Ritual 12

We come to ritual twelve and our credits had this beautiful scroll of Basho and the landscape. The landscape is extremely important. It is one of three themes that Basho brings into play in a braiding way. He takes landscape as a theme, he takes poetry as a theme and he takes the ruins of previous Japanese dynastic empires and braids these three themes together with an overall synthesising theme of Buddhism in its Zen preciseness. This is very similar to Greek tragedy, which will take the pride of powerful people and the inevitability of the Gods and their powers and the attempt to be clever with ones power to reorganise life so that you dominate the Gods, which after all are just mythological, aren't they? And that those three themes in Greek tragedy are blundered together with a Pythagorean retrospective where one has a moment of realisation in Greek it is called an epiphany, so our presentation for ritual 12 is Zen and Epiphany.
Moments of realisation, and the realisation is that a whole cycle has come to a point where it would close and if it closed it would then just simply repeat itself again and again by rote. The point in both epiphany in the Pythagorean sense and Zen in the Buddhist sense is that ritual does not ever just close itself and repeat, but when ritual becomes close enough to be completed it reaches a threshold where a new process gets energised to come into play and we'll see with our next phase, which is myth that what comes into play is the process of experience, where the ritual action and comportment which is almost brought its sequence around full circle generates just before it would close the furthering of experience of the mythic horizon, the mythic process that comes out of it and what is released are images and feeling tones and language.
It is a powerful realisation that while there has been ritual comportment of hominids for hundreds of thousands of years, Homo neanderthalensis frequently buried their dead with flowers, but it is only with the further development of homo-sapiens that language was able to come into play and that the oral language generated a quality of having an imagery which was not just in the world, but through language came to generate a space of the mind and for the images of oral language then to find a way to visually occur in the space of the mind and that those images carried with them the quality that in ritual was emotion, was the body's responses to stimuli, just emotion to carry them out of the field, out of the phase of ritual into the phase of the mythic experience where emotion then put into play began its various modulation, through imagery, through an image base and refined itself into feelings, so that when one has an integral of feelings you get a completely different thing from the emotion in the body. You get an idea then that carries the tremendous synthetic idea and the idea is able, because of its superior integral to hold the rawness of emotion in the body's actions in its sequences to hold it in a larger and larger set of parenthesis by which an idea then expands itself and symbols come then to synthesize a whole image base of feeling and oral language which is then able to relate all the way back to the existential actions of ritual of the body.
This referential in the natural integral is called pragmatic because it's based on the ritual action having an index in the symbolic mind. Mediated by the actual images and feelings and language of experience that hold the ritual comportment of pragmatos, the action with the symbolic thoughts, pragmatism. The pragmatic quality of integral nature registers as a form in the mind and that form in the mind has the ability to also do something like ritual because as soon as ritual almost closed itself it was able to generate experience symbolic thought just as it comes to its completion where the idea would be powerful enough to come full circle to be really fully formed. It has the power to develop a further visionary phase, a quality of consciousness that quality is generally traditionally called pneumatic, so that while symbols in their ritual referentiality are pragmatic the visionary consciousnesses is pneumatic because it is able to go back as if it were a larger breathe and bring a new life into the transform of ritual, which then generates a refined experience which then integrates into a much superior quality of idea of the pragmatic integral of symbols.
When we look at Zen we are looking at it in terms of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, his longest greatest Zen travel log, his journey that he took towards the end of his life and we are trying to understand and appreciate that for Basho living in the late 1600s he comes more than 2,000 years after the historical Buddha; and the historical Buddha while he was a wandering teacher the Buddhism that came out of him, out of his sermons, out of his teaching had a career of constantly expanding by very large journeys its domain in Asia and by about 250BC already the spread of Buddhism was completed from almost all of India through a king named Ashoka and in order to make a pivot at a centre of India, so that the entire range of the resonances of Buddhism would carry all the way through India and perhaps even beyond, a central architectural point at the very geographical centre of India was established by Ashoka and it is called Sanchi.
Sanchi is one of those great efforts at architectural structure, it has a curious quality, here's the cover of a reprint of our classic volume on Sanchi. The four directions have these triple torii gate like structures facing out and on the inside was an area of a balustrade and in this balustrade was set a dome and that that dome, this entire structure was called a stupa, that dome ended with an umbrella of royal design at the top except this was not just a single umbrella as a king would have or a raja would have, but this was a triple umbrella and the triple umbrella is not only to give shade from the sun but it is a structure to collect energy from the cosmos and bring it into a focus so that the stupa itself was energised like a bell, like an energy bell. Only the energy bell did not ring sound, it rang silence; it rang a silence within silence. It rang a holy silence of visionary space that was in the stupa but radiated out from the stupa through the four directional gates and by the pivot of the centring of the stupa bringing not only the energy down into the stupa but rooting it into the ground itself.
In this the historical Buddha was presented in a set of four mudra's hand gesture rituals . The first one was to have the left palm with fingers touching the ground to root the earth, to root the teachings and the earth in a ritual comportment. The second was to raise that hand and hold it forth so as to be able to receive completely and quietly. The third mudra that was used was a mudra where the hands were brought up into a meditation and the fourth mudra was that the right hand was held in a mudra that had two very close qualities of ritual comportment. One was to hold it up even and that was fearlessness. The other was to put the middle finger forward just slightly and that was the mudra for teaching. These four ritual comportments brought together in the mudra's were the four direction gates Sanchi is in the middle of the Dekan, the central dessert and one can see Sanchi from very long ways off, even though today it has a number of other buildings and has been refurbished it once stood like a conspicuous man made hill in the centre of a dessert plan with the four great triple barred gates on the four directions and with this balustrade going around it, it was an invitation for someone, a pilgrim to be able to come through any of the four gates into the Sanchi complex but the east was always the favoured way. It was the synthesising entrance by which one could read out through the ritual comportment, the actual traction that the symbols would be able to eventually synthesise into meaning and that if one walked this way through the stupa you would by your own journey of your actions have walked out the existential reality that was there in the life of the place, in the ritual structure of the place. In that what you would be able to recognise later was to be able to think about what it was that you had actually experienced. That the ritual going through the pattern gave you the experience and the experience integrated gave you the ability to think about it and that the retrospection of the symbolic thought was through the experience to the ritual steps that one actually did.
It is the ritual steps that are the formation, there is a classic volume, The Symbolism of the Stupa published at Cornel University, the series is Studies on South East Asia the author Adrian Snodgrass, it is very difficult to come by now. The scholarly volumes were only put out in very limited quantities, probably 500 copies, 1,000 at the most. The classic ritual basis of all Indian architecture, Buddhist, Hindu, Jaina, whatever was always the same, rooted in what were called the Shilpa Shastras and the Shilpa Shastras designated the actual steps, the actual sequences of steps that one would go through so that the making of the architectural aspect of it by the workman was their ritual of bringing it into existence. They would do this in such a way that the existentiality of the temple or the stupa or the mandala any architectural structure whatsoever was made in this kind of comportment, each step was distinct and clear and related to the next step by its actuality that this was the next step and no thought to a plan yet. No thought to the effect of it yet, but simply to follow through step by step in the right sequence until it was finished and completed and only then if someone went into that completed structure in a ritual way could you tell that you had built it right, that the temple resonated. That the stupa vibrated, that the mandala integrated. One would guarantee this by having done the ritual comportment exacting not to plan but to emerging the existence of it out of the oceanic process of nature. Nature not as a knot, and not as a sing, but nature as a process capable of emerging iteratively again and again in a way that was realisable in form and that as existence in forms is realisable, because they occur. The higher symbolic forms are realisable because one understands it and the understanding symbolically has a direct alignment to the ritual existentiality. If it is made with an action to just now materialise it. To just now put it together, it will work, it will generate experience and if that experience is integrated into the mind, it will form in such a way that is realisable.
Snodgrass writes here under the ritual demarcation of the stupa plan: 'The stupa plan is determined by ritual means, the ritual procedures detailed in the Indian building manuals, the Shilpa Shastras, its used by all times all peoples in India. The ritual forms part of a cultural heritage shared by all Indian traditions and one that dates from the very earliest times.'
The earliest times go back very far indeed. We think of India as going back to Vedic times which is about 1500BC; 1500BC is very recent. The Indus civilisation goes back at least to 3500BC, and that was a civilisation that had two huge cities on the Indus River, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro and its traditions go back to at least Palaeolithic times in India. We are speaking of several dozens of millennia before the beginnings of even the early Indus civilisation.
One of the qualities that's here in Basho is that the Indian ritual comportment of the structure of the temple, of the stupa, of the mandala is carried over very deeply into its career of historical development in the journey in which it took and Buddhism developed in such a way that it spread from India into central Asia, eastward into the near east, but mainly across central Asia and into China and into Japan; and by the time it got to Basho's Japan in the late 1600s the quality of the journey was that it had become structured as if it were a very special quality of temple. It was a temple that was put into a landscape ritually, it was put into architectural structure of writing or of a building or of a symbolic expression, but it went further from that. It went into the quality in Zen which is not just a realisation but is a realisation that is transparent to reality. So that it is not just simply the mind that realises but the mind realises that in its transparency it is able to behold for the first time reality.
From China to Japan the largest Zen journey recorded before Basho was the long scroll by Sesshu. Sesshu was a, Sesshu means snow boat, means a man so great that he is able to carry a boat of snow into the mountains. This is Sesshu. He is a combination of Rembrandt and several other great artists that you would recognise, but Sesshu in his long scroll and it's presented always in many different versions, you can get a small pocket version of Sesshu's long scroll and what is stupendous about it is that Sesshu studied in China, the landscape tradition then came back to Japan and whereas the Chinese landscape scrolls were single scrolls or sometimes they were put together with a couple of others to make a triptage, Sesshu was the one who made the long scroll. Enormously long, about 75 feet by this size, almost a foot and he painted the entire thing in one day. To show the energy of the Zen artist who is able to take the ritual comportment of the materials, thoroughly released into a fantastic array of experience that can be brought almost instantly to a mind that is able to bring that pragmatically to not just an idea but the braiding of themes into an idea that is transparent and opens itself to an array where the ritual comportment now is instantly transformed into an artistic presentation.
The largest example of Sesshu is Hiroshige's Great 53/55 stages of the Tokaido, done in 1833, where all of the steps, all of the stages of the Tokaido, the road between Edo and Kyoto each has its own presentation and he did many versions of it. The difference is that Sesshu's long scroll is an early Japanese transform of the Chinese landscape scroll. Whereas Hiroshige's Tokaido series and another series called the Kisokaido and another series is 100 views of Edo are developments somewhat presaged by Hokusai before him 36 views of Mount Fuji, but it is Basho who makes the ritual comportment different from the Chinese in a very special way. You hardly find any references in Basho to China, but you find a complete array of indexes of Japanese civilisation going back more than 1,000 years before him and one of the qualities in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, right at the beginning he writes: 'No sooner had I swept the cobwebs from my broken house on the river Sumida, [which is in old Edo, Tokyo,] before the new year and the spring mist had begun to rise over the fields than I wanted to be on the road again to cross the barrier gate of Shirakawa in due time.'
And then about 10 pages of the 40 page manuscript, about a quarter of the way through, he finally comes to the great barrier gate of Shirakawa and he records it in this way:
After many days of solitary wandering I came at last to the barrier gate of Shirakawa which marks the entrance to the Northern regions. Here for the first time my mind was able to gain a certain balance and composure, no longer just a victim to pestering anxiety, so it was with a mild sense of detachment that I thought about the ancient traveller who had passed through this gate with a burning desire to write home.
This gate was counted among the three largest gates. It was traditional that between the large provinces of Japan because of wars and dynasties that at each provincial border there were these huge barrier gates put up and one of the largest in Japan was Shirakawa because beyond it was the wild north, like Hadrian's Wall separating Scotland off from England, like the Chinese wall separating off the Gobi Inner Mongolian dessert from the farm lands of northern China, the barrier gate at Shirakawa was that beyond this the reach of power began to fray into the wild chaos of the unknown and many strange things would happen there, that while the rest of Japan down towards the south had been pretty well digested by the time of his journey in the 1680s the north was still wild. It was the scene of bears, it was the scene of wild animals of the Ainu people still holding on Hokkidō Island and parts of northern Honshū.
The protection of crossing such a gate ritually was by his time to leave a poem and he was unable to do so. Nothing would come out of him and so he finally made his way to the house of a poet and confessed that he had been unable to be able to write a poem and looking out he saw that it was time for the rice planting and the rice planting in Japan is always a ritual activity. You can see in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai at the end of the film the rice planting songs where especially the men will beat drums and chant the rice planting songs and the women will do the bending and putting in of the plants and it's a choreography of making this planting so that the harvest will be able to continue life. Basho finally was able to do his poem. The first poetic venture I came across, the rice planting songs of the far north.
His ability to go back into a transition in the journey of not just being on a long, perhaps the last journey of his life, in fact his companion Sora had to leave him before the journey was finished and actually died very soon after that. Even though Basho was only about 50 years old the hardness of the life of the time made him an old man. The portrait by Buson of him shows him already even though with the irony of a man aged in our time it would be someone almost in their late 70s.
The quality of the pragmatic as it generates the pneumatic has a different quality of focus then, instead of it being a centre it's a pivot, and instead of it being a synthesis it is a pivot of a dynamic which we would call prismatic, it's like a lens. It doesn't just focus the images to the sharpness of an image, the centre of one's seeing, the perception to the conception, but that what is lensed is a complete spectrum of possibility of ways of looking at it. One of the great American Zen poems by Wallace Stevens is called Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. It has a quality that when the prism is put into play as a differential form a new quality of experience comes out which is kaleidoscopic and it is the kaleidoscopic range of experience that makes us affine to the cosmos because the cosmos is a kaleidoscopic reality. It is not a form like a minds form, it is not a form like existence is form, but it is a larger differential form like the prismatic form of the artist and so does the artist who generates the kaleidoscopic process of history which makes it possible for us to have a harmonic with the cosmos in its reality.
There was a great linguist named Roman Jakobson and he was interviewed towards the end of his life, just a few months before he died by his wife Krystyna Pomorska, Jakobson was born in 1896 and he died in 1982, he was at Harvard for 20 years after he left the Europe of the Nazis, his wife said to him in a question, in a book called Dialogues, published by MIG: 'You mention grammatical categories among the elements that can form couples of equivalents.'
The couples of equivalents of Jakobson is like our pairs, 'Your innovative contribution to poetics, especially in the years that you spent in America lies in the study of the particular role of grammar in poetry',
Impossible to translate certain categories from one language to another, because they are linguistic units, they are code units, obligatory having that character of grammatical categories of a compulsive character that come out of the way in which people live, not in their experience, but in their actions, in the rituals which they do, the actions of their bodies, the sequences of how they do something registers and is the very base upon which their language and their images and their feelings will generate. So that one cannot look to the mind for a grammar, one cannot look to experience for a grammar, one has to look to the ritual action comportments for the grammar, not just the grammar of a language, but the grammar of then all forms including art forms.
The grammar of architecture is in how the materials are used to build and in what sequence and they deliver the foundation of what that building is, of what that poem is, of what that journey is. Not in its existentiality of it is, but in its possibilities of what it could be and the range then of a critical quality of prismatic life is to understand that you can improve and select and refine so that the art replaces the ritual by transform and what happens when art replaces the ritual is that the entire thrust shifts from the base of traction to the attraction if its possibilities. One of the things in our education is to first master how ritual gives a firm existential basis to the cycle of nature and then how art instead of being a traction is an attraction leading us forward into a future of possibilities that would never have been there in ritual even though it were perfectly indexed by the mind. The mind then has to do something radical, it has to acquire the ability to pivot on its own axis, the Greek word for that was metanoia, and if the mind cannot change it then regresses and locks itself into the ritual traction and tries to dominate the ritual traction, rather than pivoting and changing and is able to accept the attractiveness of possibilities which it can then explore.
Let's take a little break.
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Let's come back, and we are trying to give ourselves an ability to do something which is completely natural, but is so scrambled by artificiality that it generally doesn't obtain, it doesn't work, it doesn't happen and in nature there is always compensation and for something that is not really done, there has to be a compensation and because existence does not really happen the mind compensates in the only way it can. It thinks that it will do such and so and this will make up for it, so that the modern personality is 90% fantasy. Instead of there being a symbolic thought which is an index to the natural integral and a gateway, a portal to the conscious array of possibilities, the mind lives in its own day dreams. Because life does not have an existential traction it doesn't work and so the mind in its fantasy seeks to dominate and over dominate and make up procedures and methods and protocols instead of there being an existential base of actuality so that the integral can develop and how will the integral develop, it will not jump from what you do to what you think you should do, but it has an intermediary phase extremely important called experience.
Rituals are not meant to fortify the mind; rituals are the basis upon which experience is generated. If you do not generate experience by actual existence you are going to get an artificial compensation and because the artificial compensation will not really work, it will constantly be expanding its thought of what it takes to make it work and so you get the proliferation of artificial plans that become principles, that become doctrines, that become an indoctrination, that become an inculcation and all this time, not only is existence not happening, but nothing is tapping nature. Because nature is not tapped, what is it doing, it is the basis not the basis as a form, it's the basic process out of which existence and actuality emerge and come and because it's not, because its being cut off, not only is there no existence emerging and no existence which is real, it's all artificial, there is a quality that comes into play that is demonic. One cannot go back because nature is foreign to an artificial ritual existence, nature does not accept that kind of relationality whatsoever, is not indifferent but none records in the sense that there is no way to bring that process of nature into the play, into the cycling and so its missing.
Greek tragedy is all about nature missing, there is no emergence and so existence is on a plunge into absurdity. Any actions taken in this artificiality will produce a tragedy, it is built in. Not only is nature not available, but vision is not available there is no consciousness. Instead of there being a consciousness there is a fantasization and instead of there being nature there is a supposition. It should be this way, because that is the way I want to make it work and the I is the individuality.
One of the classic works of the historical Buddha was a series of short inquiries, his sutras, the original word meant thread or you can think of string, you can think of a clue, the Greek word clue, the clue was the string that you hold while you go into a labyrinth and to find your way back out of the labyrinth is the follow the clue. The sutra was a thread so that one could follow one's way through a presentation that was meant to be large enough and integral enough and complex enough to have the complete cycle to a point of realisation, to an epiphany, to a Zen moment of seeing through. None of this is available and a Greek tragedy is about the inevitability then that artificiality will continue to increase its artificiality. There is nothing to expect other than that and an increase in artificiality does something irreparable it fragments experience, not inexperience. It fragments experience in the mind's version of what experience should be and so you get a fractured mind that thinks that experience has been fragmented because we haven't done things the right way and so it increases its tyranny, its insistence that it will handle this and goes back with an increasing quality of the individuality now being tyrannical.
One of the qualities in a collection of the poignant short sutras of the Buddha, a collection called the Sutra Nipata. Sutra pronounced in a southern accept of Pali in Ceylon, instead of Sutra, it's Sutta; Sutta Nipata. It's a series of five groups of inquiry that are brought together in a set and the first four sets are attempts to formulate nexus of problems that constantly will come up and the fifth is called the Parayanavagga, it means The Book of The Way Across, the way beyond as we would say today. And that fifth book is like a quintessential thumb, it holds the other four together in such a way that you can grasp, you can get, you cannot hold, not cling, not clutch, but you can grasp the point of realisation. In the fifth book of the Sutta Nipata, which is the oldest striation of the Buddhist teachings the Parayanavagga is the oldest of the oldest, it is one of the most poignant original teachings of the historical Buddha.

A certain very powerful Yogi who has many disciples in a big outfit is challenged by a rather demonic Yogi who comes in and wants to have a cut, a piece of the action, a piece of the pie and when refused he makes a curse and he says to this Yogi master your head is going to split into seven bits on the seventh day from today and he leaves this curse on him. The master Yogi wonders how he can get out from this curse does anyone know how to do this, and he hears that there is a world teacher, the Buddha, the historical Buddha is teaching in the north of him, quite some distance and so he picks sixteen of his top disciple Yogi teachers themselves to make a deputation to the historical Buddha to ask him specifically a series of questions leading up to how do you get rid of a powerful demonic curse once it is lodged and put in there. How do you get out from this? And the Parayanavagga is about the sixteen short vignettes of the questions of these sixteen disciples and the last one is by an old disciple, quite aged and he asks very much to the point: 'The tides of evil surge all around, what force can dam them? What curb do they have? What bars them?'
And the historical Buddha replies, 'It is mindfulness that dams evils tides, they have a curb and it is knowledge that bars their flow. '
And next week for interval we are going to take the two large mindfulness sutras, the Satipatthana sutras, the one from the Majjhima Nikaya, the little links sayings and one from the Digha Nikaya the large sayings.
The question is, if it takes mindfulness, if it takes knowledge then what about the individuality, what about the knower who has the knowledge, what about the individual who is being mindful, what lays this to rest and the historical Buddha replies, 'To your question I answer that individuality can cease.'
Individuality can cease, so that the informing mind can be laid in rest. Why is it that individuality must be laid at rest, what is at rest, it's not killing it, it's not anaesthetising it, it's not enchanting it with a deal, the equanimity is the rest. The equanimity has a triple coordinate, it has the latitude and it has the longitude, but it also has the pivotude, if I can use the word and make one up. It has the three dimensions of spatiality, it has the four directions of a plane of equanimity, but that plane of equanimity could be established like a two dimensional plane and yet if you don't have the third coordinate if you don't have the axial pivot coordinate you would still have the wobble of the entire plane, which would even be worse. It gets not just demonic, but positively evil. So we have to have all three.
The old monk, the sixteenth ends by saying , 'We are all satisfied and all of us now embraced, all sixteen'.
Their satisfaction was a satisfaction that led to a group embrace. The higher life we are now committed to, we shall win our way across to the other shore. What is that other shore? The way across is the way across the seething waves of existence, which because they are seething waves of existence of the ritual comportment, the waves multiply their seethingness in a scrambled experience. And the mind which is trying to integrate them is bobbing up and down on this bubble seething ocean of chaos, not just a churning which would be creative, but it is a hurricane, it is a typhoon and because the mind can centre itself an abstraction, it considers itself the instrument which is calm and it has to calm this sea somehow and that is why it throws out its doctrines, its principles, to assert its abstractness over life. To even out existence the way it should be, to calm experience into its patterns the way it's been planned.
The sixteen carried this back to the Sage, who was under this curse and he says, 'So I now quit all blind teachers and like the Swan having gained the ocean's amplitude I am able to swim free,' because he is not any longer willing to absent himself for one moments space from the abounding wit in law of the enlightened one.
That one moment's space is any ritual step of any size to the minutest actuality of any step on any of those three coordinates. Any movement in existence that would be some movement in latitude, in longitude, in pivotude, that one does not even take one moments space step in error, in none purity. Is this possible? Yes, because if you were able to take a single step in latitude and not have factored in the longitude and the pivotude it would be an error, the same for any of the other two dimensions. That the movement in ritual existence in nature is that it is iteratively unified and does not have individual steps in sub details. So that right away the occurrences that one has been moving artificially all the time, every time, because you were taking steps where did that assessment of those steps come from?
Not from the iterations of nature, but from the minds projection, you figured out these steps that you are going to take so that this plan will work and this experience will be predictable and such and so. There is no Zen in that whatsoever. There is also no existentiality whatsoever. The ritual comportment is the comportment of the unity at every particular iteration, that the steps are iterative, they have emerged fresh and do emerge fresh just as they are happening and that is why the experience is alive. That is the why the integral of that alive experience is a living mind, whose language now, the ancient way to talk about it in Hellenistic Judaism, Jesus talked about one is the living word, every word in that language carries realisation with it, so that one only needs one word in ancient India, the word was Om.
That every movement now and every word has that living vitality of unity and wholeness and Basho in The Narrow Road to the Deep North says that he heard of this young painter, the painters name was Caiman and at the time he was still a teenager, he was about 17 or 18 years old and Basho wanted to see him because this man had the recognition from artists that he carried that Qiyun shengdong, that life movement spirit resonance in every stroke of his painting, in ever painting that he did, because it was alive in him and Basho says that he stopped to visit him and the painter took him around and showed him many secret things that he would have missed in the landscape and then showed him where a special kind of iris was blooming, that usually was very difficult to find and shouldn't have been still in season and yet in this spot and the blue of that iris, that kind of a pale neon blue that darkens almost to a lavender was extraordinary and Basho was thanking him so much and left him some poems and Caiman made him a gift of shoelaces for his sandals and they were of that iris blue, that he being a great painter has made exactly the living neon blue of that rare iris and had dyed exactly the latchet straps of his sandals so Basho looked down and delivered this Haiku, 'It looks as if iris flowers had bloomed on my feet, sandals bright in blue.'
That moment of realisation now had penetrated it's Parayana not only across the bobbing of the mind on the churning ocean of the experience on the wacky movements of ritual, but had carried a particular moment of realisation into the vast infinities of reality and from this point on he is no longer just looking forward to the journey to get rid of his anxiety, forward to going into the deep north to get away from the artificial complications of the life in Edo and trying to just lose himself into the landscape, lose himself into the poetry, lose himself into very often weeping over the ruins of power people, especially power men, of power dynasties that are gone almost forever and he has a very poignant poem he says, 'When a country is defeated there remains only mountains and rivers. In that ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive, I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly until I almost forgot time,' and then the haiku 'The thicket of summer grass is all that remains of the dreams and ambitions of ancient warriors'.
It is a peculiar quality that comes out and he goes to a port called Matsushima and the port looks out on a series of Islands, dozens and dozens of islands that have odd configurations, almost as if they are like baby animals feeding with mother animals, and in the bay of Matsushima that is this magical thing, he looks out:
The moon rose glittering over the darkened sea, completing the full transformation to a night time scene, I lodged in an inn overlooking the bay and went to bed in my upstairs room with all the windows open, as I lay there in the midst of a roaring wind and driving clouds, (it's night time,) I felt myself to be there in a world totally different from the one I had been accustomed to. My companion Sora wrote 'clear voiced cuckoo, even you will need the silver wings of a crane to span all the islands of Matsushima.
Later on in an almost apposite way, when they are on the other side of Japan's island honcho on the far north on the other side, there is a single large island called Sado, in the Japan Sea. He has been unable to write any haiku for several days but night comes and in the night two haiku come to him. He has had to calm himself by going back to this experience of the stars being able to give him this wholeness of the cosmos so that his mind, his experience, his vision are able to come into this beautiful art form of the haiku and he looks up and he sees the stars in a very special way. Two stars, one of them is called Vega, which is the brightest star in our sky, the other is Altair which is a main sequence star, very, very large and they are usually separated at the latitude of northern Japan except that once a year by a prospective they almost meet and Vega is called the weaver and Altair is called the lover in Japanese poetic law, he writes, 'The night looks different, already on July 6th for tomorrow once a year the weaver meets her lover.'
And he sees in that realisation not just the meeting of those two stars, but he sees now the Milky Way itself and the next haiku written at the same time, right after it, 'The great Milky Way spans in a single arch, the billow crusted sea falling on Sado beyond.'
And so the entire galaxy becomes an arching rainbow bridge for Basho's spirit now to go like over the rainbow bridge into Valhalla.
From the terrible pressure of the demonic tyrannies in artificial existence now he is freed and is able to send his spirit out so that even though his body is still frail and hasn't long to live, the spirit has been freed to be in its possibilities indefinitely. He says , 'There was in this city a man named Eshu whose unusual love of poetry gained him a lasting reputation among verse writers of our day. I was told however that he had died unexpected in the winter of this past year. I attended the memorial service held for him by his brother.'
And then this haiku, 'Move if you can hear, silent mound of my friend, my wails and the answering roar of autumn wind.'
And it is this autumn wind then that he begins to hear as we would call it today psychologically, it's like a white sound. It's not a white sound that is now unconscious but a white sound that weaves itself so that the autumn wind becomes ever after for Japanese poets, in fact one of the great collections of haiku by a later haiku genius Issa is called The Autumn Wind. The Autumn wind has a particular tone and in Zen it's called Yugen. Yugen is sometimes translated as loneliness, but it's not loneliness, it is lonely beauty, in that it is leaving this world of individualities that are plotting to still be, in their own grasping way, leaving that world and discovering that the lonely beauty is infinitely shareable by all spirits together in an eternal community. And so it is not a loneliness, but it is a travelling through the penetration that kept us separate, into the infinite fields of possibility that hold us in community eternally: Yugen.
He then comes to a shrine, where one of the most powerful warlords in Japanese history was buried and the helmet is there in the shrine. '... an extraordinary one with an arabesque of gold chrysanthemums, the royal insignia flower, covering the visor and the ear plate a fiery dragon resting proudly on the crest, two curved horns pointing to the sky, the chronicle of the shrine gave a vivid account of how on the heroic death of Lord Sanemori, Kiso no Yoshinaka, had sent his important retainer to the shrine to dedicate the helmet, with a letter of prayer,' and Basho because the Autumn wind is now blowing in his spirit on Yugen, because he has seen starry arch of the Milky Way spanning across to ranges of his journey, in that silence he hears, ' I am awestruck to hear a cricket singing underneath the dark cavity of an old helmet.'
Then he goes to a hot spring and in this hot spring underneath a white peak of Mount Shirane, which, like this white sound, now stays with the finer ranges of his conscious space, and he writes, 'Then on my way to Yamakada the white peak of Mount Shirane overlooked me all the time from behind. At last I came to the spot where there was a temple close by a mountain. According to the legend the temple was built to enshrine Kannon, Kannon is Kuan Yin in Tibetan Buddhism, Avalokiteshvara in ancient early Mahayana, the lady Prajñāpāramitā, who was modelled on Mary Magdalene. The goddess, the great goddess of mercy, the Emperor Kazan when he finished his round of the so called 33 sacred temples, he called this sequence of 33 sacred temples Nata compounded of two words Nachi and Tanigumi, the first and last the these temples respectively. So that now they were not just individual temples but they were a set of 33 and they had a name Nata as the set. They were beautiful and many rare rocks and old pines in the gardens surrounding them and the goddess was placed in a thatched house built on a special rock. Indeed the entire place was filled with strange sights and then the haiku, 'Whiter far than the white rocks of the rock temple, the autumn wind blows'.
The Zen of Basho is one of the world's great treasures. To convey that the free spirit is at home not only everywhere but anywhere. Which is why he characterises at the very beginning of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 'Days and months are travellers of eternity and so are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea or drive a horse over the earth until they succumb to the weight of years spend every moment of their lives travelling.'
This is the none space for a single moment of being distant from realisation, which opens instantly to reality.
Next week we are going to go to the Buddha's Satipatthana sutras, in both its lesser form because of its short and its greater form. Because Satipatthana, is a Matter Super Yoga, meant to disclose that there is no movement possible in realisation or reality other than a complete fresh iteration every time of the unity of all. It isn't just that our unity occurs, but that unity itself occurs, unified and that there never is a moment a time and therefore any blossoming of space other than that actuality and when ones realisation at the centre of the integral is that the centre vanishes into transparent fertility and emerges whole again, eternally free.
Two weeks from now we are going to go to Myth and we are going to take Inanna, Diane Wolkstein's beautiful translation and Jane Ellen Harrisons Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. We are going to go back to the very ancient near east, back about 4400 years and we are going to go to the very origins of the experience of the Greek ethos and these two women did a beautiful service for all of us.
I brought a little stuppa here, it is actually a form called the dagoba and you might take a look at it. This has the ability to come undone and inside is a little copper scroll and it has a nice little heart sutra on it. The core of the heart sutra is a ritual poem: 'Gati, Gati, Par Gati, Buddisva ha.' Gone, Gone, Gone beyond, realisation hale. The way across, the Parayana, there is also this beautiful little lacma, book on The Silk Route and the Diamond Path. The largest journey in Asia was the great silk route that went from where Shanghai is all the way to Rome, the great silk road, and the Diamond Path is that kind of moments of realisation that are available at any given time in any given space anywhere on that journey.
More next week. Thanks.