Ritual 10

Transcript (PDF)

We come to ritual ten today. And in our phases, we need to remind ourselves that there are intervals. And in the process that we're working with, the intervals constitute a set of eight. They're like an octave. And each one of the intervals is a classic of. Universal wisdom. The first four in the integral cycle have a pattern to them, and perhaps you haven't noticed it or noted it. The first interval is Chinese, the second is Indian. The third interval text is Chinese, the fourth is Indian. So that we use China and India because they're on the other side of the world from a great deal of our experience. But the choices that are there are choices that have been considered very deeply over quite a long time. The first one is the Tao Te Ching, but the third one will be the classic Chinese poets of the Tang dynasty, Li Po and Two Fu. Who are a deeper quality. Lee Poe considered that he was a distant descendant of Lao Tzu, whose name was Li Li Er and the emperor of the Tang Dynasty. Li Shimin considered himself a descendant of Lao Tzu, but the point for us is that the classic great apex of Chinese poetry of Chufu and Li Po are a deeper integral from the Tao Te Ching. Just so the second and the fourth intervals. The fourth interval is deeper, even though the second interval is the Great Satipatthana Sutra of the Historical Buddha. The Mindfulness Sutra in both forms. For the first time in this cycle, both the one in the Majjhima Nikaya, the middle length sayings. It's about ten pages, and in the Diga Nikaya, which is the long sermons of the Buddha, it is a more than twice as long, but the Satipatthana Sutras are deepened in the fourth interval because we use the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. So that what you have at the first go round is you already have a world class quality. And the second go around of the second pair is a deepening of both in kind. The Satipatthana Sutra is deepened by the Yoga Sutra. The Tao Te Ching is deepened by classical Tang poetry of Li Po and Du Fu. So that I am setting up here for us a very complex interplay that has its structure built in all the way through. And you can develop, you can trust it to develop on any scale, on any level of complexity that you wish to develop out of it. Like a good yoga, you can use it forever and master it more and more. The same holds for the way in which the phases work. A phase of process will always emerge a form. It is a universal quality. Any process that occurs will emerge into form. If you have a dynamic, it will assume an energized form. It shows up as wave particle in quantum physics, but as a universal way in which this happens. So that processes will emerge form, but forms will generate processes. And so you get a kind of a dosey doe. You get an articulation of it. But there's also a universal quality that once you've done this emergence of a form from a process, the next process will be deeper. And the next form will be deeper. Now, if you go deeper than just the dynamic of nature, you come to mysterious nature. And it is mysterious because now what is added to the flow is a rich nutrient that includes sentient beings. That's the way the classical yoga would have styled it some 3000 years ago. Not just human beings, but beings everywhere in the universe who are sentient, that is, who have a heart centered process of experience. And the classic form of honoring that in Mahayana Buddhism was the Heart Sutra. And the Heart Sutra always is recited world round for the last 2000 years by every Buddhist in the world. Rather like facing Mecca. In Sanskrit, it runs. Gotti. Gotti. Gotti. Gotti. Boris. Vaha. It means gone. Gone. Completely gone. Enlightenment. Hill. Now, what this means is that when you interiorize. When you internalize the Heart Sutra, the heart centered process of sentient experience, all of the images that are flowing with that, all of the feelings that are flowing with that will integral deeper than the integral that was there on the ritual level. Even though the ritual level, its stability of form that has emerged out of nature, is ultimately characterized by the word existence. What could be deeper than existence? Is the center of existence, which is realization. So that you have nature generating the forms of existence, but sentient experience generating the forms of symbolic realization. And so you have not just an integral of four that go around in a circle one, two, three, four, but there's a quality that is happening in there, and the quality that is happening in there does not stay put in either process or form. And so the classic way of understanding it in wisdom was that it was a fifth element. It was a quintessence. It was the fifth business in show business, the magic of the performance. We're looking at a Zen travelogue in this this presentation. In fact, for four presentations last week, this week and the next two. And generally, Westerners will say that the Zen. Journal. The Zen poetry is always seasonal. It follows the seasons, and ostensibly it does the cycle of nature in its process of spring, summer, autumn, winter. But in Zen there are five seasons, not four. There's a quintessential, and it is a season that occurs only one day out of the entire year, New Year's Day. But it doesn't occur all day on New Year's Day. It occurs only at one moment on New Year's Day, and that moment is the rising of the full moon. Now in East Asia. Spring was generally in February Chinese, New Year's, Japanese, New Year's, Korean, etc.. And so while there are four seasons that have three month durations, there is a fifth quintessential season that has a point of emergence and realization that happens like that when the full moon rises. If you've ever been in a deep samadhi and witness the full moon rising when it clears the horizon, whether it's a flat horizon like in Egypt or a mountainous horizon like I used to meditate in the Sierra Nevada's and watched the full moon come up almost every full moon for several years. When the moon clears the horizon, it bounces up. It jumps slightly up. But if you're in a deep, appreciative samadhi, the jump of the moon is that it leapt into fullness just then. Only at that moment is there a fifth season. The magical moment, the carrying that the whole cycle of nature that integrals and goes deeper and deeper goes to a special moment where it leaps out from where it was higher, so that it vanishes from where it was, and instantly reappears where it now is slightly higher than it was before. And so the understanding in deep meditation is that the whole cycle of integral of existence coming out of nature, of intelligence, coming out of experience and centering into a point of realization. Then if you hone especially that point of realization exactly to its focus, it will vanish. It integrals to vanishing even in mathematics. So well-used terms these terms integrate to vanishing. Where do they go? They go where time space cannot go. And when it reoccurs, it reoccurs as a five dimensional, not a five dimensional nature, but a five dimensional seed, which is super nature, we call it today in science, advanced, uh, uh, astrophysics, we call it supersymmetry. In more ancient times. They call it the supernatural. It was supernatural in that it now has five dimensions instead of four, and the fifth dimension was acquired instantly. But it's instantly as it is acquired because it was not a part of the integral. It now introduces as a five dimensional possibility that every single thing that is formed in the integral can now be transformed, and every single process that was there can be met by a another kind of process that goes counter to it. Not to annihilate it, not to cancel it out, but to interpenetrate with it, to weave with it. And so in Zen, the whole understanding is that you keep honing your practice, your practice ritually to comb out your existence so that you exist emergently fresh, whole, out of nature. And because we are scrambled by countless layers of artifice and interruption, deception, inadvertence, ignorance, even the classical Buddha once styled it in a cycle of 12, which in Sanskrit is called pratityasamutpada. It means the the circle of dependent origination and it constantly just goes on. Each one leads to the next in a wheel. And it is this wheel which we are bound to until we learn not to try to get off the rim of the wheel. Because what comes off the rim of that kind of a wheel is a ghostly realm called the pretas. You become a not spiritual, but you become a ghost, a faded being still chained to the wheel of existence, but not having too much existence anymore. The way out of the wheel is to go to the hub, to go to the center of the hub, because in the center of the hub, no matter what spokes are holding what rim, the hub is a hub not just to hold the spokes and not just to center the rim, but a hub always has a hole through it, an aperture. And what fits through that aperture, that hub is the axle. It is an axle which not only drives the wheel, in fact a pair of wheels, but it also is a pivot by which the mobility of the entire wheel can be controlled. And so one has this ability to not only take the rim of existence and the spokes of experience that come to the hub of the mind, but one can go to the center of the mind to that point of realization, which is axially open, always is. And so what happens is that the integral disappears not into vanishing nothingness, but into empty transformability of consciousness, supernatural consciousness. And it happens quicker than an instant because it doesn't happen in time. Which is why if you go into very, very deep samadhi, you can actually tell that what has transpired here has no time whatsoever. It is not only that it is quickly, it is instantaneously different. And what we're looking at now is another pair of presentations in ritual to see how ritual has again emerged. Existence whole, out of the process of nature, but at the very same time is generating another process, the process of mythic experience. So what will be generated out of the ritual action, the ritual limits of the sequence of what we are doing, and the weaving of those together in a loom, square frame, or or the positioning of the cycle of those, like a potter taking his basic clay and making his pot. What happens in both processes is that we are generating a shape which will be able to carry figures, and that this shape and this figuration is the very essence of the stability of form, and it is out of the cycling of existential forms that will generate the dynamic like a dynamo. The whole process of experience. Now we're taking Basho. We're taking his Zen travelogue, the Great One. The narrow road to the deep North. Oku no Hosomichi. This is a portrait of Basho done by a very great, the second greatest haiku poet, Buson, who lived in the 1700s. He was roughly a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin. And Basho lived in the late 1600s, so he was a contemporary largely of John Milton. What is extraordinary about Basho is that he came from a samurai family, and by his time he was born in 1644, most of the samurai had been tamed from the kind of Kurosawa Toshiro Mifune grunting, half barbarian, half, uh, sophisticated plotters into managers of estates. And as x samurai, very often there would be someone in that lineage who would be an artist. And for Basho, he used words. He used language like a samurai would. His sword. And a haiku is like a flash of the samurai language. He is the one who invented haiku, in the sense that haiku had been around as a part of Japanese poetry for a very long time. One of the earliest geniuses in, uh, Japanese poetry, where you find haiku embedded is a saigyo. And saigyo. Uh, this is a collection of his works, mirror for the moon. And there's another collection here published by, uh, The Asian Classics of, uh, Columbia University Press. Burton Watson, a great translator. Saigyo lived from uh, 1118 to 1190. So he's a contemporary of Richard the Lionhearted Robin Hood. A poem on travel from over 800 years ago. Parting me from the capital. These mountains I've crossed now. Even they are fading into the mist. Uh saigyo spent most of his life, uh, traveling. And so the collection is called poems of a mountain home. He also wrote a great many love poems. Uh, beautifully translated, but esoterically, uh, published, uh, uh, in South Pasadena. Warm soft village branch, Langstaff Publications, Fremont Avenue, South Pasadena. It's very difficult to have ever found these things. Fortunately, I've been collecting these things for 50 years. And 50 years ago, you could still find them. Here's one of his love poems. Only the moon high in the sky as an empty reminder. But if looking at it, we just remember our two hearts meet. And of course, this is the full moon, which is just risen as the fifth season, as the instant sharing of a point of realization that vanishes from the integral and reappears instantly in the five dimensional differential consciousness, and that it is a shareable moment. And the whole purpose of great Asian poetry is to share the leading up to that moment of realization. And the genius of the Japanese haiku is to share exactly the moment where it vanished, and they split spontaneously, where it reemerged at the same time. So when you have rules about writing haiku in English, this was the first time that they were ever put out. This is the Japan Society. Um, and this they were in New York. This came out in 1965. I was at San Francisco State teaching in the Humanities department, and one of my specialties was Tang Poetry. I was doing translations of Du Fu and Li Po, uh, with some help from my Chinese mentor. This little booklet was excellent. Japan Airlines, which in 1965 was just beginning to take off as a really viable company, ran a haiku contest in the United States. And they expected to have, uh, 500,000, maybe 2000 entries. They received over 50,000 entries. And so they got beautiful old, uh, uh, Harold G. Henderson. His introduction to haiku came out, uh, in Anchor Doubleday paperback shortly after that. There are rules in here of how to write haiku in English, but they rules are misleading in the sense that there is no rule for realization at its vanishing, nor for consciousness at its supernatural appearing, because it doesn't just stay when it appears, it vanished as a point of realization in the integral, but it reappeared instantly as the seed of a differential process called visionary consciousness. So that you have an instant generation that did not take time. There was a preparation, but the preparation was so that existence would be a good stable base. The body was ritually shown how to comport either by sitting in meditation or by dancing and Sufi whirling like the Mevlevi dervishes. Whatever it is, the body is ritually positioned to be stable indefinitely, so that the time space in which it is stable is able to generate an experience that flows without interruption. It is the continuous flow of experience without interruption, no chapter heads, no sound bites, no separations of any kind, so that when it flows it is said that it flows pure, and that pure flow then has as its quality heartfulness. The Confucian word for it, uh, stressed by Confucius constantly was Jen. Jen is the human heartedness. And what is human hearted is not that it is a form that keeps, or has or holds, but it is a generated wholeness out of existence, kept stable enough so that the flow is a flow between as many people as participate as there are. And so the whole notion of a sentient experience is that it is the community of Heartfulness that occurs. And anyone who participates together in the stability of the existence of the ritual forms that generate that experience, they are then a part of the generation of that. They will be heartful followers in that community together. And so the whole basis for our kind of sentient beings, for human beings, of our particular species, indeed Homo sapiens, is to share that heartfulness of experience by participating together in the rituals that go to weave the baskets of existence, or the throwing of the pots. When you throw a pot, you don't just plunk the clay it is thrown onto, uh, so that you get a dynamic quality of shaping. And the shaping is not done by the mind. It's done by the hands that know the feel of the shape of the pot, or by the hands that know the loops of the weave, many different ways to weave. And so does the ritual of the hands that now are given the flow of sentience. And this is the way in which ritual generates experience, and the better it is. It is not an unconscious process at all. It is a sensory traction to a sense sensate sentience that occurs lots of S's. So the importance of ritual is that it emerges whole from the flow of nature and generates as purely as possible, the mysterious nature of experience. And if this link is done in exactly the right way, what is the right way? That the flow of nature and the flow of deeper, mysterious nature will allow for the emergence of a realization in the mind that is a deeper parallel to the stability of existence. So that now the ideas that one has realizable in the mind are not only very good ideas vis a vis the mind, but they are deeper analogues to the stability of actual existence. And the more that they are in this relationship, the more accurate is a referential. The mind now will have an accurate referentiality to whatever it is thinking about, because they are emerged whole out of nature. One of the famous criterias that Dante had for good poetry is that the images must be, first of all, natural. And if they are, then they may become symbolic. And if they are, then they may have an interpretive development that leads into artistry. And if all three of those occur, a fourth quality comes into play. They will be true cosmically as well. And so you get constantly with poets as great as Basho, the sense of taking whatever ritual comportment was characteristic not only of the several dozen cultures in that part of the planet, but of the civilized synthesis that happened. But we're looking at the basic quality that runs like this. Every process will emerge. A form, every form will generate a process, and that each time that this tandem occurs, it deepens in the integral. But in the differential it expands. It goes higher so that the form that will come out of visionary consciousness will be art. It will be the spiritual resonance of art. And the oldest written aesthetic in East Asia is by Chacho. He lived in the four hundreds, and he's famous for six principles of art. And the very first one is always singled out because all everything else comes out of it. And in Chinese it's pronounced Cai Yun, xiang tung, and it means spirit resonance. Life movement. We're looking at it from the ritual standpoint, not art. So we dosey doe that it is life movement in ritual that forms the attraction basis that a whole frame square of attention later will become the art of spirit resonance. Resonances will always add up in an integral to a set, which is able to be integrated and able to be deepened. But resonances do not just add up to a set in the differential, they accumulate into a harmonic, and so one has an integral analysis that can be performed symbolically by the mind in terms of realization. But something else happens in the cycle of differential consciousness. It isn't the mind of realization that integrals deeper, but it is the spirit resonance accumulated to a prismatic person who is the index to the harmonic, and that index to the harmonic for the first time is able to generate a quality of higher consciousness, which we look at as history. And out of that comes a harmony called the cosmos. And so the person who has an artist is able to generate works of spirit called works of art, including themselves. The art of the person that index for the first time is able to generate a process. That is able to bring not only the creation of the harmonic into play, but a harmonic analysis which will be objective, consciously true of the cosmos, and that form will generate a process, and the process that it generates is nature. So in a way, there's like the classic infinity sign. There is a continuity that nature as a process has been generated from the cosmos. That certainly is the form doing the generating. But that it also has its own origins. And the origins are that nature has not just occurred completing the cycle or redoing the cycle again, but that the whole double cycling is fertile. It is fertile in nature, it is creative in consciousness. And so ritual comportment is extremely important. If it is done not with an eye to just making something which is going to stay there, but with a sense of keeping its vibrant, iterative vitality and fertility, then the experience that comes out of that will also be fertile and the mind will be emerged born out of that, integrated out of that as a living quality of thought. It will be living thought. And it is that living thought. Then that will um, direct, as we will see when we come back from the break. Not only the Zen journey, but Greek tragedy as well, was a honing in on coming to a point of realization in the mind and passing through its center unharmed. The tragic view of life is that one passes through a moment, a point of realization where everything has been totally ruined not because you did anything wrong, but that it is permanently ruined and there was nothing you could do to stop it, and to pass through that and realize that that is only provisional in terms of an integral, and that the same integral can be redone in such a way by the rituals, so that instead of it being a moment of tragic realization, it is a moment of realization through a tragedy to something else, to a realization that it goes beyond that. As the mind is a form of realization, the cosmos is a differential form of reality. And so we're going to come back and take a look at the way in which Basho begins with the simplest of phrases. He says, days and months are the travelers of eternity, and so are the years that pass by, so that the ritual measuring of time, especially for our kind of sentient being days, months, years, the day of day and night, the months of the moon, the year of the sun. All of these are existential forms that are able to generate the flow of experience, which is a journeying, a traveling. He says. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every single moment of their lives traveling. Let's take a break. Let's come back. Let's come back to one of the great classic Japanese prints. This is by Hiroshige. It was done in 1835, and he established one of the Great Landscape series in the world called the 55 stages of the Tokaido, the highway that went from old Edo down to Kyoto along the Pacific coast. Out of the 55 stages, this is right in the middle. This is stage 27. The 55th stage is Kyoto, and it's the destination. So this is right in the middle. This is Basho traveling with his companion, whose poetic name was Sora. And this is not from the narrow road to the deep North. But this was another travel journey where he went down. Basho was born in Iino, near Um Nara. That's not too far from Kyoto. This particular print is called Kakegawa. That's the stage, the 27th stage. And you can see that what is working here are a series of arcs. The bridge arcs one way and the kite strings arc the other way so that you get a divergent quality. And this kite shows the wind. And there is a second kite which has either been cut loose or broke loose, and it is freed. That freed kite is the moment of consciousness. That is the jump from the last vanishing point of realization in the mind. Uh, there is a beautiful quality, as we were saying, that the East Asian seasons are five, there are the four seasons of nature, and there is a point of realization that comes on the new year. And for the Zen tradition, it is the rising of the full moon. And exactly at that moment, the full moon doesn't just clear the horizon, it slightly jumps above the horizon. We're also in addition to doing all of our presentational work, you have behind the scenes, a year long journey of reading, and you have four different tracks that you can take. One of them is The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, one of the world's great classics of literature written about a thousand years ago. And if you are reading every week a little bit in The Tale of Genji, you will be this week at chapter 23, which is exactly fitting with the presentation I'm giving you spontaneously on Basho, chapter 23 of The Tale of Genji. The Japanese name for the chapter is Hatsune Uh, subtitled by the great translator here, Royall Tyler, uh, as the Warbler's first song. And the little reminder is that this chapter title, which means first song of the year, is from a poem that the lady from Akashi sends with a New Year's gift to the daughter, whom she has not seen since Murasaki adopted her. And here is the just a little bit of the Japanese Jane Austen, one of the most exquisite writers that the world has ever seen. The sky on New Year's Day was bright and perfectly cloudless within the lowest hedge, fresh green now glimmered and the snow, a promising haze of buds swathed in trees and people's hearts to naturally seem to swell with gladness. Now, if you've been following the first part of today's presentation, you recognize all of the themes that are there churning. What delights there were to be seen then in the jewel strewn garden before Genji's residence, and how poorly mere words convey the exquisite beauty of the gardens of his ladies. The one before the spring quarter, where the scent of plum blossoms mingled with the fragrance within the blinds. Their perfume especially recalled the land of a living Buddha, though actually the mistress of the place lived there in peace and quiet at her ease. She had given her little girl the pick of the younger women in her service and the ones who were somewhat older, hence all the more pleasingly dignified in manner and dress, and now clustered here and there, amusing themselves, celebrating long life. They had even brought in mirror cakes to praise a year rich with the promise of a thousand more to come. The mooncakes from China with the little wooden, uh, forms, and then the batter put in. And then you would have these moon cakes for full moon. This is the special for the new year. Just then Genji. Genji is now about. He is just turned 36 and Lady Murasaki is 28. He peered in. Oh no, we are caught! They cried when they see him peering in, snatching their hands from the breast fold of their robes. How nicely you are all assuming your good fortune. I expect each of you has her wishes. Tell me some of them I shall look after, praying for them to their eyes. His smiling figure summed up all the felicity of a new year. In the narrow road to the deep north. Basho comes to very quickly to a section which is featured very early on in the Zen travelogue. He has been on the road just, uh, a week or so, and he comes to Mount Nikko and he says it used to be spelled Nikko in translation. Now it is spelled Nikko. And this Mount Nikko has the holiest shrine in Japan. Uh, it was built by a high priest, Zen priest, genius poet named Kukai. And Japan, he's very often referred to as Kobo-daishi. And he built this shrine. And he called the mountain now, not Nikko, but Nikko, which means, um, the bright beams of the sun. Kukai must have had the power to see a thousand years into the future, for the mountain is now the seat of the most sacred of all shrines. This was, uh, 400 years ago, and its benevolent power prevails throughout the land, embracing the entire people like the bright beams of the sun. To say more about the shrine would be to violate its holiness. And right here he puts a haiku, not a haiku, about the shrine, but a haiku about the effect of this spiritual, special place, Nikko, illuminating the entire people and the entire land. And he uses an image that Murasaki had used exactly here in chapter 23. The haiku was this. It was with awe that I beheld fresh leaves, green leaves bright in the sun. The haiku is the moment where you have stopped reading the prose and the mind has stopped integrating symbolically. And there's a slight pause. And then the haiku delivers the quintessence, the essence of the fifth dimension that comes into play exactly in New Year mode later. He has taken to another very special place, and that special place is put into, like an apposite reissuing, with the one about Mount Nico and the wave that the sun beams of spirit energy from Kukai, from Kobo-daishi have for a thousand years illuminated. The land here is now a very special waterfall, and that this waterfall has a tremendous energy as it plunges through a circular opening in the rocks and shoots out several hundred feet and falls into a deep green pool. And what is interesting is that the Zen meditators have made a special place behind the waterfall, in a cave where one can sit in deep samadhi and watch the rush of the water go through the hole and spew out and plunge several hundred feet into the deep green pool. Silent a while in a cave. I watched a waterfall for the first of the summer observances. Now. There are esoteric aspects to all of this, of course, and I'll just fill you in with a little bit of one so that you can understand how deep all of this great material that we're using really is. We're using the creme de la creme of the entire planet through its entire heritage. Why? To establish for ourselves a new civilization. That will cherish all of this. And dwarf it by its accomplishments. Kukai lived in the late 1700s and early eight hundreds, and he was a son of a very royal, wealthy family. But he was an extraordinary, uh, being in that his ability to take his sentience from such a huge wide area and bring it to the exact honing of a vanishing at the center of the hub of the mind and springing forth a creativity that was suddenly fresh and new that almost no one had seen before. Because Kukai was the first one to bring all of the world's great religions together into a single insight. He got it because when he was in China in the Tang dynasty, the capital of China again in the Tang was Chang'an, now called Xi'an. Chang'an had been the capital in the Great Zhou dynasty and the Han dynasty, now again in the Tang Dynasty beyond Chang'an is the west of China that extends all the way into where now is Afghanistan and Soviet Central Asia. Now just Central Asia. There was raised in 781 AD, just a few years before Kukai went there. A monument, that is, when it was first translated into English. It was called the Nestorian Monument of Xi'an. And this Nestorian monument has on it an inscription, and it had an esoteric Christian cross. If anyone recognizes this, uh, this was the esoteric cross of manly P Hall as well, because he was in that tradition as well. And the monument began and read it is acknowledged that there was one unchangeable, true and still the first and unoriginated incomprehensible in his intelligence and simplicity, the last and mysteriously existing the Alpha and the Omega, who, with his hands operating in the mysterious abyss of space, proceeded to create, and by his spirit to give existence to all the holy ones himself. The great adorable. Was this not our aloha with his marvelous being? 3 in 1 the Unoriginated true Lord. It was a bringing together of Mahayana Buddhism and Daoism, of Confucianism, of Manichaeism, of Nestorian Christianity, and Kobo-daishi added Shinto to it so that when he took the rubbing of the monument back to Japan in the late 1700s, a duplicate of the Nestorian monument in Xi'an was put up at a monastery called Koyasan, and it was there that the interpenetration of all the great religions of the world were brought together in a harmonic, and Koyasan was a very special monastery. It had huge stairs and steps that went up ascendant like a pyramid to the top, to where there was an esoteric temple building, and the entrance to the temple building was all around from any direction. But you had to stoop to get into it, and when you stooped to get into it from any direction whatsoever, when you stood up and your eyes got used to the darkness, just enough to discern that it was empty. The arrival in the temple was the arrival at the moment of realization, where it is empty. And because you are consciously there, it is now full of your consciousness. The esoteric. Koyasan has one place in the world where it has a pair, where it has a twin. In Japantown in Los Angeles. It is a quality they called the ancient Nestorian Christian Buddhism to Shin, which then later on in China became became Tiantai and in Japan became Tendai. And it is a particular quality where not only with Koyasan, but there is a pilgrimage that is done around a mountain that has 100 stations, and you must do the ambit of the 100 stations with a friend. Only pairs may go, and you must do the entire ambit of all 100 stations in one night. You may begin when the sun goes down. You must stop where you are when the sun comes up. When I was in Canada, I met a Japanese priest named Ikuta. Ikuta. He had done that with a friend and had made it the two of them to all 100 stations. And what happens when you finish the hundredth station? You finish it. Just a split crack of dawn previous to it. And there is that kind of a moment where you have an opportunity. If you have done this ritual continuous together, there is a looking into each other's eyes and a moment of sharing. And he, Reverend Ikuta, said that he had had that. Years later, when I came to Los Angeles and was sitting with an old Buddhist bhikshu named Subhadra, his American name was Julius Goldwater. He was a cousin of Barry Goldwater. His best friend was a Japanese from Gardena, a Japanese minister, and he was Suzaku's friend, and he had gone with him. And so I got to meet both of them. Several thousand miles and many years apart. Exactly. And their recounting of the incident was exactly right when they looked into each other's eyes in that preparation at that moment, they saw clearly themselves in the other's eyes. In the High Mahayana and the Bodhicaryavatara by Shantideva guarding the path of enlightenment for bodhisattvas. He says in chapter eight out of ten that the highest beyond realization that occurs is the secret exchange of selves, what I call the shared presence. This quality is what Kukai took to ancient Japan in the late 1700s. It is a quality that Basho especially was able to engender in his Zen travelogues, and the narrow road to the Deep North is exactly what we are taking a look at now. The translator of The Tale of Genji, Royall Tyler, has also translated Japanese Noh dramas for Penguin Classics. The Japanese Noh drama is like Greek tragedy only again, it's a Zen form and has been made especially so that the realization moment that occurs has been prepared ritually, so that if you have followed in your experience an unbroken flow, not from the rituals that you do in your life, but from the rituals presented in the drama. Exactly right, so that its cone of realization integrates exactly at the center of the symbolic thought, there will be a split openness, which, if your experience is flowing exactly right, will stop flow and be again there all in the same instant. The great writer of Japanese Noh drama was named Zeami, and his father was one of the great actors in Japanese drama. But it was his son Zeami, who lived to be 80 years old and, like Euripides, was put into exile by an unappreciative state government. His exile was forced on him when he was over 70 years old, which at the time most Japanese Basho lived to be 50. Most Japanese that lived to be 60 were old. Xiami, at 72, was exiled off the mainland of Hokkaido island. The mean shogun exiled him to an island called Sado, and that island, called Sado, is off the coast in lonely, and it is a particular, uh, gem that Basho was able to focus on and, uh, in his focus and his haiku. I'll have to recite it from memory here. Across the rough seas. The island of Sado alone, bridged tonight by the Milky Way, so that the connection between the mainland tradition of Japanese excellence and the place of a single genius and his exile are related by the entire galaxy arching over and keeping it related. It is this quality in Basho that one finds again and again, and there is a beautiful rendition of one of Basho's paintings in this book on haiku painting, Leon Zylbrad. And there are a number of portraits of Basho and works by Basho. But this one. Is extraordinary. It shows on the one side a flock of crows, and on the other side a traditional Chinese East Asian landscape scene of the artist looking out to sea from a few pines, the vast open space within which the plum tree is able to blossom. And there the crows. Basho's poem for this. On a withered bough a flock of crows is perched. Autumn is over. Now, what's interesting is that in Zen, which originally in China was Chan. And though Chan had roots in Chan, and when we get to vision, uh, early next year, we'll take Shunzo and see how that actually began. It was a blending of a special quality of Mahayana Buddhism that was already suffused with an esoteric Christianity for many, many centuries with the native Daoism. And when they came together, they came together in a very poignant way. A Zen master named um Huineng. And we're going to take Huineng. He became the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism, and after Huineng, there was no seventh, except that any one who was able to tune in to the broadcast shared realization, become reality would find that they were now each one the seventh Patriarch. No matter when, no matter who. This quality of Basho is exactly the under side. Going the other way of the presentation of Euripides in The Bacchae. In The Bacchae. There is a particular quality that we need to appreciate, and it centers around a ritual in the most fundamental possible way. It is this. The figured action of a ritual establishes by vibrant iteration, sustained long enough with precision, perimeters of shape, and weaving all these together gives the fabric and its traction for a culture and its tradition. In the phase of myth. But there is also an annual cycling and a lunar cycling to generate a more ceramic shape or perimeter for a culture and its existential customs. So that tradition and custom are slightly different, though intimately related. And it is ritual delivering a myth, structuring tradition and ritual delivering a social structuring life custom that shows the gender chirality of ritual masculine, feminine not just men, women, but masculine, feminine. And as both the masculine has a hunting kind, a journeying, hunting kind of quality, the feminine a gathering birthing quality. In The Bacchae by Euripides, and we're using Michael Cacoyannis translation. Dionysus is a crossover. He is a masculine who does the feminine gender function, and it is the feminine gender function of Dionysus crossover that allows for a complementary crossover of a feminine who does a masculine gender function, and that is Athena. Athena is feminine, yes, but she does the masculine. She has the spear, she has the helmet. She is wisdom who is able to defend in a masculine way. Though she is feminine. Dionysus has a spear, but it's a spear that is not covered by a point. To be a warrior, to kill his spear is entwined with ivy, a helical vine that covers all and delivers it, as it was called a thyrsus. It delivers instead of a spear that is a masculine spear, it is like a feminine staff of life. And when he comes in. The description of Dionysus by Euripides in Kokkinos translation is perfectly clear about this. There is a crash of thunder. The point of realization, followed by an eerie stillness accentuated by the rustling of ivy leaves. Out of it grows a distant drone of women's voices, and then Dionysus appears. He carries the thyrsus and his scant dress draped with an animal skin. A fawn skin suggests the Orient, his flowing blond hair cascading around his shoulders, and his life smooth skinned limbs, no hair come complement the feline, almost feminine grace of his movements. The umbrage that King Pentheus takes is not just that this is a foreign god who says he's a god, but he is a gender who is doing a function that is opposite of the function he should be doing, and is forcing a gender shift in all the women, not from feminine to masculine, but from staying at home, feminine to wild, orgiastic out in the mountains, feminine. He has shifted them from the domesticity of staying in the masculine ruler place that they have been put, and they leave the home. They leave the city. They leave the domestication. They go into the primordiality of just being women who are advocates of existence, coming into fertility, not the false artificial pseudo fertility of staying put in layer upon layer of domination. So at the back-i on many levels reaches not just one point of realization, but a whole gamut of them, like croquet hoops. Or a better usage would be like the way in which huge magnetic storms on the sun send huge flares hundreds of thousands of miles into space, and curving around and between the two feet of these flares is a very curious quality. The sun at these two spots becomes comes almost like a mirror, in that they electrons caught in this magnetic hoop are reflected back and forth between the two mirrors. And you get in this the not just the arch, but the magnetic lines more and more become like a Gothic arch at a point. And the alignment of all of these pointed arches of the magnetic fields find a moment where there is a complete surfeit and there's a sudden release. That's a solar flare. The estimate astrophysically is that some solar flares are as large as 2 million thermonuclear bombs in less than a second. We're living in a star system that has all of this happening, and we're living in a very sophisticated development as beings where our energies, not just psychic energies, not just mental energies, but that the conscious dynamic now has built to such an extensive quality that we are going to emerge into a whole new experience. And we are doing this now, but we are also going to jump above the horizon into a larger dimensions. That's why this yoga of civilization, to develop the beginning, visionary population of people who will refine it and take it out. It is a method, and it is a process of learning that is necessary and essential. None of the old ones will work, no matter how sophisticated, even Zen. If one wants to give a Buddhist traditional name to it instead of the Hinayana or the Theravada or the Mahayana or the Vajrayana, it's better to call something like this the Parayana the beyond way. Next week I will bring in some of the very esoteric qualities of Zen and show how originally the historical Buddha prepared a mysterious openness which he would almost never talk about, and only once demonstrated. There was a crowd of about 500 very sophisticated Buddhist meditators, and among them was the ex great sorcerer magic working Yogi before he was converted and became a disciple of the Buddhist. His name was Mahakasyapa, and it was Mahakasyapa who had this ashram of magic sorcerers on the Narayani River in what is today Bihar. And the Buddha, fresh from his triumph, not only under the Bodhi tree, but there were four trees over 28 days. And when he came out of his enlightenment, he went to Mahakasyapa's ashram of black magicians. And he asked to spend the night. And while he was sleeping, they all tried everything they could, not only to give him bad nightmares, but to give him colossal magic enslavement. And when he woke the next morning, all their powers were gone. So Mahakasyapa became one of his chief esoteric monks. When the Buddha got to the point of talking about the Parayana, he stopped speaking and he picked up a flower and he held up the flower. The only monk who smiled was Mahakasyapa, and the Buddha gave him the flower. Zen begins there, where that point of realization was given a transmission outside of the mind. What is outside of the mind. The whole conscious cosmos. More next week.