until Moses led a group of transplanted Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and trekked with them back to the Promised Land. Moses took his orders directly from Yahweh, who was quite clear about what He expected from His Chosen People, issuing directives on everything from ethical conduct (�Thou shalt not kill,� �Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor�s wife,� etc.) to diet (�Hold the bacon�). The shalts and shalt nots were recorded, along with much divinely revealed history, in the Torah, later compiled and edited into the first five books of the Bible.

If this is beginning to seem like an awfully long story (and we�re only up to about 1300 B.C.E.), so much the better. In the absence of a homeland, a strong national identity, or even passably tolerant neighbors, history is about all the Jews had to rely on to keep their traditions alive through the next several millennia of persecution, exile, and general tsuris. History, that is, and the law, as embodied in the Torah and buttressed by the scholarly commentaries on same, were later collected in the Mishnah and the Talmud, Judaism�s next-most-important books.

Because Jewish law and tradition evolved as a kind of survivor�s guide to life on a hostile planet, Judaism is somewhat more practical and here-and-now oriented than many other religions. (The childhood trauma that might explain Judaism�s you-only-live-once mentality: the Diaspora, which originally referred to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. and the subsequent exile of the Jews to Babylonia, known as the first Babylonian Captivity, later to the chronic dispersion of the Jews across the face of the earth.) Jews don�t believe in the doctrine of original sin, for instance, or in a devil powerful enough to instigate anything worse than a parking violation, and they spend considerably less time fantasizing about a blissful afterlife than planning for a comfortable retirement in Florida. It�s true that ethical conduct�especially helping anyone worse off than one is�is an almost obsessively big deal in Judaism (it�s no accident that so many liberal Democrats, social workers, and shrinks are Jewish), but morality isn�t hitched to a system of rewards and punishments, the way it is in Christianity. A Jew is required to do the right thing, just because. �The right thing,� by the way, can be loosely defined as any action that would put a smile on God�s face if He should happen to be looking. (And if He had a face; Judaism posits a God who can�t be adequately pictured or conceptualized. In this, Jews are a little like physicists.) Such obligatory good deeds are called mitzvahs and can range from faithfully lighting the Sabbath candles every Friday night to saving a life or picking up after your dog.

Other key terms: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, the four branches of modern American Judaism, which differ mainly in the degree to which they adhere to tradition�Orthodox, 100 percent, no excuses; the other three, anywhere from about 75 percent down to about 10 percent, depending on the congregation, the individual, and/or the zeitgeist�although occasionally they�ll agree to disagree about a core belief, such as whether God is a personal entity or, as many Reconstructionists insist, a natural force, like gravity. Then there�s Zionism, the political movement born in reaction to European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century (and in particular, to the Dreyfus Affair), that aimed at making good Yahweh�s original offer of a Jewish homeland in Israel; and Kabbalah, Judaism�s complex mystical tradition, based on esoteric reinterpretations of Scripture and currently enjoying a vogue among Hollywood celebrities. Holocaust you already know. CHRISTIANITY

1.5 billion followers: 1 billion Roman Catholic; 170 million Eastern Orthodox; 370 million Protestant. Dominant in Western Europe and the Americas.

The first Christians weren�t Christians at all, of course, but Palestinian Jews who, smitten with Jesus of Nazareth�s notions about universal love, the brotherhood of man, and redemption through faith, saw nothing particularly disloyal or disruptive in regarding themselves as Jews for Jesus. It wasn�t until Jesus� followers began recruiting non-Jewish converts, who insisted that circumcision was weird and Christ divine, that Christians and Jews started giving each other dirty looks across the bazaar.

Although it�s never easy to launch a new world religion, the early Christians had a particularly tough time of it, beset, as they were, by a lot of internal bickering over who, exactly, Jesus was, and by any number of competitive pagan religions bent on co-opting the Savior for their own nefarious purposes�notably the Gnostics, with their salvation-through-revelation occultism and their predisposition to see Good and Evil in very black-and-white terms. In fact, most early Christian doctrine was formulated as a defense against total incoherence; hence its tendency toward dogmatism and the Christian establishment�s later habit of excommunicating anyone who didn�t toe the party line. There was also the problem of the ruling Romans, who, not in the least obsessed with distinguishing true Christians from false ones, simply declared open season on all of them.

It wasn�t until the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that Christians were transformed from persecuted underdogs into imperial pets. After the construction of Constantinople as Christian capital and arts center, a new yuppie constituency began replacing the original slave, peasant, and humble-laborer devotees. In A.D.325, the church was rich enough to host its first ecumenical council, out of which came the Nicene Creed, which affirmed, mainly, belief in the Holy Trinity and which is still the basic statement of faith for most Christians. By the end of the century, Christians had put together a testament of their own, comprising the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one epistles, and the Revelation of St. John the Divine. (They�d already appropriated the entire Hebrew Scriptures, which they renamed the Old Testament, plus the Apocrypha, a collection of writings retrieved from the cutting-room floor, whose authorship was more than ordinarily dubious and which were later rejected as uncanonical by Protestants.)

Success didn�t eliminate dissent within the ranks, however. In 1054, after a few centuries of squabbling over such issues as whether or not art was OK (remember the biblical injunction against graven images), the Pope of Rome excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Church was henceforth split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox divisions. Today, the two Churches differ mainly in decor (the Eastern Orthodox Church got the Byzantine domes and the elaborate mosaics; the Roman Catholics got the Gothic cathedrals and the Renaissance art collection), style (the Eastern Church still goes in for interminable masses, showstopper rituals, and the burning of extravagant amounts of incense), language (Greek and local vernacular in the East; Latin, and lately, local vernacular in the West), their attitudes toward the Immaculate Conception (not bloody likely, according to the EOC), and, of course, the infallibility of the pope.

More fussing and fighting in the West led, in the fourteenth century, to the Great Schism, during which two rival popes ruled simultaneously, one from Rome, one from Avignon; and in the fifteenth century to the Reformation, when Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al., fed up with Church corruption, split Western Europe into Catholic and Protestant factions.

Today, Protestant sects (there are about 250 of them) dominate much of northern Europe and the old British Empire, and maintain a slight edge over Catholicism in the United States, while the Catholic Church has pretty much cornered the market in France, Italy, Spain, and Latin America. The modern ecumenical movement hopes, someday, to put all the pieces of the Church back together again. In the meantime, the combined Catholic-Protestant head count still matters, since Christianity, as anyone who has ever opened the door to a Seventh-Day Adventist knows, is one of the great missionary religions of the modern world. ISLAM

More than 1 billion believers (and growing fast), only about a fifth of whom are Arab. Indonesia is the world�s largest Islamic country. Islam is also the dominant religion in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, in addition to the Arab world.

Oops. Did we say it�s never easy to launch a new world religion? We overlooked Islam (you can bet it won�t happen again), the youngest of the monotheistic megafaiths. In A.D. 622, its official birth year, Islam was little more than a gleam in the prophet Muhammad�s eye; less than two hundred years later, it was the power behind an empire that stretched from Spain to India. Of course, Muhammad didn�t really start from scratch; as a Bedouin trader (and a direct descendant of the prophet Ishmael, the first son of the prophet Abraham) living on the outskirts of Mecca, he�d already picked up a lot of gossip about Judaism and Christianity by the time he began having divine revelations of his own. As a result, Islam bears an uncanny likeness to its two predecessors, though with variations that, from the beginning, made it highly appealing to the common man (and we do mean man) as well as to certain fierce desert tribes prepared to appreciate Muhammad�s policy of winning through decapitation.

One of the main attractions of Islam (Arabic for �submission to the will of God�) is its practicality. Your average Muslim (Arabic for �one who submits�) can get to Heaven not by striving for some quasi-mystical and pretty much unattainable state of grace but simply by honoring the Five Pillars of Islam. First and most important of these is the affirmation of faith, in the words �There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.� Say this with real feeling just once in your life and no one can accuse you of not being a true Muslim (although only you and Allah will know for sure). Two: Pray five times a day, turning toward Mecca (no need to check your watch; just listen for the call of the muezzin and hit the ground when everyone else does). Three: Fast from sunup to sundown throughout the entire month of Ramadan (and, if you�re a well-to-do twenty-first-century Muslim, binge-eat into the wee hours). Four: Make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once if you can afford it (luckily, you no longer have to travel on foot or by camel; flights leave daily from most major cities). Five: Give alms, unless you�re so poor you have to beg them. And if you want to earn bonus points to ensure a smooth entry into Heaven, simply contrive to die while fighting a holy war.

In case you get confused, you can look up the essentials in the Koran, the one and only sacred text of Islam, which contains the words of Allah as revealed to Muhammad. You may find the going a bit tricky, however, since Muhammad wrote in a rhythmic Arabic that�s completely untranslatable. Join the club; three-quarters of the Muslim world is now composed of non-Arabs, and none of them can read their own Scriptures, either. Anyway, most of the Koran is devoted to retelling the stories of the Old and New Testaments from the Muslim�that is, the correct and uncorrupted�point of view. (For instance, the five great early prophets were really Adam, Noah, Abraham�the first Muslim�Moses, and Jesus. Alexander the Great was a prophet, too, and Muhammad was the last to carry Allah�s divine word to man; and that�s Allah, by the way, not Yahweh, which must have been some sort of typo.) The Koran won�t give you much detail about ethical behavior or daily ritual; for that, you�ll have to turn to the Hadith, the collected sayings of Muhammad, which, almost everyone acknowledges, are probably not authentic.

The Muslim world (and remember, that�s not synonymous with the Arab world) is meant to be a theocracy, and it�s in the who�s-running-the-show department that Islam splits into its two major sects, Sunni and Shi�a. Sunnis, who make up about 85�90 percent of all Muslims, believe that Muhammad�s old friend Abu Bakr, who was elected the first caliph after the Prophet�s death, was the latter�s legitimate successor. The minority Shi�ites insist that the Prophet chose his nephew and son-in-law Ali to succeed him; they trace the line of succession through Ali and Fatima, Muhammad�s daughter. They believe in rule by twelve imams or perfect leaders, under whom the ayatollahs compose a sort of middle-management cadre. Over the years, politics widened the rift between the two camps, which tend to regard each other as heretics, although they agree on most of the religious fundamentals.

From its inception, Islam has had great success in winning converts in hot, arid, impoverished countries where the locals are susceptible to a lot of shouting and sword-brandishing, and to the promise of a Heaven that, unlike home, consists of green meadows and babbling brooks. Another bonus: Traditional Islam is basically egalitarian and flexible; follow the simple rules and nobody is going to torture you for heresy or shun you because of the color of your skin. Feminists, pacifists, and drunk drivers, however, need not apply. ZOROASTRIANISM

150,000 believers, mostly Parsis living in India.

You pretty much had to be there�Persia, in the sixth century b.c., that is�to get the full flavor of Zoroastrianism as Zoroaster conceived it. (Actually, as he conceived it, it was called Zarathustrianism; Zoroastrianism is the Greek translation.) By the time it became the state religion of Persia, in aA.D. 226, Zoroaster�s own mother wouldn�t have recognized it. But use your imagination. Picture yourself trying to settle down and run a peaceful little ancient farm while surrounded by a zillion nature gods perpetually vying for your attention. You could spend half the day sacrificing to gods of twigs and pebbles and the like just to get in a decent harvest, and you still wouldn�t have a clue as to how to behave nicely or raise your kids. Zoroaster eliminated a lot of the time-wasting twig worship while adding a relatively coherent moral dimension to daily life. It�s true that Zoroastrianism, in its earliest form, was mainly concerned with increasing the harvest and ensuring the happiness and well-being of various farm animals; nevertheless, it was as subtle and sophisticated an ethical system as anything you�ll find in � well, wherever you look for ethical systems nowadays.

Zoroaster trimmed the pantheon of Persian gods to two warring ones: Ahura Mazdah, a.k.a. Ormuzd, the Creator and God of Goodness and Light; and Ahriman, God of Evil and Darkness. Ahura Mazdah is attended by six lesser deities, or archangels, or ahuras, or abstract qualities, take your pick, who translate roughly into Good Thought, Highest Righteousness, Divine Kingdom, Pious Devotion, Salvation, and Immortality. Ahriman, naturally, has his own entourage of evil spirits, called divs or daevas. Human beings, by their thoughts and actions, can side with Goodness, Light, and Life or with Evil, Darkness, and Death, and, by doing so, participate in the ultimate destiny of the Universe. Up to a point. The catch�and what makes Zoroastrianism different from the purely dualistic religions that were all the rage in ancient times�is that eventually, Ahura Mazdah is going to win. This makes for a nice, if somewhat complicated, marriage of free will and determinism�and, eventually, for a kind of happy ending.

Daily life for a Zoroastrian was nevertheless a very risky business, with evil spirits lurking everywhere. Near-constant ritual purification was necessary to ward off the forces of corruption, darkness, and death. At the same time, Ahura Mazdah�s elements, fire, water, and earth�all of which are reverenced but not, as any modern Zoroastrian would be quick to tell you, worshipped�had to be particularly well protected from contamination; hence the spooky �Towers of Silence� on which Zoroastrians placed their dead so as not to defile the earth. But physical corruption and defilement were also linked to evil mental states, thought being a very powerful force in the Zoroastrian cosmos. At some point, as you can see, it all becomes a bit much for the techno-happy Western mind to grasp. (Although you can bone up on the purification rituals, along with a lot of songs, hymns, and liturgies, in the Zoroastrian scriptures, the Zend Avesta, it�s so fragmentary, so corrupted, and so old that you still won�t know your forces of Light from your forces of Darkness, much less be able to tell who�s winning.) The Eastern mind, on the other hand, seems to do very nicely with it. When Persian Zoroastrianism was wiped out by Moslem hordes in the eighth century, a small group of Zoroastrians escaped to India, where incessant ritual purification is never a bad idea. Now known as Parsis and concentrated in and around Bombay, they�ve become one of the wealthiest, best-educated, and most-respected minority groups in a society that doesn�t normally reward strangeness or strangers. HINDUISM

More than 700 million believers, mostly in India.

Very old: predates all other world religions, except Judaism, by centuries at least. Also, very disorganized: has 330 million gods, more than enough for every family to have its own; a couple of dozen sects; a clutch of holy books; plenty of rituals, ceremonies, and spiritual disciplines; and neither a historical founder nor any consensus as to what, exactly, religious practice consists of. In a sense, Hinduism seems easy�tolerant, inclusive, undemanding, with an embarrassment of color, pageantry, and paths to Brahman, the Infinite Being (and ultimate reality) you eventually want to be at one with. Easy, that is, assuming you�re not infelicitously placed within the caste system and stuck being a servant or a peasant; or infelicitously placed without it and stuck being an untouchable�or a pig or a mosquito.

The paradox here: You have plenty of time (in fact, as many lifetimes as you need) and plenty of ways to work out the release of your soul from the world and the ultimate rendezvous with Brahman. But there�s a real chutes-and-ladders feeling to the game plan and, rather than getting to simply shake the dice, you�re always being judged on how nicely you behaved on your last turn. In other words, your karma�literally, �action�; figuratively, a kind of cosmic system of cause-and-effect�determines your rise (and fall) in caste, through life after life, incarnation after incarnation until you finally get to the top of the board and the end of the game.

Along the way, be prepared to deal with the most prominent of the gods (each of whom, incidentally, is a manifestation of Braham, and many of whom have subsidiary manifestations of their own): Shiva the Destroyer, a.k.a. the Cosmic Dancer; Vishnu the Preserver, a.k.a. Krishna, a.k.a. Buddha; and Shakti the Divine Mother. And with a couple of important sets of books: the Vedas, those ancient scriptures, written in Sanskrit, that lay the groundwork for Hinduism and culminate in the Upanishads or �secret doctrine�; and the Mahabharata, the longest poem in the world, containing India�s favorite religious text, the Bhagavad Gita, a dialogue between the god Krishna and a soldier named Arjuna. And with any and all animals, especially cows, bulls, monkeys, and snakes (each of which you�ll be nice to, since it, like you, is probably on its way up or down). Of course you�ll visit Benares and bathe in the Ganges. And you may go Tantric, embracing that branch of yoga (from a Sanskrit word meaning �to join� and related to our word �yoke�) that seeks enlightenment through, among other procedures, a style of sensual lovemaking in which �each is both.� Needless to say, you�ll also be on the lookout for gurus, mantras, mandalas (the former chanted, the latter painted), and sutras (treatises on various aspects of the Vedas, the Kama Sutra section of which may remind you of Tantric yoga classes).

Not that Hinduism is all easy-listening. You�ll also be expected, en route to Brahman, to give some thought to maya (originally, �might�), the illusion that the shapes and structures, the things and events we perceive with our senses in some way stand for reality�otherwise known as confusing the map with the territory. Problem is, as long as we�re under the spell of maya and think we�re separate from our environment, we�re going to be bound�and pushed around�by karma, and once again find ourselves being issued an end-of-lifetime report card. At which point, according to Hinduism (and for that matter, Buddhism, warming up in the bullpen), the whole business begins again. BUDDHISM

310 million believers, mostly in Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan.

Take Hinduism. Subtract the caste system, downplay the gods, the ritual, and the Play-Doh colors, and substitute Nirvana for Brahman. Now add the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, the Three Baskets, and the Great Wheel, and transport the whole business from India to points south (Sri Lanka), east (Burma, Thailand, and Indochina), and north (Nepal, Tibet, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan). Refuse to take any questions on the origin of the world or the nature of the divine and insist that everybody in the group work, quietly on his own, toward feeling better about himself through a program of pity, joy, kindliness, and meditation.

It�s not that Buddhism is abstemious, exactly (the robes are saffron, after all, and representations of the Buddha can be several stories high and made of gold), just that there�s a pared-down quality to it and that it comes down hard in all the places where Hinduism is free-form and assimilative. In part this is because Buddhism had a single founder (and hence an indisputable source and role model), Siddhartha Gautama, the so called �historic� Buddha, son of a sixth-century b.c. Indian prince, who proceeded to renounce worldliness in favor of enlightenment, of the middle way (between extremes of self-indulgence and self-denial), and, eventually, of Nirvana itself�a word that means, literally, a �going out,� as of a candle when there�s no more wick to burn, and, figuratively, liberation from all desires, cravings, and �becomings,� from suffering and from the endless round of lifetimes and selves. And in part it�s because Buddhism, as a missionary religion (like Christianity and Islam), had to travel light, both to maximize its chances of getting over the mountains and through the rainforests and to leave its converts some room to use their imaginations.

Basically, these converts fall into two camps, roughly established (cf. Catholicism and Protestantism) along north/south lines. The southern camp (Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia) practice a form of Buddhism known as Hinayana (or �Little Vehicle�), characterized by orthodoxy (what the historical Buddha said goes), austerity, and a concept of salvation based on one�s own right living. The northern camp (Nepal all the way to Japan) practice Mahayana (or �Great Vehicle�), which postulates that the Buddha is not just historical but divine and that nobody�not even a bodhisattva, two-thirds of the way to being a Buddha himself�is going to enter into Nirvana until every last one of us is ready to enter into Nirvana. Two important subcamps of Buddhism: the Lamaism of Tibet, in which the Dalai Lama called the shots until Communist China threw him out, and the Zen Buddhism of Japan, transplanted from China, in which satori�the attainment of enlightenment, plain and simple, through intuition rather than intellect�is the name of the game, prepared for in activities like judo, calligraphy, flower arranging, and so on, and embodied by the koan, a paradoxical observation of the sound-of-one-hand-clapping variety.

Careful: It�s often hard to remember what�s basically Hinduist, what�s Buddhist. Not only did Hinduism spawn Buddhism, it then glommed on to a lot of what the Buddhists had gone on to say and think. So you get nirvana, karma, mantra, tantra, and yoga, not to mention Buddha himself, in both packages (though usually not in the same strengths). Do try to remember that there are now almost no Buddhists in India itself. And that whereas the spirit of Hinduism is theatrical and clubby, that of Buddhism is no-nonsense and do-it-yourself.

Let�s begin with yin and yang. You remember yin and yang: the two poles of experience, joined in a symmetric union, a continuous cycle; yang the bright, creative, male, heavenly force, yin the dark, receptive, female, earthly one, each of the two containing the seed of its opposite. Note that we�re not talking Western-style opposites here, of the true-false, good-bad variety, but something more like harmony, balance, completeness, fulfillment.

Turns out, that�s pretty much how Confucianism and Taoism work. Each founded in the sixth century b.c. (and thus predating the arrival of Buddhism in China by roughly seven hundred years), and each equipped with its own legendary sage, the two together sum up, play to, and care for the Chinese character as we know�or think we know�it. Confucianism is practical, social, ethical, full of advice on how to behave in the world, father to son, husband to wife, ruler to subject, older friend to younger friend, and it�s more code than creed, with no churches or clergy in sight. Taoism is mystical, devoted�even more than Buddhism (though probably less than Zen)�to transcending everyday life and finding the tao, the path, the way of the natural order. Nor did the Chinese fall into the trap of doing some schematic Type A/Type B thing with the two. Rather, they chose to emphasize Confucianism when they were educating their kids, then convert to Taoism when they got older in the hopes of regaining the spontaneity that had been squelched by a lifetime of honoring social conventions and playing by the rules.

Confucius�K�ung Fu-tse, or Grand Master K�ung, back home in China� was, you don�t have to be told, particularly good with the one-liners: �It is only the wisest and the stupidest who cannot change,� �The proper man understands equity, the small man profits,� �Silence is a friend who will never betray,� and so on, enough of them to fill the Lun Y�, or Analects, Confucianism�s basic reference work. Lao-tzu�the �Grand Old Man� (literally) of Taoism, said to have once baffled Confucius in philosophical debate�had a more enigmatic style, as befits a religion determined to transcend: �Without going out of the door, one can know the whole world. Without peeping out the window, one can see the tao of heaven. The farther one travels, the less one knows.� His collection is called the Tao Te Ching (The Way of Virtue). The I Ching (or Book of Changes), by the way, which you once may have been in the habit of consulting on days when the Tarot wasn�t working out, and which is as much about yin and yang as everything else in the country is, predates both men; Confucius even based some of his teachings on it.

So, Confucianism is yang: practical, masculine, dominant, active. Taoism is yin: intuitive, feminine, yielding, passive. The Confucians wanted to get the job done, keep the wheels greased, make sure the system held up for another few hundred generations; the Taoists to lead a perfectly balanced life in harmony with the tao and to leave artifice and conformity in the dust.

Not that it stayed so simple. First, threatened by Buddhism, Taoism sacrificed all the understatement to eye appeal and sheer numbers. Buddhism had thirty-three different kinds of heaven, so Taoists came up with eighty-one. Taoism took over some of the Buddhist gods and restored others from the old folk religions it had supplanted (including the City God, the Wealth God, and the Kitchen God), and developed a lively interest in selling charms, reading fortunes, and sponsoring secret societies. Today, it�s still sect-and-society mad, a religion of the semiliterate and the eternally hopeful. Confucianism, too, once it had eliminated the examination system it ran to keep those civil-service candidates on their toes, seems to have had an identity crisis. Both are outlawed in the People�s Republic today (it especially didn�t help Confucianism that Confucius was a feudal aristocrat), but we know that�s just a phase of the cycle, don�t we? SHINTOISM

3 million believers, mostly in Japan.

The Hammacher-Schlemmer of Eastern religions, full of odd and largely useless items, as well as old and demographically undesirable shoppers, and, perhaps most important, overshadowed by Bloomingdale�s up the street (that would be Buddhism, a sixth-century import from China via Korea; that there are as many Shintoists as there are today is due in part to sheer force of habit and in part to the fact that most of them are practicing Buddhists, too).

The religion of ancient Japan, Shintoism�from shin-tao, the later Chinese equivalent of the Japanese kami-no-michi, or �way of the gods� (Japan had no written language until it appropriated China�s in the fifth century A.D.)� developed out of a combination of nature and ancestor worships, sometime around 700 b.c. The religion had a complex pantheon of kami, or gods, led by a Supreme Sun Goddess and including guardian household spirits; presiding tree-, river-, rock-, and village-divinities (including kamikaze, the �divine wind�); deified emperors; and miscellaneous national heroes.

A set of customs and rituals rather than a moral or philosophical system, Shintoism puts a lot of stress on purity, especially bodily cleanliness, and obedience; makes little of life after death and a lot of self-versus-nonself thinking; and fosters the belief that, since the Japanese have occupied their island pretty much by themselves for as long as anybody can remember, they are all related to each other, to their royal rulers, and to the Supreme Sun Goddess herself. It�s these last planks in the Shintoist platform that had so many Japanese committing harakiri for their emperor in World War II and Douglas MacArthur banning Shintoism as an instrument of the state, while allowing it as a religious sect, shortly thereafter.

Out of the Cyclotron, into the Streets

Some scientific terms yearn for a notoriety greater than the university community or the industrial complex can provide. Bored with having a precise, agreed-upon meaning known only to a few white-coated old lab technicians, they set their caps at becoming indispensable to David Letterman and Barbara Walters. They may lose a little of their cogency in the process, but they sure do get around.

The World According to Whom?

Gosh, so much has happened over the years. Wars and revolutions, edicts and referendums, dynasties and one-night stands, rebuffs and embraces. You�d think we�d have learned something from the whole business by now; after all, as the turn-of-the-century Harvard philosopher George Santayana admonished, �Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.� But how do you decide whose version of things you�re going to buy? Well, you should begin by realizing that there�s history (or, more formally, historiography), which is the writing down of everything that ever happened, and then there�s the philosophy of history, which attempts to say what, exactly, that act of writing down accomplishes and/or where, eventually, the historical process itself leads; and that most �historians� do one or the other, although some wind up doing both. Beyond that, don�t look at us: We�ve just examined everybody�s celebrated account of one or more of the world�s great moments and it seems perfectly obvious that everybody�s lying. SPOKESPERSONS

Ten guys, two each from five different history-minded civilizations; listen to them and you�ll find out how the world�and the history biz�has been going for the past 2,500 years. The Greeks: Herodotus and Thucydides

The Greeks got history�from their word histor, �learned man��started, the same way they got philosophy and drama started, and their history, like their philosophy and drama, hits the ground running. Suddenly, it seemed obvious that events accumulated and that the past connected not only to the present but to the future. For the Greeks, the big deal was war, with a tip of the hat to revolution, and it was to wars that the two great Greek historians addressed themselves: Herodotus (c. 484�c. 425 b.c.) to the Persian ones, which were still going on when he was growing up; Thucydides (c. 460�c. 400 b.c.) to the Peloponnesian one (likewise), which ended in 404 b.c., shortly before he died.

Both men are clear-eyed, go-with-your-instincts observers, but there the resemblance ends. Although only a generation older, Herodotus has less in common with Thucydides than he does with Homer, who�d been dead for five centuries already. Expansive, digressive, myth-minded, insatiably curious, and gossipy, capable of repeating anything anybody tells him (not that he necessarily believes it himself), with, as Macaulay put it, �an insinuating eloquence in his lisp,� Herodotus comes across like Truman Capote. Thucydides, on the other hand, is Gore Vidal: concentrated, critical, clinical, obsessed with his own methodology and limited in his interests, cold, aristocratic, grave. Of the two, Herodotus, who claimed in his History to want only �to preserve the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory,� is the good read�the one you could get into on a cross-country bus trip, where his anthropologist�s impulses would seem right at home. Thucydides, who was more the political-scientist type and who hoped his The Peloponnesian War �would be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future,� is the choice of assistant professors, junior senators, op-ed-page writers, and anybody else who requires a little status along with his relevance.