Wang Fo and an Ethic of Free Association: Poetic Imagination, Mythical Stories, and Moral Philosophy

The myths as we have them are the creation of great poets… written in a rich and subtle and beautiful language…in their own image.…In the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of in the world before them, but never to leave the world after them.

In The Psychoanalysis of Fire, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1968) notes that science normally begins empirically with observations of reality that gradually lead to an intellectual construct. The arts, however, begin with a constructing power, the imaginative dimension, and embody it in forms that make them objects of perception to others and, as applied to the external world, provide a way to understand its phenomena (1968). In Greek mythology, for example, Zeus, the king of the gods, rules the heavens and universe from the cloud-wreathed heights of Mount Olympus. The lesser gods and the merely mortal looked to him for protection, justice, and assistance in times of distress. At his side, Zeus kept the symbols of his rule as a sky god, a mighty eagle and a stockpile of thunderbolts that he would hurl down from the heavens to strike down those who angered him (Seton-Williams, 2000). The constructing power of the poet's imagination helped explain the jagged bolts of lightning, the deafening claps of thunder, and the awesomely destructive