Interval 8

We come today to the last presentation in what has been an excursion that has lasted 42 years. When I began this in 1965 in graduate school in San Francisco, I had already spent five years as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin with a double major and a minor. And it was apparent to me when I left with my bachelor science degree that I had gotten my money's worth because I had studied what I wanted at my own pace and had barely a C average during my undergraduate years. When it occurred to me that I would like to go back to graduate school, like everyone else I had to take the graduate record exam, the GRE, and me strategy as an undergraduate paid off. I scored in the 97th percentile, high enough so that they gave me a paid teaching assistantship; they paid me to go to graduate school.
And one of the stipulations was that I had the right to offer a course at San Francisco State. My first course was on the hermetic Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance of the Medicis, the Ficino, Botticelli, Michelangelo. And it was so successful I offered a second course on job and Faust, Two Faces of Evil. And that also was quite successful and I pioneered taking some of the classes of campus; San Francisco State is very near to some urban lakes that about the great highway where the Pacific Ocean is. And I would take the classes to, in good weather, out by the lakesides. That also went very well and so I offered a third course on the cosmology of Teilhard De Chardin.
All of these were so successful that they were included in the curriculum of San Francisco State but these were also years of great travail, for anyone who is acquainted with the history of that era, and by the late 60s the social turmoil was so heavy that San Francisco State was literally closed down by a week of siege. It happened to coincide with my taking of the graduate written exams; there were 5,000 police on campus, so many that they were trucked in busses. And these military style busses held 40 officers each and there were about a mile and a half of these buses parked where the lakes were, where I had delivered classes on job and Faust, Two Faces of Evil. And the rioters were from Berkeley and San Francisco and all around and collected, and there were more than 15 to 20,000 rioters.
I happened to be standing next to Sensei Hayakawa in his little plaid beret when he pulled the plug on a demonstrator's loudspeaker and became a national hero for pulling the plug. It was a nothing act but in that mêlee my graduate written exams had to be under police protection and then I had demonstrator proctors protecting me from the police. And, finally, when they were over, my major professor who was Chinese, Kai -Yu Hsu, walked me across the campus to deposit my written exams in the president's office, John Summerskill was just leaving to go into the peace core but he was still, his office, was still available. And in this it was decided that my oral examinations would be held off campus. The reason for forcing the issue of having written exams during the riots was because I was selected to be the only graduate of San Francisco State of 19,000 students in 1969. All of my mentors and confreres decided they'd enclose the campus, they cannot stop the educational procedure and so I was the nominated graduate to make sure everyone understood that even under duress education and civilisation will continue.
But, because I was the only graduate, the orals were attended by more than two dozen professors and the usual questions I used the T'ang poets TuFu and LiPo I used the great medieval Celtic mystical book of Kells and I used the novels of William Faulkner as an interdisciplinary penetration in pattern. But with the questions from about 25 or 30 professors, over many hours, it became apparent this was a crapshoot and I was saved by my old friend professor Jacob Needleman - who's still alive amazingly, he's one of the few - and he brought in iced champagne bottles and glasses and said, 'We need to take a little break.' And Jerry - everyone calls him Jerry - wisely assessed that once they got into the champagne it would be more easily suggested that maybe we extend the champagne hour and to let me off the hook. It worked.
A couple of months later I was ... one of the few places you could teach was in Berkeley - University of California, Berkeley - in the evenings. The daytime was much too dangerous and so I was teaching in Dwinelle hall which is the Classics building at UC Berkeley. And the course was on Ghandi and Faulkner, the place of the individual in ethical decision making in a society of ultimate crisis. And the third evening presentation we smelled smoke and a couple of students went to the big windows, we were on the second floor of Dwinelle and looked out and Wheeler Auditorium had been torched and fire trucks and police and thousands of bystanders and who knew for what reason. And for about an hour we looked out and came back, I was ready to dismiss them and they said, 'No you persevere to get your degree, we will persevere to have your course.' And so we stayed until after midnight and I delivered the third presentation on Ghandi and Faulkner.
The reputation from all of this bled over into the Ghandi centenary late in 1969 and I was chosen to be the American liaison with the Gandhi Peace Foundation and in that connection I had a poem of mine written, called The Ghost of Martin Luther King Junior, published in the Gandhi Marg it was read by about ten million people at that time. And the Indian Council General in San Francisco, Bajaj, had a young assistant and Rogenath [9.56] was somebody who had been posted several places in the world and who helped secure for me a very rare film, a 14 reel film, called Mahatma, a portrayal of the deep spiritual yogic, karmic yogic, energy of Ghandi and how it blossomed into a social transformation movement that eventually led to Indian independence. And so I contacted and connected the UC Berkeley officials and said I wanted to have the quickly refurbished Wheeler Auditorium to show Mahatma. And wheeler Auditorium seats about a thousand people, we had standing room only. And it was the last lecture I gave in the San Francisco Berkeley era because I left the next day to take a position in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The vice president of instruction had come down to the San Francisco area to try and find someone who could design an interdisciplinary programme because the college, that had been in business for almost a hundred years was building a brand new campus. It was going to be a 15 acre building with no walls, it was going to be three levels; like a super shopping mall only for learning. And there were to be no classrooms, there were to be kiosks filled with the latest technical equipment and to be deposited, like little matrix seeds, throughout the 15 acres of this triple level building. The ceilings were 50 feet high to accommodate the various levels.
I was hired in a very peculiar way: I heard from a friend at UC Berkeley who knew the interviewing people at San Francisco State and they had not let me know that there was somebody interviewing on campus in San Francisco. It turned out he was staying in a motel in Berkeley and invited me to his room and when he saw what I had done and got the picture, a week later from Calgary came a set of the architectural plans for the building and the invitation to be not only scott free, as it were, in designing the entire inter disciplinary programme, some 16 courses, but to also be tax free. And it was an offer I could not turn down. When I left the next day after the Mahatma film, filled with ten years of strife of not only the civil rights movement and not just an ant-iwar but a pro-peace planetary quality, many of the people that I had studied with fellow students, teachers, were dead or dead to the world, drug casualties. And I didn't realise how much pent-up ferocity there was in me until I realised I was just going to drive and drive and drive and drive. And when I finally came to a resting place I was in Pocatello Idaho, 900 miles from San Francisco. And the only light in Pocatello in that area were the gas flares from the oil fields, giving this inferno light, and that's when I recalled walking across San Francisco State's campus with about 25,000 people malling each other - clubs, chloroform, rocks - that it was a scene out of Dante's Inferno.
And I remember the courage of Kai Yu, quietly walking me and saying, 'We must not be afraid, even though we are fearful we must not be afraid.' And it was a sign to me of the kind of courage that led me to continue to refine that programme that I started to develop at San Francisco State, now, and this is the last presentation 42 years later. This is as refined as I can make it. The eight phases of this learning are like the eight spokes of a wheel that in ancient India would have been called the Dharmackra, the wheel of truth. But there is a deeper wheel of truth where the spokes are not what you see but that the spokes are what you do not see; they are the invisible part of the Dharmackra. A physical existential wheel will have physical existential spokes but a high Dharmackra does not have existential spokes, it has invisible energy ratioed harmonics that take the place of spokes. And so you have a ghost wheel where the spaces in between the physical spokes are now the content and the spokes themselves are but the harmonic ratios of the resonances. And if you took all eight of them together, they would make a set that would record as absolutely zero. The high Dharma records not at all in physicality or in the mind; the mind will have no image of it whatsoever, the physicality will have no evidence of it whatsoever because it has stepped up to a hyper dimension where the reality now is weighted towards something else.
We're taking, in between the eight phases, eight intervals that are the invisible spokes and this is the eighth interval and, like the other intervals, I have presented the crème of the spiritual testimony of the heritage of this planet. The first interval was the Tao Te Ching because it was so difficult to find a good translation I spent about 35 years making my own translation of it. The last is today and it is a very rare document, its name is the Prajna Parameta Rathan Guna Samcaya Gahta, it translates as the accumulation of precious qualities in this 1962 translation published in New Delhi. But it does not translate as that, samcaya does not just mean accumulation or collection; it has the quality that there are resonances where something that is taught is not a thing that can be collected but is a resonance that accumulates. And, as it does, it acquires what in yoga is called tapas and that tapas allows for a deeper and deeper penetration: as you accumulate the resonances the tapas allows you to see into, deeper and deeper, what is there existentially and what is there mentally. And by going deeper, by auguring deeper in, the physicality becomes less and less certain and the mental images become more and more faded until they become transparent. And it is the ability to see through the mind that is transparent, that is the getaway to waking up.
The awakening is a quality that cannot be told, the experience cannot be physical, the integration of it is not in the mind, it carries further than the mind can go. The mind is best when it reflects like a mirror but when it is transparent it doesn't reflect, it opens out to vision. This quality is here in the samcaya Gatha - and notice the title is not that of a sutra but of a Gatha - a Gatha is a very ancient word not used in India except by very rare refined individuals. Gatha is a central Eurasian term that comes from the area around Samarkand and it came into play about 2,000 BC and the first great Gathas are those of Zarathustra. Now, I use in the education programme the Gathas of Zarathustra and I use y own translation, it took about 10 years to make it. Zarathustra's language, Avestic, is not Irani, it's not Arabic, it's not Chinese; it's an ancient Indo-European language and Indo because ancient Sanskrit is a version, it's like a pair , it's like a twin to Avestic.
One of the deepest impresses of this is that in very refined early India high Dharma teaching you had a sense more and more where the Sanskrit that was used was not the Sanskrit of the Vedas but was a special hybrid, as it's called, hybrid Buddhism, hybrid Buddhist Sanskrit. The term was given to it by a Harvard professor, Franklin Edgerton a long time ago, he did a great edition of the Bhagavad Gita with commentary and he pointed out that many of the rare words that occur in Buddhist Sanskrit are odd because they have a tone of reference that is wider than India's Vedic culture and goes back primordially before it. And so you have a deep ancient connection of 4,000 years ago between central Asian Avestic and the earliest qualities of esoteric Sanskrit. That central Asian population are the first to tame horses and they're the first to understand that you can pair horses and have a chariot and so the ancient image of the chariot is the sure sign of the influence of ancient Zarathustrian wisdom. The Greeks called him Zoroaster, his name in Avestic is Zarathustra, his family name was Spitama.
The first appearance of chariots in China are about 2,000 BC because when you have tamed horses you are now able to go over land on caravans, enormous distances. If you're walking, a horse can carry you about 20 times further that what you can walk. When I was the head porter and Sequoia National Park in my early 20s I was able to work up to be being able to hike 50 miles in a day. You could hike 25 miles quite comfortably but on a horse you can cover several hundreds of miles and so the ancient caravan routes were extended and extended from Central Asia across into western China. And the great outpost was a place called Khotan where two streams come down from the Kunlun Mountains and each of those two streams have a colour of jade; one has white jade and one has black jade; a dark jade and a very, very light jade. And the jade that comes down is not able to really be seen with the eyes, it has to be felt with the bare feet and the most sensitive bare feet are the bare feet of young women. And so the collection of early jade 4,000 years ago were young barefoot women walking these stream beds and feeling the clumps, the jade, underfoot and bringing them down to Khotan. So that for the very first time you have an interpenetration of horses and chariots and jade that go into China and found dynastic China, the Xia dynasty is the first time that one found the stone of heaven and chariots together. And it's also about the time that chariots appear in ancient Egyptian history, all radiating out at the same time: northern Anatolia, Egypt, China, all coming from Central Asia.
That language, that Buddhist Sanskrit language received a deep energising quality at the middle of the first century AD: inheritors of that ancient Central Asian Zarathustrian wisdom that had been blended and mellowed and simmered with Mesopotamian wisdom and deeply influenced by Egyptian wisdom, was collected together in the first half of the first century AD by Jesus who made a radical recalibration of how language could be given its penetrative quality, almost to an ultimate. The disciple of Jesus that went to India was St Thomas and Thomas went to the south of India, here is published by Cambridge University Press the Indian Christians Of St Thomas. An Account of the Ancient Syrian Church of Malabar, Kerala state. Because at that southern tip of India, on the Indian Ocean side, there were ancient Jewish communities, trading communities, that traded directly along the coast of what is today Gujarat, what is today Pakistan, where the Indus river comes down and the Indus civilisation, along the Belluci [Bushire 27.52] coast of Iran, crossing over to the Arabian peninsula along the Arabian peninsula and up the red sea.

And that concourse was initiated in a very big way by Queen Hatshepsut in 1500 BC. She's the first to be able to understand that if you have ports paced you can send ships both ways, and the red sea port for Egypt was about 100 miles inland from a point just north of where Thebes is on the Nile river. Its name in ancient Egypt was Qelt. By the time of Jesus the family that ran the shipping routes from Alexandria down the Nile to Qelt, across the land to the sea port, down the red sea, down to the island of Socotra and Aden on the Arabian peninsula, and all the way over to India, the family that ran that was the family of Philo of Alexandria. And it was his older brother Alexander who was the financial genius of the family and the two sons of Alexander were two of the most powerful Semitic people at the time of Jesus because Alexander, Philo's brother, was the richest man outside of the Herodian kings. When Herod The Great wanted to build a new sea port called Caesarea, Philo's brother Alexander financed it, built a whole harbour, built a whole city.
They had a special designation because they were the ones who had saved Julius Caesar's neck in the Alexandrian war. Julius Caesar was cut off by the last Ptolemaic figures and he would have perished, unable to get back to his ships which were being torched, and he would surely have died, and it was the Jews of Alexandria under the family that became the Alexanders that saved him. And so the two nephews of Philo of Alexandria his oldest nephew was Marcus Julius Alexander and his younger nephew was Titus Julius Alexander. Marcus Julius Alexander became the head of the shipping caravans that went to India and so when it came time for Jesus to send St Thomas to India it was easy to make the arrangements through Philo's family to get him there. And was taken down in southern India in Kerala is where the spices, like cinnamon and many other special spices, pepper, were collected and sent back.
And one of the trading qualities that was there is not only spices but incense, fragrances, and a textile which is an Indian muslin which in the time of Jesus was one of the most refined cloths you could find. Linen was always a sacred dress for sacred priests but those who were wealthy dressed in muslin that came from India, so it's Indian textiles, Indian spices, Indian contributions to incense, that were constantly a source of revenue. When St Thomas went to the Semitic communities of south India he realised that they had extended themselves to the other coast of the peninsula of India. The big city there at this time, they've changed the name recently but it traditionally is called Madras. If you make a direct diagonal line between the Kerala Semitic communities and the Semitic communities in Madras you will find that that line has a city exactly in the centre and its name is Salem, like Jerusalem, like Salem, Massachusetts, meaning peace, meaning this was a centre of a Semitic penetration into the developing Buddhist India in the south. And if one takes a good look at the map of madras you will notice the most salient high spot in madras, the southern part of it is St Thomas' Hill where he is buried.
It is out of the contact of Thomas, and if you read the gospel according to Thomas you will see the penetrating pithy language of Jesus influenced the southern Buddhism so that it began to have a radical change and became the source of the Mahayana. The Mahayana is a Semitic transform of Buddhism initiated by Jesus. That first generation from Thomas, he arrived in India about 38 AD and incidentally he brought with him a gospel of Matthew, Thomas and Matthew and Philip were the three who were entrusted to write everything down: Thomas was to write the seeds, the sayings, the logoi; Matthew to put them into sermons so that you could see what the flowering of this was when Jesus spoke at length, the sermons are like the sutras; and Philip wrote his gospel to be the bouquet of all of this, the mystery of the bridal chamber, the spiritual marriage that is not between just two but between as many as will ever be born anywhere and everywhere.
The quality that is there is noticeable because when you look at the writings from the first century - and when we come back from the break we'll look at the questions of King Milinda. Milinda is the Pali pronunciation, Pali is an Indo-European language very much like English would be but it is a southern language and so it is a Buddhist Sanskrit spoken with a southern accent. Milinda is Menander who was a Greek king of Bactria, a region that is now part Afghanistan, part Pakistan, very close to Kashmir. Nagasena in 100 BC talks in a debating dialogue way whereas 100 AD, when we come to the Samcaya Gahta, it has a completely different tone: the language is no longer a dialogue discursiveness but is a resonant harmonic and cautions those who try to hear it with their minds and teach it from that basis.
The counterfeit of the true perfection of wisdom, when a bodhisattva falsely reveals form, perception, feeling, will or thought as impermanent, claiming that they are destroyed, in the counterfeit perfection of wisdom he courses considering not wisely because the learned never effect the destruction of a dharma. Wherein a form or feeling or perception or consciousness or will, there is no apprehension by the method of emptiness and non -production recognising all dharmas. This is the practice of wisdom, the foremost perfection.
The early Mahayana from St Thomas to Parsva to Asvagosha who writes a book that is very strange, its translation into English is The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. Nowhere in the Buddhist sutras do you hear anybody talk about faith but in Jesus you always hear that faith is the initial nourishment of the seed of your eternity to come into fruition and, when it does, the zeroness, the emptiness of the world, becomes apparent because it is transparent, it is not permanently there, it is only there as if it were a mirage. The figure that came right after Asvagosha was Nagarjuna who is the founder of the Madhyamaka and who brought into Indian play, for the first time, the penetration of the word Sunyata, the void, the emptiness. But Nagarjuna was also a very great architect and he built two great cities that are both have been in ruins for at least 1,500 years. One is the great hill of Nagarjuna, Nagarjunakonda, and the other is Amaravati, both of them on the Godavari River that goes from the Bay of Bengal side of India deep into India, into the central Deccan. And from there one can see the reason why in the very centre of India you have a very special Stupa, a Buddhist monument called Sanchi, built by Ashoka about 220 BC. But it is at Sanchi that for the first time one understands the central part of Sanchi is shaped like a bell. The Dharma, when high, rings in silence, one does not hear sound, one hears the harmonic, which silence is, is the space within which all sound can take place. The high Dharma teaching has a particular quality that when we come back from the break we'll take look at in more depth. Let's give ourselves a little break.
Let's come back. Since this is the last presentation of 42 years of work, I'm recounting it a little bit to you for the record. Each one of the courses that I offered was highly successful, I one time forgot to put a curb, a ceiling, on an early symbols course and they quickly called me and said, 'There are 350 people who have signed up for your course, we can't do this, because in Canadian law after 70 students for each 13 you have to have a TA and we don't have enough TAs in the province to handle this.' And of course the TAs that were appointed knew nothing about how to teach like I was teaching and so I had to teach them as well so I had almost 400 people one time. And so I decided to split the symbols course so that I ran half of it during the day for the college and half of it in the evening and invited people from the community of Calgary to come. And it was quite interesting because I had the mayor and a number of corporations. Calgary was the home base of 400 oil companies because Alberta is the home of tar sands oil. And, in fact, the man in charge of the consortium that figured out how to extract oil from tar sands was Necmettin Mungan, who was from what is today southern Turkey but he's Kurdish. And Nick is quite a character, he went to Kazan in what was then still the Soviet Union but it was Tataria and as soon as they saw that he wasn't ... he didn't look Canadian, he didn't look American and they gingerly started to talk to him and they found out he could speak Azerbaijani quite well and immediately there was a crowd them around and said, 'Well, we're not Russians, we're tartars, we're like you.'
And when he came back he was so successful he had the red Chinese petroleum engineers come from Beijing to his house - he owned a big house, one of the biggest houses in Calgary; I had a three storey house on a little river myself about a mile from where he was - and so he had me, because of my acquaintances with China, to co-host this. And this big bus pulled up and all of these red Chinese engineers, all of them much taller than me, I mean they were like Olympian athletes, all in black Mao suits with a little red star and the leader of it was a man named [Tang Kai 45.10]. And I had put out on the table all kinds of translations of Chinese things; none of them looked at the I Ching translations, they loved to see the biography of recent Chinese people because they wanted to find out what had happened to who. And so they were all there and I sat next to Tang Kai: stiff silver grey short hair, burley and pudgy, he smoked a cigar with two fingers and when he raised it, like this, without taking a puff, there was silence in the room and then he would take a puff and the conversations would continue. So I asked him through ... a little discrete thing, I said, 'Well, how many people are you in charge of?' and the man next to him motioned me with his eyebrows and said, 'Several million.' He didn't like that I spoke up about the wisdom of ancient China that seemed to be missing, it wasn't a nice thing to say.
When I would teach, every course there would be projects, just like in the learning here there are eight pages of projects to do to help you augur into not only the process but discover the geology of the forms that make a laminar pattern because the phases are in a direct correlate line with the development of our species. Not just our species but with life on the planet and so it's like the double helix for DNA: this learning is the order in its spiral development, both to augur in and to spiral out, both at the same time of the way in which learning takes place on any planet in any star system for any beings who are conscious. All of these projects, because I would have 4 to 500 students per year, per semester, per year, double and over five years and I would save all the projects and so it looked like an archaeological dig with maybe a thousand paintings, maybe 800 sculptures, all kinds of things. So that wherever it was that I was habitually holding forth, there was this archaeological mound and people would get into the whole thing of adding to it. And when they would have tours, internationally, of people coming and they would be walking through this campus that was bigger than any shopping mall building you've ever seen.
The ceilings were so high and the sunlight so bright in Alberta that all the skylights would set off the sprinkler system so they had to opaque all the skylights for a 15 acre building. And then it was so dim inside that they had to have really strong lights and so they had parking lot mercury vapour arc lamp lights to put the illumination down and the floor was covered with an orange inner-outdoor carpeting, fireball orange it was called. And because most of the faculty couldn't deal with just open space they had these five foot high [pogo 49.34] partitionsthat were nicely arched do they were a little stylish and they were covered with a purple fabric much like the fireball orange. So, with the mercury vapour lamps and the fireball orange expanse of the floor and the purple, after about an hour you could blink your eyes and you could see what you had just seen fluttering, fluttering, flashing, and after about three or four hours you would start to get little headaches, little hairline headaches. So I, because I had access to a lot of equipment we had Portapak televisions, I had about a dozen of them and had students trained to do what we're doing here, keep track of everything and film it all the time and make these available at the various kiosks.
And it was quite something, when I left I had become a tenured professor at age 34 but they wanted me to give up my American citizenship and I said 'I don't think I can do that.' I'm a seventh generation American, my family came here from Scotland in revolutionary times - I'm named for George Rogers Clark - and my family settled into Illinois when it was still a territory and the original weir house was the only three storey building west of the Mississippi, a couple of hundred years ago. I said, 'I don't think I can do that.' So I wanted to go back to San Francisco and learn Chinese, I had had only two years, and made preparations to go back and study with Kai-Yu Hsu and he died in a freak accident just a week before I was to meet him again after five years. He lived in Tiburon across the bay from San Francisco in Marin county, and in a huge rain storm his house slipped its foundations and crushed him. I have the television programme that documented that, it was a real cause celebre.
When I came back I could not stay in san Francisco because of the memories, because of the qualities, and so came to Los Angeles and opened a centre here called Bodhisattva and met a great number of interesting people through that and offered a course at UCLA extension in the evening. And it turned out that across the hall from me was Kai Di offering a course on the I Ching and right next to me was Doctor Stefan Heller offering a course on Gnosticism. And so here were two great friends immediately in this little group of UCLA extension people but the person that drew my attention was the abbot of the Vietnamese Buddhist community, Thich Thien-An, who also was the founder of the University Of Oriental Studies and Thich Thien-An and I saw eye to eye like two open eyes will see through each other. And the day came when the Vietnamese who were being held at Camp Pendleton, families, were all turned loose on the same day to try to make their way in American life in the Los Angeles basin. And they literally had almost nothing and so Thich Thien-An and I went to work scrounging, very effectively, and as soon as we would bring truck loads of things into the centre that was off Vermont at New Hampshire, near Vermont and Olympic, the trucks would be emptied in about 25 minutes because there were literally thousands of people. And so when Thien-An brought out his book Zen Philosophy, Zen Practice, his dedication is, 'To Mr Roger Weir, best wishes for Bodhisattva Works,' and, in Chinese, his real name.
And we decided to open up Bodhisattva Books in the temple bell garden that was the centre court garden of the University of Oriental Studies and I was going to offer my programme and in preparation for that there was a peace bell, that Thien-An's father had collected in Saigon all of the guns of people who were killed in the monastic neighbourhood and had them all melted down and had two peace bells sent to the United States. One of them is down by San Pedro up on a pergola overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the other was there at the University of Oriental Studies. And so I hand linseed oiled the entire temple bell holder and one of my helpers was a descendent of the Shakya clan, the Buddhist clan from Nepal, who gave me a hand prayer wheel; it's only the Shakya clan who are able to make religious artefacts because of the direct heritage. And the other was a young monk from Sri Lanka, Piyananda, who is now the head, senior head, of the Dharmavijaya temple on Crenshaw. He was just a novice monk at the time.
The next day, for undetermined causes, the pagoda burnt down and the temple bell of melted down guns from the Vietnam War sat in the midst of ashes. So I realised that there was something saying, 'Hold off,' and the next week I was contacted by Northrop University in Inglewood. The president was a very interesting character, BJ Shell, and he wanted to have a programme like mine run in a technical university, he thought it would be the perfect adjunct to have something that was an interdisciplinary planetary humanities course in a technical university. And we made arrangements to do this in 1977 and by the close of 1977 there was suddenly a crisis, again. One fourth of all the students of Northrop were of Irani descent and the Ayatollah Khomeini had taken over and cancelled out the funding and the funds and the background for so many that it had to be put on hold. And we waited through '78 and into '79 and it was finally realised that conditions were not going to change. Northrop had just started a law school and they had to keep that going and so I looked for yet a third place to do the education.
And that's when I was invited by Doctor Heller to attend a Christmas party for the staff of the Philosophic Research Society, held at the Blarney Castle on Western between Sixth and Walsher and at the bar I was seated on a stool next to an older woman and we got to talking and she said, 'You need to offer this education at the Philosophic Research Society.' And I said, 'Well, I'm not metaphysical at all, in fact I see through metaphysics.' She said, 'Well, you'll find that the founder has the same qualities as you, he sees through everything, his name is Manly Hall.' And since she was his executive secretary, the next day I showed up in his office and there was immediate rapport and his comment was, he said, 'You've been given talents and you've been given opportunities and the only thing you can do with them is to share them. If you hold them they will curdle and they will be destructive. It's the constant giving of them that keeps them aerated and fresh.' And that's the Bodhisattva way, that's the great way.
If you look at the earliest reportings of Jesus, they did not call themselves Christians, they were not Christians. They were doers of the way. The way, in Sanskrit, yana, is a beautiful transformation because the original Buddhism from the historical Buddha was not a yana but a patha, therapatha, the way, the path of the elders. The path of the elders is what you follow but a yana is not a path, it's a field. And so the Mahayana is the great field within which there are various elder ways, lots of different ones. And so the Mahayana is a cosmic conscious field whose pathways are the various lineages that occur within that field. And eventually the Mahayana is the development in India of the seed that St Thomas brought in 38 AD.
Here's something from 100 BC, when the greatest Monk of the age Nagasena goes to King Menander and they have a conversation, 'You have, you tell me that your brethren in the order are in the habit of dressing you as Nagasena, now what is that Nagasena? Do you mean to say that the hair is Nagasena?' 'I don't say that Great King.' 'Or the hairs on the body, perhaps?' 'Certainly not.' 'Or is it the nails, the teeth, the skin, the flesh, the nerves, the bones? The saliva, the mucus, the oil that lubricates the joints, the urine, the brain, any of these that is Nagasena?' And to each of these he answers, 'No.' 'Is it the outward form then?' In Sanskrit form is rupa, and the language way in which rupa is cinched is by name and in Sanskrit that's nama, so they are always together, namarupa. 'Is it the form, then that is Nagasena or the sensations,' The vandana 'or the ideas,' The sana 'or the confections, the constituent elements of characters,' Samkara 'or the consciousness' Vijñāna ' that is Nagasena?' and to each of these he also answers, 'No.' 'Then it is all these skandas combined that are Nagasena?' 'No, Great King.' 'But is there anything outside the five skandas that is Nagaseena?' and still he answered, 'No.' 'Thus, then, ask as I may I can discover no Nagasena. Nagasena is a mere empty sound; who, then, is the Nagasena that we see before us? Is it a falsehood that you're reverence has spoken an untruth?' And the venerable Nagasena said to Milinda the King, 'You, sire, has been brought up in great luxury as beseems your noble birth. If you were to walk this dry weather on the hot and sandy ground trampling underfoot, the gritty gravelly grains of the hard sand, your feet would hurt you and your body would be in pain and your mind would be disturbed, you would experience bodily suffering; how, then, did you come on foot, or in a chariot?' 'I did not come, sir, on foot, I came in a carriage.'
And then it goes on to the constituents of the carriage and so forth. What comes out in a methodological Theravada analytic is that there is nothing that is really there to found anything independently being there. In the classical presentation of the historical Buddha this is called samyuktha, dependent or origination. The chain of dependent origination is a round robin; it does not have a beginning or an end and its interconnectiveness is only operative if you pursue it. If you do not pursue it, the interconnectiveness no longer occurs and it breaks the samutpada so that once it's broken, the entire chain vanishes. But it's difficult not to pursue in some way, subtly, that dependent origination because it always occurs in such a way that its continuance of motion is the tone of certainty which we are existentially habituated to and mentally addicted to, so that if we stop the motion of certainty, we will vanish. And the historical Buddha said, 'That's exactly right, so vanish.' In Jesus he called this his rest, that when you enter his rest there is no more illusion that is capable: it not only vanishes without leaving a trace but because it has no trace whatsoever, it cannot start up again. It has no way to go back into motion. 100 AD, now you get not the classical Buddha but you get the beginnings of the Mahayana, the classical Bodhisattva, the great being. Notice how different.
'Call forth as much as you can of love and of respect and of faith. Remove the obstructing defilements and clear away all your taints. Listen to the perfect wisdom of the gentle Buddhas, taught for the wheel of the world for heroic spirits intended. The rivers all in this Rose Island apple.'
The Rose Apple Island in Sanskrit is Jambūdvīpa, it means a special place. Rose apples are not apples but it is the kernel, it's like the rosebud, but it's the kernel of the vegetation and its trace goes back to the Chandogya Upanishad about 600BC, where the declension of the layers of reality is that man is the essence of plants, not of animals and speech is the essence of man and Om is the essence of speech. So that the planted life which clothes the landscape as a home for life forms, for man is the essence of the life forms, for language is the essence of him for a moment of exclamatory pausing, Om. And usually in Sanskrit Upanishad, the Om would be followed by three utterances of the word that translates as peace, shanti: Shanti, shanti, shanti. It is the vibration of the exclamation that is in the inclination of how one says 'Om'. Om is all of the syllables beginning with a, oo, mm. It is a word that encapsulates with the inflection of suddenness and peace is the resounding resonance of that.
And after three repetitions, after three presentations of it, the fourth is absorbed into a silence so that one hears silence purely and pristinely. The most beautiful Upanishad is the Mundaka Upanishad, it's the razor Upanishad, that as you shave away all of the things that it really isn't, one is left with no hand and no razor. And that rest is an emptiness which is fertile because what comes out of it, then, is not a beginning but everything emerges all at once as its unity, in the Bodhisattva understanding there is no Big Bang that starts and then goes for some extension, however long, of space and time but that the occurrence is out of the openness of the infinite and it happens all the time, that photons and electrons and other particles are being manifested. It's not because some particle is decaying into this but that the quality of its emergence is continuous.
'The rivers of all this rose island apple which causes the flowers to grow, the fruits, the herbs and trees, they all derive from the mite of the king of the nagas.' Nagas are the serpents, the Chinese have an ancient phrase [di tur shur 1.12.01], it means to no one is wiser than the snakes in a place because they know the underground as well as the above ground. When the historical Buddha was meditating for his enlightenment, finally after seven years of travails, of trying to force, aesthetically, enlightenment and it didn't come, he ended up as an emaciated skeleton of a man and literally fell in the dust, face forward. His life was saved by an old village woman who moistened some rice with her own saliva and with a couple of fingers fed him. When he revived enough strength he realised that there is no way to become enlightened by those aesthetic forces and so he sat out, not only under a Boddhi tree but under four trees. Seven days under each tree. In the third of those seven days a tremendous electrical storm came up and so this king cobra, the naga king, came out from the jungle and wrapped its coils around the meditating Siddhartha and flared its head, hood, and placed that over the Buddha-to-be's head so that the lightning that would come to this rajputana tree would not kill Siddhartha but would run through the king's body, that was coiled not to kill but to protect and to ground that lightning through the tail of the king cobra back into the earth.
It was after that that the fourth tree was the Boddhi tree, that he was able to be resuscitated enough to accomplish. And so one runs across this kind of language about 100 AD, 100 of the Common Era. 'From the dragon residing in the Lake Anavatapta his magical power just so whenever Dharmas the Jinist disciples establish.' Jina is an ancient hybrid, Buddhist hybrid, Sanskrit word for a conqueror, someone who doesn't conquer but who has absorbed all of the obfuscating karma so that it no longer occurs because it has come to its rest. The ancient way of saying it: whatever needed to be set has been set up and whatever has needed to be taken down has been taken down and so the horizon is an endless balance that no longer fluctuates, of up and down. 'Whatever they teach, whatever adroitly explained concerning the work of the holy which leads to the fullness of bliss and also the fruit of this work, it is the Tathagata's doing.'
The deep quality that comes into play in the Mahayana is that there is a pair of tathata, suchness, and shimiata, emptiness. And that that interplay is not an interplay of energy but is the interplay of the ecology of reality and that energy is a quality of the tathata, of the suchness of things, it has that current, it has that energy, and everything will have a frequency, will have a spectrum. But it will have a source in a field which is at once both natural, a natural field, and a conscious field, together and that they constitute the Tao and the Te. They constitute the way of tathata, of suchness, and the way of shiniata, of emptiness, not at one and the same time but before time occurs, not in a place but in the openness in which place occurs. 'No wisdom can we get hold of, no highest perfection, no Bodhisattvas no thought of enlightenment either. When told of this, if not bewildered in no way anxious, a Bodhisattva courses in the well gone wisdom. In form and feeling, will and perception and awareness, nowhere in them find a place to rest on. Without a home they wonder, Dharmas never hold them nor do they grasp at them, the Jina's Boddhi, they are bound to gain the wondering sarinka in his gnosis of the truth.'
The first astronaut to experience that was Ed White on the first EVA, he was in a Gemini capsule with McDivitt and he stepped outside of the Gemini capsule and in those days you were linked to the internal part of the capsule with an umbilical cord. And because it was fresh in doing this sort of thing the umbilical that had the oxygen, the communication, was coated with gold, real gold. And so when Ed White stepped out he floated away from the Gemini capsule, far enough that the umbilical cord grew taught and he turned to his side and he put up his hand and he eclipsed the entire earth by his hand and he moved one foot as if to step and that foot stepped into an endless universe of openness, away from the earth. They kept calling him to come back in; he did not come back, he didn't respond. They finally had Mcdivitt pull him back in forcefully by pulling the umbilical and they x-ed out of the transcripts all of Ed White's comments about being born openly and that he was home, he didn't have to come back. Unfortunately Ed White was one of those who died with the Apollo 1 fire with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee. There is a famous life cover of Ed White doing the first EVA with the gold umbilical cord out, stepping out, into the universe like the bodhisattvas, that the emptiness is not empty, it is the field out of which consciousness and nature, at their eternal rest, allow for the energy play of life and things to occur. And so it says,
'To course in the skandas, in form, in feeling and perception, in will and so on, and fail to consider them wisely or to imagine that the skandas as being empty means to course in the sign the track of non production ignored. The sign will always be the mental projection. Only when the signs are transparent and one no longer sees them but sees through them, one sees through them forever.' [There was no one manipulating them, no one generating them, it was an artefact of the way of seeing that was illusionary: when one sees real one sees that reality cannot occur or un-occur] 'Remaining unaware of coursing firm in wisdom, his thoughts a non production, then the best of all the calming trances cleaves to him.'
And it goes on from this. One of the qualities is that these early perfection of wisdom, Prajnaparamita writings, have so many peculiar words in them that are not cognate in Sanskrit, they don't come from Sanskrit, they come from an ancient Semitic Hellenistic Egyptian combination of language, refined to an extent that for the first time one can say something that the words themselves have their meanings curl around and disappear back into the usage as you're speaking. This is called a high Dharma poetic. As soon as one says something in this way someone who is not able to hear in reality will hear nothing, they will understand nothing of what you have said, it will go over their heads, as they say, because they're used to listening with the head as an antenna and what's being said is not to be tuned by antennae, it's to be heard with reality. And if we are resonantly harmonic there we hear it: if you have ears to hear then hear. That's it.