Interval 3
Presented on: Saturday, September 30, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to an interval and our intervals or presentations that give an articulation to the flow of our learning. And, as you know, instead of focusing on subjects, which are then addressed in disciplines, which has been the normal course of education for quite some long while, much to the detriment of our lives in the late 20th and early 21st century, so this is a transformation taking education out of the categorical dicing up into subjects which then must be related to by interdisciplinary nets. I myself was educated this way some 50 years ago, 40 years ago, and it was always a difficulty not to appreciate that there were many other qualities and aspects of human life that one would be interested in but everything was disjunctive in the sense that you were always referred to some classic book and it was always out of place in terms of your speciality. When I began electrical engineering I was shocked that there was someone like Baudelaire that wrote poetry. When I was in philosophy I was shocked that were such things as anthropologists who really did know how to perform and understand the Grand Medicine Lodge, the Midewiwin ceremony. And when I was an interdisciplinary graduate major there was constantly the pull of realising that you would not live long enough to even just skim the surface of what would be of interest to you.
Our learning by phases allows us to get the sense of balance and movement, of form and dynamic in an alternating sequence and the alternation of the phases takes its cue from the most ancient surviving cultural understanding in the world and that is from ancient China about 5,000 years ago. While the Egyptian civilisation goes back that far it has not carried itself through at all and 2,000 years ago the complete transformation of the Egyptian heritage into Christianity and then again 1,500 years ago into Islam made the ancient Egyptian civilisation so unknown that it was not until Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, with his great entourage of savants about 200 years ago, that the rediscovery of the greatness and quality in depth and profundity of the Egyptian civilisation was brought to the fore but in China it has never been lost.
And so, when we began our learning, we took the tack that the first phase will be nature but not nature as a subject but nature as a dynamic, as a process, as an ongoing process and that the Chinese referred to this as Tao. That nature has as Tao not a designatable objectiveness and if one were going to use a notation for nature you would use zero and that out of the zero-ness of nature emerged its complement which was Tê and that Tê could be assigned a number one. In fact unity, the power of a unity, the power of something to be, is exactly what Tê denotes in Chinese and that Tao Tê have a cooperation: the one emerges the other. And as Tê emerges from Tao it has a reciprocal quality of making a pairedness, not only does it emerge as one but now one has a relationality of a pair of zero and one. And so, in a very peculiar way, at the very origins of Chinese civilisation the binary quality of zero and one was already brought into play and evident.
The first Westerner in modern times to understand the profound symbolic quality of this was Leibniz. Leibniz was in the Netherlands visiting a fellow philosophic genius named Spinoza and Spinoza, being there in Amsterdam where many merchants from the Fareast were bringing trade goods and one of the manuscripts that came to him was a Jesuit translation of the I Ching into Latin and Leibniz was able to read that and even though he was only 20 years old he was already a mathematical genius. And he wrote a small book on the mathematical possibilities of an ancient Chinese book which was the way in which Leibniz's calculus began to figure. The infinitesimal calculus which is both integral and differential, that one can approach between zero and one an infinitesimal series of designatable stages, parts, steps and that between one and zero one could also have the same infinitude brought to exactness yet not compromising the infinite array. Curiously, the development of calculus was paralleled in England by sir Isaac Newton who used alchemy as a basis. But Newton's alchemy was extremely sophisticated, it was late 17th century, 1600 hundreds, and already Newton's understanding of alchemy was completely transformed by the Asian alchemy that had been brought into play originally through the Islamic sages in the early 13th century, early 1200 hundreds. Eclipsed for a while by European mining and metallurgy experiments in alchemy but eventually brought back into play again so that Newton's alchemy had a great deal of Chinese alchemy in it: the transform. And his calculus along with Leibniz's showed that there was some very deep resonance between east and west.
And of course at the time that they were writing this one of the longest lived Chinese emperors, Qianlong, reigned for over 60 years in China and the era of Qianlong affected immediately the whole course of western civilisation: in France chinoiserie became the designing element, the whole fascination with somehow there had to be a wider trade network and eventually, what has come to be in our time, is the necessity of having a planetary culture but that planetary culture has, like any kind of a dynamic, a form which it can emerge. That cultural dynamic is our phase of myth, that that mythic horizon is exactly the experience that we have as a process that has images, it has feeling tones, it has, especially, oral language, the discourse of speech. And it has the possibility of then having that process emerge a form and the form that comes out of the flow of imaged feeling-toned language experience, that form is the mind, the symbolic mind. And the symbolic mind is just as objective as the existential things of the world which are the objects, the objective focus of Tê. And so when Tao emerges Tê, as the Chinese would say, one now has a relationality between the Tê and the Tao and the Chinese word for that relationality is Jen - human heartedness - which is a ratioing to the Chinese, not of two things but of any thing and its shared Tao source.
One of the qualities that we're going to look at in this presentation today are the two greatest Chinese poets who were contemporaries who lived about 1,400 years ago. And they were disparate in terms of their personalities, their poetry, the style, the literary quality and yet they were related in a very deep way because their Jen, their human heartedness, included the emergence of a form out of that human heartedness and the form that came out in Chinese is called I and it means symbols. It means that the mind is a symbolic structure that has an objective reality and that if it is nourished by an experience, a Jen, that has a deep synergy with Tao, the mind will have an objectivity which is not just temporal but is eternal. And that the eternal form of the mind is that it is not opaque but it is capable of being transparent. And that one able to look through one's own mind, one's own transparency of symbolic self, one is able, now, to see in a completely new way, that the transparency is not so much a window but is like a prism, it's like a jewel, it's like a crystal. And what one sees is that there are many facets now to Jen, that Jen has a jewel-like multifaceted quality and it makes then of the forms that are able to be engendered out of that transparency of vision, those forms are now art forms. And the seer is creative in the sense of being an artist and so one's own person becomes an art form.
Both Tu Fu and Li Po are two of the greatest poets in the planetary culture but our concern goes even beyond planetary culture. We realise we live in a century, the 21st century, where the emergence of a completely new civilisation is already under way and that civilisation has for its domain, for its realm, the entire star system. Instead of it being a civilisation of some kind of geographical area on earth, it is going to be the geography of the entire star system which is, in the last 10 or 15 years, expanded some three or four times what it was for the last previous 50 years. We know now that the ninth planet Pluto is not a planet, one can call it a dwarf planet, but it is an astral body that is one of tens of thousands out way beyond the orbit of Neptune. And just as the four terrestrial planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars - are surrounded by an asteroid belt of many tens of thousands, the giant planets -Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are surrounded by an enormous Kuiper Belt which has some 50,000 to maybe 75,000 objects, dozens and dozens of them will be larger than Pluto. And beyond the Kuiper Belt is a source of long-term comets called the Oort cloud. And so, our start system, if you were to measure a diameter, it would be almost one light year across which means it extends about a fifth of the way to the next star system, the multiple-star system of Alpha-Beta-Gamma Centauri.
One of the qualities that we're looking for is how to emerge that civilisation from a planetary culture and the only way to do that, and it is the only way, is to allow the civilisation to have its kaleidoscopic consciousness that is emerged from the works of art, from the person as a work of art. Just as the symbolic mind will generate a visionary consciousness, not an integral consciousness, but a differential consciousness, the person, as a prismatic jewel, generates in its turn, the kaleidoscopic consciousness of historical. That historical consciousness is able, for the first time, to have enough dimensions to be able to see, for the first time, the complexity of the cosmos. The cosmos, if it would only exist in four dimensions, could be seen by the symbolic mind. It cannot. Visionary consciousness, in the old alchemical language, is a quintessential dimension, it's a fifth dimension. Now, when we come to Li Po and Tu Fu, we realise that even though they lived in the seven hundreds they lived 3,700 hundred years after the beginnings of the I Ching, after the beginnings of Chinese civilisation.
And, in that time, what was the dominant historical form were different dynasties and the dynasties always carried within themselves the sense of power being focused in the hands of extraordinary men. The only time in which that was effaced and changed in Chinese history was at the beginnings of the T'ang dynasty. And it's in the T'ang dynasty that Tu Fu and Li Po have their careers and their lives. What happened, for the first time, is that at the beginning of the T'ang, women, for the first time in Chinese history, became the dominant force in the T'ang dynasty to the extent that it was for a while effaced and no longer called the T'ang but called the Wu dynasty. And the person involved in this was a woman known in history as the Empress Wu, her name was Wu Zhao and Wu Zhao lived to be 80. And she dominated Chinese history for 50 years and she induced into the Chinese civilisation the sense that women, when they are extraordinarily talented, outdistance men no matter how powerful they are. And so after the episode of Empress Wu and the succeeding generations that led up to the time of Li Po and Tu Fu, women were increasingly not dismissed because they were not important or second class but that they were more dangerous than men when they were talented.
And one of the qualities that came out was that the T'ang dynasty was split in half between the earlier T'ang and the later T'ang by one of the most devastating social revolutionary wars of all time. In the high T'ang the population of China was about 50 million people, in 755-756AD, CE, one third of China were killed, more than 17 million people died within a space of just a few years. It is, in historical parlance, called the An Lushan Rebellion but what it was was a complete rejection of the possibility of allowing there to be an equanimity of gender in Chinese civilisation. And out of that came a recoil where the masculine tone of integration overtook the way in which life was organised and set up that when an Imperial woman rose again in China it was the end of Chinese dynastic history. And this happened at the end of the 19th century when Tz'u Hsi was empress and China again at the end of the Qing dynasty, the Manchus, completely collapsed and in that collapse the European powers were able to come in and divide up China into different colonial powers. So that one had, around 1900, an event called the Boxer Rebellion of China at the end of Tz'u Hsi's reign trying to 'Throw the foreign devils out,' to get rid of them. And it's very much like at the end of the 20th century, of the Islamic world wanting to have some kind of fundamentalist reform and 'Throw the foreign devils out.'
The Chinese experience is a case in point that a civilisation that emerges out of the culture must have a chiral balance, it must have a symmetry of genderness, otherwise it loses its ability to regain two indispensable qualities: one of realisation and one of reality. Without an equanimity realisation is not possible and without an interpenetration reality will not occur, so that you build in a kind of an illusion on the basis of an illusion. The illusion is that the individual can be all things in themselves, that once individuality is now the norm and one's own equilibrium is the equilibrium. And this is in ancient civilisations that kind of person who is called a neuter: instead of being male or female they were neither, they were neuter. And it is the neuter it-ness of a human being that produces the demonic. So without the gender balance not just between men and women but between masculinity and femininity, that balance that can be within an individual, whether they're male or female, they can have masculinity or femininity. But the balance is that that gender equanimity is able, in the culture, to have its way in which the mind, now, is able to become transparent to vision, able to become a frame of reference as we would say. The term that I have used for decades is square of attention. That square of attention, that frame, that picture occurs as an indispensible quality in Chinese poetic literature.
One of the earliest of all of the writings on Chinese literature is called The Art of Letters, is called the Wen Fu, written in 302AD by a man named Lu Chi and he wrote this: he said, 'Every time I look at the works of talented writers, I'm interested by the way in which they exercised their minds.' And then he says, 'I am constantly anxious less meaning should not match the object of intention.' The object of attention, that is that the mind's objectivity doesn't come into sync with the objects of existence; that those two objectivities also have a balance and equanimity so that the equanimity of the mind is based upon an interpersonal quality of cooperation and allows for the depth - it's like the third dimension of space for the depth - then that it isn't just an identification of objects in the mind with objects in the world but it is a correlation and that the correlation means then that there is a vibratory resonance between them. And that vibratory resonance is very difficult to express, Lu Chi says, 'I am constantly anxious less the meaning should not match the object of attention, lest the artistic form should not reach the level of the meaning. This is not a difficulty in knowing, it is a difficulty in being able to put it into expression.' And that expressiveness is very difficult for the mind that doesn't have a balance. And, later on, Lu Chi will say that when you come to right a poem, this is the quality that occurs in the person, in their mind:
Taking his stand at the hub of the universe so that he might objectify the outlook, feeding his purpose with the sacred writings of the past he follows through the four seasons with a sigh at their passing and surveyed all creation and mused on its tangled skein.
So that the equanimity is not just a balance but that that balance is like a plane that generates a sphere and that that sphere, in terms of the world, has a surface but, in terms of the Tao, its surface is openness so that Tao has no form but rather has an infinite field. But to the mind that infinite field is not discernable as an object so that the field becomes looked at in terms of identification of the interior of the sphere of the completeness of the form of the mind. This interior, now, is called nothing and the exterior is called everything and anything. And the mind in its surface bubble, its sphere, has a situation which is expressed in Chinese poetry over and over again. The quality of one of the poems that were taking comes here from Tu Fu who is climbing one of the five sacred mountains of China. The mountain is called Tai Shan, shan means mountain. Tai Shan is the Heavenly Mountain and it's in Shandong province which is on the pacific coast of China, about midway between Shanghai and Beijing. The translation reads like this:
The winds cut. Clouds are high. Apes wail their sorrows. The air is fresh. Sand white. Birds fly in circles. On all sides fallen leaves go rustling, rustling, while ceaseless river waves come rippling, rippling. Autumn's each faded mile seems like my journey, to mount alone and ill to this balcony, life's failures and regrets frosting my temples and retched that I've had to give up drinking.
It's not a bad translation but this is an even better translation, the Chinese title for the poem is not From a Height, in Chinese Deng Gao. Den Gao, here is a deeper translation because it pays attention to the way in which the Chinese artistic language is expressed through the openness of the mind not just the transparency of a frame of reference:
Wind keen sky high apes scream mourning. Island pure white sand birds fly revolving. Without limit falling trees bleakly-bleakly autumn. Not exhaustible long river rolling-rolling come. Myriad miles melancholy autumn constantly being traveller. Hundred years much sickness alone ascend this terrace. Difficulties bitter-regrets proliferate greying temples. Despondent newly stop muddy wine cups.
The quality in Tu Fu is to open the mind to the scintillation of the person who is resonant to an indefinite cosmos of Tao. The Chinese sense for this is that one now returns back to Tao, not back to some thing but in returning back to Tao is absorbed at the same time as you are readmitted, reemitted. So that absorption and emission occur instantaneously, that when you are able to go back into Tao the Taoist energy cycle instantly begins again and you emerge, instantly, back into existence but emerge fresh. You are no longer tied connectively to who you were just a moment ago but you are now freshly emergent, originally. And the Chinese phrase for this indicates that, now, the mind is going to integrate itself out of an experience, from a physicality which has emerged pristinely out of Tao, just now, in a completely fresh way. So that, while that Tao has been returned to, one has freshly emerged and you are slightly different in the sense that now you have more dimensions in your physicality than you did before. When you were physical before you were out of your existential body, having four dimensions, now you're an existential body having many dimensions. And those many dimensions are able to engender and experience which is super complex. And being super complex it means the mind that comes out of that will now have facets that it did not have before, it will have powers that it could only dream of before and now they are there, they are manifest, not just telepathy but many other powers. That mind is called now a pure mind in that it does not any longer have to have a frame of reference, it no longer has to have a square of attention, its attentiveness is 360 all the time, instantly. And so the person, the art of the person that now emerges, is not just an artist but is a spiritual being, the Chinese word for such a being is a shen. That spirit being, now, is at home permanently in all of the phases of reality, including the cosmos, including Tao and because of this is able to live eternally.
And so this whole process of maturation, to the Chinese, well tested even 2,000 years ago, comes out in a beautiful quality of a Chinese literary work called The Art of Carving Literary Dragons [37.47 The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons]. The quotation is this, this was written about 440AD, 'Although the form of poetry has a universal norm, the working of poets' minds are never stereotyped. Each writes according to his own nature and gifts and few are able to encompass all the good qualities. If a poet has a shrewd understanding of the difficult he will find his course easy but if he carelessly attempts to treat everything as easy the difficult will certainly remain in store for him.' The flow, in its effortlessness of Tao, is not an easy flow. It is a flow that includes the zero-ness of no resistance which is not the same as something being simple in the sense of it just being easy. The complement always is that the other side of what you are doing will be the characteristic of the form that comes into play. If you are balanced in your realisation of equanimity, the form that comes into play will have that double shared symmetry and meeting anyone else that has that you will have a quality of two symmetries coming into play together and so you will get a new kind of kaleidoscopic squaredness. The ancient Taoist saying is that when you meet a Taoist master his pupils of his eyes will be square, he will see instantly, in what Edwin Weston the great American photographer once called the strongest way of seeing, he will see as an artist composing, instantly. And what he composes he will be able to express and this is where the art of person making comes into play. Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
Let's come back to our interval. If we touch there is a connectedness, if we don't quite touch there is an energy. If you have very, very powerful forms that are brought very, very close but without touching there is a tremendous vacuum energy that comes into play. In this cosmos, vacuum energy is the most powerful omnipresent source of dynamic that there is. It is the close interval between being and non-being, between Tao and Tê that generates that quality of emergent energy. The best way to think about it is that it is not empty but it is super full. The vacuum energy being super full has a numinous quality so that all emergence, all forms that come into being, will have this push behind it that it is capable of stepping up its order of energy, its dynamic amperage, to unlimited charge. What we're doing in our learning is to bring phases very close together at points of interval, like this presentation, so that the intervals will be characteristic of the cream of world civilisation. The first interval that we took was The Mindfulness Sutra of the historical Buddha, the Satipatthana Sutta. We're bringing n Li Po and Tu Fu together, now, as a spirit poetic that is one of the highest taht has ever been achieved on the planet. We've seen how the quality of Tu Fu has a kind of a nostalgic quality for the hominess, for the oddness of being out in the world. He was the kind of careful man that when he was in the military field, when he was in battle conditions, he would write like this:
There we heard owls hoot from mulberry leaves. Saw field mice sit upright by their holes. At deep of night, cross the battle field, chill moonlight shining on white bones. Guarding this pass, once a million men, but how many of them ever left this pass? True to orders, half the men in Shin, here, had perished and were alien ghosts. I had fallen too in tartered dust but can return with my hair-like flower. A year but passed to my simple home and my own wife in a hundred rags. Who sees me cries like the wind through the trees, weeps like a well sapping underground. And then my son, pride of all y days, with his face too whiter than the snow's. Sees his father, turns his back to weep, His sooty feet without socks or shoes. Turning my mind to the rebel camp, it's sweet to have all this nonsense and noise.
Distinct from that is this quality of Li Po that, whereas Tu Fu has this quality of wanting to return back to the normalcy of the everyday, supercharged by the incredible circumstances that proliferate and become more and more incredible - which they did in the time in which they lived - for Li Po, he turns that incredibleness inside out and makes it super magical. Here's an example:
Sea farers tell of the Fairy Islands hid in sprays of great seas not easily sought. The Yeuh people say the Queen of the Skies can for moments be seen in a rainbow's light, rising high in air above heaven's yoke [47.26], overawing a red rampart above the five peaks were heaven's terrace, 48,000 feet, faces as if it would fall into the southeast.
He goes into a weave-form litany where the Chinese poet line of sometimes four characters or five characters, will have a quality when pronounced, has a peculiar rhythmic tone like this: 'See bee ee tung sheng, sheng bee chang she she. Jang nan jang lee dee, Ju kay wu jao jee. Guren ru wow en, ming two chang shee hee. The quality of this is a poem which Tu Fu wrote about Li Po when the two of them finally came to the focus of the An Lushan Rebellion, which was killing millions of people, the two greatest poets of the age were exiled to opposite ends of the kingdom. Li Po was exiled to the far south and Tu Fu to the far north and the whole of the Chinese T'ang empire in between them. I translated the two poems called Dreaming of Li Po by Tu Fu about 40 years ago, in San Francisco. And the first reading of Li Po reads like this:
Death partings always cease sobbing. Life partings anguish again, again. Chang'an, swampy coffin country. Exiled man and sealed, no news. Old friend entering in my dreaming, marking clear where my thinking is. How you are in legal fetters, how then these feather wings. No fear your living spirit for distances of unknown road, your spirit comes through maple meadow. Light your spirit goes through mountain pass dark. Sinking moon fills these roof beams, perhaps yet fleshing out your features. Deep waters, broad waves, dragon waters. Don't get got/caught [50.46].
The dragon in Chinese civilisation is the incredible sinuous energy curl of the Milky Way which is the largest cosmic structure that one can discern from earth. And the Milky Way, in especially northern China, has a quality where the lowest curve of the dragon's body is exactly positioned so that the pole star Polaris is positioned just above it. And if you drew an imaginary visionary line from Polaris down through the Milky Way, through the dragon's lowest curve of the body, it would touch the earth exactly at the winter solstice, exactly at the spot where Tai Shan is in China. So, to the ancient Chinese sense, it is this incredible vibrant frequency of the vacuum zero of Tao that has a measurable length when it touches the earth, of the perpendicular of the pole star coming down through the whole dragon sinuous energy and that sacred mountains like Tai Shan, then, are the reaching up of the earth to touch the energy coming down from heaven. And that in recalibrating life on earth, when it gets too confused, when the tangled scheme becomes chaotic, when the energy no longer is laminar in its flow at all but is turbulent and muddied then someone, an emperor, a new fresh dynastic emperor must perform a pair of ceremonies called the Feng and Shan ceremonies. Feng is a phoenix, Shan, mountain.
That emperor reinstates then, at that beginning of the dynasty, the recalibration of the turbulence into a laminar flow by offering himself as the last thrust of the earth and its sacred mountain to meet the thrust of the heavenly energy coming down from the pole star which is always still, with all the other stars rotating around it, through the dragon's energy frequency energy body. And by receiving them he will receive not just the energy but he will receive the measure, the measurement, which will be the way in which the value of the recalibration will be able to be expressed on earth. The new dynastic emperor will ascend, usually [Tai Shan 54.31] by himself, like Moses going to the top of mount Sinai, himself, to receive the energy in measured commandment form, not just one but however many there are they will be in a set and that set will be the ruler by which one can translate the energy of heaven through a mandate of the fresh, emergent dynasty emperor to the way in which life will be recalibrated, rituals reformed.
The mythic horizon retold and the symbolic mind reintegrated for the first time in a new dispensation. It's like if you have an energy frequency that you know the calibration of that energy frequency, the sine wave of that energy frequency, if matched to a length, like a hollow tube as one does with Geiger counters or one does with all kinds of physics instruments, if the length of the tube is equal to the energy frequency, now you have a way of making a translation from earth to heaven or heaven to earth through a measurable architectural way of expression. In the T'ang dynasty they tried for more than 70 years to build a special building called the Ming Tang and they were trying to figure out how to build it in Chang'an - which was the great city of its age, it was the Shanghai of its time, it was the New York of China of its time, massive city, the city itself was something over 30 square miles just for the formal city - but the Ming Tang could not be built because the ancient ways of describing it were all at discrepancies and men, however powerful they were, could never build this.
The empress Wu is the one who finally built the Ming Tang and it was one of the most immense buildings in antiquity, it was over 300 feet tall, that's more than 30 storeys, in three tiers. And those three tiers had in the centre a circular huge vast drum-like structure with the square on the base and the third storey almost like pagoda-soaring. And in this Ming Tang she now presented herself on an architectural mountain-building as receiving the recalibration of the way in which things were going to be and cancel the T'ang dynasty and said 'It's now my family, the Wu family, it's the Wu dynasty.' Within a handful of years the building caught fire and burnt to the ground. The empress Wu rebuilt it exactly the same way within a couple of years. Unfortunately for her she had, as she got older, kept up a habit that she learned when she was just a teenager and that was cavorting with interesting men.
She was the daughter of one of the really important generals and when she was 13 her father had died and in order to preserve the family's economics and integrity and social position, she volunteered to be sent to the emperor's attention to see if she could be made a concubine, she was 13 years old. The emperor that was the true founder of the T'ang dynasty, T'ang Taizong, always referred to as the Son of Heaven and his portraiture shows him to be a massive, enormous imperial man. In fact, his first military victories were when he was 15 years old and his father was somebody who was indecisive all the time and T'ang Taizong's family name was Li, Li Shimin was his name and he wasn't the oldest son he was the middle son of three. And so he was given not the responsibility of being the Crown Prince who was going to take over command or the youngest who had to be really specially tended to, he was given one of these educations where he could pick and choose what he wanted to master. And he mastered three things to the best, probably that's ever been seen in Chinese history.
He became the greatest archer of all time, he also became the most accomplished horseman in Chinese history. Unlike Alexander the great who had just one great horse Persepolis, T'ang Taizong was in so many battles that five great warhorses were killed under him and he had each one commemorated by statues. Whenever you see T'ang sculptures you will see the T'ang horse, that's in honour, as a symbol, of Li Shimin of T'ang Taizong. But the third thing: he was the greatest calligrapher in Chinese history, he could write language in a personal style that has always been held then as the paradigm of the way in which an elegant, sophisticated, artistic man will express himself, whatever he writes his calligraphy will be him. And T'ang Taizong's calligraphy is always held as the model, as if it were like a celestial, perfect presentation of the complete powerful man.
The empress Wu, Wu Zhao was her family name, was sent to be his concubine when she was 13 and he immediately took interest in this precocious 13 year old and he called her Beautiful Wu and put her in, I think, on the fifth level of concubines which meant they didn't have to do too much and probably weren't approached too much. But she watched how he worked and for 15 years she watched how he ran things. Unfortunately he died at age 49, she was sent to a convent to be a nun and she lasted for just a little while when she realised this was not going to be her life and she came back into play because the son of T'ang Taizong who became emperor was having troubles because the family was indecisive, only Li Shimin had proved to be a decisive figure. So she came back and she became the top concubine of that emperor and within a couple of years he made her empress of China and for 50 years she was the paramount power in Chinese civilisation, she ran everything behind the scenes and her style of learning things was to keep so many factions of people watching each other to see what they were going to do that she was the only one who could keep track of the kaleidoscope of the intrigues and their involvements, a real Chinese puzzle box of power court intrigues, layer upon layer upon layer, she was masterful at it.
While she was doing this, though, she kept up her sense of having adventurous liaisons with interesting men and when she was in her early 70s two brothers, the Zhang brothers, came to court and they were exotically peculiar: they dressed in odd coloured silks, they went in for peculiar, exotic parties involving all kinds of odd foods and music and so forth. She was completely fascinated by them but outside everyone realised that she had begun to go off the deep end by bringing in persons who had nothing to do with running the dynasty or of keeping China healthy. And so, increasingly, the intrigues started to look for an opportunity to have her replaced but to have her replaced on her own recognisance; they respected her too much, no one is going to kill her. They tricked her into resigning so that one of her sons could become emperor, that they said, 'You've run him all his life, what does it make any difference whether he's the emperor? You'll still have control.' And when he became emperor they manoeuvred and said, 'Well we can't have an ex-empress and an emperor in the same city, in the same place so, if you wouldn't mind, there's this beautiful palace and you can manipulate him from that, in Luoyang, not here in Chang'an .'
And as soon as she was out of range, all of the people that she featured, like the Zhang brothers, found that they were dead. All the ministers that had ever opposed her also came into play and, increasingly, one had this instability in China about 705AD. The way in which it was resolved finally was a young grandson of hers named Li Longji, known in Chinese history as the Brilliant Emperor, Ming Wang, his family name was Xuangzong. He became, like T'ang Taizong, the founder of the pinnacle of the T'ang dynasty, and he ruled China for almost 50 years by himself, he's the one that finally showed that what we're after here is a pinnacle of excellence. And in his reign any court official, any military man had to learn to express himself in poetry, that writing poetry became the order of the day by which men showed their affinity with the cosmos, their ability to cooperate together in terms of the flow of the Tao and their ability to express themselves. So that the energy of the brilliant emperor could be distributed accurately without resistance and interference everywhere that the military needed to be, everywhere that the bureaucracy needed to be and the bureaucracy was several hundred thousand people by that time, enormously complex.
T'ang Taizong, when he took over and founded the T'ang dynasty, that China was largely limited to just a very small area in north-central China, when he finished, China spread from where Vietnam is now into Siberia, from Korea all the way almost to the Caspian Sea. It was the largest extent that China has ever been in its history. And Ming Wang trusted the fact that he was brilliant enough that he could take over the shoes, his difficulty was that there were talented individuals like Li Po and Tu Fu who excelled by many orders the next level of capacity among men. Li Po, whose family name was the same as the ruling rulers of the T'ang, Li Shimin, Li Longji, Li Po and they traced their heritage back to Lao Tzu whose family name was Li and who was called Li Er in ancient times. The curious thing about Li Po is that he had blue eyes because he was born in far eastern Turkestan rather than in China proper. He had Irani blood coursing in him.
He was raised though in the capital of Sichuan, Chentu - Chengdu as it's called today - and when he was 14, his father, noticing his great poetic talent, had him write a special long poem called a Fu which usually has a little prose introduction and then it has as a subject some kind of mythological story that is brought into an artistic flare so that the poetry more and more becomes more and more fantastic and energised until it almost borders on being a science fiction quality of fantasy poetry and yet has this spiritual depth and subtlety to it. And at the age of 14 Li Po wrote one of the very famous Fus based on one of the original great Fus of hundreds of years before on Mr Nothing who has a conversation with Nobody Daddy and who involves another prince called Prince Nullity. And he was so successful that he became a cause celèbre and yet he could never stand to be in one place very long or one room very long.
He was constantly feeling the urges of going out and I wrote a poem in San Francisco, 1957, describing the quality of Li Po at that time, that was still alive in the San Francisco of the 60s. It reads like this:
He was madly the greatest poet who ever lived and madly still is. Tu Fu dreamed of him and thought of him even at the world's end. If, with a little more wine in time and pure space in place of place, I could just now greet old Taoist Li Tai poem for poem. Contemplated, rather glared straight through the moon's wet reflection sent the thousand autumn [1.13.07] downstream fast to the equation. If one old m, E=mc² can do all that. We are never, oddly, going to get sober.
One of the qualities of Li Po was that his ability to bring the fantastic into play such that it dwarfed the fantastic social confusion. Instead of resolving it, like Tu Fu's poems sought to do, he sought to ridicule it as being [pickyune 1.13.49] turbulence. When there is cosmic turbulence that is so much more powerful and so much more interesting, that there are beings in other dimensions and you're fighting over mere land.
There are spiritual beings from so many different planets, he took his name honorifically Tai Po instead of just Li Po. Tai Po in Chinese is the planet Venus, the Morning Star so he literally called himself Morning Star Li:
I'm somebody who's there every dawn, I'm really there, very big, in the evening and I am a part of a celestial movement, constantly. While all the other stars generate themselves in circles around the pole star, the five planets move in their own way across this target field, I am the brightest star of those five.
And so his quality comes through in such a way that he reminded people of the first Taoist poet recluse who left the court world and his name was Tao Chien - that's an honorific name. This poem was written about 350 years before Li Po, 'It is an empty boat cast adrift back and forth with never any end. It seems but a moment since the year began yet nearly half the stars' course is run. The double luminaries make things flourish, the north grove puts out blossoms and grows thick. The spirit spring pours out the timely rain, early dawn plays a summer breeze. Once here, who has ever failed to leave? Human life always comes to an end, accept your lot and wait till it's over. To stay free, crook and elbow for a pillow, accord with change whatever its ups or downs, follow your bent no matter the heights or depths. If what I serve is high enough already, what need do I have to climb Mount Hua or Song?'
That quality in Li Po comes out in a poem like this:
If heaven loved not the wine, a Wine Star would not be in heaven. If earth loved not the wine, the Wine Spring would not be on the earth. Since heaven and earth love the wine, need a tippling mortal be ashamed? The transparent wine, I hear, has the soothing virtue of a sage while the turgid is rich, they say, as the fertile mind of the wise. Both the sage and the wise were drinkers, why seek for peers among gods and goblins? Three cups open the grand door to bliss; take a jugful, the universe is yours. Such is the rapture of the wine that the sober shall never inherit.
One of the powerful influences of Li Po is on Persian poetry, in fact there's a great collection of Persian poetry called The Drunken Universe. It's a equality, where, through Li Po, the Chinese influence into the Irani literature has been a complement, many centuries later, of the influence of Irani culture on the Chinese. Most of the great plants that characterise China were originally developed in ancient Iran - most of the fruit trees like the pear, the peach, the apricot, roses, many other things - and introduced into China. In fact, there was a study done about 75 years ago, a 500 page book just cataloguing all of the influences of Iran on China. And the reason for this is that the earliest long caravan route in the world was from Samarkand to the area where Chang'an was, a distance of about 7,000 miles.
We're looking at Tu Fu and Li Po to give us an articulation and a breather between two massive phases: one of them myth, the other symbols. One of them a process of experience, a source of images, a tuning of feeling tones, a expressive generation of oral language, that suddenly develops a space of the world where there is now an inside space, that the space of the world now has come to like an exchange where there is an inner quality of it and that interiorisation is the space now that the mind will develop in. And the mind expands its space by meaning, where the images and imagery now can be repositioned again and again, where the feeling tones can be woven and rewoven in new weaves, new patterns, where the spoken language now becomes a written language. And the symbolic mind, as it grows in its space, finds that it is many orders larger than the existential space of the world so that the social world we will discover when we look at symbols, becomes much more powerful than the physical world, the world of the mind is many orders larger in its integrative capacity than the existential, phenomenal world.
At a threshold where the mind begins to exceed the world in its power, in its domination, is a crucial decision: whether to now dominate the world by the social world or whether to open up the mind in such a way that it will no longer dominate what will flow back into the natural cycle. If the mind flows back into the natural cycle, consciousness generates itself spontaneously, if you close it off, the mind now increasingly will sabotage and forbid visionary consciousness in favour of its own directive, projective power on the world. It will either dominate the world or will open itself up into the infinities of a conscious cosmos. We again live in a generation where we are exactly at that point, we can either go out into the stars or we can close that off and stay on the earth and strangle ourselves, suffocate. The unfortunate thing for us is that modern technology makes it much, much faster than it used to be, instead of it being a matter of several generations or even a century or two, it's a matter of just, actually, about one decade.
So we have that choice before us but the choice is not recognisable without something like the phase form, only in the phase presentation does one lean oneself away from the identifications of the subjects limiting the problems to something that can only be solved by the mind. The problems are not problems of the mind; they're issues that involve many more dimensions than the mind has. Let's end with quality, here, this is Tu Fu, translated by Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, two Boston ladies who really got Tu Fu:
I did not know the road by the southern embankment, I now realise it's there at the fifth bridge, the famous garden lies beside pellucid waters and wild bamboos rise to the blue sky. Scholars met in olden days at the mouth of this valley and learned men were invited together to this little hamlet. My life-long I have found inspiration in lonely places. I don't care how far my horse's hooves must travel.
More next week.