Being Truly Human June 2020 Newsletter

From the Editor

A booking was made at Claridge House, Lingfield, for our Summer School from 4th to 7th August. At the time of writing there is no way of knowing whether it will be possible to hold the Summer School due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Let us keep our fingers crossed and, as Phiroz used to say, “Keep going without flagging!”

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at Dilkusha, Forest Hill, London on 9^th June 1974

It is a specially significant fact that in all the great religions of the world prime place has been given to Love. Whether the word used be Love, or Compassion, or Loving Kindness or Friendship, this ‘something’ which has been called Love has primary place, not only in the great religions of the world but also in the earlier forms of religion, such as those which have come down to us traditionally in the different so-called mythologies and in the pantheons of the different cultures that have existed in the world. We all know that Love is the world’s supreme need now, just as it has always been its supreme need.

The human race is still so immature that it is unable to live simply in accord with Love. This is not too surprising considering our origins. This organism, the psycho-physical organism of the human species, is of animal descent. The animal world displays love in its own way, and its way is predetermined very largely by nature, by the ordinary chemical and physical processes that take place in the body and according to the seasons. The animal obeys them, it has little, if any, choice to disobey. So its obedience to the laws of its being are easier to understand and preserve than obedience to the law of our being, by us humans. We have the power of choice to a degree that no other kingdom of nature has. We have this power of choice, but we still have not developed the intelligence to choose wisely. We lack both intelligence and wisdom, and this is a very important point to bear in mind. And the purpose of the effort to live the religious life is to release this intelligence and wisdom. We are still learning what are the laws of our being, we do not really understand them, we haven’t the vision, we haven’t the knowledge. We think we do, we imagine we do, and we feed our ego conceit, and we try to satisfy our vanities accordingly. Now this lack is not due to lack of experience, experience we have in plenty, but the trouble is that our intellect, our discursive, logical faculty has run ahead of our other development to such an extent, and we are still so dominated by our what we call natural, instinctive urges and desires, that the intellect has become the slave of desire. Under these circumstances, wisdom, understanding, compassion lag behind.

Approach it from another point of view. Why is it that they lag behind? What is it that is the root source of our state of conflict in the world, within ourselves, fundamentally and essentially, and between ourselves and our environment, our fellow human beings? What is the root cause of it? Surely is not the root cause the fact that we are conscious of our existence in this dualistic sense of Self and Not-self? On the one hand there is the overwhelming awareness of ‘I am I’. The consciousness of the rest of the whole universe is all dumped under the ‘other fellow’, the ‘other thing.’ It is a one-one relationship. I, this infinitesimal little speck, less than a grain of sand in the ocean, in the huge immensity of the cosmos, and so important to myself, so fill my own self-awareness that all the rest of the cosmos is just perhaps as much as another speck. This fundamental ignorance, this fundamental conceit, lies at the root of all our conflict, it is the basic root. When there is a one-one relationship of that sort, and there is the instinctive urge to survive, then one is perpetually in a state of conflict, of struggle. “I am going to survive, if there is going to be difficulty with the other fellow.” Now you see, this is where we lack understanding, wisdom and intelligence. As we speak about such things, as we read about such things, the intellect says, “Oh, yes, yes, of course, obviously so, this is obviously true, this is perfectly logical”, and so forth. But this intellectual assent is an extraordinarily impotent assent, it has not got the power so to transform me that I am aware of existence in terms of a single Totality, a great unity. This transformation of my awareness of existence is really our fundamental need. And the whole of religious discipline is directed essentially for the purpose of bringing about this transformation, and of course there we have Mindfulness therefore playing the dominant part.

We are not really awake, we are conscious of ourselves and of our environment in the wrong way. We have constantly the wrong approach, the approach of Self versus Not-self, of Self surviving at the expense of Not-self. So you see, it is impossible for Love in the real sense to flourish. It flourishes within limits in the sense in which love flourishes in the animal world. There it flourishes perfectly according to the laws of being of the animal. (Even that turns to lust and horror and terrible things in the human kingdom, in the name of Love.) We have to understand these things very, very deeply, understand them, not just logically, not by means of mere intellectual comprehension, but by virtue of seeing Truth, by being the Truth, and here of course Mindfulness is the supreme instrument for it.

Let us consider the matter first from the individual, the personal point of view. Do I hate myself? It is a curious thing that everyone of us, in some mysterious way or other, has a great deal of self-hate. Part of ourself, deep down in the unconscious, wreaks vengeance upon the whole being. There are many causes for this. One is the fact that we have accepted the imposed morality of religion, of society and so forth. Religion lays down, “Thou shalt not do so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so.” Society says, “Thou shalt refrain from this, that and the other.” Now, whether we agree with what is laid down or not makes no difference to the fact that, having been conditioned in that way, through our upbringing and education, there is this unconscious acceptance of those norms. We have never really looked into those norms, never really understood them, never outgrown their limitations. So this which is accepted by the psyche, in the depths of the psyche, acts as the censor and as a ruthless, sometimes brutal judge and punisher, of what we do wrong. This is one of the extraordinary aspects of our life. Some of the great poets, the great tragedians, men like Aeschylus and Sophocles and others, have expressed this in extraordinarily deep ways. There is that in us which decrees our own punishment as well as our own reward. But that in us which decrees, and the way it is carried out, and the way the whole thing takes place, is entirely confined within the limitations of this dualistic, ambivalent, discriminative consciousness (Viññaṇa). It is within this sphere that all this takes place. It is the sphere of conflict, it is the sphere of beginning and ending, of being born, of coming to birth and dying. It is the sphere of sorrow and suffering, because every happiness, every joy, which is confined within the sphere of ambivalence comes to an end and causes grief, because it is felt as a loss. Supposing one were quite free of this dualistic awareness of existence, this ambivalent state. If one is quite free of this ambivalent state, then one is aware in terms of Totality, of the Wholeness, and in terms of the Wholeness there is no gain, there is no loss, there is no good, there is no evil in our limited dualistic state. The conditions of conflict are in our own being and deeply ingrained in the psyche. This does not mean that we are forever doomed to be limited in this way, far from it, we are not doomed at all, because the potentiality for Transcendence is within all living creatures. This is only a potentiality which the intellect cannot bring out, it needs understanding, and this understanding is the child of love and wisdom in harmony. Until then there is merely intellectual comprehension as a logical process, and logic will never take you out of the circle of duality. (You can’t present a logical statement unless it is within the sphere of duality, because if a statement is made it is not its opposite, and so forth. You must have duality where statements are made, so intellectual comprehension doesn’t do at all).

How then do we find this release? We use the word seeing the truth, but we could just as well say touching the truth, hearing the truth, smelling, tasting, savouring the truth, eating it, digesting it, becoming it. When we say ‘seeing’, obviously, because our physical eyes see that which is outside the eyes, we are always aware and conscious in terms of ‘I’, the seeing subject, observing the external object. There is the subject/object relationship, and they are different from each other, so that won’t do it. If I touch it, again there is the ‘I’ touching. We see at once how difficult it is then for any verbal process, any discriminative thinking process, for thought, for intellect ever to break through the bounds as such. And yet it is intellect alone which will give the first inkling, the first glimmering and the first big kick out of this circle, this sphere of limitation, of mortality, of suffering, of duality. When we realize that, we naturally become concerned with finding out, discovering how this intellect is to be treated, to be dealt with, so that that it has the power to pierce through the eggshell.

Here we come to that very mysterious aspect of the whole psycho-physical being (physical as well as the psychical part). We’ll just generally say the mind. It is sensitivity (it is a peculiar sensitivity). The word sensitivity again has its difficulties because we associate it with sensations, and sensations of course are associated with the nerves and the brain and all the rest of the story. (But there are no words in any language. We have to use some words and just ‘feel’ them out, ‘feel’ our way out of the limitation of the word). So this sensitivity has to come into play, this ‘feeling’ aspect, and the feeling aspect is warm. The purely seeing aspect is cold, cold intellect, and then there is the warm aspect of the heart. The knowing by the heart, as we may say, is of quite a different quality and nature from knowing by the intellect. The knowing by the heart, because of its warmth, softens that which rigidly holds us enclosed. It softens all those aspects of our mind, and in that softer condition of the mind, that deeper potentiality, which enables the emergence into Transcendence to take place, does take place. We have therefore so to live, to be mindful in such a way, to meditate in such a way, to perform all our daily actions and go through our daily life in such a way that this perfect marriage of the cold intellect and the warm heart takes place within us. There is a secret, an open secret, about consummating this marriage, and that secret is simply ‘non-grasping’. If we don’t ‘grasp’, if we don’t ‘clutch’, in other words, if we are free from slavery to personal desire, ambition and so forth, then we become quiet and still within ourselves, and in that quietness and stillness our whole seeing and hearing and touching and everything gets transformed into something totally different. It gets transformed into that developed sensitivity which lies hidden within our minds, by which everything is experienced in terms of wholeness and not of particularity. When you experience in terms of wholeness and not of particularity you have ceased to take sides. If you have ceased to take sides you have also ceased to separate Self from the Not-self, because we live all our lives taking sides with our own Self against the Not-self. When you cease to take sides, when there is this sense of wholeness permeating you all the time, it becomes second nature to you and you function in this totally different way. When there is no need to seek, to talk, to search for, to try to express love, or wisdom, or truth, or goodness, then it just happens naturally, it happens as naturally as the bud unfurls and becomes the full-fledged flower, a thing of beauty, of marvel.

We are so accustomed to seeing the phenomena of nature and we take them for granted. “There the clouds gathered, and there was hail, there was a storm,” or whatever it is. We just take it for granted like that. But do you know that this is Eternal God showering blessings upon the earth? It is Transcendence itself pouring its benediction upon us, but we are not conscious in that way about it. We are conscious in a different way. “Bother this rain, the match has to stop now and it’ll probably be a draw instead of a win for us.” I am the devil, I am the destroyer, I am the obstructor of Transcendence because I am aware of Self and the so-called Not-self in this peculiarly devilish manner, the manner which produces, sustains and maintains conflict, war, suffering. So you see there is a shortage of Love throughout the world.

I suggested a few moments ago the fact that we hate ourselves. If we were not fragmentary in our own self we would cease to hate ourself. If we don’t hate ourselves, we go to the other extreme, we have self-love, and self-love is also a divider of oneself from the environment. This love, this hate lie within the sphere of ambivalence, and this is what we have to transcend. We have to be free both of this love (which is a possessive love, which is a destructive love really, in the long run, a love which brings pain and sorrow, disappointment in one form or another), and of this hate which is obviously evil. So non-grasping, we suggested, is one very, very important factor in all this.

Let us approach this in still another way. There are various techniques of meditation. We have in both the Hindu and the Buddhist presentations meditations that are known as the Brahmavihāras (the Divine Abidings). Consider how this is presented and how does it arise in the case of the Buddha and his teachings. Throughout the various Discourses you will find these presented by the Buddha. In one case a young Brahman called Subha, who is an intelligent young fellow, comes to the Buddha and talks with him about religion, about the deeps, about the bringing of the religiousness within our being to fruition. And during the Discourse the young Brahman speaks out something which obviously lies deep in his heart, and he asks the Buddha, “Show me the way to union with Brahmā.” Now Brahmā is the Father God, the Creator God, Love as the creative power of the universe, Eros. You find Eros presented by Hesiod in his Theogony in two forms. One is the ordinary presentation which all the world knows and chatters about a lot, in connection with the word erotic, and so forth, that part of Eros which is the ordinary positive/negative, male/female attraction, the sensational pleasure, and all the rest of it. But kāma is presented by the Ṛgvedic teachers, and Eros is presented by the Greeks as the creative power of the universe. Eros is the creator of all the gods and conferrer of immortality. It’s a very important point to bear in mind. It is Eros who confers immortality. Secondarily to Eros, secondarily to kāma, all the other gods confer immortality also. But that is the significance of Brahmā, the Father God as the Creator God.

And this young Brahman Subha asks the Buddha the question, “What is the way to union with Brahmā?”, and the Buddha immediately presents the teaching of the Brahmavihāras, the Divine Abidings. In brief it consists of its four aspects, Mettā, Loving Kindness, Karunā, Compassion, Muditā, Sympathetic Joy, and the last one is the most interesting of all because it is the peak point, Upekkhā, which is Perfect Equanimity, Perfect Mindfulness. And the Buddha always associates that with the idea of perfect purity, perfect purity of Mindfulness. (People forget the purity part of it, they think only of the Mindfulness).

Now the aspirant suffuses himself with Loving Kindness, he suffuses his teacher, suffuses the dear one, suffuses the ordinary acquaintance, and, when he is developed enough, he suffuses the hostile one and the whole world with Loving Kindness, as well as any members of the opposite sex. It is a very interesting point, you will find it in Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, that the beginner must not attempt to suffuse a member of the opposite sex by this meditative process, otherwise he will get into trouble, and probably so will the other person. What is the meaning of this? How do you suffuse yourself with Loving Kindness? What sort of a ‘psychical sprayer’ filled with this mysterious liquid or powder, Loving Kindness, do you use? And how do you do it? What sort of psychical or spiritual or psycho/spiritual shampoo is this? Have you ever really gone into it? No! Has anybody really gone into it? Several of us have practised the meditations, as we say, and what do we do when we have practised these meditations? We go through a verbal ritual, don’t we? There is a laid down ritual with respect to it, and remember that this is not only Buddhist, this is pre-Buddhistic also, pre-Buddhistic by over a thousand or fifteen hundred years. It comes down right through the beginnings of Yogic teaching, which are at least five thousand years old. That is an historical fact.

The verbal ritual is laid down, and the believing disciple just goes through the verbal ritual and hopes that something will happen. But does it? John Brown has practised Mettā and Karuṇā and these Brahmavihāras for the last sixty five years, and John Brown explodes with anger and annoyance if his favourite chair by the fireside is taken, or his pipe has been mislaid by the chambermaid. Where is his Mettā? What has happened? A verbal ritual, a purely intellectual process is impotent where the transformation of the psyche is concerned. You can acquire ideas, you can hold on rigidly to beliefs, you can have all sorts of intellectual convictions. They are utterly useless. You will find that you use them against your own good and against your fellow human beings. This softness, this warmth of the heart, this natural something has not been allowed to emerge, to come to fruition.

You have a lovely garden, and the flowers come out in spring, they give you pleasure, every year you look at them, you tend them and you pronounce judgement, “This hasn’t come off well enough,” or “These are lovely this time,” and so forth. Have you noticed that it is all a little bit cold blooded? It is very analytical. You know all your botany, you know the names of all the flowers, the numbers of petals, of sepals, and goodness knows what, all sorts of marvellous things — you’re so learned. But you are separate from that flower. You are not in union with that flower. By contrast, when you are at ease within yourself, within the innermost depths of your psyche, and when you do not know with the brain, intellectually, that you are in this state of ease, then you are in that peculiar state of receptivity and responsivity, because of which, when you have seen that same bush producing flowers which you have seen year after year, suddenly you are lifted up into a totally different sphere. You are rapt beyond the senses, and you know an ecstasy, a quiet ecstasy. There is a stillness and a silence within you which makes the whole mind completely shut up, and something divine, something utterly transcendent, something which is total and whole, permeates your whole being, and our body too responds to it. Have you noticed how your hair stands on end? As I say these words, as a matter-of-fact, I feel that feeling throughout my body, not excitement, not sensational upset, but this extraordinary sheer delight, this state of bliss, which actually produces electro-chemical processes in the body.

Now in that state you are suffused with Love. You can’t order it, you can’t compel it. You can’t say, “I’ll practise this, that or the other laid down ritual or discipline,” and bring it about. It is not like practising your scales or arpeggios on the piano, practising your piece till you know it very thoroughly, and then you can play it and captivate your listeners. It is not like that. This is a thing that happens, and remember, how and why did it happen? Because you were in this state of ease where there was no Selfness, no grasping anywhere. You had let go, there were no barriers. There was not a Self and a Not-self, there was only the Totality, there was only God, there was only Truth, only Transcendence. There was only beauty, wonder, marvel. Use what words you like, they are all inadequate and useless. But you know what I am talking about because you yourselves in your lives have experienced that sometime, somewhere, somewhen. Perhaps you even experience it frequently. (God caught you napping and he filled your whole being.) This is what happens.

When the intellect also really sees all this very clearly, it ceases to be the slave of desire. It ceases to be the miserable Machiavelli who plans, schemes out and carries out all the evil which preserves separateness, duality, conflict within oneself. You unconditionally surrender to Reality, and in that unconditioned surrender there is no question of defeat or victory. At last Reality as it is, Truth as it is, Transcendence as it is, has come to fruition through you, and then the shape given to its manifestation is named in terms of thought and speech Mettā, Loving Kindness. It is named in thought and speech Karuṇā, Compassion. Where there is real Loving Kindness, where there is real Compassion, it is not I who am compassionate towards another. It is not I who am condescending, patronising, sending out pity, or all this usual rubbish. “Poor chap, poor darling, etc.” It has no meaning behind it, no substance behind it. Then there is only the reality of the thing. then you can experience Muditā, Sympathetic Joy. We all turn on the tape of Sympathetic Joy. So-and-so is getting married, you write off a lovely letter and all the rest of it. So-and-so has had a first child (or the seventh grandchild, as I had recently, last month), and the usual tamasha, the pantomime, the show takes place. No! It is not necessary for the child to be my grandchild, or my child or anything at all. I see a little one toddling across the pavement, full of the delight of life, jumping and running. And on those occasions when suddenly my hair stands on end, that is Muditā, Sympathetic Joy, the sheer delight of life. When you see a youth and a maid, perhaps sitting or talking to each other, you may see that glance which is that magic of communion taking place. Not mere animal attraction, remember, something quite transcending that takes place, and then there is Sympathetic Joy, and this expression of Transcendent Love has come through there unobstructed, unhindered.

So there is Muditā, Sympathetic Joy. And then there comes that peak point, as both Hinduism and Buddhism have presented it (in a form which is perhaps rather peculiar to most minds, east or west, north or south, it makes no difference), Equanimity, Poise. Why should Poise, Balance, Equanimity and Purity of Mindfulness, why should that be associated with Love? If the Holy Ones thought that that was the peak point of Love, it is not very likely that they were wrong and we are right! You remember that I said a little earlier that you cease to take sides. When you cease to take sides there is no separation, in the absence of separation there is no disharmony, there is only harmony. And the state of harmony is the state of union. And the state of harmony is not a static state at all (there is no condition attached to it), it is the unconditioned state. And the state of harmony is continuously moving, it’s a dynamic, it’s a continuously creating state. It is creating right beyond the bounds of all my little observations and knowledge. And this is what happens in you and through you, when you are in Upekkhā, in Equanimity. This is the magic of stillness and silence, and this is the state of Love, the Love that is utterly unpossessive, that is not binding, that lays down no conditions, that is unconcerned with reciprocity, which is not concerned to give, nor to take, because this Love is the energy, the power of Transcendence in its creative activity, flowing unhindered through you, the purified one, the perfectly mindful one.

Now you see what is the meaning of suffusing the friend, the acquaintance, the teacher, the world, with Equanimity. (I wonder if there are any texts which have presented things like this, I don’t know, I have not come across any texts of that sort). But you see this raises a great point. How truly, how purely do we care for Truth, for Transcendence? Or do we seek Truth because we want to be free of our suffering, we want to gain nirvāna, etc? You know how often and often I have put this point for consideration, why do we turn to religion? Is it in order to gain something for ourselves, to assuage our griefs? Do we turn to religion as a balm for our pain and suffering? Then we are not turning to religion as true religion, we are only looking for a palliative, and in the case of certain pains things like aspirins are far more effective than all the religions of the world put together! Isn’t that so? Why do we turn to religion? Do we really care for Truth? And if we care for Truth, we will not chase it, what you chase gets frightened. In our ambi-valent sphere, when the male chases the female (or perhaps nowadays the roles are getting reversed, the female chases the male!), there is fear, one is on guard at once. And also one enjoys the excitement of the chase, but where does the chase end? The hunting ends with blood, doesn’t it? The spilling of blood. And remember the significance of blood, the blood is the carrier of life, and when we have spilt that we have squandered life, we have destroyed life, we have sinned. So you see, no chasing of the Truth, but caring for the Truth, loving the Truth, and in that state of Love there is no Self to obstruct the Truth from being in us, permeating our being and flowing out freely. These are not mere words, these are not just airy-fairy poetic fancies, they are of the very life, the very throb of the heart of Truth itself. This is what happens to you, a Man, and only through Man can this happen. It cannot happen through a cat or a lion or a bird or a tree, but it can happen through you, your divine destiny, the purpose of our existence in this world. And it is not you who can fulfil it but the purpose and the totality fulfils itself through you. Let it do so and this world will know no shortage of Love. It will be full of Love and it will be full of that Love which will heal the strife and the sufferings and the sorrow of Man. It will be the Love that will bring the strength, the extraordinary comfort and that infinite resilience which will enable each and everyone to take the whole of life, of circumstantial life, in their stride, and circumstantial life will always present the dualities, pleasure/pain. That is the nature of concrete physical existence. That you can never get rid of, never try to get rid of it, but learn out of it all the time. Then you will find that your intelligence will be wholly awake. There will be real wisdom because of this ‘feeling’ aspect particularly, this knowing through the power of the Divine unknowing, and that will mean the transformation of life and being.

By Ron Martin

Continued from part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6

Chapter 11: Convergence

So far very little reference has been made to the vast body of literature supporting Buddhist doctrine, but it is important that the preceding chapters should be seen in context. Although modern scientific knowledge has made a new approach possible this book has, in fact, revealed nothing not known about for many centuries, even though the mode of expression may be very different.

The probable founder of Taoism, Lao Tzu, gave us the Tao Te Ching, which deserves to be ranked as one of the great religious books of the World. In spite of its terse, epigrammatical style and difficulty in translation, anyone who has experienced, in meditation, the fundamental truths of Buddhism, will recognise the seeds that the Buddha brought to fruition.

At the other extreme in time the poets, philosophers and scientists of the recent past have struck many chords in harmony with Buddhism. In a book of this size it is clearly impossible to give more than a few examples of what the diligent reader can explore elsewhere, but the following extracts should help to complete the overall picture.

There are, however, dangers in making a study in depth too soon. Some of the scriptures are of doubtful authenticity, some are extremely esoteric in character and are little help to the newcomer, and some include special meditation techniques, such as the cemetery and body meditations, that are likely to be so distasteful to the novice that they could produce feelings of revulsion.

Of the New Wisdom Schools, the writings of Zen offer the prospect of either utter bewilderment, or ecstatic elation at the insights they reveal. Such is the paradox of Zen that the gap between these two states of mind is so small that it needs only the tiniest spark of intuition to bridge it — the problem is how to generate that spark! If, after much study, or tuition, it still eludes you, then Zen may not be the way for you, but the attempt is worth making.

Mention should be made of the epic poem by Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia, first published in 1879 and being an attempt to bring Buddhism to the notice of the general public in the West.

These extracts are from Book the Eighth:

Ye suffer from yourselves, None else compels,
None other holds you that ye live and die,
And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony,

Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness,
Behold, I show you Truth! Lower than hell,
Higher than Heaven, outside the utmost stars,
Farther than Brahm doth dwell,

Before beginning, and without an end,
As space eternal and as surety sure,
Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good,
Only its laws endure.

And again:

Pray not! The Darkness will not brighten! Ask
Nought from the helpless gods by gift and hymn,
Nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruits and cakes;
Within yourselves deliverance must be sought;
Each man his prison makes.

From the Tao Te Ching we get the first recorded insight into the nature of conceptual thought:

Tao was always nameless
When for the first time applied to function, it was named.
Inasmuch as names are given, one should also know where to stop.
Knowing where to stop one can become imperishable.

…and the way concepts create relativity by making distinctions, whereas the Tao is without distinction and is therefore indescribable:

When all the world understands beauty to be beautiful,
then ugliness exists.
When all understand goodness to be good,
then evil exists.
Thus existence suggests non-existence;
Easy gives rise to difficult;
Short is derived from long by comparison;
Low is distinguished from high by position;
After follows before;
Resonance harmonizes sound;
Therefore, the Sage carries on his business
without action,
and gives his teaching without words.

(The Tao Te Ching was written on tablets which became separated over the centuries and so could be re-assembled in any order. The writer has taken the liberty of transposing lines 9 and 10 of the translation by Ch’u Ta-Kao).

The last three lines of the extract cannot be understood without some intuitive interpretation. The Sage may be likened to the dog, which wags its tail but is not conscious of doing so; as a consequence the Sage’s life functions efficiently and virtually without effort. The last line is concerned with the Sage’s exposition of the Tao by example and personal charisma, without falling foul of the language trap.

Dr. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki takes up the point of duality, in its application to the idea of a separate self, in his book, The Essence of Buddhism:

“What is wrong with intellection, or reasoning, is that by its dualism it sets up the idea of self as if it were a reality to which is to be given a specially honoured niche in the hall of human experience. As long as intellection is confined to its proper sphere of work, all is well, but the moment it steps out of it and invades a field which does not belong to it, the outcome is disastrous. For this stepping out means the setting up of the self as a reality, and this is sure to collide with our ethical and religious valuation of human life; it also runs contrary to our spiritual insight into the nature of things.” Later, Suzuki goes more deeply into the question of duality than has been attempted in this book; however, his exposition may be difficult to understand without some insight derived from meditational experience.

“The fundamental idea of Buddhism is to pass beyond the world of opposites, a world built up by intellectual distinctions and emotional defilements, and to realise a spiritual world of non-distinction, which involves an absolute point of view. Yet the Absolute is in no way distinct from the world of discrimination, for to think so would be to place it opposite the discriminating mind and so create a new duality. When we speak of an absolute, we are apt to think that, being the denial of opposites, it must be placed in opposition to the discriminating mind. But to think so is in fact to lower the Absolute into the world of opposites, necessitating the conception of a greater or higher absolute which will contain both. The Absolute, in brief, is in the world of opposites and not apart from it. This is apparently a contradiction. To go beyond this world will not help, nor to stay in it either. Hence the intellectual dilemma from which we all struggle in vain to escape.”

For those who have difficulty grasping the gist of such profound thinking the story of the missionary and the Maori chief may help:

An English missionary set out to convert the Maoris of New Zealand. He began with a Maori chief and drew a circle in the sand on the beach and said: “Inside that, you fella know.” The Maori nodded. The missionary then drew a larger circle round the first and said: “Inside that, I fella know.” The Maori nodded. He then drew a very large circle enclosing the other two and said: “Inside that, God fella know.” He stepped back and beamed at the Maori. The Maori chief nodded and said: “Outside that, God fella, he not know.”

No matter how large the missionary had made the outer circle there would always remain an area not bounded by it. If, on the other hand, he had told the Maori chief that the outer circle was infinite in size, and so could not be drawn, then neither he, nor the chief, could have had any conception as to its nature, or even whether it existed. This attempt to convey the idea of God to the Maori really amounted to a demonstration of the insoluble theological conundrum that if ‘All is God’, then there is no God (i.e. a duality between God and Man) but if ‘God is not All’, then God is not infinite. The Buddha is unique among all the great religious leaders in history in discovering the solution to this enigma.

From the Old Wisdom scriptures we find the true source of Enlightenment:

“Within our mind is a Buddha, and the Buddha within is the real Buddha. If the Buddha is not to be sought within, where shall we find the real Buddha? Doubt not that a Buddha is within your mind, apart from which nothing can exist.

Avert thy face from world deceptions, mistrust thy senses, they are false. But within thy body, the shrine of thy sensations, seek in the impersonal for the ‘Eternal Man’, and having sought him out, look inward; thou art Buddha.”

As to mistrusting the senses — when you see green grass do not believe that the grass possesses greenness, since the greenness is the product of the mind and is not in the grass.

The desire for Enlightenment is doomed to failure unless this and all other self-perpetuating desires are eliminated by having a pure experience, devoid of concepts and without clinging to these experiences as if they belonged to us. The obstacle to Enlightenment cannot be conquered by increasing conceptual knowledge, or by intellection, and the Buddha was careful not so say anything that would divert his followers’ attention from the Goal. From the Theravada Scriptures we get:

Once the Exalted One was staying at Kosambi, in the Sisu Grove. Then the Exalted One, taking up a handful of sisu leaves, said to the brethren:

“Now what think ye, brethren? Which are more, these few sisu leaves that I hold in my hand, or those that are in the Sisu Grove above?”

“Few in number, Lord, are those sisu leaves that are in the hand of the Exalted One; far more in number are those in the Sisu Grove above.”

“Just so, brethren, those things that I know by my super-knowledge, but have not revealed, are greater by far in number than those things that I have revealed. And why, brethren, have I not revealed them?

Because, brethren, they do not conduce to profit, are not concerned with the holy life, they do not tend to repulsion, to cessation, to tranquillity, to the super-knowledge, to the perfect wisdom, to Nirvana. That is why I have not revealed them.”

Man’s obsession with the death of the body has resulted in craving for eternal life; this has led to theories and doctrines in all religions, and Buddhism is no exception. Before his Enlightenment the Buddha, as a wandering mendicant, pondered deeply about this ‘problem’ and the story of Kisagotami and the mustard seed, in The Light of Asia, deals with a mother’s futile search for a cure that would bring her dead child back to life:

“My sister! thou hast found”, the Master said,
“Searching for what none finds — that bitter balm
I had to give thee. He thou lovedst slept
Dead on thy bosom yesterday, today
Thou know’st the whole wide world weeps with thy woe;

The grief which all hearts share grows less for one
Lo! I would pour my blood if it could stay
Thy tears and win the secret of that curse
Which makes sweet love our anguish, and which drives —
O’er flowers and pastures to the sacrifice —
As these dumb beasts are driven — men their lords,
I seek that secret; bury thou thy child!”

Buddhist doctrines about the ‘after life’ range from the notion, in Zen, that since the Here and Now is the only reality, we are continuously being re-born from one moment to the next, to the doctrines in both the Old and New Wisdom Schools concerning re-birth. We should be wary of devoting too much time to these doctrines because:

“…they do not conduce to profit, are not concerned with the holy life, they do not tend to repulsion, to cessation, to tranquillity, to the super-knowledge, to the perfect wisdom, to Nirvana.”

And why do they not do this? Because they can be meaningful only when there is a concept of a separate self to be re-born — they cannot apply to the meditational experience.

The last extract is from the writings of the great scientist and humanitarian, Albert Einstein:

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description … If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.”

Continued in part 8 and part 9