—

While most people in the Western world are aware of astrology, comparatively few know that other cultures have other systems of astrology. There are Chinese and Tibetan horoscopes, with their cycles of twelve signs going through years rather than months, so that the key to your character is the year, not the month, you were born in: the Year of the Dog, Dragon, Tiger, and so on.

But the nation that probably has the oldest and richest astrological tradition is India. Indian astrology bears some strong resemblances to its Western counterpart: the signs of the zodiac are more or less the same, as is the significance of the planets. (Indian astrology, however, uses only the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, as well as the Sun and the Moon, in its analysis.) In India, however, astrology is taken much more seriously than in the West. Few Indian parents would seek marriage partners for their children without having an astrologer evaluate their horoscopes; a wedding in India may take place at a strange hour of the night because the astrologer has chosen it as the most auspicious time; and some affluent Indian women are choosing to have childbirth by cesarean section so that they can time the births and their children can be born under auspicious stars.

Indian astrology is often called Vedic astrology because it is rooted in the ancient sacred texts called the Vedas, the oldest of which are dated to c.1500 BCE by conventional academics and to 2000 or 3000 BCE by alternative scholars. A Sanskrit name for Vedic astrology is Jyotish or Jyotisha, meaning “science of light.”

One of the most striking ways in which Vedic astrology differs from its Western counterpart is that it is sidereal rather than tropical. The tropical signs remain fixed throughout the centuries, whereas the constellations revolve in a long cycle sometimes called a Platonic year, lasting nearly 26,000 ordinary years. In c.2000 BCE, when the current Western astrological system was first devised by the Babylonians, the constellation of Aries was in the tropical sign of Aries, and, moreover, the spring equinox took place when the Sun was at 0 degrees of Aries (March 21 in our calendar). But because the cycle of the Platonic year produces a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, the spring equinox took place in the sign of Pisces for approximately the last 2,000 years and is now beginning to move into the sign of Aquarius – hence the coming of the Age of Aquarius.

Vedic astrologers do not use this tropical system; their horoscopes are based on the actual current positions of the zodiac constellations in the sky. Hence there is a discrepancy between the Vedic and Western systems, amounting to approximately 23 degrees. That is, if the Sun in your natal chart is at 24 degrees of Sagittarius in Western terms, it will be at 1 degree of Sagittarius in your Vedic chart; and so on. Because this is almost equivalent to the number of degrees that a whole sign occupies (30 degrees), chances are your astrological birth sign will be different in your Vedic chart. Say you have your Sun at 13 degrees of Virgo, Western style; in that case it will be at (approximately) 20 degrees of Leo in the Vedic system.

While this may sound complex, with a computer a Vedic chart is no more difficult to compute than a Western one. Interpretation is another story. Vedic astrology is not necessarily more complex than Western astrology, but it is probably fair to say that the typical Vedic astrologer feels the need to look at the extended implications of the chart than the typical Western practitioner, who usually focuses on the birth chart and the current position of the planets in regard to it. Vedic astrology, by contrast, has over twenty subcharts called amshas or vargas, which provide insights into the subject’s chances of marriage, likely career, and degree of success in life. One amsha indicates the subject’s spiritual inclination and capacity, while another, particularly important one called the navamsha addresses marriage, general life themes, and the second half of life. Yet another amsha is said to cast light on past lives and incarnations.

While the intricacies of Vedic astrology would be difficult to fit even into a substantial book, much less a short article, some key things about it are worth noting. One important feature of Jyotish is the system of nakshatras. This is a series of 27 lunar houses that, much like the Sun sign in Western astrology, gives crucial indications about character and fate. If your nakshatra is Rohini, for example, it is said that you will have an affectionate and truthful disposition as well as an affinity for the arts, beauty, and culture. Bharani, by contrast, is favourable for competition and for activities regarding bold or aggressive action. Each day is also governed by a nakshatra, making it favourable for certain types of activity (or inactivity).

Birth nakshatras are also important because they form the basis for computing dashas, planetary cycles in life. The complete cycle of the dashas is 120 years; within this, there are individual dashas of varying length. Each of these is ruled by a planet or luminary: Venus, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury, as well as Rahu, the north node of the Moon, and Ketu, the south node of the Moon. (These last two are not planets, but have many of the same functions as planets in the Vedic system.) The particular dasha that you are running at a given period in your life is likely to give a strong clue of your key concerns at that time. If you are in a Venus dasha, you may be occupied with relationships and marriage; a Saturn dasha may indicate a time of sober responsibility. Whether these are fortunate or unfortunate will depend on the place of the planets in your chart; for most people most of the time, the influence of a dasha is likely to be mixed.

These emphases mark another difference between Vedic and Western astrology. Particularly since the twentieth century, Western astrology has become reluctant to speak in terms of fate or destiny, preferring to describe a chart in terms of character tendencies and hesitating to make firm predictions about what will or will not happen to the subject. Vedic astrology has no such inhibitions. It is focused on what will happen to you in your life in very specific terms, and it purports to tell you when these things will come about. As such it can sound extremely fatalistic to the typical Westerner, and in truth Jyotish probably is more deterministic than the types of astrology that are most in vogue in the English-speaking world.

But Vedic astrology is not fatalistic in the most negative sense. It does not encourage people to sit back in quietude and allow events to happen to them. Because it is rooted in the Vedic tradition, which is a whole system of knowledge that encompasses all fields, it also points toward remedies. Someone in a highly unfavourable dasha may, for example, be told to chant certain mantras as a way of counteracting its influence. Other remedies include ayurvedic medicine as well as certain religious rituals. Subjects have reported uncanny reversals in fortune (including cures of life-threatening diseases) as a result of carrying out these instructions.

Gemstones are another popular way of countering unfavourable planetary influences. David Frawley, an American practitioner of Jyotish, advises strengthening a weak Sun in your chart by wearing a ruby. The remedy won’t be cheap, though: the ruby “should be a minimum of two carats in size, set in gold of fourteen carats or more…. As a substitute, a good-quality garnet can be used, but it should be of at least three carats in size, preferably five.” Gemstones for other planets include pearls for the Moon, red coral for Mars, emeralds for Mercury, and diamonds for Venus.

As with most forms of divination, there are dangers associated with Jyotish, especially if it is practiced with impure motivation. Ammachi (pictured top left), one of contemporary India’s most beloved gurus, has said that the coming of Jyotish to the West, while generally a positive development, has a dark side. The American Vedic astrologer Linda Johnsen quotes Ammachi as saying, “When a powerful predictive system falls into the hand of a materialistic culture, the potential for abuse is enormous…. Astrologers concerned only with making money or gaining fame will not succeed. This is because it is not possible to do Vedic astrology properly without tapas (spiritual self-discipline). Real astrology lies beyond the calculations.”

SOURCES

David Frawley, Astrology of the Seers: A Guide to Vedic/Hindu Astrology, Twin Lakes, Wisc., U.S.: Lotus Press, 2000.

Linda Johnsen, A Thousand Suns: Designing Your Future with Vedic Astrology, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.: Yes International, 2004.

RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty years of experience studying and practicing esoteric spirituality. His books include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books and Quest magazine, both published by the Theosophical Society in America. His website is www.innerchristianity.com. Portions of this article have been adapted from his books The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe and Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 127 (July-August 2011).

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Soeharto (1921 – 2008)

By VICTORIA LEPAGE—

The recent death of ex-President Soeharto of Indonesia at the age of 86 has reminded me that I was present in Jakarta in 1967 during the bloodbath in which the Communist Party was decimated and General Soeharto rose to political power, along with the minority modernist Muslim party that supported him.

At that time Indonesia was only nominally Muslim: under the charismatic President Soekarno it was animistic, feudal, steeped in an other-worldly mysticism, and was infested with starving beggars, superstition and black magic practices. General Soeharto, of humble village origin, had risen high in the military apparatus and married into a family of the minor nobility in Solo. His marriage gave his political aspirations legitimacy in the eyes of Indonesians, who believed in the ancient tradition that links royal status to the right to rule.

The General was well known to have a close affiliation with a Javanese magico-mystical school believed to give him great occult powers, yet from the time of his ascension to the presidency he appeared, unlike ex-President Soekarno, to deny the affiliation, at least publicly. The new pro-Western president donned the Islamist black pitje and publicly espoused and supported the political arm of orthodox Islam, which in the main was vehemently opposed to any and all occult practices. It proved to be the best thing that could have happened to the country.

Whatever President Soeharto’s questionable legacy in other areas, in this respect he dragged Indonesia from the dreaming Middle Ages into the modern world. Today, Indonesia is officially a member of the great Muslim international fraternity, and Islam’s austere religious mores have increasingly infiltrated the national culture, modifying its more primitive animistic traits and greatly strengthening its influence in Asia-Pacific politics.

Nevertheless, Pak Soeharto retained to the end of his life his private allegiance to Javanese mysticism. Doctors who attended him in the last weeks of his illness, during which he rallied more than once from heart, lungs and kidney failure, said they were amazed and baffled by his recuperative powers. It was commonly believed, however, that the power of spirits and the implantation of many lucky charms inside his body was the factor keeping him alive. Indeed, those who were close to Soeharto in his home town of Solo, the heartland of the Javanese culture, have attributed his resistance to death to his devotion to the powerful occult forces that resided in him throughout his life.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, all six presidents of Indonesia “paid respects to the spirit world, visiting sites said to hold mystical powers, consulting with seers and collecting tokens of magic like the Indonesian dagger called a kris.”¹ Among these leaders, Soeharto was outstanding as a devotee of the occult. He studied as a boy with a spiritual teacher and performed ritual acts throughout his presidency, continuing to do so even after a popular uprising deposed him in May 1998.

According to his aides, over the years he made frequent visits to sacred places, including mountains, caves, tombs and ruins, and took ritual baths in oceans and rivers sacred to Nyai Loro Kidul, the mighty Queen of the South Seas. He also collected hundreds of sacred objects in order to absorb their magical power.

The Javanese Science

Despite the ascendancy of modernist Islam throughout the nation, Soeharto’s private loyalty to Java’s spiritual past is mirrored in Javanese society in general, though its allegiance now tends to run underground in the face of Islamic disapproval, especially that of the strict Wahhabi sect, which over the years has become extremely influential. To the outsider today all Indonesians are strict Muslims, but under the pitje or the headscarf there is likely to be concealed a mystic of quite a different stripe. The people of the island of Java in particular are very proud of their indigenous pre-Islamic spiritual tradition, which they refer to as the Javanese Science, and while few may actually practice it now in its pure occult form, most have a proprietorial understanding of at least some of its sacred principles. They are evasive about discussing this hidden dimension of their society, especially with Western foreigners, but one would be mistaken in not taking the Science very seriously indeed as the essence of the Javanese culture even to the present day.

The Javanese Science is a syncretic blend of Hindu-Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist and ancient animist strands, and evolved in the royal courts of Solo and nearby Jogjakarta in Central Java as a system of self-transformation confined solely to the aristocracy. But since the Revolution that ejected the Dutch rulers from the country after the Second World War, the Science emerged into the popular culture in the form of hundreds of kebatinan (or inner-being) sects, each one of which celebrates some aspect of the royal mother tradition. These esoteric sects have drawn a very large minority of the Indonesian population into their sphere, forming an immensely creative and diverse subculture at the leading edge of national life, very much as happened in Japan after the Second World War.

The Kebatinan movement has in many respects evolved into an inherently new form of mysticism. Syncretism raised to a religious principle is its dominant keynote, a drive towards pluralistic unity that echoes a prominent feature of the New Age spirituality appearing elsewhere in the world. But the Javanese approach to the universe and the human situation generally, though at its best of a high metaphysical order, is in many respects quite different from that of the West. It doesn’t involve religious theories and dogmas so much as a science of inner energies perceived directly with a highly sensitised intuition – one might say, clairvoyantly – and manipulated directly by the will.

This shamanistic approach can lend a disconcerting ambiguity to those moral categories that the Western mind likes to regard as eternally fixed: Justice, Compassion, Truth, Altruism, Duty and so on. To the Javanese, mystic things in the moral sphere are not good or bad according to what we in the West would regard as an ethical judgment, but according to whether the personal energies concerned balance out in a manner beneficial to the whole. Do they bring harmony to the individual, do they stabilise him or her? For the Science all is dynamic, all is in ever-transformative and purposive flux: good is what works in the present moment to the spiritual benefit of the whole; bad is what fails to do so. This stance contributes a relativistic and unpredictable note to the Javanese outlook that Western diplomats and others have famously found difficult to deal with, yet its creative power is undeniable.

Javanese adepts with access to this underlying realm of subtle forces are reputed to have diagnostic powers and techniques of psychic healing of extraordinary efficacy, and are believed to understand the dynamics of spiritual physiology better than any other race on earth. The Javanese Science has much in common with other shamanistic Eastern paths such as have been found in Tibet and Japan, where syncretism has similarly been raised almost to a spiritual principle. These too have dealt in patterns of shifting subtle energies rather than fixed doctrinal systems. But there is something different and mysterious about the Javanese Science, a depth, a quality of purity that most researchers are agreed sets it apart from any other form of mysticism. What makes it unique?

The Invisible People

In a visit to Indonesia some years later, I was able to put this question to Pak Joyo, at one time the Director of a Christian Theological College in Central Java and the pastor of one of the largest charismatic Lutheran churches in the Reformed Dutch Church of Indonesia. Pak Joyo was a fourth-generation Christian whose great-grandfather was converted to Christianity at the point of his Sultan’s kris (the Sultan himself having been similarly converted by Dutch missionaries), and Pak Joyo followed in his family’s footsteps in deciding to train for the ministry. But halfway through his theological training, he decided to quit the church and give all his allegiance to a contemporary mystical sect called Hardopusoro which interested him a great deal more.

However, he told me that in a vision Christ asked him to remain in the church, where he could be more useful than anywhere else; and after an internal struggle he obeyed. Pak Joyo went on to become a multilingual international emissary for Christian ecumenicalism – but, with the blessing of his bishop, privately continued in Hardopusoro, in which he became a high initiate. Such dual religious allegiances are entirely natural to the Indonesian temperament.

Pak Joyo’s answer to my question surprised me. The source of his country’s spirituality, he said, was not familiar to other races. It was unique because it stemmed from the Invisible People, the Badui, who grew no bigger than a ten-year-old child and who lived in an inaccessible part of the mountainous jungle in South Bantam, about a hundred miles west of Jakarta. The Badui were “closer to the soul” than other people, said Pak Joyo, and were the X factor in the background of the Javanese Science. Invisibly they had instructed the Javanese people for nearly three thousand years, helping to guide them from their original primitive state to their present civilisation.

The Badui were not Indonesian and had no part in the country’s laws or economy, but lived apart in forest territory forbidden to outsiders and had great spiritual knowledge and strange magical powers. Although rarely seen by outsiders, they were held in awe in the marketplaces throughout Indonesia. When Indonesian spiritual and political leaders needed advice, said Pak Joyo, even the most illustrious of them went into the jungle alone to consult the Badui seers, for the understanding of the Invisible People on spiritual matters was a universal one that embodied a primordial tradition beyond factions or institutions.

President Soeharto would undoubtedly have been one of those top leaders who was not too proud to seek enlightenment, possibly of a political as well as a spiritual kind, from these strange priestly people of the jungle. Leaving behind his aides, bodyguard and driver, he would have had to ascend alone the jungle forest track that led to the Badui colony, there to consult with its leading prophets.

Inexplicably, although remote from the teeming civilisation surrounding them, the Badui knew everything that happened in it long before the news was heard on television. They had prophesied the Second World War and that the Dutch would leave the country soon after peace was declared. They knew the destiny of peoples worldwide. The Badui, it was said, planted sacred trees – living trees, as they called them – representing their tribal leaders in a hallowed grove called the Artjas Domas, which was visited once a year by the highest-ranking Badui priests. By studying the growth on the trees clairvoyantly, they were able to read the fortunes and destiny not only of people, but of nations and the world. From this yearly examination everything of value to their leading families was recorded in a script known only to them. The Badui were said to have telepathic powers and a magical way of keeping others away from their settlements, especially from the Artjas Domas.

I have recently learned that the Badui people have now inexplicably disbanded and their old territory has been settled by Indonesian farmers. But when I revisited Java in 1980, their colony was still a great focus of mystery and unanswered questions. Why were these strange forest-dwellers so influential? What kind of special wisdom did they possess? Where had they come from? And why did they live apart, alien, feared, invisible – and yet, according to Pak Joyo, all-seeing? Sir Stamford Raffles referred to them in his eighteenth-century History of Java, yet since then no traveller from the West had succeeded any better than the Indonesians themselves in setting foot on the Badui’s inner territory or penetrating their secrets.

Eventually I learned more about this remarkable people from Dr. Paul Stange, an American lecturer in Asian Studies who grew up in Indonesia and who obtained a doctorate from the Michigan University in the US for his study of Sumarah, an akebatinan sect that has become influential in Indonesia since the Revolution.² In his thesis, Dr. Stange was able to relate the Badui indirectly to the growth of kebatinan sects such as Subud and Sumarah as constituting a cutting edge phenomenon in the evolution of mystical consciousness.

Custodians of the Soul World

It seems that the Badui are of the dark-skinned Tamil race that is believed to have spread from Africa long ago into southern India, and from thence into Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, where they lived unmolested for thousands of years. But about eight thousand years ago the Malays, at that time a mainly Caucasian race from the north, crossed the Sunda Strait and displaced the Badui culture in the Sunda Islands, with the consequence that most of the indigenous race withdrew into the mountainous interior of Java, far from the spreading communities of the newcomers, while a remainder migrated further east.

Some time in the first millennium BCE the remnant of the aboriginal Tamil people in Java was joined by a large group of Indian initiates – probably, some authorities think, refugees from the defunct Indus valley culture in which holy trees also played an important part – and the two groups, each with its heritage of ancient racial wisdom, together formed the Badui priesthood.

Forty Indian Hindu-Buddhist families, constituting a sacred nucleus, inhabited a central group of three villages served by an outer ring of vassal Badui communities: together the two clans built a spiritual power-centre in Java which, isolated though it was for nearly three thousand years and finally greatly diminished in numbers, preserved unchanged its sacerdotal structure and identity and its pivotal place in Javanese religious life. Those in the inner esoteric circle wore white sarongs and turbans, were called the White Ones, had strict rules of conduct and were forbidden by their laws to have any communication whatever with the outside world, while those in the outer villages wore blue sarongs and turbans and were called the Blue Ones. There was no intermarriage between the two clans.

Although the use of money or of weapons was forbidden to all in the colony, the ascetic laws of the Blue Ones were less severe than those of the others, and enabled them occasionally to visit an Indonesian village to obtain by barter the very few items the farming colony needed (mainly smoked fish and salt), and to serve where necessary as liaison officers and spokespersons for the White Ones.

Despite their harshly primitive way of life, it would be a mistake to suppose these jungle people were not, in their own way, highly civilised. Nina Epton, a British journalist who is the only known Westerner to have met the Blue Ones and a few of their holy White Ones (although many Dutch researchers tried before her), speaks in her book The Palace and the Jungle of their aloof dignity, their air of having “a destiny apart from other mortals,” and above all, of what she calls “the Tibetan look.” This was a wide-eyed all-seeing look common to many of the Badui, which she describes as staring beyond this world into the spiritual realm. It was a look she associates especially with pictures of seers like Guru Padma Sambhava, the great Indian initiate who brought Buddhism to Tibet.³

Ms. Epton has described the Badui physiognomy as varied and clearly of an older ethnicity than that of the Indonesians. But the elderly leader of the White Ones, reputed to have been a saint and a sage and obviously of a superior caste to the others, was plainly more ethnically advanced. She noted in particular that he had a worn, patient and ascetic face which reminded her of that of a well-mannered European intellectual. In other clothes he would have passed unnoticed in an English crowd, for he had a very light complexion, a narrow face and the gentle bearing of a civilised person. Altogether, Epton says, the Badui were not what one expects from the jungle.

This assertion is borne out by the personal history of a young runaway, the son of a pu’un or chief of the White Ones, who in the seventeenth century escaped the colony to become a stable boy in the then Sultan’s palace. Soon he became the Sultan’s counsellor and then his son-in-law, and today his descendants are the Jajadiningrat family, one of the most aristocratic and politically influential families surrounding the Indonesian presidency. Throughout the intervening three hundred years, the Badui continued to “read” the sacred tree of the stable boy’s line, to visit his Jajadiningrat descendants once a year with predictions and advice for the coming year, and where necessary protect the members of the family from danger.

In fact, the sole reason for Nina Epton’s unprecedented interview with the leader of the White Ones was that, through the Sultan, she obtained an introduction to the Jajadiningrat family, who asked the White Ones as a special favour to grant her an interview. In no other way would the meeting have been possible.

The Badui priests continued to follow the destiny of the Jajadiningrats, says Epton, because for the Invisible People once a holy lineage is laid down it is laid down forever, it belongs to the timeless realm of the soul world. The Badui in fact denied the reality of time. Their sages believed that the rules of life were laid down once and for all at the Beginning of things by an ancestral divinity called Batarratunggal, who will one day return to govern the Badui and the world. In the meantime, it was their sacred obligation to maintain everything exactly as it was at the beginning, without change, without innovation. Nothing concerning their customs or belief system must be disturbed from their state of primordial perfection: hence the necessity of isolation.

To the modern Javanese mystic this Badui belief is merely the folk expression of a deeper spiritual reality. He sees the concept of a Beginning-time or Dreamtime to which so many early races look back with longing, believing it to be a cosmic paradise that must be ritually preserved for the future, as simply a metaphor for the inner soul plane, which is both cosmic and interior at one and the same time. That inner place, eternally omnipresent within each human being, is really the cornucopia from which all spiritual paths and religions flow forth in their season. As a race we have long ago lost contact with such a high level of soul-consciousness, and so it is called by other names: the Garden of Eden, the Dreamtime, Paradise, the Kingdom of Heaven. But according to the Javanese view, it is in truth a soul-world present in each one of us, a celestial headwaters from which the river of the spirit flows continually into our bodily spacetime. This higher/inner world must be kept purified, as it once was and will be again in the future, and it was the task of the Badui to help do this, since we as a race cannot.

No one knows for certain why the Badui people have now dispersed. But it is evident that deep changes reflected in its politics have overtaken Indonesia within the last few decades. The erratic occult climate that pervaded the early years of independence has yielded not only to a stricter Islamist discipline but also to the growing apparatus of democratic government, a maturing judicial system and economic reform, all of which has brought stability and prosperity to the people. The nation has come of age. According to Dr. Stange, who received a wealth of Javanese lore from the Sumarah cognoscenti, there is a school of thought that believes the Badui have now fulfilled their mission in the South Pacific, and that is why they have at last dispersed into the Indonesian population.

The reign of animism in this region under the sovereignty of Nyai Loro Kidul had long been prophesied to end during the twentieth century, giving way to a new and higher religious and cultural dispensation for the Pacific races – one perhaps best represented by the modern Kebatinan movement in Java. It is thought that the Badui understood well that this prophesy has now been fulfilled. They understood that their reign is no longer needed – or indeed tolerable under the new conditions. Having played a custodial role by preserving in secret the pure and unsullied soul-conditions necessary for such a surge of higher consciousness, they have now been able to die out as a separate society.

Whether or not there is any truth in this theory, it is undoubtedly the case that around the Pacific Rim a new religious spirit is rising. Akin to kebatinan and to the Javanese Science in general, it is based on principles of high shamanism known to the Badui many thousands of years ago, but forgotten by modern humanity. Recognising that enormous healing powers are locked in the ancient soul-ways, seekers visiting Indonesia today find common ground with the synthesising mysticism of the new kebatinan sects and are forming part of a spiritual network that stretches from Findhorn in Scotland to the esoteric centres of California. This development in the Pacific zone has in it the potential for creating a new religious paradigm of global significance. But how much of it is indebted to the heroic patience of the Invisible People of the Javanese jungle, as mystics like Pak Joyo believe, we shall probably never know.

Footnotes:

1. ‘As Suharto Clings to Life, Mystics See Spirits’ Power’, Seth Mydans, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2008.
2. Paul D. Stange, The Sumarah Movement in Javanese Mysticism, UMI Dissertation Information Service, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1980.
3. Nina Epton, The Palace and the Jungle, Oldbourne Press, London, n.d., 55.

.

VICTORIA LEPAGE has published numerous articles on the new spiritual paradigm emerging in cultures worldwide and is the author of Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-la, published in ten foreign languages. Her latest book is Mysteries of the Bridechamber: The Initiation of Jesus and the Temple of Solomon. She lives in New South Wales, Australia, and can be contacted through her website at www.victoria-lepage.org.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 5.

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In August 2008 Bun Rany, the wife of the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, led Buddhist monks and soldiers to the site of the historic Hindu temple Preah Vihear to call upon their ancestors to protect the temple. The site of this temple is located on disputed land, perched atop a cliff on Cambodian soil but with the most accessible entrance to the site located on the Thai side of the border.

This 11^th century temple is located on the border between the two countries, but the borderline itself has never been clearly demarcated because the area is littered with landmines left over from decades of war. Ownership of the temple was originally awarded to Cambodia, but dispute between the two countries flared up when Preah Vihear was granted United Nations World Heritage status.

Desperate to resolve the issue, both sides deployed military forces – but when they were unable to reach a solution to the conflict, Cambodia and Thailand resorted to supernatural means. Fearing that the magical abilities of Cambodia‘s Buddhist monks would weaken Thailand, residents throughout the province of Si Sa Ket wore yellow to help protect Thailand from Cambodian magic.

Though Buddhism is not often thought of as a religion that practices magic, in such communities as those found in Thailand and Cambodia, there can be no doubt that Buddhism shares common ground with belief systems that are primarily associated with the use of magic.

Both countries have a long history of engagement in spiritualist and animistic magical practices. When Buddhism first arrived in these areas it came into contact with pre-existent traditions that believed in spirits, both benevolent and malevolent, and a developed system of magic which was to be feared or revered, depending on whether or not it was used for good or ill.

For Buddhism to flourish under such conditions in Thailand, it was necessary to develop a complex system of interaction between Buddhism and what has been called the Spirit religions. Debate still exists as to whether or not the two systems have become completely integrated or not, although the interaction of the two systems is sometimes referred to as an example of syncretism. On the subject of interaction between Buddhism and the Spirit religions in Thailand, the academician B.J. Terwiel says the following:

When I interviewed villagers in Central Thailand on the relationship between Buddhist and non-Buddhist aspects of their religion, a variety of reactions were observed. The more sophisticated informants generally stated that the Lord Buddha had never forbidden rituals of ancient origin. Other persons hesitatingly made up their minds with regard to the orthodoxy of the ritual, but on subsequent occasions contradicted their own judgment. Many were at a loss to classify rituals or beliefs under rubrics such as ‘Buddhist’ and ‘non-Buddhist’.¹

It would appear from this statement that the boundary between the use of magic by the indigenous tradition of Thailand and the practice of Buddhism is not apparent to many of the inhabitants of Thailand themselves. This is most likely due to the fact that the people of rural Thailand are raised in a society where the two systems are found closely entwined together.

The religious traditions of Thailand have always included the belief in spirits and the ability to manipulate them by means of magic. For example in Thailand preservation of the spirit of life (khwan) is considered to be of the utmost importance, as is ensuring that malevolent spirits (phii) do not enter the body. Control of these spirits is greatly emphasised in rural Thai culture, as the service of these spirits can be employed to improve the qualities of day to day existence.

Magic and the Sangha

In the lives of ordinary Thai people, more value is placed upon the improvement of their current existence than on transcending the cycle of rebirth, as is advocated by Buddhism. The relationship between the members of the Sangha (community of Buddhist monks) and the practitioners of magic in Thailand combine in a variety of ways, as one system (the Spirit religions) deals with the aspects of gain in this world (laukika), whilst the other (Buddhism) advocates the importance of salvation and ideas of transcendence (lokottara).

This relationship is complicated even further by the fact that in Thailand almost every adult male will become a member of the Sangha at some stage in his life, for in rural areas the taking of vows is considered to be an essential element in preparation for adult life. Given the wide range of magic and animistic beliefs which operate within rural Thailand, these men will carry a variety of beliefs and practices with them into the Sangha, not all compatible with the ethics of Buddhism.

In accordance with this, religious opinions are not questioned during ordination. As a direct result, villagers can be found entering the Sangha for a variety of reasons, as is reflected in the following Thai rhyme:

Ordination to fulfil a promise to the Gods,

Ordination to escape poverty,

Ordination to flee from a wife,

Ordination to save money,

Ordination to eat better food than at home,

Ordination to join one’s friends in the monastery.²

Thai belief does not only consist of beneficial Gods and spirits. It also abounds with belief in ferocious spirits of pure malevolence, from who the villagers seek magical protection. Amongst these classes of malevolent spirits are such beings as the preed (a giant, looming shape with a small head that emits a sharp, piercing sound, as a reflection of its past sins), the phii krasy (a type of parasite which inhabits human bodies, feeds on excrement, and is shaped like a human head with entrails protruding from beneath), and the phii baan (the ghosts of ancestors that hover around their previous home and watch their descendants with malignant jealousy).

Whilst it is possible for these spirits to be exorcised, Buddhism chooses to deal with their interfering presence in another way; the correct approach for a Buddhist to cause these spirits to cease meddling in the affairs of their human victims is to preach to them, thus converting the spirits involved to a more benign nature. There are certain canonical texts which serve this purpose of protection, which can also be recited at specific times in order to avert misfortune. These texts are known as the phraa parit. The source of the magical power of these texts has not yet been clearly identified, but Y. Ishii, author of Sangha, State & Society: Thai Buddhism in History, claims that whilst some possessed a magical content from the beginning, as modifications of Hindu rites, others such as the Mangalasutta originally had no magical connotations.³

Indeed, for most people, including some who chant them, the parit are incomprehensible, being in Pāli. Rather, I believe, the magic of the parit stems from three factors: the social recognition that parit should be chanted for certain purposes (e.g. blessing); the existence of an established formula for their chanting; and the sanctity attributed to the chanter.⁴

The use of parit is a means by which to ensure protection; it provides good luck and disperses misfortune whether caused by the presence of spirits or not. As is seen in the above passage the presence of magic being used by the Sangha is not overtly explicit in the parit texts, rather it is interpreted to be so by the lay audience. They do not understand the words the monks recite, but because of the respected state of the Sangha in Thailand, the lay community assumes that it must be not only beneficial, but also powerful.

Amulets

Another type of magic practiced by the Thai Sangha is the manufacture of amulets. These amulets are employed for a variety of reasons, including protection from diseases, black magic and accidents. Of these amulets the ones portraying the Buddha are the most popular, although some also are made in the likeness of famous monks and King Chulalongkorn (also known as Rama V, one of Thailand‘s most revered kings).

The sanctity of the subjects portrayed upon the amulets is a reflection of the beneficial powers they are thought to contain. The Buddha images vary in size, from anywhere between two and eight centimetres, and can be manufactured from wood, metal, ivory or resin, although frequently they are made from a selected combination of these elements, pressed into a mould and baked.⁵ To create a pressed or printed image (phraaphim), a monk needs not only a mould, recipe and the proper ingredients; he also requires an advanced knowledge of spells and sacred script.⁶

The inherent sanctity of the amulet is not always thought to be sufficient; hence its power needs to be enhanced by means of the correct recitation of spells and sacred scripts. The most simple of these sacralisation rites is known as plugseeg.⁷At the culmination of plugseeg the monk will either blow upon the Buddha image or draw over the amulet with the index finger of his right hand.⁸

During the manufacture of amulets the Sangha is also invited to perform a consecration rite known as phutthaphisek.⁹The use of magic within the phuttaphisek is illustrated by the fact that it is desirable for at least one of the monks participating in the phutthaphiseek to be either advanced in meditative technique or in the Brahmanic rites known as saiyasat.¹⁰

These rites are intimately entwined with another type of Thai ritual, namely the ceremony held to consecrate Buddha images which infuse the representation with the auspicious wisdom and power associated with Prince Siddhārtha’s victory over the demon Māra and the obtainment of enlightenment by Siddhārtha. During this ritual monks chant in Pāli or preach in Northern Thai several texts including the Buddha Abhiseka (Consecrating the Buddha [Image]).¹¹ This text focuses on the powers of the mind attained by the Buddha that are associated with his enlightenment. Both the consecration of images and amulets draws their impetus from this core idea.

One specific example of a text dealing with the extraordinary supernatural powers of the Buddha that occupies a position of prominence in Thailand is Bimbās Lament. (Bimbā is the Buddha’s wife, who he left to pursue the life of an ascetic.) 

By his magical power he created a crystal path in the sky from the eastern boundary of the city of Kapilavastu to its western perimeter. Then, ascending into the air, the Tathāgata, surrounded by many previous Buddha’s, walked on the sky-bridge he had miraculously created… he also preformed other miracles, such as appearing to walk above the heads of the Śākyans.¹²

Tattooing is another magical practice that is widespread throughout Thailand. At some stage in their adult life many Thai males will receive a tattoo of some description or another. This is of significance because in the culture of rural Thailand tattoos are representative of magical power. The magical power of these tattoos stems in part from the tattooist, for whilst both layman and monk may be a tattooist, there is vast difference in the scope of their work and the designs used.

The types which may be employed by the monk are restricted. As a monk, he is limited to tattooing the upper parts of the body, for not only would it be seen as sexual misconduct on the part of the monk to tattoo the lower areas, the upper parts of the body represent the higher, more spiritual aspects of humanity, whereas the lower regions represent mankind’s more base, animalistic attributes. The tattoos done by the monk are also limited in application. The monk may bestow tattoos that are of a beneficial or protective nature. Other tattoos, such as those which bestow things such as sexual virility, can only be performed by members of the lay community.

Another Thai rite involving magical skills of the members of the Sangha is the Wong Dai Sai (Encircling with Holy Thread).¹³ This is a type of consecration rite designed to protect a place from evil. It is believed that the consecrated place will be protected by the power of the Three Gems and the phraa parit.¹⁴ During this rite cotton is affixed to an image of the Buddha, stretched clockwise (as is the way of beneficial magic; anticlockwise is considered to be used for evil purposes) around the place to be consecrated, and finally wound back to its point of origin, at the Buddha image.¹⁵ If the thread should snap at any stage, it is considered to be an ill omen.

The main doctrinal link between Buddhism and the Spirit religions is found in the incidences where magic is employed by the Sangha as a transfer of merit. The theory of the transference of merit is based upon the concept that when a member of the lay community performs a virtuous deed, such as making a donation or feeding a monk, the Gods witness the act and empathise with the process. The Sangha themselves are referred to as being a ‘field for merit’ (na bun), as is found in the Sanghnussati-bhavana.

Well practiced is the Exalted One’s Order of Disciples, practiced in integrity, practiced in intellectual methods, in right lines of action – to wit the four pairs, the eight groups of persons – this is the Exalted One’s Order of Disciples, worthy of offerings, oblations, gifts, salutations, the world’s peerless field for merit.¹⁶

Monk’s Superior Magical Status

The greater the purity of the monk, the more magical power/merit he is said to generate. The sanctity of the monk himself is the source of belief in the efficacy of his magical power. The magical power that is generated by the monk is also classed as being superior to that of the layman, but by its very nature it is also more limited in its application. A monk is also deemed to be superior to a spirit, and thus a monk should never be seen to supplicate himself before a spirit. When a member of the Sangha addresses a spirit, he never raises his hands in supplication, in contrast to the layman who will raise his hands when requesting a favour from a spirit.

The superior magical status of the monk stems from his purity; the monk must not do anything to compromise his superior position. Part of the magical power which results from the monks’ purity is derived from celibacy. A monk should never touch a female (human or animal), and is forbidden to even receive an object that is directly given to him by a woman.¹⁷ In order to receive an object given by a woman, the monk must first take a piece of cloth and place it upon the floor, upon which the woman will then place the gift in whilst the monk holds the edges of the cloth.¹⁸ The cloth is used as a medium by which to transfer merit since there can be no direct contact between a monk and a woman. The merit flows from the fingers of the monk holding the cloth, to the woman who has donated the cloth. The medium of cloth must be used so as not to deprive the female donor of the merit she would otherwise not receive. One of the reasons for which a monk may not have contact with women is not only due to the temptation of sexual misconduct, but also because women are believed to be associated with a type of magical power said to be diametrically opposed to that of the monk.¹⁹ This is due to the fact that menstruation is associated with dangerous magical power, and is classed as being capable of destroying some of the beneficial power of the Sangha.²⁰

Another aspect of magic in Thailand which needs to be considered is the import of magical systems via India. The branch of Buddhism found in Thailand is an older form known as Theravāda, and its links to Hinduism are much stronger than those of the later Buddhist schools. For example, in the book A Summary of the Seven Books of the Abhidhamma (Abhidhamma Chet Khamphi Ruam) there are elements of cosmology, cosmogony, buddhology, ethics, epistemology and language that are integrated into a yantric/mantric system.²¹ This system is very much similar to that found in Indian magic, and it is reasonable to assume that many of the formulas found within are directly based on the use of Hindu mantras. These are broken down into component syllables for recitation by the Buddhist practitioner. The mantra Namo Buddhāya (Homage to the Buddha), is correlated with the five vowels, symbolising the five elements (dhatū) – water, earth, fire, air and atmosphere.

Furthermore, in the following passage from the Seven Books of Abhidahamma, we also find a formula which contains correlations with the Hindu Tantric Yoga techniques, dividing the body into a solar right and lunar left, and creating what appears to be Buddhist chakra centres. This integration of the occult, Tantra and Buddhism is by no means unique for it is prolific in Tibetan Buddhist texts and practices.

Na = the Buddha Kakusandha at the right eye

Mo = the Buddha Konagāmana at the left eye

Bhud = the Buddha Kassapa at the back

Dhā = the Buddha Gotama at the naval

Ya = the Buddha Ariya Metteyya at the forehead²²

Transmission of Occult Techniques

One possible explanation of how this similarity between Thai Buddhist and Hindu occult techniques occurred can be found by examining the magical history of a third South East Asian country – namely Myanmar (Burma).

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Burmese kings imported large numbers of Sanskrit texts from India on topics such as medicine, alchemy, incantation and astrology.²³ In Burma, these Buddhist wizards are practitioners of what is called the weikza-lam (path of occult knowledge). This tradition still exists today in Burma, and the largest of the groups practicing this occult path is based in the city of Pegy, and is called the Manosetopad Gaing. Like their Thai counterparts, this organisation bases an interest in the occult on the powers attained by the Buddha on the path to enlightenment. They also believe that the relics of the Buddha (Burmese dat-daw) (Pāli dhātu) are possessed of a kind of majestic power that he infused in them through the force of his samādhi.²⁴ The similarity between this branch of Burmese magic with that of the Thai people is amply illustrated in the following extract from a magical treatise by the Manosetopad Gaing:

A person wishing to practice the path must first suffuse his mind with thoughts of the Three Jewels, and cultivate loving kindness toward the various grades of nats… the nats referred to here include powerful nature spirits dwelling in trees, the earth, and mountains, minor deities who preside over the use of magical incantations and diagrams, and medicine spirits whose domain includes the well-known herbs and minerals of alchemical lore.²⁵

From this passage it is clear that the Manosetopad Gaing not only use Buddhist motifs, they are also drawing upon a much older tradition of Spirit religions and animistic world views. These Buddhist wizards, however, are also drawing upon Hindu texts on supernatural lore; and if such texts entered the Burmese magico-religious system then it is entirely possible that influences from India may help to explain what appears to be a yantric/mantric tradition within the Thai Seven Books of Abhidahamma.

With their magical prowess and the protection of the Sangha, why do the Thai people fear the magic of the Cambodians? Cambodia is also a country with a long history of occult practices. For instance, in the Khmer book The Tale of Ancient History there is a legend of Prince Chey Ahca who led a ghost army against the Siamese – Siam being an earlier name for Thailand. More recently, we also find record of Po Kambo, who in 1866 protested against French colonial rule and was alleged to know a magical formula that deflected bullets. Even as recently as the 1970s and 1990s, Khmer soldiers utilised magical tattoos, in a similar manner to that of their Thai enemies, and used mantras written in Pāli and Sanskrit, the holy languages of Buddhism and Hinduism, to protect them in battle.

All of the magic employed by the Sangha in Thailand is based on one important concept: the sanctity and purity of the Sangha themselves. The forms of magic the Sangha use is limited in scope by this fact, for they can use only what is generally referred to as ‘white’ magic: that which benefits another and causes no harm. Use of magic to harm another or for personal gain would result in expulsion from the Sangha. Similarly, a monk may not use magic that serves to improve the virility of a layman or create love charms, as this could severely impair the powers of the monk which stem from his sexual abstention. A monk may not request the spirit world for aid, for this would compromise the superior status of the monk who is deemed to be beyond the mundane affairs of this world.

Whilst the power of the Sangha is more limited in application than that of laymen, it is also deemed as stronger for it stems from other worldly sources, as opposed to the spirits who remain bound to this world. As such, villagers come to the monk knowing that when they treat the monk with a proper attitude of respect, the cosmic forces shall share their merit and transfer it to demonstrate approval. The transfer of merit thus benefits not only the Sangha, but the laity as well – even providing protection in times of conflict.

Footnotes:

1. B.J. Terwiel, Monks and Magic: An Analysis of Religious Ceremonies in Central Thailand (Curzon Press, 1975), 3.
2. Ibid., 20.
3. Y. Ishii, Sangha, State & Society: Thai Buddhism in History (University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 21.
4. Ibid., 21.
5. B.J. Terwiel, Monks and Magic: An Analysis of Religious Ceremonies in Central Thailand, 74.
6. Ibid., 75.
7. Ibid., 77.
8. Ibid., 78
9. Y. Ishii, Sangha, State & Society: Thai Buddhism in History, 23.
10. Ibid., 25.
11. D. K. Swearer, Consecrating the Buddha, in ed. D. S. Lopez, Jr., Buddhism in Practice (Princeton University Press, 1995), 50.
12. D. K. Swearer, Bimba’s Lament, in ed. D. S. Lopez, Jr., Buddhism in Practice (Princeton University Press, 1995), 543.
13. Y. Ishii, Sangha, State and Society: Thai Buddhism in History, 22.
14. Ibid., 22.
15. Ibid., 22.
16. Ibid., 14.
17. B.J. Terwiel, Monks and Magic: An Analysis of Religious Ceremonies in Central Thailand, 114.
18. Ibid., 114.
19. Ibid., 115.
20. Ibid., 115.
21. D. K. Swearer, A Summary of the Seven Books of Abhidamma, in ed. D. S. Lopez, Jr., Buddhism in Practice (Princeton University Press, 1995), 336-7.
22. Ibid., 340.
23. P. Pranke, On Becoming a Buddhist Wizard, in ed. D. S. Lopez, Jr., Buddhism in Practice (Princeton University Press, 1995), 343.
24. Ibid., 345.
25. Ibid., 351.

GWENDOLYN TOYNTON is the editor and founder of Primordial Traditions – www.primordialtraditions.com. Her articles have been published in many magazines and she is also published in the New Zealand Collection of Poetry & Prose 2002.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 7.

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Perhaps the three most influential and adored personalities in recorded human history are Lord Krishna, Jesus Christ, and the Prophet Mohammed. Even today thousands of pilgrims travel to Jerusalem in Israel, Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and Vrindaban in India to remember and venerate these great souls.

Does the fact that most of the followers of Lord Krishna are in the East, those of Lord Jesus in the West, and those of the Prophet Mohammed in between, mean that they have “spheres of influence,” and represent the Divine only in their respective spheres of influence? Do they represent the same Absolute Truth, or are they contending antagonists for the hearts and souls of mankind?

Actually, of course, as God is One, His message is one – no matter who preaches it! That message is Love – Love of God and love for all God’s separated particles, which include all living beings and even things inanimate. Speaking for the Absolute, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna in Bhagavad Gita 10:8: “I am the Source of everything. Everything emanates from Me. The wise who know this perfectly engage in My devotional service and worship Me with all their hearts.” Lord Jesus proclaimed the same universal message of love: “A new commandment I give you – that you love one another, even as I have loved you.”

The philosophical basis for this universal love was spoken very explicitly by the Supreme Lord to Lord Brahma, the material Creator of this universe, in Srimad Bhagavatam 2.9.33: “Brahma, it is I, the Personality of Godhead, Who was existing before the creation, when there was nothing but Myself. Nor was there the material Nature, the cause of this creation. That which you see now is also I, the Personality of Godhead, and after annihilation what remains is also I, the Personality of Godhead.”

This supreme undying truth is not always understood or seen so clearly by imperfect human beings, who always see through eyes of duality and division. This is because we see through eyes of ignorance that see ourselves as a material body, and thereby transform God’s perfect unity into disunity and competition.

Over a century ago, the great W.E.B. DuBois, himself an American of African descent, observed, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.” It appears that the problem of the 21^st century may be determined by the “Faith line.” On one side stand those who we may call the “religious totalitarians,” who believe that only their interpretation of their particular religious ideology is right and bonafide, and an acceptable way of believing and living on the Earth. Anyone else should be converted, or condemned and killed.

Fortunately, there is another side of the Faith line composed of those who we may call the “religious pluralists” who, while following their own particular tradition, maintain that faith in and obedience to the Supreme Being according to any religious tradition is always good, and that persons believing in different religious creeds should live together in peace and harmony, trying to inspire each other to even higher levels of Faith and Love for the One Supreme Being, Whom we all adore. The pluralists advocate neither mere toleration nor an artificial consensus. Rather, they encourage proactive cooperation between each and every soul that simultaneously preserves individual identity while working for the health and wellbeing of all. This is indeed perhaps the only way we may survive the rampant godlessness of the present civilisation. Pluralists believe that each religious community should be allowed to make its unique contribution for the good of all.

The outcome of this great Faith line struggle between the religious totalitarians and the religious pluralists depends on young people. The young and impressionable have always played a significant role in social movements. They did against apartheid in South Africa, and they did for the rise and success of the Nazis in Germany. Today, the demographics of the world’s religiously volatile areas are strikingly young. Thirty-two percent of India’s population of 1.2 billion people are under the age of 25. Forty-two percent of the residents of the Palestinian territories are below 15 years. Nearly one fourth of Iran’s population is under the age of 15, and the median age is 26.4. They are all standing on the Faith line. Which side they choose depends on whose message reaches them first. Will it be the message of love and toleration, or the message of hate and conflict?

We who believe in love and toleration must make sure our message of freedom, cooperation, and acceptance reaches them first. Speak out! It’s your duty!

SRILA BHAKTIPADA was born on September 6, 1937, the son of a Southern Baptist minister. He imbibed his father’s missionary spirit and attempted to convert classmates to his family’s faith. Despite an acute case of poliomyelitis which he contracted around his 17th birthday, he graduated with honors from Peekskill, New York, high school in 1955. In high school and college he excelled at debate. Maharaja received a Bachelor of Arts in History from Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee on May 20, 1959 and graduated magna cum laude, first in his class of 117. He then received a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to study American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he remained for three years. Kirtanananda was among the first of Srila Prabhupadai’s western disciples to shave his head , don dhoti and kurta, and move into the temple. During March 1967, on the order of Prabhupada, Kirtanananda established the Montreal ISKCON temple. On August 28, 1967, while travelling with Prabhupada in India, Kirtanananda das became Prabhupada’s first disciple to be initiated into the Vaishnava order of renunciation, (sannyasa: a lifelong vow of celibacy in mind, word and body), and received the name Kirtanananda Swami. In 1968, Kirtanananda Swami founded the New Vrindaban community in West Virginia. Over the following years, a Palace of Gold, Radha Vrindaban Candra temple and large guest house manifested. New Vrindaban became the most visited temple in America with many thousands of visitors a year. Bhaktipada attracted millions of people, toured and taught non-stop and authored the best selling Christ and Krishna along with over a dozen other books. Kirtanananda died on October 24, 2011 at a hospital in Thane, near Mumbai, India, aged 74.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008).

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—

Sufism belongs in spirit to the modern age. It has an affinity with it; it is in tune with secularism, with the modern thirst for objective knowledge. Yet the Sufi tradition is immensely old. In some quarters a belief still persists that it is a mystical offshoot of Islam, but most reliable sources claim it is far older than the Muslim religion.

Evidence is emerging that suggests the tentacles of the brotherhood reach out to many religions and cultures and extend thousands of years into the past, and that its members were once better known as the Friends of Truth, the Builders, the Masters, the People of the Way and numerous other appellations that had been circulating for far longer than the lifetime of Islam. The Friends, it is said, were already present in Medina during Muhammad’s lifetime and adopted the name Sufi after taking an oath of fidelity to the Muslim cause.1

A number of derivations of the word Sufi have been put forward, including Ain Soph, the Kabbalistic term for the unknowable, and Sophos, meaning Wisdom. This is in line with the view held by many students of Sufism who claim that it corresponds with the hidden esoteric wisdom-dimension that underlies all religions. Thus the British Sufi fellow-traveller and author Ernest Scott believes the Sufi tradition has impregnated Western culture to a degree we rarely realise, leading him indeed to call it the Invisible Tradition. Its covert influence, he says, has been strong in Manichaeism and the Cathar faith, in the Troubadour and Jester traditions of medieval Europe, in the evolution of Jewish Kabbalah, in alchemy and in Christianity itself. Scott quotes the Afghan Sufi teacher Idris Shah as saying that “there is evidence that at the deepest levels of Sufi secrecy, there is a mutual communication with the mystics of the Christian West.”2

Scott further quotes Hakim Jami, a twelfth-century Sufi master, as implicitly denying Sufism’s Islamic origin by declaring that Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes lay on an unbroken line of Sufi transmission, thus making a causal connection between Sufism and the Greek Mystery schools of antiquity.3 The British esotericist J.G. Bennett goes further, claiming that the Sufis are the descendants and spiritual heirs of the old master magicians of Altai, and that Central Asia has been their heartland for forty thousand years or more. He says that it was from the Altaic shamans that the Sufis inherited the religious tolerance, supremely practical expertise and democratic ideals that are their hallmark today. And it was from the Siberian schools of wisdom that they learned their unique way of surrender, the way of total obedience to a higher principle than man which has earned them the soubriquet “the slaves of God.”4

Bennett gained much of this knowledge of Sufism’s hidden history from his mentor George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1877 – 1949), the Armenian-Greek mystic and spiritual teacher who travelled extensively in the Caucasus and Central Asia and who received Sufi training in the dervish schools he encountered there. In The Masters of Wisdom, Bennett recounts:

Gurdjieff told me that he had learned about these ancient schools of wisdom from researches he himself had made in caves in the Caucasian mountains and in the great limestone caverns of the Syr Darya in Turkestan. I have since learned that there is a Sufi tradition in Central Asia that claims to go back forty thousand years.5

Gurdjieff also told Bennett that the paintings in the Lascaux caves in the Dordogne, France, which the great authority on parietal art, the Abbé Breuil, has dated to about thirty thousand years BCE, were the work of later Sufi descendants of the shamans.6 Gurdjieff took the story of Atlantis literally. He associated it with pre-sand Egypt and believed the Lascaux artists were members of a brotherhood that survived after Atlantis sank seven or eight thousand years ago.7 They were highly evolved Masters of Wisdom, “‘psychoteleios’ who had learned the secret of immortality,” and whose centres of initiation on the now submerged Atlantic continental shelf have left us, in their paintings of deer, bison and auroch, a magical message of prehistoric spirituality that lay undeciphered for many thousands of years.

In that palaeolithic age art and religion were still one; secular and religious consciousness had not yet separated out, and spirit and matter were not yet in opposition; nor was evil an absolute force seeking the overthrow of good. All things and all attitudes to things were filled with the magnetic, synthesising radiance of hypercosmic energy, which Gurdjieff called conscious energy. In such a unified world the great Initiates developed the unique type of spirituality that still distinguishes Sufism today, wherein the polarising activity of mind is submissive to the over-riding Spirit that ever seeks a return to the One. Only in the later more alienated religious systems, Gurdjieff believed, do we find the divisive seeds of philosophical dualism.

The Sarmoun Society

At the apogee of the Sumerian civilisation, Bennett continues, the Sufis are believed to have founded a brotherhood called the Sarman or Sarmoun Society, which, according to Gurdjieff, met in Babylon as far back as c. 2500 BCE and was responsible for preserving the inner teachings and initiations of the Aryan tradition in a period of religious decline. Sarmoun is a word meaning bee in Old Persian, and refers symbolically to the practice of the brotherhood of storing the “honey” of both the traditional wisdom and the supernatural energy or baraka enabling it to be understood, and sending this double “nectar” out into the world in times of great need.8 The word Sarmoun can also mean “those who are enlightened.” The Sarmouni are believed to have secret training centres hidden to this day in the most remote regions of Central Asia.

In Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Bennett conjectures that around 500 BCE the Sarmoun Society migrated from ancient Chaldaea to Mosul in Mesopotamia, moving north into the upper valley of the Tigris, into the mountains of Kurdistan and the Caucasus. There it became active in the rise of Zoroastrianism under the Persian monarch Cambyses I. According to Gurdjieff, the Society later moved eastward to Central Asia, twenty days’ journey from Kabul and twelve days’ journey from Bokhara. “He [Gurdjieff] refers,” says Bennett, “to the valleys of the Pyandje and the Syr Darya, which suggest an area in the mountains south-east of Tashkent.”9 Although Gurdjieff was never explicit about his relationship to the Sarmouni or the precise locality of the monasteries in which he trained towards the end of his travels, he provides many hints in such autobiographical writings as Meetings With Remarkable Men that this Sarmoun brotherhood, whose monasteries were situated on the northern slopes of the Himalayas, was the custodian of the most ancient wisdom known and the primary source of his extraordinary esoteric knowledge and powers.

Gurdjieff came to the West as a man with a mission. He had journeyed extensively in the Caucasus, where it is thought he first entered the tekkes of the Yesevi dervishes of Sheikh Adi in the Kurdish foothills and later those of the Sarmouni in Afghanistan, receiving a number of initiations by the remarkable age of twenty two. Those closest to him maintain that he remained in touch with hidden Sufi sources throughout his life and received help and support from them. He clearly believed that he acted on their authority in setting up schools in the West that transmitted the cosmological and psychological teachings he himself had learned during his travels. Yet while freely recounting his many Central Asian adventures in his search for wisdom, Gurdjieff managed to draw a permanent veil of secrecy and ambiguity over all details of these intimate encounters with the dervish tradition. This of course is in line with the extreme reticence of the Sufi orders themselves.

Gurdjieff and the Masters of Wisdom

A charismatic hypnotist, carpet trader, Russian spy and mystic extraordinaire, George Gurdjieff was the son of a Greek-Armenian bard and was deeply impressed by his father’s songs concerning the great spiritual luminaries of a vanished past. The boy apparently began his search for the lost wisdom of the ancients at the early age of fifteen, and maintained it at huge cost to his health and material resources until he emerged, nearly thirty years later, a magus of mysterious yet undeniably charismatic authority. Possessed of enormous personal courage, during World War I Gurdjieff led a large posse of Russian followers across Eastern Europe to safety, through the raging battle lines of Bolsheviks and Cossacks in turn, eventually establishing a school in Fontainbleu, outside Paris, for the study and practice of methods of spiritual self-transformation. These methods, revolutionary in their day, are believed to have included the sacred dance and music exercises of the shamanistic Yesevi dervishes of Kurdistan, a community in which Gurdjieff seems to have received his initial training in Sufi techniques of “soul-making.”

The Yezidis, a secretive Kurdish religious sect from which the Sufi Bektashi order has sprung, live to this day in the foothills north of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan pursuing a cult of angels. According to the British baroness E.S. Drower, who in 1940 published a detailed paper on the sect, the chief Yezidi angel is Malek Taus, the Peacock Angel who has some likeness to Lucifer, the fallen angel of Christian fame. A black serpent is also held in special reverence in the Yezidi religion as a symbol of magical potency – no doubt ultimately a symbol of kundalini and the spinal system of energies elaborated in spiritual physiology. While paying lip service to the Muslim faith, the Yezidi have their own unique cosmogony, mythology and ritual practices, which have more commonality with the Magian or Gnostic belief-systems than with either Islam or Christianity. Ceaselessly persecuted and destroyed by Kurdish Muslims and Ottoman Turks as well as Islamic armies of both Iraq and Iran, the once powerful Yezidi tribes have been almost wiped out as heretics of the first order. Only isolated groups are now left. These include small pockets in Central Kurdistan, the Russian Caucasus and in satellite communities in Syria, Lebanon, Anatolia and Iran.

Sheikh Adi, a noted mystic of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, was a Median Magi, and although he is regarded as the founder of the Yezidi faith and an incarnation of the Peacock Angel, both the religion and the tribe are ascribed a far earlier date of origin. They are believed to be heirs to an ancient ancestral tradition going back to Noah. Adrian G. Gilbert comments:

It is my belief that they [the Yezidis] are descended from the ancient Chaldaeans. Their own tradition is that they migrated from the South, and they may well be the lost remnants of the Babylonian Magi who disappeared after the time of Alexander of Macedon.10

This is certainly in line with Gurdjieff’s belief that the roots of Sufism lie in a spiritual tradition of extreme antiquity such as is found in the Yezidi faith, and that it was probably centred in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that Sufism continually developed beyond its initial form and amplified its teachings over the ages.

The late Hugh Schonfield, a noted Jewish scholar and author, says that by the third century CE Sufi schools were well established in the Middle East, particularly in Mosul, the heart of the old Assyrian kingdom, under the auspices of the Zoroastrian Magi. There the Sufis were joined by many Jewish refugees from Egypt fleeing Roman persecution. Among these were the Therapeutae, members of an Essene Order of contemplatives strongly imbued with a revolutionary New Covenant with God. The covenant involved a Judaic reformation that forbad militarism and animal sacrifice and embraced the principles of gender equality and an equitable distribution of wealth. The Therapeutae brought to the Sufi tradition not only these enlightened social ideals which were actually already enshrined in its own constitution, but much of the new Hermetic and Kabbalistic mysticism fermenting in Alexandria. Thus, says Schonfield, throughout Egypt and the Middle East

there were religious fusions and amalgamations, and the emergence of spiritual hybrids… Zoroastrianism and Mithraism lent their characteristics to Jewish Essene teaching, and found a Greek expression in the Hermetic and Christian Gnostic. The coverage of the Roman empire right round the Mediterranean carried the cults with it, and opened the way to new blendings.11

In this way Sufism was continually invigorated by new trends and in turn invigorated others. Then, when in the seventh century CE civilisation was in danger of total collapse through the ravages of global pestilence, war, earthquakes and the suppression of all Greek learning by Byzantine Christianity, the Sufi masters transferred their allegiance from Zoroastrianism to Islam, the latter offering the greater hope of rehabilitation for humanity. Thus the wisdom and science of Persia, with its great heritage of Greek learning, passed into the Muslim culture and was carried by Muslim sages into every quarter of the globe. The Dark Ages were halted and Islam, supported by the Sufis, brought about a brilliant revival of the Graeco-Roman arts and sciences.12

The conquest of Spain by the Muslim Moors meant Jews, Muslims and Christians were able to live there harmoniously until the fifteenth century, creating a culture of superb beauty and intelligence which lasted until the Jews and Muslims were banished to Byzantium, and which gave Sufism entrance into the rest of backward Europe. During the same centuries Crusaders such as the Templars encountered the rich Saracen culture in the Holy Land and secretly brought back the cream of Sufi thought to Europe to enrich Christian theological scholarship, art and sciences.

Himalayan Withdrawal

With the Mongol invasions, however, came difficult days for European civilisation as many sources of Sufi wisdom withdrew. The Sufi Masters of Wisdom known in Central Asia as the Khwajagan lineage withdrew at this time to the Trans-Himalayas, where their schools still persist. The Khwajagan were neither savants nor mystical ecstatics. They were practical men who assiduously practiced the breathing and mantric exercise of the zikr, fought their own weaknesses by means of trials based on humiliation and abasement, and during the Mongol depredations of the conquered western cities built new schools, hospitals and mosques. Some say these Masters, who may be synonymous with the Sarmouni, have continued to this day to head the Sufi hierarchy – which Bennett has called the Hidden Directorate – from its hidden Trans-Himalayan headquarters. Meanwhile, the Sufi orders left behind continued to strengthen their ties with other esoteric systems, such as the Magian secret societies in Persia and the Copts in Egypt, and to extend their formidable influence across the world into South-East Asia.

In the Sunda Islands they amalgamated successfully with the indigenous shamans, Hindu-Buddhists and Taoists and were instrumental in establishing in Java one of the most influential schools of Tibetan Kalachakra Tantra in the world. The result was a chain of hybrid secret societies around the globe whose roots were buried deep in a freedom-loving soil compounded of Sufism, Magian wisdom and the Solomonic and Hermetic wisdom of the Egyptian Essenes. It was these pan-religious amalgamations that produced over the centuries initiatic schools like the Templars, the Chartres masters, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Theosophists, all dedicated to working for the religious and scientific dawning of a new age free from religious intolerance.

Throughout the long Sufi saga, the West had been unaware of intervention in its affairs, or indeed of the very existence of a powerful organisation in its midst that was monitoring the course of history and at the same time maintaining its own hierarchy, objectives and worldview independently of the visible political and religious structures of society. But the Sufi masters knew that this unconscious condition, mainly imposed on the people by repressive forces outside their control, must end, and that the time of awakening was drawing near.

Sufi Masters and Rosicrucianism

The two Rosicrucian manifestos pseudonymously published in Germany in the early years of the seventeenth century marked the first Sufi venture into the public domain and caused a sensation. The manifestos purported to advertise a mysterious order called the Fraternity of the Rosey Cross which had been founded, it was claimed, by one Christian Rosencreutz; and a third publication called The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, written in high Dutch, came out soon after. The manifestos declared that Fr. Rosencreutz had obtained the inspiration for his brotherhood from Arabia, Fez (the home of Sufic alchemy since the eighth century) and Egypt, all centres of Sufi activity. And Rosicrucian tradition has it that Fr. Rosencreutz was initiated in Palestine by an Arabic sect. Observes Ernest Scott:

When it is realised that the Sufi teacher Suhrawardi of Aleppo had a teaching method called the Path of the Rose and that the Sufic word for a dervish exercise has the same consonantal root as the word for a rose, the Sufic origin of the Rosicrucians may be inferred with some confidence.13

As we now know, the series of Rosicrucian publications with their visionary and reforming talk of an invisible college, a “winged academy” dedicated to a commonwealth of man, created a furore in Europe. Some saw the publications as a hoax, others as a God-given sign of the millennium. As ever, the Sufis were not directly mentioned: but, sweeping like a rejuvenating wind through Protestant and Catholic lands alike, the movement stirred up by the mysterious manifestos became a potent though short-lived catalyst for change. It instigated a religious and intellectual uprising that sought reform in education, religion and science, promising a coming utopia in which the dignity and worth of every man and woman would be recognised.

Frances A. Yates, a foremost Renaissance scholar, believes this period in the seventeenth century can rightly be called the Rosicrucian Enlightenment and that out of its “great reservoir of spiritual and intellectual power, of moral and reforming vision”14 came the Royal Society and the age of scientific revolution.

Full of Christian mysticism yet also permeated with Hermetic-Kabbalistic angelology and alchemical religious philosophy, the Rosicrucian teachings proclaimed that this age of enlightenment, in which religion and science would no longer be antithetical, was at hand. Great advances were to be made and a reformation of the whole wide world would presage “a great influx of truth and light” into fallen society such as shone on Adam in paradise. For a time large factions of the Church espoused these ideas, and the Jesuits, themselves of occult and hermetic origin, took over much of the Rosicrucian symbolism and emblematics.

Yet in the event the whole programme was aborted by the fiercely reactionary response of the Spanish Inquisition and its political ally, the Hapsburg dynasty, which instigated the Thirty Years’ War, forcing thousands of religious dissidents to flee with the seeds of the new vision to the New World. The Sufi programme had to incubate in secret for several more centuries.

Sufis Re-emerge in Twentieth Century

Not until the twentieth century, in a more tolerant and receptive age, were the Sufis finally able to reveal themselves openly. In 1921 Gurdjieff, the emigré and entrepreneur from Armenia, was the first to make this possible. He came with a crucial message for the twentieth century and, as we shall see, for our own era in the third millennium. Of great personal magnetism, drive and unusual psychic powers, Gurdjieff burst upon the Western scene with his programme for spiritual development, bringing to the European cognoscenti for the first time an awareness of the sacred ritual dances and dervish exercises of the East. These, he said, had strong links with Altaic shamanism and Tibetan and Chinese Tantra.

But Sufis have never regarded spiritual exercises alone as adequate. Generally speaking, little is said in Sufi literature about baraka, the effective grace that makes spiritual development on this path possible, yet its importance is primary. Baraka, as transmitted from teacher to pupil, is said to be a high emotional energy associated with the heart centre, and according to Bennett, enables the pupil to do what would be quite beyond his unaided strength.15 It is this inner infusion of conscious energy – energy of a high spiritual nature – that enables the zikhr, the Sufi invocatory exercise, to be fruitful. Discipline, austerity and voluntary suffering, which Gurdjieff translated as conscious labour and intentional suffering, were also needed. By intentional suffering he meant exposing oneself to painful situations in order to help others.

While the southern Sufi orders embraced the mystical doctrine of love and union with God, these northern Sufis were strongly influenced by Buddhism and, like the Khwajagan, were concerned with a total liberation from self and the world of appearances. They were regarded by the more conservative southern Sufis as unorthodox, even being accused of magical practices learned from the Siberian shamans to the north. Nevertheless, Gurdjieff saw great benefit for the West in the dervish practices, disapproved though they were by the more purist brotherhoods such as the Nach’shbandi and the Qadiri, and made his unique programme available to all those wishing to develop their human potential.

At his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainbleu, Gurdjieff trained his students in group dance movements set to dervish rhythms that demanded of them intense physical effort and coordination and which raised the body to a “high state of consciousness” conducive to a transformation of energies. He also encouraged his pupils to observe intensively their own psychic centres of thinking, feeling and instinct as a means of achieving a degree of self-government that man at present entirely lacks – but without which, Gurdjieff insisted, it is impossible for him to govern and maintain the planet. Public performances of Gurdjieff’s dervish dances were put on at various theatres, even in the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York, and Europe and America marvelled: nothing like it had ever been known. Sacred dances, Gurdjieff said,

have always been one of the vital subjects taught in esoteric schools of the East… Such gymnastics have a double aim: they contain and express a certain form of knowledge and at the same time serve as a means to acquire a harmonious state of being.

At one time it was his intention to use the movements in the traditional way for which they were principally intended in the ancient temples of initiation – that is, as a means of transmitting knowledge directly to the higher centres without passing through the mind, which is the way of Tantra. But a car accident in which Gurdjieff’s physical health was severely damaged put an end to his wider plans for the movements and turned his attention to writing and training selected people to carry on his work at a more intellectual level.

Sufi prescience, Sufi aptitude for the right teaching in the right time and place, is well attested. In many respects, Gurdjieff’s writings contributed enormously to the familiarisation of the West to the radical idea of the psyche or soul – the dynamic centre that mediates between the spiritual and the sensory functions – which at that time Sigmund Freud was also bringing to Western notice. Recognition of this unifying centre of relativity, which modifies the traditional absolutes of philosophy and religion on one hand and the physical sciences on the other, was just then opening up, and Gurdjieff’s psychological brand of theosophy, which became the vogue at the same time as Freudian and socialist theory, made a very great impact.

The Gurdjieff schools of self-development spread to numerous countries and his ideas became common coinage in the new enlightenment of the sixties. Through the interest aroused in his methods and teachings, in which the centrality of individuation was paramount, Gurdjieff was able to give out for the first time a certain amount of information about the Sufi tarekats hidden in Eurasia. And in his train came a school of eminent Sufi writers like Guénon, Bennett, Ouspensky, Schuon, Hazrat Inayat Khan and Idris Shah, all of whom further opened up the world of Sufism to a vast reading public.

One of the central strands in Gurdjieff’s belief-system was the principle of world-creation and world-maintenance, which he said was derived from “an old Sumerian manuscript” discovered by a great Kurdish philosopher. The doctrine can be summed up very simply: “Everything that exists maintains and is maintained by other existences.” Peculiar to Sufism and appearing in no other religion, it states that the whole of the universe is a web of mutually supporting systems, “apparatuses for transforming energy,” each one of which produces the means of sustenance for others.

This law of reciprocal maintenance governs all of life and applies to man as well as in his relation to Mother Nature. The world is not made for man, as we have been taught; both are made for each other. Man’s destiny and the destiny of the earth are interdependent. The evolution of the one depends on the evolution of the other, the survival of one on the survival of the other. Man is not separate from the cosmic process; he is himself part of the ecosystem he observes out there, and he must serve the evolution of the world as well as his own. That is the law of the cosmos, even as the palaeolithic shaman defined it many millennia ago.

From the Sarmounis, Gurdjieff learned that man is at present an automaton, a mere mechanism driven by the blind forces of action and reaction, his sense of identity fragmented, his will almost non-existent. Yet even work on himself will not redeem him without an acceptance that he is here to serve the world. Through Gurdjieff, therefore, the Sufis gave out to the twentieth century a new teaching, a new outlook on life that was revolutionary seventy years ago: man cannot advance spiritually unless he fulfils his obligation to planet earth, and through planet earth to the solar system. He must “pay the debt of his existence” by nurturing that which nurtured him.

For man’s cross is a twofold spiritual destiny; to evolve as an individual, but also to serve the evolution of kingdoms other than his own, lives other than his own. Out of the friction these opposed drives generate, said Gurdjieff, there comes a transcendental third, the birth of conscience. This suffering of the tension between the opposites is the law of true religion and is alleviated only by the awakening of the mediating force inherent in the soul; that is, conscience or love. The Sufi theory of world-creation and world-maintenance – “a new master idea for the coming age,” as Bennett called it – has become increasingly relevant as the planet’s ecological crisis has worsened over the decades; and now, looking back from our vantage point in the new millennium, we see how it has indeed become the hallmark of our time, perhaps the key to its essential meaning. Wherever the next civilisation is centred it must be where the third and reconciling power can operate; where conscience can find a home. That is the prime Sufi message for our generation, as it was Gurdjieff’s.

Footnotes:

1. Ernest Scott, The People of the Secret, Octagon Press, London, 1985, p.45.

2. Ibid., p.118.

3. Ibid., p.45.

4. J.G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Turnstone Books, London, 1973, p.94.

5. J.G. Bennett, The Masters of Wisdom, Turnstone Books, London, 1977, p.40.

6. J.G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, p.86.

7. Ibid., p.86.

8. Ibid., p.57.

9. Ibid., p.64.

10. Adrian G. Gilbert, The Magi, Bloomsbury, London, 1996, p.49.

11. Hugh Schonfield, The Essene Odyssey, Element Book, UK, 1984, p.166.

12. J.G. Bennett, The Masters of Wisdom, Ch. 6.

13. Scott, op. cit., p.176.

14. Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1986.

15. J.G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, p.278.

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VICTORIA LEPAGE has published numerous articles on the new spiritual paradigm emerging in cultures worldwide and is the author of Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-la, published in ten foreign languages. Her latest book is Mysteries of the Bridechamber: The Initiation of Jesus and the Temple of Solomon. She lives in New South Wales, Australia, and can be contacted through her website at www.victoria-lepage.org.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 107 (Mar-Apr 2008).

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In a changing and unpredictable world, no classical text is more rewarding, or more challenging, than the ancient Chinese I Ching or Book of Changes. This classic presents itself as a book of divination and invites dismissal on such grounds amongst educated Western circles, including even the great British sinologist and advocate of Chinese science and technology Joseph Needham. It is, however, the most modern of practical handbooks, being a remarkably wise and profound guide to that nagging imperative of contemporary personal and political life – self-organisation.

This truth only grows as political authority shifts from West to East, as economic productivity travels from America to China, as industrial technology grows robustly throughout Asia and shrivels in the developed economies and as health and well-being wisdom is found more surely in Asian therapeutic traditions than in contemporary share market driven medical innovations.

Indeed, the I Ching is not only the source of a profound personal, social and political wisdom but also of a scientific genius that is holistic and organic and that led the world for several millennia until the rise of Anglo-American power over the past two hundred years. Moreover, this scientific culture promises much for the future of a troubled global community. It contrasts with the culture that has turned contemporary life into one large uncontrolled and poorly understood scientific experiment, where the casino of the marketplace has ceased to respect the ecologies of life.

Central elements of the text of the I Ching are attributed to men (King Wen and his sons King Wu and the Duke of Zhou) who were responsible for overthrowing the powerful tyrant who ruled a declining and corrupt Shang Dynasty, as the prelude to founding the Zhou Dynasty around 1045 BCE. As such, much of its wisdom can be read as a political text, informed by profound and holistic wisdom. This wisdom is shaped by a keen sense of the social morality needed to win widespread popular support, the human understanding needed to avoid the perils of carelessness and hubris and the acute insight into the dynamics of life and nature essential to prosper in this world.

There is no more seminal influence in Chinese culture than the I Ching, with its history of over three thousand years and its roots in the wisdom that guided the founding of China’s longest and most culturally productive dynasty. Contrary to modern fashion, the authority of the I Ching tends to increase with the age and experience of the reader or interpreter. Japanese who lived during the Tokugawa Shogunate counseled against serious study before the age of fifty. At the same time, one of the most renown Chinese commentaries on the I Ching was completed by a scholar who died at the age of twenty three in 249.

Despite the fact that the 17th and 18th century German philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz had been shocked to discover that his binary arithmetic was matched by an arrangement of the I Ching’s hexagrams, the West’s greatest authority on Chinese science and technology – the 20th century Joseph Needham – dismissed it as of little worth. Now, it has been shown by later scholars to have a mathematical structure similar to that of DNA, discovered in the West more than three thousand years later. In this, it is the world’s first, and possibly still only, serious guide to self-organisation at personal, social and political levels.

Moreover, another scholar suggests that it may reveal an understanding of still poorly understood fundamentals that inform a wide variety of physical change, in both living and non-living structures. This all reflects the almost unbelievable Chinese genius for observing the minutiae of nature, a quality that long informed the world’s most innovative and productive scientific and technological civilisation.

In many ways, the I Ching is an enigma. Apart from qualities noted above, it offers a unified understanding of what are often seen as China’s two main contending spiritual traditions – Confucianism and Daoism – and some even see in it the source of both these traditions of thought. Moreover, while the I Ching has always served as a book of divination, this article will treat it essentially as a book of moral, political and scientific wisdom.

(It should be noted that I Ching is more accurately written as Yi Jing, as laid down in the transliteration system prescribed by the Chinese Government, but is presented here as I Ching in order to avoid confusion in referring to several book titles, which use a dated system of transliteration that is often preferred in the United States.)

Contrasting Wisdom – East and West

The use of the I Ching as a book of divination has worked since ancient times to give the I Ching an authority that has shaped all levels of Chinese society. Anything with related aspirations in the West has been marginalised either by the Christian Church or by the tradition of Greek rational thought. Consequently, despite its growing popularity in alternative Western circles, it is difficult for mainstream Western thought to accommodate or relate to the disciplines of the I Ching. Yet, the I Ching has made the mature management of inevitable and irresistible change one of the great art forms of the East Asian ruler, administrator and head of family. At the same time, it contains a gentle acumen that finds a fulfilling role for all who make up society and does not exclude the exceptional and idiosyncratic.

Perhaps, the clearest and simplest explanation of the differences that derive from these two contrasting traditions has been given by Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin in The Way and The Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. They conclude, with politically tactful deference to Western sensitivities, that neither China nor Greece uniquely monopolised the development of science. Each possessed the conceptual frameworks and institutional structures necessary to inquire systematically into organic physiologies, material nature and cosmic processes. Yet each displayed unique qualities.

The Greek way sought predominantly foundations, demonstration, and incontrovertibility. Its central authority was found in the principles of clarity and deductive rigour. The Chinese approach was most strongly characterised by the search for correspondences, resonances and interconnections, which encouraged the exploration of holistic and organic relationships that integrate highly divergent areas of activity and order.

The I Ching not only does not respond to a need for ‘clarity and deductive rigour’ but it will frustrate and irritate those with minds that insist on such convenience. Rather the I Ching inspires a seemingly infinite range of possible ‘correspondences, resonances and interconnections’ and warns against the impatient or thoughtless need for action.

A little reflection may prompt recollection of the opening two lines of the Dao De Jing, the seminal Daoist classic. These assert effectively that words, concepts, rational structures and scientific theories may all be useful conveniences of the human mind but should not be mistaken for an accurate statement of the natural world.

Once one has come to terms with what seems to the Western mind to be its counter-intuitive character, one can start to explore and discover in the I Ching a profound wisdom that has guided, shaped, preserved and advanced Chinese civilisation for more than three millennia.

The Living I Ching

Although deeply rooted in ancient Chinese history, the I Ching lives like perhaps no other classic form of wisdom. This is indicated by the commentary written by Wang Bi who lived almost thirteen hundred years after the founding of the Zhou Dynasty and who died at twenty-three. It can also be found in works translated respectively by the American Thomas Cleary as The Tao of Organisation, The Buddhist I Ching and The Taoist I Ching, which derive from texts attributed to the 11th century Neo-Confucian Cheng Yi, the 17th century Buddhist Chih-hsu Ou-I and the late 18th century Daoist Liu I-ming.

The movement by some Westernising Chinese to marginalise and banish the I Ching from respectable intellectual company has, paradoxically, been parallelled by a contrasting movement in Western publishing, where it appears in diverse, numerous and multiplying forms of publication. At the same time, it assumes an identity that now ranks it for many at least on the same level of cultural authority as the Bible, even as some choose it in preference as a work that has nourished a more stable, prosperous and continuous sense of civilisation.

The relevance of this may be most readily found in the manner in which one version, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation by the Taoist Master Alfred Huang, introduces the work in a way that details the circumstances in which the founders of the Zhou Dynasty worked to replace the corrupt Shang Dynasty. This is given an acute sense of relevance because Alfred Huang makes it clear that the I Ching was a major form of spiritual and practical sustenance during difficult times for him and others personally after 1949.

More pertinent, however, is the fact that contemporary leaders in Japan, Korea and China have emulated the qualities of patience and humility displayed by the Zhou founders as they have built their strength in a world that had earlier humiliated them. It might be going too far to liken the contemporary West with the self-indulgent and indiscriminately assertive Shang Dynasty. Even so, it is difficult to dismiss the thought that this parallel may present itself to many in East Asian communities.

Any sensitive Westerner who has had the good fortune to live, work and reflect in contemporary East Asia is likely to have concluded that the certainties derived from a Western education are a poor guide for action in that part of the world. Many pleasant things will come one’s way but in a manner that defies explanation by familiar principles and in a manner that can invite an uneasy sense of losing control. In seeking to comprehend the reasons for such sentiments no better guide can be found than the classic texts that have shaped, informed and inspired its people. None of these is more seminal than the I Ching, even when today’s East Asian youth may feign disdain or ignorance of its wisdom.

Yin and Yang

The essence of the I Ching is to be found in the dynamic of yin and yang, complementary opposites that:

•           lie at the heart of the I Ching and all Chinese thought

•           require one always to adopt a holistic view of issues

•           highlight the need for internal and external balance

•           emphasise a constant state of flux

•           are at the heart of all development

•           are forever interdependent

•           are essentially dynamic and creative in their interaction

Five basic principles can be identified as inherent in yin and yang.

•           all things have two facets: a yin aspect and a yang aspect

•           yin and yang aspects can be divided into further yin and yang polarities

•           yin and yang mutually create each other

•           yin and yang control each other

•           yin and yang transform into each other.

It is customary to identify yin with qualities such as femininity, softness, darkness and receptivity and yang with the qualities of masculinity, hardness, brightness and assertiveness. At the same time, there is scope for endless discussion about yin and yang qualities in various specific situations.

The important point rests, however, in the infinite range of dynamic reactions set up by the interplay of yin and yang. Most important, and infinitely complex, is the interplay of yin and yang within the sixty-four six line hexagrams that make up the I Ching. According to established procedures either yin or yang can transform into the other and the significance of yin and yang depends on which of the six positions is occupied by a yin or yang line and a variety of other complex relationships.

In other words the use of the I Ching for divination creates an almost infinite range of possibilities for interpretation. This reinforces perceptions of the fundamental dynamism of the I Ching, of nature, of political fortune, of human relationships and, if one so chooses, of the sexes. The subtle interplay of eight basic three line sets of yin and yang that can be labeled heaven, earth, fire, water, valley, wind, mountain and thunder (two of which make up a six line hexagram) further strengthens the sense of forces of nature exercising an authority before which humanity must be humble and attentive.

A most important consequence of the fluid sensitivity that flows from the use of the I Ching is the manner in which this reveals the rigid abstractions that have come to command Western thought as both limited and marginal. The cerebral universe that derives from the I Ching is incomparably more complex and dynamic. In just one example, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to apply Western notions of equality to a world where all nature and life is the product of the rich and intense interaction of yin and yang.

Contingency

The I Ching provides an endless flow of moving commentaries that remind continually of the need to recognise:

•           the contingencies of chance

•           the full environment of any action

•           the possibilities of side-effects in any action

•           the multiple layers of contingencies in organic beings

•           the limitations of causality and rationality in managing life

•           the need for mature reflection on all important actions

The I Ching profoundly challenges Western intellectual and scientific certainties because:

•           it is a unique mix of probabilistic science and timeless literary comment

•           it portends to guide future behaviour, attracting Western derision as fortune telling

•           it is integral to an organic and holistic sense of science

•           it was part of a superior scientific culture until the beginning of the 19th century

•           its formula for self-organisation has an unrivalled record of success in maintaining the continuity of Chinese civilisation.

While Western commentators continue in a state of denial it is difficult to dispute that I Ching science:

•           outperformed the West and rest of the world until the 19th century

•           again today outperforms Western science and technology

•           disdains the West’s mechanistic and reductionist scientific assumptions

•           highlights an aggressive and shallow character in the European Enlightenment

•           is genuinely holistic, organic and humanistic in ways denied Western science.

The I Ching cultivates disciplines of the mind by encouraging continual questioning of and reflection on the dynamic and volatile forces that command natural and human processes. This commences with the acceptance of human humility before forces that will never be fully mastered but that must always be fully respected. Its seemingly infinite variety of possible readings nurtures an acute sensitivity to the contingencies that accompany action.

Competing Medical and Scientific Cultures

The contemporary West has gone in a very different direction: It has built a type of structured religious faith around a rational mythology that promises belief in endless progress. The associated human conquest and subjugation of nature is conducted through the use of experimentation to identify a variety of notionally universal truths. These are marketed as the fruits of medicine, science and technology even as they produce an exponentially mounting volume of environmental, ecological and health troubles.

Problems inherent in this faith and mythology were compounded as the 20th century progressed by the annual allocation of many of the best brains and most vigorous spirits in each generation to intense training and lifetime service before the Gods of medicine, science and technology.

Subsequently put in various ways at the service of large corporations, this talented and dedicated priesthood is then paid to sacrifice all for the corporation. It should surprise no one that this has produced scientific and medical cultures that are prone to systemic corruption. Highly educated, newly graduated and ambitious young souls quickly learn that this is the only way to gain a reasonable return on the investment of money, time, effort and hope spent in an exhausting and extended education. Some of the more obvious dubious aspects of the priesthood’s work is conducted:

•           in relentless experimentation in artificial laboratories

•           in high brow but often duplicitous marketing

•           in peer reviewed, but misleading professional articles

•           in misrepresentation or non-disclosure of research

•           in the exercise of official responsibilities to serve corporate interests after being placed in government administration positions

•           in some other use of prestigious, high sounding and daunting academic qualifications to fatten corporate bottom lines.

Many of the certainties cultivated by Western beliefs and rational structures, ostensively verified by scientific processes of proof, are revealing themselves to be cruel hoaxes. These are often designed to persuade large communities to subject themselves to experiments that are neither understood nor controlled by their initiators. Increasingly, the profitable areas of a struggling American economy seem to fall into such categories, whether they be chemical agriculture, processed food, fast food, synthetic pharmaceuticals, bio-technology or nano-technology.

The corporation, which is designed by its commercial nature and legal structure to maximise profit, has grown in reach and influence more or less in parallel with the advance of post-Enlightenment science and with the consolidation of Anglo-American political authority. With the exhaustion of new lands and new resources to discover and colonise, profit maximisation has increasingly focused on seizing a competitive advantage through innovation and the monopolisation of intellectual property. This frequently necessitates the authoritative denial and dismissal of the possibility of any harmful side-effects or consequences.

In contrast, the I Ching scientific spirit advanced largely in harmony with environment, ecology and human health and achieved a record of diverse innovation predating many of the most critical European inventions. These included:

•           developing a cybernetic machine 1,600 (possibly 3,000) years before Europe

•           developing the compass 1,000 years before Europe

•           inventing paper 1,500 years before Europe

•           inventing printing 600 years before Europe

•           developing a calendar 1,000 years before the ancient Greeks

In fact, China preceded the West, in most cases by at least a millennium, in almost one hundred inventions and discoveries from a wide variety of fields of activity, including:

•           agriculture

•           astronomy and cartography

•           engineering

•           domestic and industrial technology

•           medicine and health

•           mathematics

•           magnetism

•           the physical sciences

•           transport and exploration

•           sound and music

•           warfare

Western communities have had neither the strength nor integrity to address the fact that this achievement did not involve the perils to the environment, living ecologies and human health generated by contemporary corporate science. This is not surprising because an adventurous, conquering corporate spirit has been fundamental to Western advance over the past two centuries. The cost has been high. Perversely, as it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the consequences so it also becomes more and more difficult to recognise their source.

The West’s insistence on clarity and deductive rigour has conveniently enabled it to distract attention from many of the side effects of its scientific advances. It has made it easy to marginalise holistic concerns about identifying possible resonances, correspondences or inter-relationships that might compromise the desirability of some new energy source, innovative weapon or pharmaceutical breakthrough.

The anomaly in all this is that in the early 21st century it is the economies of East Asia, long under the influence of the I Ching’s concern to cultivate sensitive attention to nature, its processes and its contingencies, which are proving most successful in the marketplace of catering to human needs. Unfortunately, communities programmed to compete blindly for economic growth, a legacy of the Anglo-American genius that has constructed the contemporary global order, are unlikely to find their way out of this Faustian dilemma.

Caution, Humility and Patience

No reading of the I Ching can leave an attentive auditor unimpressed by its concern to stress the importance of caution, humility and patience. In an important sense, this was probably the world’s first handbook on how to conduct a revolution in the face of overwhelming but intolerable power. It was imperative to emphasise the dangers inherent in the undertaking. In the process, however, it laid down standards that have informed Chinese politics and culture ever since, producing the world’s most resilient and robust civilisation. It also nurtured perhaps the world’s most deceptively cautious, humble and patient people.

It is possible to see the Six Secret Teachings, a strategic classic that is attributed to a strategist and general credited with a major role in the founding of the Zhou Dynasty, Jiang Taigong, as being inspired by a similar ethos. These Teachings include the Twelve Civil Offensives, which lay out a strategy of essentially peaceful conquest, through the exploitation of an adversary’s moral weaknesses. These vulnerabilities are simply serviced and indulged by a more disciplined, purposeful and patient rival. Ultimately, dependence and excess ensures a favourable outcome for the more virtuous party. Such basic wisdom, which equates caution and humility with virtue, and ultimately strength, permeates the I Ching and the civilisations of East Asia.

The two central lines (second and fifth) in the most auspicious hexagram with six yang lines (identified as Heaven) in the I Ching capture the judicious quality of the I Ching in all situations. In the popular Richard Wilhelm translation, the commentary on each of these lines is auspicious but concludes with the same caution ‘It furthers one to see the great man’. This reminds of the need to always seek guidance from those better qualified and hints that nothing can be taken for granted even in the most favourable circumstances.

Equally, the hexagram composed of six yin lines (Earth) is characterised by ’receptive devotion’ and identifies the superior man as marked by breadth, purity and sustaining power, like the Earth capable of carrying and preserving all things that live upon it. In this way it quickly becomes apparent that the yin and yang distinction is one that enriches human perceptions and is far from the prejudicial attitudes that have come to characterise the contemporary West’s struggle with distinctions between male and female behaviour.

The I Ching also reminds repeatedly that great success is often the prelude to difficulty and that great hardship is often the necessary preparation for subsequent achievement. In this manner this seminal Chinese classic works to inspire both caution and aspiration, with the emphasis being placed on life’s recurring rhythms and humanity’s endless challenges.

Conclusion

Like the Dao De Jing, the I Ching is a book that grows in significance and influence with familiarity and time. It continually surprises by revealing new dimensions and insights. These may be in the mathematical structure of its sixty-four hexagrams and their complex variations or in the philosophical and historical commentaries that it has accumulated over three millennia.

Its role as a book of divination cannot be separated from its role as a book of wisdom, as one function complements and deepens the other. Ultimately, however, it is best evaluated as the product of the highly developed Chinese capacity to observe and order the minutiae of nature, whether personal, political or cosmic. In this it makes the clearest statement possible about the limitations inherent in the West’s preference for rational structures, which override the diversity and contingency of our world, simply to provide the often misleading convenience of clarity and deductive rigour.

.

REG LITTLE was an Australian diplomat for over 25 years in Japan, Laos, Bangladesh, the United Nations, Ireland, Hong Kong, China, Switzerland, and the Caribbean, obtaining advanced language qualifications in Japanese and Chinese. Deputy or Head of Mission in five overseas posts, he served in Canberra as Director of North Asia, International Economic Organisations, Policy Planning and the Australia-China Council. He has participated in Conferences in Asia since 1987, has been a Founding Director of the Beijing based International Confucian Association since 1994 and has co-authored two books, The Confucian Renaissance (1989) in English, Japanese and Chinese, and The Tyranny of Fortune: Australia’s Asian Destiny (1997). His latest book is A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? Reg Little’s website is www.confucian-daoist-millennium.net and he can be contacted via email at reglittle@yahoo.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 100 (Jan-Feb 2007).

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—

It is unfortunate that Buddhism’s most enduring (and universal) contribution to the world has been insufficiently translated as compassion. The original Sanskrit word is karuna, which holds within itself traces of the fragment ‘ru’, meaning to weep. While the Oxford dictionary describes compassion as pity bordering on the merciful, karuna is actually our ability to relate to another in so intense a measure that the plight of the other affects us as much as if it had been our own. 

The term karuna is central to the entire Buddhist tradition. It is frequently described as a love for all beings, equal in intensity to a mother’s affection for her child. However, it is quite unlike conventional love (Sanskrit: priya, kama or trishna), which is rooted in dualistic thinking and is egoistic, possessive and exclusive, in contrast to the all-encompassing nature of compassion. The root meaning of karuna is said to be the anguished cry of deep sorrow and understanding that can only come from an unblemished sense of oneness with others.

In fact, the evolution of Buddhism in Asia and its spread throughout the world is, from a spiritual point of view, none other than the unfolding of karuna in history. Nowhere is this more explicitly exemplified than in the Chinese assimilation of Buddhism. Few would deny that the defining symbol of this integration is the goddess, who with her sweet and merciful disposition, has won the hearts of not only the Chinese, but also profoundly affected even those who, belonging to a foreign tradition, have only had a fleeting interaction with her. This divine female is none other than Kuan Yin, beloved goddess of over a billion people the world over. Her name too signifies her compassionate nature, literally meaning ‘One who hears the cries of the world.’

It remains a historical fact that Kuan Yin is the Chinese version of the male god Avalokiteshvara, whom the ancient texts eulogise as the patron deity of compassion. It is fascinating, however, to observe that nowhere in India (where he originated) or Tibet (where he remains the most popular deity) is the latter ever deified as a female figure. In China too, his worship began as a male god, but over time, changed into a goddess and by the ninth century her popularity had prevailed over that of Avalokiteshvara’s.

There are many reasons why this gender transformation took place. As Avalokiteshvara evolved into the supreme personality of the Buddhist pantheon, with this heightened pedestal came the inevitable elitism. Karuna, however, cannot be and is not (as it has become today under the pseudonym of compassion), the exclusive preserve of a charmed circle, but rather a symphonic identification with the masses, sharing their suffering and pleasure alike. No wonder then that Avalokiteshvara shed streams of tears observing the plight of his people. Now, any emanation from a divine form is bound to hold a dynamic potential within itself and indeed Indian mythology is replete with examples where fluids emerging from deities have led to enormous consequences. Tears similarly are a spontaneous emotional response to external stimuli and represent the outward flow of Avalokiteshvara’s infinite karuna.

From these pearls emanated a beautiful female as attractive as she was compassionate. The goddess Tara, thus born, has continued her upward spiral of popularity and remains one of the most loved and widely recognised deities of the Buddhist pantheon today. Truly, even though Avalokiteshvara retains his foremost status in the gallery of Tibetan gods, in the popular imagination it is Tara, who with her supple charm, has come to symbolise the tenderness of karuna.

It is relevant here to observe that Kuan Yin is often depicted in art holding a leafy twig, derived from the ‘weeping willow’ tree, known so due to its trailing leafy branches that droop to the ground and along which raindrops trickle down like tears. One of its distinctive characteristics is remaining green throughout the year, pointing perhaps to the goddess’ fertility aspect, which is further echoed in images showing her with an infant.

The willow also has a deeper and direct connection with Chinese culture and it is believed that Lao Tzu, the author of Tao-te Ching, loved to meditate under its shade (6th century BCE). It was under the same tree that the younger Confucius had his famous interview with Lao Tzu, telling his disciples afterwards:

I know how birds fly, fishes swim and animals run. But there is the dragon – I cannot tell how he mounts on the winds through the clouds, and rises to heaven. Today, having seen Lao Tzu, I can only compare him to the dragon.

Over centuries, Kuan Yin’s visual depictions have highlighted her lithe, flowing form, much like the willow tree itself, which has the ability to bend during the most ferocious winds and then spring back into shape again. Indeed, who wants to stand rigid like the tall oak that cracks and collapses in a storm? Instead, one needs to be flexible like the willow, which survives the tempest.

Or perhaps, Kuan Yin merely uses the willow branch to sprinkle the divine nectar of life on her devotees, which is stored in the vase she holds in her other hand.

The Chinese (ever disposed to envisage friendly divinities in idealised human forms) seem to have been initially perplexed by Avalokiteshvara’s complex iconography. Not for them his thousand hands or even the seven eyes of Tara. Exposed for eons to the essentially humanistic philosophy of Confucianism, such images were alien and felt to be unsuitable for portraying the ‘soft’ emotion of karuna, the yearning passion a mother feels for her child.

The Tibetan mind solved the craving for a down to earth, visual embodiment of karuna by envisioning the goddess Tara; the Chinese genius did the same by enclosing this virtue in the graceful and beautiful Kuan Yin, who was eminently human in appearance and approachable by all. Indeed, she gradually became the favoured goddess of the peasants and fishermen of China, retaining her place in their hearts to the present day.

Additionally in China, not only had popular gods always been real people who had once lived in specific times and places, even mythical figures were turned into historical cultural heroes who were then venerated as the founding fathers of Chinese civilisation. Unlike Greece, where human heroes were transformed into Olympian gods, in China the reverse held true and if a god or goddess was not perhaps originally a human being, there was often an effort to turn her or him into one.

Kuan Yin thus again had to change from a goddess into a living woman, so that she could be worshipped as a Chinese goddess. Truly, the human character of Chinese deities is one of the most distinctive features of their religion, and like ordinary mortals they too have birthdays, ancestries, careers and titles. Therefore, even though Kuan Yin is not given a date of birth in any of the Buddhist sutras, her birthday is widely celebrated on the nineteenth day of the second month of the lunar calendar.

The legend describing how Kuan Yin was once a woman gives a fascinating insight into the working of the Chinese genius and the process by which she was given a distinctively local flavour and absorbed into their pantheon:

It is said that in the past, there once lived a king under whose rule the people led a peaceful existence governed by Confucian ethics. He had three daughters; the eldest two having already married the grooms of their father’s choice. The youngest offspring however, was unlike any other normal child. Firstly, when she was born, her body glowed with an almost unearthly light so much so that the palace seemed on fire. She was thus befittingly named Miao Shan (Wonderful Goodness).

Secondly, as she grew up, she wore only dirty clothes and never did display any urge to adorn herself. Further, she would subsist on only a single meal every day. In her conversations she would talk about the impermanence of material things and how human beings suffer because of their attachment to such objects. Naturally worried about their daughter’s detached inclinations, her parents proposed that (as per the Confucian ideals of filial piety) she too marry a husband of their choice. To this she replied:

“I would never, for the sake of one lifetime of enjoyment, plunge into aeons of misery. I have pondered on this matter and deeply detest this earthly union (marriage).” Nevertheless, when her parents insisted, she agreed to comply with their wishes if only her future mate would save her from the following three misfortunes:

1) When people are young, their face is as fair as the jade-like moon, but when they grow old, the hair turns white and faces become wrinkled; whether walking, resting, sitting, or lying down, they are in every way worse off than when they were young.

2) Similarly, when our limbs are strong and vigorous one may walk as if flying through air, but when we suddenly becomes sick, we are confined to the bed.

3) A person may have a large group of relatives and be surrounded by his flesh and blood, but when death comes, even such close kin as father and son cannot take the person’s place.

Finally she concluded: “If indeed my future husband can ensure my deliverance against these misfortunes, I will gladly marry him. Otherwise, I vow to remain a spinster all my life. People all over the world are mired in these kinds of suffering. If one desires to be free of them, the only option is to leave the secular world and enter the gate of Buddhism.”

This narrative of course, is parallel to one of the most significant episodes from the life of the Buddha when he encountered the three maladies of physical existence: sickness, old age and death.

Exasperated to no end, the king summoned an old and experienced nun of his kingdom. He asked her to take the princess under tutelage and expose her to as much hardship as possible in the nunnery, so that she realise the futility of her desired path. The instruction was tinged with a threat of annihilation if after seven days Miao Shan was not ‘reformed’.

Needless to say, all the travails she had to undergo at the monastery, including hard manual labor, were insufficient to deter her from the path of Dharma. However, Miao Shan did realise that she was being thus subjected because the inhabitants of the nunnery were under the threat of death. She addressed them, saying:

“Don’t you know the stories about the ancient prince Mahasattva, who plunged off the cliff in order to feed the hungry lions, or King Sivi’s cutting off his flesh to save a dove? Since you have already left the life of a householder, you should regard this material body as illusory and impermanent. Why do you fear death and love life? Don’t you know that attachment to this dirty and smelly leather bag (body) is an obstacle?”

At the end of the stipulated period, the monarch, in a mad and frenzied reaction, ordered that Miao Shan be beheaded. As her executioners approached the monastery gates, Miao Shan rushed out of the building, eager to embrace her impending death. No sooner had she kneeled at the stake and the deadly sword been raised, than a blinding thunder rose. Before the assailants could regain their composure, a tiger darted out of the darkness and carried away the swooning girl into the nearby hills. The king, now beyond the bounds of reason, ordered the hermitage to be burnt down with all its inhabitants.

It was not long before his karma caught up with him and he fell sick with kaamla (jaundice). He was restless for days on end, finding no rest even in sleep. The disease spread all over his body and the best doctors throughout the land were unable to cure him. One day, a holy mendicant came to his door and predicted: “If some person would willingly consent to give his or her arms or eyes without the slightest anger or resentment, the elixir made of these potent ingredients will surely relieve you from your suffering.”

“Where alas will I find such a compassionate being?” lamented the king. “In this very land,” said the monk. “Go southwest in your dominion, on top of the mountain there is a hermit who possesses all the characteristics which are necessary for your healing.”

No sooner had he heard this than the king ordered his envoys to hurry to the abode of the recluse. On being informed of his plight and its prescribed remedy, the hermit readily agreed to undergo the supreme sacrifice, requesting them to ask the suffering king to direct his mind to the three treasures of Buddhism and then very calmly proceeded to gauge out both the eyes and asked one of the men to sever the two arms. The three worlds shook under the impact of this terrible sacrifice.

When he had fully recovered, the king made haste with his wife to pay homage to the one who had so miraculously saved his life. After bowing low before the mutilated form, as soon as they raised their heads they let out a shriek of astonished horror; the hermit’s true identity lay bare before them. She was none other than their youngest daughter Miao Shan. Realising what she had done for him, despite all that he had done to her, the king fell prostrate upon the floor and asked for forgiveness. Overcome with emotion, the parents embraced her and the father said: “I am so evil that I have caused my own daughter terrible suffering.”

Miao Shan replied, “Father, I have suffered no pain. Having given up these human eyes, I shall see with diamond eyes. Having yielded the mortal arms, I shall receive golden arms. If my calling is true all this will follow.”

Much sobered by this intense experience, the king returned to his palace and ordered a statue to be made of her, which, emphasising her sacrifice was to be without eyes and hands. Now, in Chinese, the sound for ‘bereft’ or ‘deficient’ are virtually identical with ‘thousand.’ At some stage in the transmission of this message, the two words were confused and the sculptor toiled away, desperately seeking some way to capture the essence of the king’s wishes. He very imaginatively (or perhaps following Indian or Tibetan models) placed one eye on each palm, making the number of eyes equal to the arms, giving rise in the process to an awesome and complex image of breathtaking splendour.

Unable to relate to the thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara, the above legend provided a rational explanation to the bewildered viewer and helped integrate the goddess into the Chinese ethos.

The story of Miao Shan represents the fusion of the Buddhist theme of the gift of the body and the Confucian concept of filial piety. In the former tradition, giving is one of the six perfections performed by a bodhisattva (would be Buddha). Amongst the different forms of gifts, that of one’s own body is the best. The only difference is that while the bodhisattvas give up their bodies in order to feed or save sentient beings regardless of any formal relationship with them, the fact that Miao Shan does so for her father is where the Confucian model comes in.

In the former context, a tale is narrated of the Buddha, who in one of his previous births was a pigeon. He saw a man lose his way during a snowstorm, driven to the point of starvation. The pigeon gathered twigs and leaves, made a fire and threw himself wholeheartedly into it, to become food for the distressed soul. It is this lofty ideal that Kuan Yin was following, a self-sacrifice par excellence, motivated by pure (selfless) and indiscriminate compassion (karuna).

On the other hand, Kuan Yin as Miao Shan gives a bold and provocative message, challenging Confucian value systems as delineated in the ‘Classic of Filial Piety’ (published by the emperor Xuan in CE 722). Her life glorifies austerity, celibacy and renunciation, which, as per Buddhism, are highly valued (against the householder, who is necessary in Confucianism for creating offspring to perpetuate the lineage). In times of the Ming for example, one could achieve religious sanctification by performing one’s domestic obligations to the fullest degree. Eventually, Chinese of all social strata and both sexes came to know Kuan Yin as the strong-willed yet filial girl, who refused to get married and rebelled against stifling authority.

The goddess Kuan Yin is a symbol, not only of the Chinese assimilation of Buddhism, but also of the many hued flavour of karuna, expressed through the softer wisdom of a woman. She is a pointer to the re-emergence of the goddess and the gender transformation of Avalokiteshvara in China represents perhaps a universal imperative, which is similarly reflected in the emanation of the goddess Tara from the compassionate tears of the same bodhisattva. Though often images are encountered which show her sporting a moustache, emphasising masculinity, this is negated by the softness of her demeanour.

Can anything be more subtly female than her graceful poise – modest and inward looking, yet potent enough to generate and compassionately nourish the whole outside world? In the words of Martin Palmer: “The divine feminine cannot be suppressed for long. In China, it emerged by the transformation of the male into the female,” only god (or the goddess) knows how it will transpire in other cultures.

References and Further Reading

Blofeld, John, Bodhisattva of Compassion The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin, 1988.

Boucher, Sandy, Discovering Kwan Yin, Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, 1999.

Cabezon, Jose Ignacio, Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender, 1992.

Colin, Didier, Dictionary of Symbols, Myths and Legends, 2000.

Farrer-Halls, Gill, The Feminine Face of Buddhism, 2002.

Jones, Lindsay (ed), Encyclopedia of Religion (Previously Edited by Mircea Eliade) 15 volumes, 2005.

Keown, Damien, Oxford Dictionary of Buddhism, 2003.

Kinsley, David, The Goddesses’ Mirror Visions of the Divine from East and West, 1995.

Palmer, Martin and Jay Ramsay, with Man-Ho Kwok, Kuan Yin Myths and Prophecies of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion, 1995.

Phillips, Kathy J. (Photography by Joseph Singer), This Isn’t a Picture I’m Holding: Kuan Yin, 2004.

Watson, Burton (translator), The Lotus Sutra, 1999.

Wright, Arthur F, Buddhism in Chinese History, 1959.

Yu, Chun-Fang, Kuan Yin The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara, 2001.

The above is reprinted with permission of the author and was originally published on www.exoticindiaart.com. Many articles on the living traditions of Indian art, culture and aesthetics are available at the site.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 99 (November-December 2006).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

Madame Alexandra David-Neel

BY HERBIE BRENNAN

—

Authors note that fictional characters have a tendency to take on a life of their own. But few readers realise just how literally they mean it. A friend of mine, engaged in writing a romantic novel, called me in a panic just a year ago to complain that two of her characters had just run off and got married… thus ruining her carefully-crafted plot.

In theory this should not have been a problem. From her god-like perspective, the writer could surely have deleted the relevant passage and written a new one that put her creation back on track. In practice, any attempt to rein in characters like that will produce an almost unreadable novel, full of wooden dialogue and contrived situations. The only viable answer is to let them go their own way, abandon any preconceived plot notions, and see what ‘really’ happens.

The popular American science-fiction writer, Ray Bradbury, was so intrigued by the phenomenon that he wrote it into one of his own books. The Martian Chronicles describes how visitors to the red planet are confronted by characters from classical fiction who had somehow taken on corporeal existence in the alien environment.

Curiously, Bradbury’s idea – that fictional characters might, in certain circumstances, take on solid form – had widespread currency in Tibet. Such creatures were known as tulpas and at least one European traveller claimed to have seen them.

Madame Alexandra David-Neel, a distinguished French academic and explorer who died in 1969, reported that while camped in the Tibetan highlands, she was visited by a young painter she knew vaguely from a previous stay in Lhasa. The man had a particular obsession with one of the many Tibetan gods. For years he had meditated daily on the deity and painted its image many times. As he entered the camp, Madame David-Neel claimed she saw a misty representation of the god hovering behind him.

She was so intrigued by this phenomenon that she studied Tibetan teachings about tulpas and eventually decided to create one for herself. To this end, she visualised a cheerful brown-robed monk, based loosely on Friar Tuck in the Robin Hood legends. After weeks of effort, the imaginary monk became so vivid that he appeared to her as if he were physically present – an induced hallucination.

But then, says Madame David-Neel, the monk began to turn up when she was not trying to visualise him. Furthermore, his appearance was changing: he grew thinner and developed a sly expression. When other members of her camp asked about the ‘strange little lama’ she decided the time had come to destroy her creation… and battled for weeks before finally managing to do so.

Could such a thing really be possible?

During the early 1970s, a group from the Toronto Society for Psychical Research set out to see if they could make a ghost. First they dreamed up a fictional character, then invented a background to go with him. The character was named Philip and lived at the time of Cromwell, in a house called Diddington Manor. He fell in love with a beautiful Gypsy woman named Margo and subsequently had an affair with her. When his wife found out, she took her revenge by accusing Margo of witchcraft. Margo was tried, convicted and burned at the stake. Philip, mad with grief, committed suicide.

There actually was a Diddington Manor and pictures of it were obtained by the group. The rest of the story was fiction. Philip never really existed. But that didn’t stop him haunting.
The group held a series of séances with photographs of the manor placed around the room while they concentrated on the fictional Philip. For several months nothing happened. Then a rap was heard. The group set up a code and communication was established. Sure enough, the communicating ‘spirit’ turned out to be Philip, claiming the life history they had invented for him.

As the séances continued, the fictional Philip continued to behave exactly as séance room spirits have always behaved. He caused raps and brought through such a richly detailed description of the Cromwellian period that the group actually double checked to make sure they’d not somehow based Philip on a real life character. (They hadn’t.) Later, the Toronto experiment was duplicated by other groups. One of them dispelled any lingering doubts about the fictional nature of the spirit by communicating with a talking dolphin.

Although Philip was a step removed from the sort of visible ‘spirit’ appearance reported by Alexandra David-Neel, he did manage to produce physical phenomena like raps and table turning, which suggests the psychological mechanics of the two experiments may not have been all that different. But if certain persistent accounts are to be believed, the techniques used for creating ghosts went far further in Tibet than they ever did in Canada – and generated a valuable spiritual lesson in the process.

One of the most fascinating stories involves a mythic creature called a Yidam, a tutelary deity in the Tibetan pantheon.

In Tibet, many young men (and some young women) suffering from a spiritual itch, apprenticed themselves to a single guru rather than follow the traditional monastic route. A few of them who showed real spiritual promise would eventually reach the point where their guru would admit he had nothing more to teach them. If they wanted to go further, they would need a far more advanced guide. To that end, the guru would advise them to meditate on the Yidam and study pictures of it in the sacred scriptures. These showed the creature to have a fearful, almost demonic aspect.

When the student was saturated in Yidam lore, he would typically be advised to find a remote cave and there create a magic circle (known as a kylkhor) using powdered chalk. The purpose of the circle was to encourage the visible appearance of the Yidam.

In order to achieve this, the pupil was instructed to visualise the Yidam within the circle. Over a period of weeks, or months, the pupil had to continue the exercise until a full-scale hallucination resulted and the Yidam appeared. At this point, the pupil would be told he was obviously favoured by the god.

But for his next step, he would have to persuade it to leave the circle.

The process might take several more months, but eventually the pupil would report that the god had stepped out of the kylkhor. He would be congratulated, then told to see if he could manage to get the Yidam to speak to him.

Once this was achieved, the goal-posts were moved again. The pupil was required to receive the Yidam’s blessing, a process that, in Tibet, involved the laying of hands on the pupil’s head.

Once the pupil reported positively on this latest task, the guru would typically tell him he had only one more step to take. He had achieved conversation with and blessing from the Yidam, but it was still confined to the cave. In order to establish the deity as his personal guru, the pupil had to persuade the Yidam to leave its circle and accompany him wherever he went. Off went the pupil to his Himalayan cave again.

With the benefit of our tulpa studies, we might suspect that the pupil was creating a fictional character, albeit one based on scriptural authority. While the appearance of the Yidam is a matter of visualisation, any conversations must require essentially the same creative input as an author writing dialogue.

The gurus who developed the exercise clearly recognised its tulpa aspect as well, for the whole experience was actually a test. If the pupil succeeded in creating a Yidam that would walk and talk with him, his teacher would tell him his studies were ended since he now had the wisest and most powerful teacher possible. But the pupil who accepted this evaluation was deemed to be a failure – and sent off to spend the rest of his life locked into a comforting hallucination.

There were, however, a few pupils who expressed doubts. They might begin to wonder if the Yidam was the god they believed it to be, or an aberration of their own perceptions. Often the guru would feign anger and send them back to the cave to redouble their efforts. But if the doubts persisted, then came the crunch.

“Do you not see the god? Do you not hear the god? Do you not feel the god when he lays his hands upon your head to impart his blessing? Is not the Yidam as real as the mighty Himalayas?” asks the guru.

The pupil agrees that he sees, hears and feels. He agrees that the Yidam seems as real and solid as the Himalayas. And yet he doubts.

At which point the guru springs his trap. The experience of the Yidam is not simply a lesson in tulpa creation. According to the insights of Tibetan spirituality, human perception of the ‘real’ world is fundamentally flawed. Not just its politics and values, not just its preconceptions and ideas, but its very structure is something other than what it appears. The world as we know it – from our friends to ourselves to the mountains above and the valleys below – ismaya, a word imported from India that translates as ‘illusion.’ What happens in the creation of a Yidam proves that absolutely.

An eerily similar theme underlay a popular Hollywood movie called The Matrix. The premise of The Matrix was that at some point in the distant future, humanity fought an apocalyptic battle against intelligent machines… and lost. With commendable efficiency, the machines decided to use captive humans as a power source. (The human body generates a measurable amount of electricity.)

To avoid any possibility of a resistance, the machines wired their captives’ brains into a central computer running a complex program that created the illusion of day-to-day reality. Although actually stored neatly in nourishment tanks, the population of our defeated planet slept on, convinced that the world of offices and jet planes functioned exactly as it always had.

The idea is not a new one, even in our materialistic West:

“And then…?” the Emperor Claudius asks of the Sibyl in Robert Graves’ I Claudius, on discovering he is dead.

“Then you shall dream a very different dream,” the Oracle replies, referring to Claudius’s next life.

Among spiritually-enlightened Tibetans, the notion that we all live in aMatrix-style illusion is widespread. But the illusion is not maintained by rogue machines – it is generated by our own minds. When I first came across the doctrine, I was forcibly reminded of a saying you hear every day in Haiti: What you see… it’s not what you think.

At least one (American) Buddhist attempted to convince me the Tibetan doctrine was purely philosophical. She believed it to be essentially a question of emphasis, in the way that a handful of American deaths might seem more real (to Americans) than a million famine victims in distant China.

Her stance was sophisticated, her arguments psychologically enlightened, but even our own Western physicists know better. Investigations of the quantum world of sub-atomic particles reveals a universe founded on no more than statistical probabilities and built with little bits of something that appear out of nowhere, exist momentarily before vanishing again… and are profoundly influenced by human observation.

Physicists have now become accustomed to thinking mathematically about an 11-dimensional space-time continuum that looks nothing like the world we live in.

The only difference is Tibetan mystics seem to experience it directly.

HERBIE BRENNAN is the author of more than sixty works of fact and fiction. As a writer he has never been shy of dealing with controversial subject matter, and his subjects have included out-of-body experiences and time travel. He works as a full-time author with an interest in transpersonal psychology, spirituality, comparative religion, reincarnation, esotericism, quantum physics and psychical research. He has broadcast and lectured widely throughout the US, UK and Ireland. He lives in Ireland and his web site is www.herbiebrennan.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 96 (May-June 2006).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

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In the West and the Near East the game of Chess is regarded as a war game, and its adepts as masters of strategy. In Japan, however, among the Samurai, this game was perceived as vulgar, a diversion for traders and merchants. The Samurai had a very different idea of conflict from that in the West.Victory in chess is obtained by calculation, by trading off your own pieces in exchange for success. Winning is through deception, and always taking advantage of the other’s mistakes. Megalomaniacal in its grasp of conflict, cruel, mechanical, hierarchical, and heartless in its application, and deluded in its victory, chess was, for the Samurai, hollow and meaningless as a game of strategy. It was a clever device, a game without honour.

Honour is an unexamined concept in our contemporary culture, a frozen medieval ideal, a moral or social artefact. Nevertheless honour is a vital aesthetic with immense relevance to our situation.

Never written down, Bushido, the code of honour in Japan, the ‘chivalry’ of the Samurai, was nonetheless the most important consideration in their life. There are very good reasons for this. To stop viewing the world as right or wrong and to examine it sincerely as honourable or dishonourable is a way to distinguish the world in quite a different light.

When a Samurai boy was 5 years, 5 months, and 5 days old, he was given his first sword in a sacred ritual, dressed as a warrior, and placed on a Go board, just like a Go stone. Go is the true game of warriors and philosophers among the Samurai, who didn’t make the two arenas distinct from each other. It is the beautiful game of territory, where the highest excellence was not through wiping the opponent off the board, but by the understated beauty of winning by only one stone.

Power emanates from our perception of the true nature of our position and possibilities. It is better to know you are a sheep than imagine you are a tiger. The Samurai ethic gives us a perspective.

We are placed on the planet just like a Go stone on a board. We are all the same. We cannot control the game, and we cannot change our location. We may be placed in a pivotal time and position, or we may not. We may have a lifetime of peace, or of disturbance. We can be wiped off the board at any time. We have no control over the patterns of the higher game.

The best we can attain in the great game of life, the Samurai considered, is to be a very good stone; to be present, to have integrity, and to endure. Then we may serve the higher strategy well. This would be revealed in the future peace and prosperity of society. To be a good stone is also to rule absolutely over the tiny area actually allotted to us, to realise that we are the god of our own tiny domain.

The Samurai ethic is very much misunderstood in the West, and what little is known often derives from the later Edo period, when a rich merchant could purchase the right to wear two swords and be a knight for prestige and vanity.

“Death before Dishonour” is probably the most penetrating Samurai image, yet the least understood. It gives us the idea of the Samurai as a paragon of stoicism and righteousness, willing to die, rather than have his or her reputation besmirched, or dignity abased. The ritual act of suicide seems to epitomise this maxim. However, this is far from the truth.

Central to the Samurai ethic was the realisation that every human death has dignity, regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. Every death weakens us all, and we cannot conceptualise a useless death without demeaning life itself.

Whether it is an AIDS-ridden infant, a sick old pensioner, a suicide bomber, a death row inmate, an elderly statesman, a crime or traffic victim, an overdosing junkie, all death has the same dignity. To see it otherwise is to peer through the mesmerising fog of life.

The Samurai existed to preserve and make apparent this realisation, not to hold themselves apart from it. No death is in vain. They were not there to look after themselves; they were there to look after others. As warriors, they were even committed to dying for one purpose, to help others. Their ultimate power and protest was only to remove themselves from the board, a potent act affecting the higher game. This was power exercised at the highest level of ahimsa, harmlessness. The ritual suicide essential to their culture was an exercise in courage and humility, not in pride and arrogance.

Only from courage and humility does true honour arise. When we fail to perceive this we make an enormous mistake, for the clever mind cannot do anything but assess the usefulness of death, and by default, that of life itself.

This is the slipperiest slope of all human reasoning and it is a fundamental cause of war and violence, poverty and oppression. It allows us to kill the ‘baddies’ and starve children for a just cause. It lets us have mega-death wars and plagues, trade embargoes, the militarisation of space, yet remain “honourable,” engaged in just pursuit. It lets us lie, vacillate, and deceive others, and yet think we’re cool, compassionate, that we’re doing it for them. If the situation were not so tragic, it would be hilarious. It is certainly farcical.

True versus False Honour

“Killing is not Heaven’s way,” emphasised Musashi, “yet Heaven must employ the sword.” It is never right to kill; the finest sword is seldom drawn. But in life killing happens, and mindless, endless, pointless slaughter is everywhere, ritual sacrifices to atone for our greed and ignorance. There will always be psychopaths, greedy righteous madmen without compassion, for whom violence is an option, who take profit and pleasure in the slavery and oppression of others. To protect ourselves without enslaving ourselves we need many individuals rigorously engaged on a path of honour.

In Scotland there is a saying that honour is the sun of the mind, and one thing that must be recognised about honour is that it varies in intensity. It may be a candle or a flaming torch. Even what we consider ‘honourable’ people today are hardly honourable in the presence of such a diseased, enslaved, starved, alienated, oppressed, violent, and war-torn world.

Honourable human beings are as rare as hen’s teeth. The shrewd mind eradicates the presence of honour. The idea, the formula of a honourable person is commonplace. “Honourable” people, all doing the ‘right thing’, often act out the worst fears and prejudice of humanity. We fill our governments, courts and institutions with ‘honourable’ people. This is like filling the fire service with arsonists. Easily offended, mistaking moral outlook, learning, pride, irreproachability, and cultural predilection for honour, they are rigid, selfish, superior, self-important, lying, and judgemental, and keep our world full of dissonance so they can justify their bigotry and righteousness.

Often too, they are scurrilous criminals. The concept of honour has slipped so far from view that being seen not to be dishonourable is regarded as being unquestioningly honourable, and no one will exploit this fact more than the thoroughly disreputable.

Almost everyone considers that they are honourable, yet if one death seems to you more justified than another, there is no space for real honour within. There is only pride, and self-importance.

Honour has no place in the calculating mind of contemporary humanity. It is now an idea for living people to estimate and capitalise on their imagined worth, a means to trade for esteem. “On my Honour,” has become a vocal invoice, fly-buy points for trade deals. It keeps politicians and powerbrokers unassailable and litigious. This is not Honour.

Honour depends on your next move, not your last move. It is an intense and potent means to examine and refine self, life and relationship to others. It is a means of moving into the future with respect and intent. Honour forms the intent, the motive behind an action, and imbues that act with a higher order of significance. A good action is not necessarily a honourable act and a wrong act is not necessarily dishonourable. Honour is a new level of relationship to the world, a way of looking at our domain that allows us to examine the components of life in quite a different fashion. Now let us examine a few of these components through the lens of Bushido.

Dictatorship of ‘Calculating Men’

In the dominant culture of today, education is highly valued. The Samurai, too, held education with the awe and fervour of a dark ages scholar, they idealised a life of the higher senses, a life of learning. But they were contemptuous of all bookish erudition and regarded intellectualism as a child’s game. They were extremely dismissive of what was known as ‘calculating men.’

This does not mean sly or deceitful, but any endeavour or profession where calculation was intrinsic. Scientists, doctors, academics, lawyers, musicians, engineers, intellectuals, economists, and psychologists are all ‘calculating men’ – technicians – and they were all viewed in quite a different light from today.

In today’s society, where science has become a religion, ‘calculating men’ have a position of much greater importance than the Samurai would ever have allowed them. We have faith in their spreadsheets, hope for their discoveries, we rely on their research. We presently live in a technocracy, a world dictated and managed by experts, by specialists. Academia has cloistered all centres of power. Like infants in a gigantic school, we have learned to do what “teacher” says without question.

The cramming in of information and the capacity to manipulate and regurgitate it was regarded in the Samurai worldview as an abuse of the spirit, the reduction of a person to a function. It was certainly not education.

The Samurai had a different view of education, a vast, profound, and certain insight. True intelligence arrives as realisation. What we learn is only what we consider our life depends on. Learning is a survival mechanism, almost identical to bladder control, calming the existential panic of our true ignorance. It is essential, as it is with bladder control, that we learn. Yet to take refuge in our learning is like treating our urine as wine. We are far more than what we’ve learned as we are also far more than what we have drunk.

In life there is only one true teacher, and that is Death, the sword. Only the continuous awareness of death gives us the sobriety we require to assess the circumstances of life, to truly know anything for its own sake. This is a distinction of true knowledge that we find in many great traditions from Don Juan to Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff, who declared that the purpose of his work was that people would not “die like dogs,” dramatised the situation succinctly. In Gurdjieff’s All and Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson, Hassein asks Beelzebub how humanity could be saved. Beelzebub replied that Man would only be saved by implanting an organ that continually reminded him that everything and everyone passing in front of his eyes would, one day, die.

The warrior implants this organ, “teaches his body strategy,” and lives in an environment of sincerity and compassion.

If we could do each thing as if it was our last act on earth, say each sentence as though it was the final thing we would ever say, know always of the transience of every moment, then we would live a life worthy of our humanity. Unless we are present to death as our teacher, we have no context to think in, no perspective; we cannot see what is important about what we are doing.

Instead, the calculating mind of the ‘expert’ tries to survive, to live forever, to be right, to win, and always has an added argument, more evidence, a new theory, another angle. They are dishonest, irresponsible, selfish and cowardly, only interested to prove and support their own notions, to remain intact. They take refuge in their cleverness, yet as humans they must be worthless, as they have made themselves this way, subservient to their own lists and statistics, trapped in the webs they weave. Indeed, the greatest stupidity of the intellectual is that ultimately they deceive themselves. They restrict themselves to their own thinking, and fail to examine their own ambition.

Education in the West is now a scratching of the itch of our vanities. Any information can be invalidated by different information. We can choose our speciality to suit our personality. It is a lyrical, coffee table learning, vain and capricious, pretentious, reckless and pusillanimous. It does not transform us. It does not humble us, make us more aware of our ignorance, deepen our experience of the great mystery, or make us more modest and compassionate, as any real education must.

Instead, it makes us an ‘authority,’ gives us power over others. Experts exert more power over our freedom than a medieval archbishop over his flock, within a reality even more bizarre. We live in a tyranny, nebulous and unassailable, masterminded by the cowardice, violence and cleverness of people with lists. Education is now a career ticket. We are proud of our acquired information with which we strut and pose, demand respect, and claim a superior position.

The calculating mind confuses subjectivity and philosophy. “I know, therefore It Is.” The objectivity of science is an illusion. What the thinker thinks, the prover proves. Masquerading as truth, the expert displays the lie of a world as dead as a clock.

The quandary is that these same intellectuals are engaged in serious pursuit. They have been trained to be cunning, cowardly, factional, irresponsible, and narcissistic, the last kind of people who should be destroying atoms, playing with genes, or designing home or foreign policy. Any expert who has got the answer, who knows what’s best, is from a Samurai perspective either a lunatic or a liar. Nobody knows the best thing to do.

Intellectuals are dangerous little creatures to the ethic of the Samurai. Why? Scholars are not intellectual enough. Inflated by an infantile self-importance, the fuel for their achievements, there is one thing they do not know, and without that there is only the cowardliness, selfishness and deceit of logic and calculation, the empty arrogance and selective broadcasting of acquired information. They must be right in order to exist. They have information without enlightenment, without commitment, without responsibility, and without perspective.

According to the Samurai ethic, they are irredeemably timid and stupid, institutionalised in a dishonourable way of being, and thoroughly dangerous in their selfish approach to conflict. They are not free to think, or even able to be free to think. They are slaves to the information they have, without which they’d be nothing at all. Any specialist or expert has sold their birthright, become a function rather than a being.

“A skill or art leads to a debasement of awareness. Anyone especially accomplished in a particular ability is a technician, not a Samurai,” declared Jocho. For the Samurai, knowledge had a vast palette and broadening our vision rather than narrowing it was the way to increase and refine our realisation.

Art and Science

In the East, traditional education was an ancient and very different phenomenon. One of the major differences that convinced the early Chinese of the barbarity of Western culture is that we have no language for our arts and sciences to communicate. In Western education, which is now also extant in the East, each science invents its own terminology. The word ‘stress’, for example, means one thing to an engineer, another to a doctor, yet something else to a musician, a geologist, a priest or an ecologist.

This was probably unnoticed as Latin, the lingua franca of Church and University, gave the illusion of a shared terminology. Now, even this has degenerated to a ‘fitting’ system for the sciences.

The result of this failure of our arts and sciences to communicate and cooperate has led to an explosion of chaos. For example, in the Eastern tradition, medicine and cookery share a language. The most delicious food and the healthiest food must ultimately be the same. In the West, however, the most delicious inventions of Escoffier are, from a medical perspective, a nutritional disaster, and our nutritional ideals are often inedible.

Our arts and sciences do not communicate. They contradict and invalidate each other. Subjectivity, the great demon of the ‘scientific method’, must encroach when there is no means for communication between areas of expertise. There is no holism; each science is discrete, each has a separate agenda, hidden to the other.

The East had two major tools for cognition. There was the Eight Conditions/Yin Yang theory, one of the best known and least comprehended doctrines of Oriental science. Nevertheless, in the hands of ‘calculating men,’ it becomes almost identical to Greek Logic. There are many who think they know all about yin and yang, but those who actually do are rare, East or West. The eight conditions is not logical, and is actually more similar in its nature to Quantum physics, a peerless tool of relativity.

The other pillar of Oriental science is the Five Elements, a tool for what cannot be measured by physics, a means to determine quality, not quantity.

In the East communication was intrinsic between all arts and sciences. The five Rings of Musashi’s treatise, the five elements of medicine, the five flavours of cookery, the five tones of music, the five spies of the Art of War – they are all part of the same web, singing a harmonious song, allowing each to examine the other. These two tools allow a much greater accessibility, transparency and connectedness between disciplines.

In this paradigm, the most sublime knowledge, the most occult, the most difficult to learn and to realise, was the sword. The sword is the ultimate in intellectual attainment, transcending calculating mentality, the forging and polishing of the soul, the release of the spirit into the world, freed from the bondage of thought, and it imbued a knowledge that was sublime, inviolate, eternal, unalterable, profound and wise as a basis, a context for knowing everything else.

It is the education and empowerment of our spirit, the embodiment of knowledge, the blending of everything known into a perfect action. It supplies a keystone of knowledge, which is the foundation of education, without which nothing else can be truly known.

The sword is the art of the Universe, the unique expression, not of what we know, but an expression of who we are, who we can possibly be. Swordplay is not a function, something we can do, it is something we embody. It requires the totality of our existence.

The Samurai ethic is not a political theory, nor is it some moral standard for policing countries, or the justification of some “Might is Right” reasoning. Instead, it is a living philosophy in action, a perennial flower for humanity to cherish, a means to the highest intellect enlightened. Its insight is more valid today than ever before.

The Samurai ethic is intimately connected to others, to the peace of society. The health, strength, and power of the individual is without meaning outside society.

Spiritual illumination is not derived from a personal relationship with God, although many schools claimed a divine inspiration, but from relationship and service both to others and to the “way of the Bushi.” The word Samurai means servant, and as Dylan noted, “You’ve got to serve somebody.”

Feminisation of Men

Before we can look at the spiritual realm of the Samurai, it is useful to see the contemporary situation through their eyes. Where is a honourable life to be found? If we look at the modern ideal of human beings, what do we find? Who are the good guys?

The ideal man of today is gentle, diffident, sincere, thoughtful, and pleasant. He is well educated or trained, and is quietly or overtly ambitious. Oleaginous, adaptable and amorphous, he lies mellifluously and unabashedly to keep the peace, presents an agreeable façade to everyone, keeps his hostility covert, and unhesitatingly hands over his injustices to the authorities. He tries to entertain everyone, and never raises his voice, except perhaps occasionally and politely in righteous indignation, for correct causes. He is, as the great Japanese poet Mishima damningly observed, a “cool opportunist.”

The ideal woman is, in addition, a little more aggressive, self interested, untrammelled by children, and, if we accept the current paradigm, smarter, more sober, and in charge.

Unfortunately, our ideal individuals don’t appear to help us create a harmonious society. We have male suicide rates that have gone through the roof. We have wife, husband, and child beatings, as frustrated angry people, like animals in cages, turn on their dearest. We have packs of alienated youth, violent and criminal, directionless and confused by the world they find themselves in, caught between struggle and submission. We have an epidemic of drug addiction, as people resort to chemistry to escape an empty, unfulfilling life that brings them little but pain. Even without any obvious drama, there are millions of lives filled with hubris, waiting around to catch cancer.

On a larger scale we have a pandemic of war, oppression, poverty, slavery and violence that no country escapes. We presently live in a society that is far from ideal, a sort of Samurai worst-case scenario. A world ruled by traders, executed by technicians, must inexorably become vicious and nasty. From the Samurai point of view, we have great chaos in society, deep sickness in people’s hearts, a world without honour.

One of the greatest tragedies of recorded history has been the feminisation of the male. Men have been increasingly trained in a fashion that is alien to their nature. De-fanged and emasculated by a cowardly society terrified of virility, men have been brainwashed into a position of benign subservience to all, or else.

They are cuddly and accessible, pleasant, self-effacing, hard working, fashion conscious consumers, problem fixers, and maintenance men. They are deodorant splashed, designer-labelled, mummy pleasing, keep fitters and sport players, thoughtful and inoffensive, snaggy, sincere and reasonable. They are concerned to portray themselves in an attractive light. They keep their hostility covert. They try to look good, to “do the right thing,” whatever that may be. They also consider this to be virile behaviour. At best the highest accolade is to be “really nice.” An evening watching television is enough to adequately examine this nauseating ideal from every angle.

Jocho Yamamoto, a Samurai who became a Buddhist priest when forbidden by the Emperor to end his existence, emphasised the fragility of masculinity. He said, “Contemporary Samurai set their sights very low. They have the furtive glance of thieves. They consider only themselves, act flamboyantly, and think they are smart. Although they appear to have nerves of iron, they are all front, worthless braggarts. That attitude will never do.”

We have mislaid our models for male behaviour. We have even enthusiastically buried them. For example, the Latin concept of honourable masculine behaviour, to be ‘macho,’ has completely reversed its meaning and come to signify misogynistic, aggressive, and insensitive idiots who fart, belch and boast loudly.

Some men today are acutely aware of this emptiness in their being, and attempt to recover their vital male temperament through success or seduction, through “men’s groups,” initiations or such, anything to try to feel like a man. Drumming, ‘relating,’ blaming and hugging, tend to reinforce this alienation. It is a symptom, not a cure.

We know more about what a Silverback Gorilla is like than what a man is like, and there are even fewer places nowadays where we may hope to get a glimpse of a fully developed man. But one thing people are not is “really nice.” Chocolate is really nice, people are more complex.

Tamed, virtually gelded, trained like donkeys, and counted like cattle, men are hardly allowed to exist, not encouraged to live a responsible life. This feminisation of men turns all humans into slaves. It is very hazardous.

Society now greatly disapproves of what it labels male “boastfulness,” “arrogance,” and “immaturity,” yet perhaps it is only these unpredictable qualities that may currently prevent our total enslavement. “Stupid” and “aggressive” men are perhaps a bulwark against a world that the greasy speech of merchants and technicians would fashion to their whim.

The problem is that violence works, it is the bottom line of any negotiation, and any government or institution wishes to control who gets violated, where and when. All governments reserve the power to violate, and rule only through fear and violence, with police and army, even if a silk glove adorns the iron fist.

Authority in our world equates with the capacity to destroy, to oppress, to incarcerate, and invalidate. It requires everyone to be quiet, keep off the streets, to protest only in an impotent fashion.

Only institutions, entertainment, salesmen, cowards, thieves and bullies need a foggy calm to spin their webs, and require a dazed and receptive audience. The rest of us can be vastly entertained, informed, and brought into communication by any sincere person who doesn’t mind rocking a leaky boat. Wildness and outrageousness are freedoms granted by courage and humility, ruffling only the feathers of the fearful.

To accomplish great things one must be extreme, push the comfort zones a little. I am not entering any debate on sexuality here. The Samurai expected women and men to be at full potential. Rather, I am indicating a peculiarity of the male that I’m sure we can all agree on. Men are impulsive, boastful, idiotic, immature and reckless, even violent.

This is intolerable to all institutions. No establishment can factor it into any of the equations they develop for our ideal society, except as cannon fodder. The world unites to abolish the reality of men. We shouldn’t be like that. All science, all politics, all statecraft, all education, all government, claims “this is not impulsive, immature, reckless, boastful, idiotic or violent.” But it is often just like that. Men are exactly like that.

What it is very important to discern is that this unattractive aspect of male conduct is not inevitably dishonourable behaviour. It is quite possible to be impulsive and hot-blooded, stupid, immature, even violent, yet still be honourable. It is possible even to ascend to a honourable position by being this way. Great change is brought about through enormous energy, by standing against the tide.

The Samurai recognised that beyond all our personal judgements there was a way to view others with more acceptance, more reality. Only dishonourable, selfish and ignorant behaviour truly damages society, and behaviour like that is not necessarily visible, improper or unreasonable.

Rather than viewing others from the rights and wrongs of our assessments, we can see them for their humanity, their will, their unselfishness, and their contribution. Beyond our personal notions of how people should behave, there is the recognition of a honourable existence that eclipses our assessment.

This puts men in a more precarious position than women, a position that requires a particular restraint. As men are more reckless, boastful and impetuous, honour is a more essential component of Manhood. Only honour supplies the compassion, dignity, generosity, humility and unselfishness to polish the impetuosity and recklessness that is a wonderful part of being a man. Only a honourable existence redeems and completes a man.

This feminisation has an innocuous and innocent genesis. A man only is truly a man to the extent that he does not act to be attractive. This is the Black Hole of male consciousness from which masculinity can never emerge.

When a man does something, even a good thing, in order to be attractive, he creates the invisible antagonist to a honourable existence that intrinsically must be selfless. He instantly becomes dishonourable, living in a lower domain. It sucks the life out of him like salt on a snail. It is acting from the outside rather than the inside.

The inner sincerity of masculine behaviour is paramount. No one else is there to see his intent but himself, and only the intent gives the action meaning. It is the most terrible empty perversion of power when it is employed in trying to look good, which is looking after yourself, rather than doing good, looking after others.

This is not so for a woman. Being much more level headed, they are free to sometimes act to be attractive.

While the Samurai ethic and spirituality is particularly unconcerned with sexuality, it is certainly concerned with having both sexes at maximum potential. At full strength, men and woman would be more distinct. The androgynous and self-absorbed nature of society with its ‘pleasing men and plucky women’ is only a sign of a great weakness and danger in society.

Life is Now a Show Performed by Actors

In contemporary life we also have massive amounts of entertainment. Everyone wants to be famous. We give great attention to movie stars, swimmers, singers and footballers. Yet famous people, like technicians, have become a function. They are famous not for who they are, but for being involved in something that fascinates an audience. They sacrifice their ideal of humanness for the adoration of the masses and hide behind their skill. They have great power and wealth. They form dynasties and expect adulation. They are the royalty of the new millennium. The ‘Willow World’ now permeates every aspect of life.

Stars dictate fashions and trends, advertise products and participate in performances. But they are mere puppets, saying lines they were told to say, playing tunes, jumping and posing to order. Because someone can, for example, run fast or wiggle their bottom in an attractive fashion, they are accredited with special insight and access to social situations or politics. Suppressing freedom through distraction, fascination and suggestion, they are the inedible part of the government of Bread and Circuses.

Scientists, experts, technicians, stars and virtuosos, are now running the world. They are all, from the Samurai ethic, identical. They are all Performing Artists.

Jocho Yamamoto recognised the bizarre and nihilistic certainty that the world was now a show performed by actors, a Heyokah, a contrary world of puppets, where everything is the wrong way round.

The difference we see between a prime minister and a cute pop singer, a genetic scientist and a juggler, is an illusion. There is no difference. They are all technicians. They have all learned a skill; all become identified with it, and use it for their own profit, while professing it to be for someone else’s benefit.

Life is now truly a mad house where a real human being now has no place or function whatsoever. It is a useless quality for society to be a human. Society needs machines. Those who are less courageous, those who have surrendered to being their job, to exploiting their function, have displaced essential humanity. The world has been spirited out from under the feet of honourable humans. They are disenfranchised from a society that now requires functions, not complete people.

There are many refugees of the spirit, displaced in this borderless, theory-driven world.

Technology Blinding Us From Our Devolution

We tend to assume that we are evolving. This is not necessarily a well-examined assumption. In fact, we can gather evidence that we are getting more dimwitted, that we are actually devolving.

P.D. Ouspensky uses the Australian bull ant as an example of these forces of devolution. This primitive ant lives in a small simple community of about 20 to 40. They cooperate to defend their nest. Unlike modern ants, bull ants have a highly developed sense of self-preservation. While they will defend their nest fiercely, they will abandon it if that is more expedient. They will not give up their life for their nest.

The modern ant is much more predictable. Fine technicians, they build great cities. Many thousands live there. But they will die relentlessly for their nest if it is attacked. The community is preserved at the expense of the individual. A house is more important than the creatures that build it.

Modern ants have lost the instinct for self-preservation, the capacity for self-reliance, and have therefore become less intelligent than ‘primitive ants,’ although their cities appear more evolved. They have devolved from a self-responsible creature, to a mere function of the nest.

The modern ant has devolved, has become less intelligent. “But look at our city”, the modern ant would say, if we suggested it was getting dumber. So, too, does our technology blind modern humans who imagine that we are more intelligent today than in the past.

Now here’s the difference between the bull ant and the modern ant. When I encounter them, the modern ant can see of me only my finger, and that is only if I stick my finger in front of it.

The bull ant, however, even from some distance can see all of me. It watches and responds to my entire body. The bull ant sees more than my finger, more than what is in front of its nose.

Intelligence changes what we can perceive within our environment. True intelligence is not about knowing more stuff. It does not transform our thinking; it alters our perception, what we can see in every situation.

True education is not learning about things. Real education increases our intelligence, and this changes what we are able to notice.

We, too, have fine cities and an immensely complex social structure. In the process we are destroying our capacity to see what is around us unless, and only when, a piece of it is stuck in front of our face.

By devolving into a social matrix where every move is pre-ordained, suggested to us, we blind ourselves to an unimaginably larger view of life that is our right and within our nature to behold. We remove an entire domain of intelligence from our being. Like moles, we shuffle through the dark little tunnels of our life, seeing nothing.

The feminisation of men, and the ascendance of technocracy and entertainment, is a part of this devolution.

So, too, is the pursuit of wealth. Greed is not good. It is a cowardly, insane response to the world. The Samurai code of honour emphasised an indifference to wealth, to not acting for profit, an aesthetic of shibumi, understatement, frugality and poverty. On his sword he carried a toothpick that he would pull out and use when invited to eat, demonstrating his unbending intent, his unwillingness to exploit others, his self-reliance, and incorruptibility.

Wealth is the tooth decay of honour, a blasphemy of our real abundance, stashing away for old age, for more stuff to fill the inner emptiness, quiet the anxious spirit.

Again Yamamoto says,
“A man with a mercenary spirit is a coward. The reason being he is always thinking about gain or loss. To him, dying is loss, and living is gain. He becomes a coward because he does not want to die. He camouflages with eloquence his real character of timidity and greed. People often fail to recognise this type of man.”

Greed and cowardliness are inseparable components of the clever mind, intent on calculation and control.

Our Perception of the World is the Greatest Gift

Since the very earliest days of our history we have recognised the concept of a “fair fight”. It is a simple notion, the ‘Rules of Engagement,’ for dealing with conflict. Even as a child, we recognise that there must be convention.

“No kicking or biting, no ganging up, and no hitting girls, even when they’re asking for it,” can allow a child to retain honour in playground disagreements. Honour is still essential to peace keeping.

Now getting around the rules of engagement is the major concern of most conflicts, from street riots to United Nations peacekeeping forces. Today, the nature of conflict is not quite the same as only a few years ago, when a war went on in a field, when oppression was regional, where running away was an option.

Now, in the culture of cowardice and calculation which we have developed, that ironically we refer too as free, peace loving, and fair, conflict is more pernicious, more insidious. In our technocratic society, there is no means for a ‘fair fight’ against issues important to us. You are only free to do what you are told. Your opinion, like your vote, is a joke.

What you think, for example, about scientists messing with the genetic makeup of the food you eat doesn’t make any difference. We must conform to what the “experts” think, even though it is perfectly clear that an informed opinion or a “proof” is no less subjective, self-interested, or prejudiced than an uninformed opinion, or belief.

Indeed, Bushido indicates that expertise and specialisation is the last refuge of the coward and scoundrel, and they are more able and more likely to exercise selfishness, subjectivity and deceit. Like rats in the wainscotings they scurry through the halls of power, debasing the foundations of truth and justice that genuine authority requires.

Today we fail to examine the divergence between subjectivity and philosophy. This is a grave mistake. Just because an expert thinks so does not make it a more correct opinion, only a more ‘expert’ opinion. Yet we run to the specialist. No one has courage any more. Everyone wants a ‘consultant’ to justify their own attitude, to back up their prejudice, to do it for them. We invent, encourage and employ our own thought police.

To the Native American warrior we come into this world with only one gift that we can present to the world. That gift is how we perceive the world.

No one sees things as you do. Your view is unique, irreplaceable, and when and if you can communicate it, you give to the world the greatest gift, indeed the only gift a human can; the gift of how you see it. Only you can be you. This is a most wonderful aspect of a Human Being.

We are creative creatures. A human being is the only place in our universe from where novelty may emit. We can be the creative force of the universe.

Einstein communicated exactly how he saw it, and for humanity, the universe changed, the planet changed, new substances and forces were created, our past, present, and future was rewritten. Not bad for a patent clerk.

What you think has equal value to what anyone else thinks. Your thoughts and feelings cannot be ‘wrong’ or ‘right.’ How you feel cannot be taken from you, and is not for others to evaluate.

It is how you see it, and for that fact alone it demands respect. You think this, but I think that. What lies between is the affair of strategy.

Expert opinion or calculation can only reduce the world to formulae, reduce a human to cipher. The world is not a machine, does not conform itself to equations. It is unpredictable and wild. Quality cannot equate to quantity. Only honour lets us touch the pulse of life directly.

The warrior finds a great beauty in pride. Not in false pride, the arrogance of imagined or certificated superiority, but the genuine, acquired, sensitive, pride (Haragei) of being a spirit materialised into this time and place for a purpose. A pride in our own thoughts, feelings and sensations is required to engage with another mind powerfully and respectfully. It is not courteous to daydream, to be impressionable when others speak. It is important to be sincere and brave in speech as well as action.

Much of life’s communication is presently full of expert opinions, persuasive advertisements, chitchat, justifications, exaggerations, omissions, explanations, and propaganda, which, like mosquitoes, disturb the tranquillity of our atmosphere. People have become immunised to this assault, yet it is not being treated in a honourable fashion. If we had a little more honour we wouldn’t find having our eyes, minds and ears filled with other people’s disrespectful nonsense so harmless. Perhaps we would even be offended by institutions trying to win us over, to persuade, to tell us what’s important, to allude, to suggest, treating us as idiots, aiming below the belt at our signal responses. No one likes being treated like a fool, yet every advertisement and news broadcast does just that.

We currently live in a world where deceit, greed, expediency and self-interest have become normal, even commendable. As a result, our view of human ideals has become twisted. In contemporary society how you see it is up for grabs by any advertiser politician, or social architect.

To die for what you think or believe, in our greedy and cowardly age, is seen as a useless death. However, there is no such thing as a useless death. The essential thing to realise is that to die for how you see it is not a dishonourable end.

To live your life willing to die for how you see it, however, is to live an energetic unpredictable, hearty, magical, joyous and even a honourable life. It is after all the only thing you have. Examine the compromises, the deceit, the greed and self-interest of your own life. Have they not made you a little less? How fluidly we lie, hint, omit, assume and exaggerate. Normal conversation requires it. We go with the flow, certain we never lie, hint, omit, assume or exaggerate, which allows us to do just that. Yet it is cowardly. To lie is to say to the other, “You are stronger than me. You have the power to make me lie.”

Doing nothing only assists evil. Honour acknowledges an imperative to repair what we find wrong. If you don’t fix it, who will? Be courageous! It is in the last analysis very simple. Are you a human or a mouse?

As Jocho advised, “Bushido is realised in the presence of death. Given a choice between life and death, choose death. Just brace yourself and proceed.”

Life is risk. When we choose death we choose to fully live. A counterfeit life, predicated by the fears and ambitions, the clever arguments, the compromises, the calculations and ignorance of specialists, experts, and authorities is the sad alternative.

Choosing death is not easy, and does not come naturally. It requires long and intense training, a steeling of the nerves, to be ready for that moment. We may imagine when we are sitting around drinking coffee that we could and would choose death, but when we are required to take the plunge, these considerations are absent. We have been deeply trained to be scared and cowardly, and in a risky situation we play safe, reduce our options, we become a little less, dying in spirit to survive the onslaught of life.

The ethic of the Samurai is pro-active towards the healing of society. It is an extremely tolerant and respectful principle which, lived to its fullest extent, dissolves all the restrictions of our world into an existentialist’s paradise, our life into a voyage of serendipitous delights.

“To treat your enemy like a honoured guest,” was for Miyamoto Musashi simultaneously the highest level of realisation into the nature of conflict, and the most potent certain method of dispatching an enemy, where the highest strategy becomes “no strategy.”

Nothing defines your spiritual stature in life more than the stature of your enemy. Even God first had to make the Devil. Like the Tango, it takes two to have an enemy.

Some people make their neighbours, the weather, their old car, the new world order or their backache an enemy. We make up most of our enemies and then suffer under their tyranny. What can defeat us, defines our stature. Like paper tiger masks, these petty demons must be cut through.

We trivialise and demean our enemies, and in the process we make ourselves even lower than that, conquered by mean trivia. Enemies may be transformed or defeated, but they must first be revered. Putting others down does not elevate us. We must exalt our enemies, because they represent our limits in breaking through to the formless freedom of the warrior’s path. If it weren’t for the great enemy, the great warrior would have no purpose or means to existence. The enemy is a gift directly from God, and if we are sincere, the door to go beyond ourselves.

Miyamoto Musashi discovered in his lifelong examination of conflict that truly, deep down in our very being, when we energetically follow a path of honour to its conclusion, “Love conquers all.”

The Samurai ethic is committed to ecstasy. We all have a right to feel wonderful, to continually sense our power. Indeed, it is only when we feel wonderful that we view the world aright. We should be healthy and strong for others.

It is committed to energy. If we don’t feel wonderful we must do something about that. It is committed to transformation. A conflict revealed in its true nature becomes a source of energy and ecstasy. The only way to transform our sad society is when each of us starts to grow, when we individually “shatter this box of our un-enlightenment.”

There are many essentially brave and courageous people, but in our present society they are taught to fear, to doubt, to be cowardly. They have no means to become truly courageous. Much has to be unlearned.

The sword, like the sculptor’s knife, like the words that come out of our mouth, shapes the future to come. We need to form society from our soul and spirit, not from our cleverness and evidence. A healthy honourable society will not make sense, and will not be predictable. It will make experts cringe. It will be, for the self-reliant, a joyous, mysterious and abundant adventure.

Perhaps the great Musashi gave the most revealing insight for action. Just the day before he died, Musashi wrote for his pupils a guide for this adventure. The first instruction was, “Do nothing that will oppose your Splendid Future.”

.

Peter Alexander teaches swordplay in Byron Bay. His sensei is Victor Harris. Peter has developed and is teaching a new system of medicine, Nen Riki Therapy, derived from his discoveries in Itto Ryu swordplay. His has written the book In the Land of the Mad King – Protocols of a New Medicine. He can be contacted at nenriki@email.com, or at PO Box 1199, Byron Bay, NSW 2481, Australia.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 69 (November-December 2001).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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