Nature 11

In 1968, the Newberry Library in Chicago published a book called The Circle of Knowledge Encyclopedias Past and Present, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the title of the whole endeavor was The Circle of Learning. This is a deceptive. And our lecture today. Our presentation today is all of the cautionary penumbra around the deception that there is a circle of knowledge. There is no circle of knowledge. That's an artifact of an imposed ideational structure that has not served us well. And in the 20th century, it damn near sank us several times. There is no projective circle of knowledge that knows better than we do about ourselves and each other. And so the whole basis of tyranny can be undercut by a population of people who know how to say, there is no circle of knowledge. There is no set pattern of rules and principles that are eternal within which we must move and have our being. And this is a very great problem. The tab that unravels that deceptive ideational tyranny is all here And the paragraph very early on in Jane Goodall's book Through a Window. She at this point has been studying chimpanzees in what is today Tanzania in West Africa used to be called British West Africa and on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the Gombe Nature Preserve. And she writes this suddenly just after 3:00, heralded by a blinding flash of lightning and a thunderclap that shook the mountains and growled on and on, bouncing from peak to peak, the grey black clouds let loose such torrential rain that sky and earth seem joined by moving water. Gimble. This chimp stopped playing then, and he, like the others, sat hunched and still close to the trunk of the tree. I pressed myself against a palm, sheltering as best I could under its overhanging fronds. As the rain poured down endlessly. I got colder and colder soon turned in upon myself. I lost all track of time. I was no longer recording. There was nothing to record except silent, patient, uncomplaining endurance. That's what's wrong with a circle of knowledge that it has no access to the infinite background against which it is projected. It has no capacity for that turning in upon oneself, so that the space within the circle melds and flows free with the space outside the circle. And what you get instead of a circle is you get an infinite extensiveness of wide openness. Within which the circle dissolves. Now, we've talked several times about how in the beginning of our education, we used like a tuning fork. We used a pair of books to get us started, to get us kicked into operation, and we wanted to get kicked into operation by just dropping ourselves into the only beginning that there is, and that is the ongoingness of nature. And we used the pair of books we used, Thoreau. We would love to have used the whole journal of Thoreau, but it's about 20 volumes, so we use some selections that were cooked down later into a couple of essays on walking. And paired with that, we use the etching because the ancient Chinese had a wonderful appreciation of the mystery of nature, which, though it was shunted aside again and again in dynastic times, it had become so naturally ingrained upon the Chinese character that it was easily rediscovered again and again throughout what came to be Chinese history. Whereas the Western sense of the grain of the mystery of nature was never allowed to flow as freely as long as the Chinese. And so the Western sense of the mystery of nature had to be rediscovered at great struggle and great cost by people that had to discipline themselves in order not to be baffled by a circle of knowledge. And so the whole technique of a yoga characterizes the Western struggle to get natural again for the Western tradition, for those that come down from India to Ireland, from the Arctic to Africa, the quality of the mystery of nature is something to be discovered by a discipline that opens us up again, whereas for the Chinese it's a matter of, um, not a yoga, but of very quickly and easily dissolving the scrimshaw of the moment. In the Chinese tradition. The solution is done by a solvent, which we're all familiar with, and that is wine alcohol, because while in the natural cycle, water and fire are natural solvents in the transformed nature, in the transformational quality Alcohol is also a universal solvent and joins water and fire. And so deep was the understanding that because water has been changed into wine, the natural solvent quality of water has become a conscious solvent in alcohol. There was the conviction that there must then be a transformational analogue to fire called spiritual fire. And so that while fire and water were solvents in nature, in consciousness, alcohol and spirit were the solvents. And so you had a pair of pairs. You had four universal solvents that could take any structure and bring it back into a saturated solution, out of which a new form Could be crystallized and precipitated and developed. Now, for the Chinese tradition, this quality of understanding that the inebriation from alcohol was a piece of the way in which one could dissolve man made forms, that nature's forms were naturally dissolvable by fire and water, but that man's forms were not particularly natural all the time. In fact, they were mostly artificial. They were artifacts of a reducing, reductive, imposed process, and they didn't dissolve with fire and water. And so it would take wine to dissolve those. It would take spiritual fire to dissolve those. And so one finds in Chinese poetry, beginning as early as Tao Yuanming, known honorifically as Tao Chen in the three hundreds AD, a poem translated here. This translation was done from Cambridge University Press by A.R. Davies, 1983. This poem is entitled Drinking Alone during Continuous Rains. Notice the continuous rains are a natural water continuum, and the drinking the alcohol is added to that at the center of that activity, like Jane Goodall turning within herself during continuous rains. Raines. Tao Chen adds something to the Chinese poetic tradition that appears for the very first time. It is the poetic displacing the rhetoric that a language which has been highly stylized by rhetorical rules, by principles of rhetorical expressiveness, so that one knew on principle what to say all the time. In every case, one's ritual comportment was fortified by a language which fit always the mythic prototypes, and was integrated along the symbolic ideas that were set down by the dynasty. Tao Chen dissolves all of that. Drinking alone during continuous rains. Translation runs something like this. The cycle of life inevitably comes to its end. In remotest antiquity, men spoke of it, so the immortals Tsung and Shao were once in the world. But now where are they to be seen? But an old man presented me with wine and said, drink and become an immortal. I try a draught. In all feelings are remote. A second cup, and immediately I forget heaven. Heaven surely is not removed from here. If one trusts in the true, one does not take first place. My cloud soaring. Crane has marvelous wings. It returns from the eight limits in an instant. Since I embraced this solitariness, I've struggled here for 40 years. My bodily frame has long since been transformed. But if my heart is constant, what more is there to say? And so in Tao Yuanming, in Tao Chen, we have the beginnings of a Chinese language that discovered that a poetic is much stronger expressively than a rhetoric, that rhetorical rules that the dynasty gives you can be obviated by a single poet who learns personal expression. And from Tao Chen on for about 1700 years, the Chinese lyric poetry tradition has been one of the grandest in the world, and at one of the great apexes of that poetic language that dissolved the artifacts of dynastic authoritarian imposition and allowed for one to return, not back to nature, but to become participatory in the mystery that nature most certainly is. That this reached an apex in the Tang dynasty, and that early in the Tang Dynasty, within about 150 years of its founding, two of the greatest poets of all time were contemporaries Li Po and Du Fu. And we talked last week About how during this glorious kind of Chinese medicine Paradise of the apex of the Tang dynasty, all of a sudden lightning struck and almost fried the entire Chinese people. What was called in history, the An Lushan Rebellion, ended up with a third of the entire population of China being killed within one year. Massive massacre after massacre. And in all of this, the two greatest poets were exiled to opposite ends of the kingdom. Li Po, who had been at home in Sichuan in the south, was pushed even further south into the jungles down beyond Yunnan, almost to the Burmese border, to Fu, exiled to the far north, even almost up to the Manchurian areas, by the curve of the Amur River. And how at that point, the whole history of China hung in balance, and what allowed for it to recapture, to recalibrate out of this holocaust was the tremendous language of tofu. His ability to use a transformational spiritual fire of language brought the entire dynasty back into play again, made it possible for that to happen. And out of this, one senses that tofu was depending upon Li Po, manifesting the mystery of nature so that he tofu could manifest the spiritual fire of consciousness, and that they together formed this way of consciousness and nature coming together, that the mystery of nature and the infinite creativeness of consciousness brought back together, allowed to come back together, not in a synergy so much, but in a cycle, so that instead of there being a circle of knowledge, there was reinstated a cycle of learning. That learning goes on in such a way that we learn how to learn, and we have no barriers than that can keep us within artificiality. That even something as powerful as the dynastic structure was not able to keep the Chinese lyrical poetic into constraints. And from Tao Chen on, you find something happening in Chinese history that had never happened before. You begin to find in remote mountainous areas, in secret valleys, off the beaten tracks. Not just hermits, solitary hermits, but you began to find communities of men and women making utopian communities so that an entire it used to be called in French European thought, socialist communities. You began to have experiments in a kind of a Daoist pre-political natural exchange between men and women, between adults and children, between members of the community. And you began to have these small valley utopias that grew, and this whole tradition thereafter is viable in Chinese history. Its carrier was the poetic language of Chinese lyrical poetry, not into political language, not into any kind of dynastic rules of ritual, symbols of ideas. And in this tofu's, confidence in Li Po is interesting. Tofu, great enough as a literature as a poet, put his confidence on Li Po being mysterious enough to be real in nature. And this was in his day, one of the mysteries of the whole fact of Li Po. Li Po was one of those rarest of Chinese. He was a Chinese with blue eyes. He was an extraordinary being. I remember one time and in the early 60s, 1960, probably 1960, you know, walking down one of the side alleys off Grant Street in San Francisco and trying to understand the Tao Te Ching, trying to living in Chinatown at that time, trying 40 years ago to really just get it. What is what is here? And I stumbled upon an old man in an overcoat. He looked like a throwback to, like, the refugees of the 19 tens. And all of a sudden he looked up and I was startled to see a Chinese man with blue eyes. I could hardly believe it. And about a half an hour later, I found myself in the Kwong Ming Dao Society and there was no one there, just the bubbling from goldfish aquariums and the stench of too much vegetation that had been left there for decades. And the sound of the clack of the mahjong games up above in some kind of an apartment. And there was no one there. And I remember 40 years ago, thinking to myself, realizing that you have to be really attentive to understand a cycle of learning. You have to be prepared to be prepared, because if you have any kind of projective expectation whatsoever, any kind of emphatic imposition of composition, you find nothing. Whereas in the nothing that does occur if you're not unexpecting for it. If you're prepared for that preparation, the nothing does something magical, something mysterious. It delivers instantaneous insight that only later through life does it disclose in odd resonances what that toneless sound was. What it was that you heard, saw, intuited was not there, but is there in the later echoes of what wasn't there? And so this is a very peculiar kind of a discovery that the deepest form of education is accepting the unknown, so that later on, as it becomes known gradually through a build up of As you become acquainted with the way in which the unknown is always here, it's called factoring in the zeros. And then instead of knowing something which has a static level of registry, you're knowing graduates to learning which is capable of going through infinite powers of development and your sense of education, instead of being a cardinal ruler of what you got becomes an ordinal harmony of what you're participating with. And so learning is like a discovery for Tao Chen, for Li Po, the classic formulation of this mysteriousness, the mystery of nature that is a complementarity to the openness of consciousness. The classical figure is Lao Tzu, Lao Tzu, who in Chinese Li er, so that his family name Li. So that Li Po was convinced that he was a descendant of Lao Tzu. He was also a Li from that same lineage, and that Li Po was convinced that the founder of the Tang Dynasty, Li Shimin, was also a descendant of Li, heir of of the Taoist genius, and so Lao Tzu became the fabulous ancestor of the Tang dynasty, and Li Po embodied this mysterious capacity of bringing the way that the Tao Te Ching complimented mystery and consciousness together, and resurfaced in the founding of the Tang Dynasty. Li Shimin became known in Chinese history as tongue tied tsung, the founder of the Tang dynasty, not the founder in the sense that me first, like an Augustus Caesar tongue tied song of which there are many legends, many literary epics, he becomes the Odysseus of Chinese history. He put his father on the throne, not himself, though he was the power, and he's the first Chinese figure since the times of Han Wuji some 700 years before him. To understand that you cannot have a social structure that spans thousands of miles Based upon the ability of legions of men marching and so tongue tied. Sung founded the Tang Dynasty in the same way that at the pinnacle of the early Han dynasty, there was a brief glimpse that the only way to keep thousands of miles of a China that went from the ocean inland as far as the Pamir mountain range by Pakistan, was to put man upon a horse. And whereas the Han dynasty briefly had had cavalry for the first time in Chinese history, tongue tied sung went further. He made a kind of pony express relay where there were caches of horses every 30 miles all the way across the deserts, all the way through the mountains, all the way crisscrossing China, so that when he wanted to send a military armed force, he sent them on the waves of fresh horses across several thousand miles of land as fast as was humanly possible 1300 1400 years ago. It's this quality that makes them the symbol of the Tang dynasty, the horse. And you see the Tang horse. And it's very similar to the old Han horse. But whereas the Han horse is based upon power, the kind of horse that could pull a plow if it weren't in military service, a Clydesdale type horse, the horse of the Tang, is mobile and supple. It's a racer. It's meant to go and go and go This quality of high mobility. This this tongue quality was there in the poetry of Li Po. And it's Li Po's poetry that becomes, even for Tu Fu, one of the high water marks of conscious insight. Though Tofu's language became more refined in terms of art, Li Po's poetic was always more participatory in the mysteriousness of nature. And so Li Po was often referred to as an alchemist of language. Whereas a tofu was called a one of the founders of the pinnacle of Chinese civilization. If we go back to the Tao Te Ching. If we go back to Lao Tzu. Back to the air. In the 39th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, we find Lao Tzu using one of the most extended displays of his language in order to draw out of us a pair of contrary understandings projected at the same time. And we recognize in this structure our paradox. But this is a particular kind of paradox, where one of the pair goes up and the other goes down, so that you're going in two directions at the same time. Do you remember the film Buckaroo Banzai, where he's born of two different races, and they say at the beginning of the film that he was born going in two directions at the same time, which is why he became a rock star and neurosurgeon. Race car driver. Like that. Here's how Lao Tzu, in the 39th section of the Tao Te Ching, pulls out a respect for law, but a mysteriousness of the root of the law, so that the more that one understands how forms are patterns which are universal, the solutions of those universal forms are eternal. This is called, I translate, the two Chinese characters that appear at the top of this, the traditional chapter headings of the Tao Te Ching, Law and root together so that it translates as law of the root. This is my translation of it Anciently te. Tao te Ching Tao and Tay. Tay is is the power, the efficacy, the existent. Tao the source, the mystery. Anciently Tay's unity is oneness. Heavens. Tay is unity, thereby an openness. Earth. Tay is unity, thus an equanimity. Spirits. Tay is unity thereby. Mind. Valets. Tay is unity. So they accept the 10,000 things. Tay is unity. Thereby they have life. Knights and kings. Tay is unity. They become heaven, Earth standard. That item in itself is unity. Indeed, heaven's emptiness is steadfast. Otherwise it would presumably break down. Spirit's emptiness is mind. Otherwise it would presumably evaporate. Valleys, emptiness to be filled otherwise would presumably be exhausted. The 10,000 things. Emptiness have life otherwise presumably soon extinguished. Therefore, the noble take from the people their root. The high's foundation is upon the low. Therefore, knights and kings call themselves orphans, widows, hermits. This is taking the people at a very wide root. A not so a. Therefore, letting go to peace as a carriage will no longer a carriage wheel. Don't desire respect like a gem, and then let them down like a stone. And so you find a kind of a politic. In the Tao Te Ching you find a rules of governing. But the rules of governing are not on a hierarchy of authority, but on an interpenetration of the mystery of nature and the openness of consciousness, and how in the play of their complementation existence has its continuity in the sense that it cycles, so that what occurs doesn't occur statically, but occurs in a movement of from beginning through development to an end, beyond which there is a return. And so this acyclic quality of the mystery that nature always returns out of the vanishing becomes a confidence in Chinese understanding that vanishing has an echo, and that the echo, when it returns, brings everything back with an added infusion of the zero ness of the vanishing, and that if one does this for oneself while you are alive in your life, enough times you begin to have that layered quality where the ones and zeros, where the mystery of nature and the existential exactness begin to layer themselves and fold and fold and fold Unfold until one becomes rather like metal, which has been folded and reheated and folded and reheated several hundred times. And you get the samurai sword, which is exactly what the personality of the Taoist master was. So that your sense of your existence, your body, your mind, yes, they're objective, but they are in no way ever static. They weren't even static when you were a child. And so this odd quality in the Tang dynasty, the Tang dynasty, by the time of Li Po and Tu Fu, is 1200 years after Lao Tsu, you get a study of Tang astronomy. And Edward Schafer, who was a Magisterial Chinese teacher calls it pacing the void, the tongue approach to the stars, pacing the void. And you get this sense that there is in the mystery of nature, not only qualities which one could develop a taste for, but there is quality lessness that one develops an open space for that you don't identify it with any taste whatsoever. And because of this, there is in the Chinese tradition after lao-tzu, a tremendous vitality for the transformational vehicle being a different form of yourself. The figure that first exemplifies this in the Chinese tradition is H1, coming about 150 years after launch, about 350 BC. Chongzuo is a contemporary of Aristotle. One of the great modern commentaries on the first three chapters of The Butterfly is Companion. This sense that our vehicle is not a vehicle that can be identified with any certainty, ever. It's not that we don't understand enough to do so. When our understanding becomes folded enough times with vanishing and reoccurring, we begin to understand that static things are deceptive targets for projection and have only artificial artifactual appearance. And they are the illusion. The mystery of nature is not the illusion. The illusion is the confidence that measurable materiality is statically there and that you can count on that. That's deception, truly. And so there is a sense in the Chinese tradition after Lao Tzu that when you're counting on your fingers, be sure that you don't count, but that you recognize that there are spaces between the fingers. And it's that mobility that allows the hand to have not just a grasp, but allows for it to have a mobility that can carry the army of your capacities across thousands of miles of desert in your life and be effective. And so there's this deep quality. There is this appreciation and it was there in the I Ching. It's there in Thoreau, and it's there in Jane Goodall. And in a moment of intuition, we now recognize that Jane Goodall spending 40 years with the chimpanzees is like Thoreau spending 40 years with the trees around Concord, Massachusetts. The more one reads Jane Goodall, the more it's like a diary of her participation with the mystery of nature again and again. What comes across is that the chimpanzees are the shadow puppet wayang performance. But the amphitheatre is the mystery of nature, and she more and more includes herself. She is the protagonist who is the dispassionate observer, the scientist who was there simply to record. But increasingly she also allows us to see. There are moments when she stops recording, when she no longer is, and in her is not, as she endures and is still participatory, and that she was accepted by the chimpanzees because she was able to do this. Generations of chimpanzees and this quality is there in Thoreau, and in a very similar way, Jane Goodall and Thoreau as a pair of Westerners are very, very familiar. When one looks at the ancient Chinese tradition, the I-Ching 3000 years ago, 1000 BC underwent a radical change in its earlier form its It's Fu xi form of a heavenly set of trigrams was transformed into a man center of trigrams. The old heaven pattern of Fu XI became the humanity pattern of the founders of the Zhou Dynasty, King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, so that the I-Ching also is known as the GE. The Book of Job the founding of the Zhou dynasty. But when you look at modern editions of the Shang modern meaning in the last 2000 years, in the last 2500 years, all of those are modern editions of the Shang. They have commentaries. They have the ten wings, but the ten wings are not all from the Duke of Zhou and King Wen. Most of them are from Confucius. Most of them are from 600 years after the Book of Job. So when you look to see what is contemporaneous with the I Ching, even it's humanity centered, gene centered instead of Dao focused, gene focused, human hearted, focused. You find the Chinese Book of Odes, the earliest collection of lyrical poetry, and it's lyrical poetry in the Book of Odes that gives us the insight into the I-Ching, not the Confucian commentaries on the I Ching, but the Book of Odes, because it's the earliest recording. And what one finds here is not the scholarly, Confucian oriented endeavor of explaining significance, but it's the lyric appreciation of the splendor of the kinds of people who are around. It's the splendor of the people of Joe, because they sing the energies of nature which coursed through them. It's not that they have an ideational sophistication for significance, but that their vitality flows from the mystery of nature into their jeon. The Tao of the mystery of nature and the jeon of their human heartedness are in sync. And it's because of that in-sync ness that their songs are natural and one of the outstanding qualities. This is a scholarly edition of the Book of Odes from 1950, in Stockholm. Bernhard Karlgren, who studied Tang ceramics, was famous for that. His edition of the Book of Odes is extraordinary because you appreciate for the first time, the exuberance of the language that's there, characterizing spiritual personality instead of dynastic power. Let's take a break. Our process includes more than just our coming together on Saturday mornings. Those are the nodes in an Ongoingness part of the flow is what you do. And in order to choreograph what you do so that a year and a half from now, you can make use of that in a memory mode. When we get to history. History is so difficult. The process of history is the most difficult process that there is. And our species has not yet dealt with history and any successful way, and all of our constructs have become ruined because we cannot face the threshold crisis of history. History dissolves everything that men have made on this planet so far. And so our crisis is one of historical incapacity. And when we come to the history section, one of the assignments is to do a history of the previous two years. And since history is the seventh quarter of this education, it means that you're looking back through the seven quarters that you've been in this situation, plus the three months before you came. Because the three months before you came are a part of this situation. They're a in displaying a sculpture. The space around the sculpture is a part of the sculpture, and a very powerful sculpture will sometimes encompass the whole room in order to have something to look back on. Historically, we have these assignments which build all the way through in the nature series. It's taking a series of random walks, three random walks, and just making a record for yourself of those three walks. And to save that. So you'll need a folder and you want to put in that folder. Now, um, three sheets of paper, each one of which records your your walk start from wherever you live. Walk around your neighborhood a little bit and come back. First walk. The second walk should be indexed by a primal element Earth, air. Fire. Water, space, metal so that during that walk, this single element becomes like a rudder to steer the way in which you take that walk. And the third walk is to walk in the opposite direction and to do it without shoes, without socks, to do it barefoot, barefoot, doctors of ourselves. These three walks then constitute an assignment in the mystery of nature. And when we come to ritual, we're going to make masks. We're going to make a pair of masks. We're going to make a mask of something from our diet, of a foodstuff or a drink. Something that comes into us from out there. The second mask will be a mask of feeling something from within us that goes out. And so the mask of food and the mask of feeling will have a mutual threshold to use a little bit of phenomenological talk. They'll have an interpenetrating liminality that will glow. And in that arc of glowing, where food and feeling come together, they have such an existential primordiality that it is possible to trust any locus within that glowing arc as the first real definition of our character. Food and feeling together in that kind of complementarity locate a true surface, a defining surface for our character. And we need to know that. Because when we get into myth, and even more powerfully, when we get into symbols, into ideas, we will want to know where do these powerful conceptions come from? They don't come from the accepted authority of more powerful minds than ours. If they do, it comes at our peril. Those ideas, those symbols are feeling toned images, their language Experiences which are further integrated, which are interiorized and being interiorized certainly develop a space called the mind. And there's certainly a physiological structure of the brain within which those neuronal nets have their theater of occurrence. But as we will see, there's a lot more to it because the mysteries of language are parallel to the mysteries of nature. Myth and nature are very parallel. There are two birds that hunt together, and on one hand the body occurs quite objectively in between them, but the mind occurs just as objectively on the farther side of them. And if we're to understand how the mind and the body are a pair, An integral objective pair, we must understand the process crucible out of which they came, and the body certainly comes out of nature, and the body has all of the registry of the mystery of nature coming into a registry of existence. And so there is a calibration of mystery in the body. Absolutely. The mind also, because it comes out of language, because it comes out of mythic feeling, toned experience, thought has its objective structure also. It's very integrated. But as we will discover, the mind has a very curious quality. While the ritual comportment of the body has a connection to nature, and the feeling toned experience of language has a parallel to nature. The mind has no first hand connection or parallel with nature, and introduces an abstract quality for the first time and can go astray. The Black elk recorded once, he said, men get lost in the dark of their eyes, and so the mind becomes extremely difficult to have an appreciation for, and many integrations go astray. Then, and there are quite indefinitely. So we would like to forestall that somewhat. And these extracurricular activities, these assignments are given to help keep the flow out of being dots that are being connected together. These are not classes that somehow connect together. There is a flow of our mutual integrity, which is most certainly the deepest. Integrating, not the integrating factor, but the ancient word for it in Sanskrit was a sutra thread. The thread that holds it all doesn't hold it in some kind of a string, like a necklace of events and things, but that thread tends to get folded and refolded and refolded so that it becomes a warp and a woof, so that we become inheritors. Not of a necklace of experience, but of a fabric of life. And when a fabric of life is integrated, the mind becomes um, ambidextrous. But if it does not have a way to deal with its abstract energy and its capacities, we go very far astray. And instead of a fabric, we think that we cut for ourselves some ultimate costume which not only we should wear, but others as well. And the regimented, uniformed tyrannies that have haunted our species for many thousands of years become so ingrained that we can hardly believe that there is any solution. Our language that we're using here is a deeply transformed language. It's been folded and refolded many times, and instead of there being a single line of argument which one could follow by identifying meaning here, there, and in some cardinal sequence. Instead of there being a logical thread of rhetorical exactness, there is a whole fabric of possibility that's kept fresh as much as can be all the time. Now, I've given you, unlike previous sequences of this education, this particular one, I'm trying to give you an insight as to how my language was formed. And so I've been bringing in, especially because of the nature of a poetic displacing, a rhetoric. Instead of this being a rhetorical argument to get my meaning across to you. This is a poetic experience, including all of us together in this amphitheater, so that what comes out is not an argument, but wisdom. Sapientia, not the points. And so I'm going to give you three poems here from the early 1960s, so that you can appreciate what a radical difference was made as soon as there was a conscientious acquaintance with the Far Eastern Way, in which language worked poetically. Here's a poem from 1966. Right in the midst of being able to understand how to write an English that was very much like a Chinese from the Tang dynasty. It's a short poem, spring with Li Po Li po. The rain has stopped and last clouds scatter down the canyon, fresh wind blowing our hair and clearing twilight. Let us drink more slowly. The moon will rise in no time at all. One of the difficulties in 1966 was that the English understanding of the Chinese poetic was heavily skewed by Ezra Pound and a whole school of especially American English language poets who thought that Chinese characters were all about imagery and bits of imagery being gestalt together and that whole school of images. Poets were associated with symbolic poets like Yeats, who came from the French Symbolists like Laforgue and Verlaine, Rimbaud and the granddaddy of them all, Baudelaire. And so one was convinced in the early 1960s that Chinese poetry must be imagist in its structure, and all of this was a false impression. In fact, a false conception, and had very little bearing. Out of that kind of hubris came a whole development of poetry, culminating in Ezra Pound's attempt to translate Confucius, the classic anthology defined by Confucius, translated by Ezra Pound, printed by Harvard University Press, 1954. It seemed like if Harvard's publishing it and Ezra Pound is doing it, it must be that way. As Lao Tzu would say, eh? And what made it more complex was that there was a confidence that somehow this was, by the time of the early 1960s, a lineage of American poetry also. And so one had this confidence. That somehow this little book, the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry, not only with Ezra Pound but with Ernst Velenosi, the great Chinese specialist from Boston. And that somehow this was really sophisticated planetary scale international understanding of poetry, and out of it came the confidence. This translation, beautifully done by Gary Snyder, not only of his first collection, riprap Riprap, was published as a saddle stitch sewn, bound little volume of poetry. It looked very much like a fascicle of East Asia books. Chinese and Japanese tradition used to have the books in little sewn saddle stitched fascicles and riprap came out in that kind of form in 1959 by Origin Press, and one was confident that here the cream of beat poetry inheriting from Ezra Pound and all these images, Symbolist poets that somehow we're going to really get it. And Snyder attempted a translation of Chinese poet Han Shan called Cold Mountain. Shan mountain mountain is usually Shan. It's also in a very special usage, UA, which means the five sacred mountains of China are special mountains that the five points of the whole of the Middle Kingdom were marked by mountains, not only for mountains at the corners, but one in the center, and that the most important of these mountains was in what is today Shandong province, Tai Shan. And we'll see. One of Tofu's greatest poet poems is on climbing Tai Shan. Not just climbing, but the the translation that carries it best is on a prospect of Tai Shan. But here Han Shan Cold Mountain, translated by Gary Snyder, one of his short little poems, translated about this time in the early 1960s. I've lived at Cold Mountain. How many autumns alone? I hum a song utterly without regret. Hungry. I eat one grain of immortal medicine. Mind solid and sharp, leaning on a stone. My poetry from the late 50s, very similar to that, is a poem called Chicago 1960. Night snow, light gray grey sky. Merged horizon. Where to now? To walk incessantly among the fall of fluff. Along the lake shore. Under black trees. Passing under clumps of twiggy limbs. One distant street lamp to the next. Where to now? To fail to found a final urge in words to fail. The bearing of things that should be seemingly inherent in that first buoyant you, and then only be passing as a single walker. Too old to have for real what he would to be as dramatic as this wind drawn face, or as completely forgotten as September. Trash of wire cage. Even this There in itself in snow. Too tired for bearing too long. Oneself as a compass for some universal navigator, enigmatic, whose pitiless roaming leaves an utter tatter a man's memory, leaving a sullen hesitancy in place of a history. Snows of the night, the heaviest clinging waiting. Barren trees, icy eyes where hate escaped. Where to now? Who phantom against the falling evening flurries in face of windblown, bitter. By vast frozen lakes that do not break the rushing. The scream of wild whisperings. Too real to hear and steady trudging. And then the poetry changes radically as soon as there's a deeper, truer understanding of how the Chinese lyric language poetic actually transforms and operates here from just a few years later learning of tofu. When Gen two fu. Learning of this in the wind and wave pavilion blown peony sweet, the evening star among new leaves reflects in the pond. A carp shape darkly eludes the mirror surface and passes beneath the star and the sweetness. A real poetic operating. It's not that the previous Chicago poem is not poetry, it's Western poetry. It's a Western. Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams idea of what it should be. Whereas this is poetry as it is occurring in a different way. The translation of the Tao Te Ching comes out of 30 years of that kind of poetic, of using the English language so that it flows spontaneously without end, not just to lecture extempore for 90 minutes, but to lecture extempore for 90 minutes for a thousand Saturdays in a row. It's a it's a yoga, but it's a yoga, not of some kind of hatha comportment or kama comportment or comportment or even some kind of a kingly yoga where all those are brought together. But what I used to call in the 60s a yoga of civilization, because our problem is not with our bodies, it's not with our minds. There are so many excellent ways that men and women have developed over tens of thousands of years of bringing the body and the mind and both of them together. And even the spiritual person, the prism of that jewel, of bringing all of them into their integral or into their differential. But no one has been able to stand up to the dissolving blizzard of history. It dissolves every single form. It makes it impossible for there to be a returning echo out of vanishing. And so it's a problem, and it's a problem that needed to be addressed. Now my. Understanding didn't come from Villanova or Pound, my teacher. Kyushu made sure that we understood that through him he was giving what he had intuited through his teacher, his teacher, one of the greatest lyric poets of the beginning of the 20th century, when Eetu, born in 1899, was massacred in front of his students in Nanjing in the Second World War. They lined him up with all the students, and they just shattered him by half an hour of machine gun fire that left tattered nothing in order to impress upon them That the Japanese Empire has arrived permanently. Here are a couple of lines from when E2. This was a poem written when he was traveling in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Just a few lines to give you his kind of quality, his character, his consciousness. I am sending these verses to you. It matters not if you cannot read them all. Just rest your fingertips on these words. The throbbing you feel will pulse in unison with your own heart. Your sensitivity is in the way you touch, and all that's being done here is to choreograph some Amplitude, where you begin to learn how you touch. And it's that feeling that you can trust. Later on, when he two wrote this kind of poem. This is a selection of a few lines from a poem called Autumn colors, and it is in the classic tradition of Chinese lyrical poetry, where the person is juxtaposed vis a vis the landscape. It has something to do with the jeweled person in the midst of the kaleidoscope of the landscape, mountains and rivers without end. This was written in the 1930s. Crystalline air, like pure water, fills the world. 3 or 4 pert children in orange, yellow and black sweaters dart through clove bushes like goldfish cavorting among the seaweeds, aren't they? A forest of masks on the Huangpu River. Those countless ascetic poplars stand piercing slate, blue sky and stony silence. That aspen stands like a gallant youth draped in a gold embroidered cape, resting one hand on his hip. He gazes at the jade green pool, admiring his own reflection as they lean on the zigzag crystal balustrades. The morning sunbeams smile at the world. From there smile flows liquid gold. Yellow gold on the oaks. Red gold on the oaks. White gold on the barks of the pines. Ah! These are no longer trees, but a palace and some Forbidden City. Yellow glazed tiles, green glazed tiles, story upon story, pavilion upon pavilion. The silvery songs of birds in imitate chimes under the flying eaves. There are no longer trees but an imperial capital. Regal in full splendor. You magnificent festooned autumn trees. Neither brocades of Lord Lingyang nor carpets from Turkey, nor the rose windows of Notre Dame, nor the frescoes of angels by Fra Angelico, can rival your colour and brilliance. Majestically garbed autumn trees. Ah, how I long to lead a life of colours as dazzling as these trees. So that's my poetic grandpa. We'll see next week that there was an indication. Two women, two American women in the 1920s 30s, Florence Ascough and Amy Lowell, for a moment brought themselves right to the verge to where they could have understood this and published a couple of books together travels of a Chinese Poet. Tu Fu Guest of Rivers and Lakes. There is in their work, and I'll bring it next week. A sense where you begin to have, for the first time, an ability to recognize, rather than just to cognize, that a poetic transforms and does not make ever clearer and clearer arguments. You're not reaching conviction on the basis of points scored. Those arcade game activities are extraneous, and they're irrelevant because there is always in a transformation, a mysterious activity where the mystery of nature is reactivated, brought back into play again by a transformation, and that consciousness does not occur without a transform. So that time and space itself become multidimensional. They become at least five dimensional, capable of being presumed by jewels and not by static targets that light up scoreboards on points made at the time when Amy Lowell and Florence Esco were doing this work with Tufo, especially with tofu, there was a writer in England. His name was I.A. Richards, who was a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, who had been very famous writing principles of literary criticism. The I.A. Richards, who was like the lion of literary criticism at the time, suddenly got it that there was an entirely kaleidoscopic possibility that he had not recognized before, and he wrote a book on Mencius and the mind, subtitled Experiments in Multiple Definition. And out of this came a whole different appreciation that the Chinese lyric poetic Had in fact occurred in the Western tradition, but in such long increments. Of non influence and non-recognition that it wasn't even visible as a lineage until later in retrospect. And that one could finally go back and say that the Western differential conscious lyrical tradition came into play as far back as about 2200 2300 BC. And that the very first author in the Western literary tradition, 1400 years before Homer. Her name was a woman. Her name was Na Duana and her father was the King of kings, Sargon of Akkad. He's the one that made the Fertile Crescent. The Fertile Crescent that joined the Persian Gulf with the Mediterranean Sea. Not in a single kingdom, but in an arc of Interpenetrating cultures that showed a different kaleidoscopic type of fabric. The Fertile Crescent was a new kind of civilization. It was not based on a kingdom. It was based on a whole spectrum of kingdoms that were reflected in a jeweled quality of personality that was different. And it was his daughter who was the great poet of her age, and she's the one who wrote the Inanna cycle, and she is most certainly the one who wrote the Gilgamesh epics. She is the great originator of the Western tradition, where language becomes a conscious differential jewel, operating as a transform within an integral cycle of learning to learn, so that what you have is not some kind of geometric thing by abstract argument, but a fructification by a nourishing life, so that everything, including the language, lives again. Living language. Living words. That habit of trying to define by outlining the boundaries goes back all the way to at least the chimpanzees 70 million years ago. It's not a bad habit of ours, not of our civilization, not even of our species, not even of the genera that our species belongs to. It already occurs 70 million years ago in the primal primate. Primitive habits of of chimpanzees patrolling the boundaries. Here's what Jane Goodall writes in Through a Window the young male chimpanzee. His adult experiences will be a very different form from those of a female chimpanzee. Milestones along the path he follows towards social maturity are different from those that mark the route for the female. Some, of course, are shared, such as the weaning process or the birth of a new baby in the family. But the initial break with the mother and the first journeys with the adult males not only comes much earlier for the young male than for the female, but he learns the young male chimpanzee learns that the first steps along the hierarchy of his achievement of power are to intimidate the females one by one, until all of them are afraid of him, and then he goes to work on the males to intimidate them. And his standing in the community is how high in that hierarchy of intimidation he can go. A hierarchy of dominance. In one of the most profound statements in the Chinese cultivated tradition, here is a single sentence abstracted from a classic called The Great Learning. The true man is sure to be on guard when he is alone. And a little later on, it says pointedly, in case you didn't hear it, the man who was not true in his privacy has the habit of setting no limit to the badness of his actions. That's 2500 years ago. To the great learning. The translation of the Great Learning, this one by E.R. Hughes from University of Oxford in the midst of the Second World War. It's usually paired with the mean in action. So that the mean in action hyphens they the way in which a principle of equanimity, which is not an averaging. It's not a mediocre reductive averaging. But the mean in action is the movement of the whole fabric all the time, through the choreography of the dance that we're doing. All of the fabric and all of the cut of all of the costumes as an ensemble together as a way of characterizing what the play is. So that mean in action is almost always paired with the great learning Joshua, and has this, um, uh, poignant kind of quality, which our friend here, uh, E.R. Hughes. Writes since this theory theory, since this theory is essentially Optimistic. Why is it optimistic? Because there is something that we can learn, and we can learn individually and also together. And what we learn, we can do it. And when we do it, we get better and better at doing it. And when we do it together long enough, that community becomes really strong, not on the basis of authority and hierarchies of dominance, but on the basis of mutual participation in the mysteries of nature and life and language and ourselves. That's really possible, since this theory is essentially optimistic and therefore open to suspicion as entailing an idealized view of man. Right? The habit of skepticism is saying, well, that's just ideal. That's dandy for the page, but it doesn't work out that way because people are not that way, because nature is not that way. And that's where the recursive skepticism must end. How do you know what nature is like? Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. What do you care what other people think? Here. Hughes, writing in 1942 1943, in the midst of the Second World War in Oxford under the bombs making this, it is significant that both Mencius and Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau of The confessions of the Social Contract of the meditations of the Solitary Walker, the Rousseau, who was a young roué and rake, and just loved to charm his Don Juan, inept way through French and Swiss, and any society that he could lay his hands on. All of a sudden, one day, rowing out on Lake Geneva, got surprised when he stopped rowing and everything calmed to perfect stillness, and he realized that something in him was calmer than the stillness. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau woke to himself in the privacy of that moment and never forgot it. After that, and from that pinprick of vanishing came an echo called the challenge of history, accepted by the romantic hero, someone who took upon himself the task of challenging romantically the adventure of the impossible dream that one can maybe not just dream. The impossible dream can awaken from it and live it and do it. And from then on, the rousseauian romantic hero becomes a figure. On one hand, the knight errant who's really going to pull it off, the gunfighter, the lone swordsman, the whoever's many faces that hero. But on the other tine, making a dilemma as well as a tuning fork out of that is the figure of something going wrong. And you come out with a Frankenstein. Frankenstein is written because the greatest hero of the age, Napoleon, turned out to be a really bigger problem after all. We're going to come back next week and take a look at more. I want to give you two poems that are 400 years apart. Both of them have the same archetypal imagery in it. One is from Tao Chen initiating the Chinese lyrical poetic of the individual Daoist romantic hero at loose. In a world where authority has gone hog wild and hierarchies of dominance have crushed almost everyone but not him. It's a poem, just a few lines hovering clouds, dense, dense. The hovering clouds. Fine, fine. The seasonable rain in eight directions. The same dusk. The level roads impassable. Quietly I sit in an east window. Spring wine alone I take it the good friend is far away. I scratch my head and linger on, like Thoreau surveying the snowstorm with the trees. And 400 years later, two views. One of his most famous poems, also called dreaming of Li-Po. Floating clouds, all day move, Wanderer, not long arrive. Three nights repeated. Dreaming of you. Kindly concern. See your mind. Take leave always Flurried ruefully say come not easy. Rivers, lake much wind. Waves. Boat, oars. Fear. Lose. Sink, go outdoors. Scratch white Whitehead as if disappointed in lifetime ambition. Officials fill the capital city. This man alone is wretched. Who says the net is wide mashed? Growing old body still in trouble. Thousand. Autumn. Name forlorn after death. Affair. So separated by 400 years. You see similar themes. What's different between you and Ming Dao? Chen and Tofu? Is that in between? In that 400 years, Chinese history developed a romantic aesthetic, just like the romantic period in European history Between Rousseau and the 1830s, and that romantic period is even codified in one of China's earliest, greatest novels, called The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was not only the influence for that whole generation of Zhou Enlai and Mao Tse-tung, who read the romance of the Three Kingdoms over and over again. But early on in Chinese history, the founding of the Tang Dynasty by Tang Tsung is based upon that heroic aesthetic being brought back into play on a civilization dynasty wide scale. More next week.