Full Circle
My previous post started with a trip to buy milk from a supermarket, and the sense of a “tangible perfection”. I don’t know what triggers these things, but the next time I went to buy milk something else worth the telling occurred. This time it was more of a thought, a realization, an inner voice rather than a wordless feeling; and the voice said something like “You have it all, so why don’t you take it? There it was in you all the time, but you weren’t ready. Now you’ve been ready for a while.”
I wondered why I didn’t hear this before, this message so full of meaning. Sometimes one gets decipherable dreams, that tell us something we’re unaware of in waking life. I don’t seem to get those any more. The message comes in a fully waking state, like suddenly encountering a mirror to the soul, or hearing the advice of a kind, wise friend. It was no trance either, for this time I went by car, stopping off at the shop on the way to somewhere else. I’m used to these angel-whisperings, if the term isn’t too fanciful. Over the years I’ve noted in these pages numerous “moments”, and what they seemed to be saying. Sometimes the words come first and the deeper understanding afterwards. Quite a few have occurred on that short stretch of road, near the traffic lights. In an earlier and more Christian age, I might have made a modest roadside shrine there, as if the place were sacred and out of gratitude to Our Lady or other saint. Similar gestures were made in pagan societies.
The inner voice conveyed that I’ve grasped something, It gave me an instant certainty, that the truth revealed in that moment would never go away. A realization had come to stay. It was very similar to that instant healing of ten years ago, referred to in my last; when I knew I was better, definitively and with no lingering shadow of doubt. That certainty has held solid ever since. This time it was the realization that any spiritual quest has been fulfilled; an integration has occurred. There is a profound and tangible inner calm; my restlessness and habitual folly is stilled.
It is apparent that there are magical powers in language, for good and for ill. Words are the mechanism for human thought. To put it crudely, we either manage them or they manage us. It has taken me ten years and half a million published words to reach this point. Of all the magic inherent in language, consider just two aspects: narrative and naming. From our earliest days, stories have held us “spellbound”. They are the connective tissue of memory; memory is the connective tissue that builds the individual sense of “I”. So powerful is language that it can take us beyond experience, and lead us totally astray into confusion and lies: the black magic of propaganda, that we pick up from the ambient culture and reinforce for ourselves. Or, as in the case of these occasional “whisperings”, language can give us wise guidance; much more to the point than anything I ever got from a guru.
And then there is naming. This is where language starts. As soon as there is naming, there is linkage. When the toddler learns to say “dog”, it learns an abstraction. Dogs come in all shapes and sizes, but it learns the quality of “dogness”, which links every member of this class of animals. Perhaps, as we get older, we learn the power of the word “realization”, which can link all the instances of direct knowing in our lives; so that perhaps we will become more sensitive to them.
And then, there is the magical power inherent in describing these things to the stranger, the unknown reader, a few cyber-friends scattered across the globe. I can’t talk about these things face to face with anyone. Only in writing, this writing, can I tell the things for which I struggle to find words, yet seem to me profoundly important. In books, sometimes rare ones, they find confirmation. And sometimes I have been drawn to books for the vistas they open and the promises they make, even though I couldn’t understand them.
Perhaps I became intoxicated with the idea of “realization” by a book on Zen that I saw in a shop window in the Latin quarter of Paris. It was Spring and I was twenty, sleeping rough, mostly beside the central-heating boilers of the prestigious École Polytechnique. (You could get in by squeezing through the window-bars.) By day I often sat by a bank of the river Seine, where the beatniks gathered, and that is where I started to read it. Later I obtained shelter with George Whitman at his bookshop “Mistral”, before it was renamed “Shakespeare & Co”.
George had adopted the custom of offering hospitality to writers, not just his friends but strangers who just turned up. The list includes Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Samuel Beckett, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to mention a few I’ve actually heard of. We hardly exchanged a word during the many days I remained there, but one day we had this brief conversation.
“So. What kind of author are you?”
“I’m writing a book on Zen Buddhism.”
I made it up on the spur of the moment, fearing he would throw me out otherwise. He merely grunted. The conversation was over, like one of those enigmatic encounters between master and monk in Zen writings. He resumed the topic days later.
“So why are there so many books on Zen Buddhism? What’s wrong with Mahayana? Why don’t you write about that?”
I was caught off-guard. He may have disbelieved me from the start, but George was notoriously hard to fathom; never exactly friendly, but always good-hearted; never told me to go. Eventually I moved on, left Paris and didn’t return till 1995; and then I knew I must go and see him again. Nothing important had changed. George was still sitting at the till near the entrance, serving customers, most of whom were young and carrying backpacks. I re-introduced myself. Of course he wouldn’t remember me, but I told him of our conversation and confessed that I’d never written that book, hoping he’d absolve me with a smile. But he took it seriously, gave me a penetrating look and said “You have still time. Go and write it.” This was as good as an angel-whispering but I wasn’t tuned to that wavelength in those days.
And so I never gave it another thought till now. He is still right, I do have time, and now would be good. As a point of honour, let me fulfil a promise, no matter how bogus it was at the time, no matter that it was made to someone who died three years ago.
So I thought of starting my theme on the book which inspired it in the first place: La Doctrine Suprême Selon la Pensée Zen by Hubert Benoit. How could I write on this topic on my own, from scratch? Do I know anything except from other people’s books?
When I said to Ellie in a comment on my last, “I deem it time to hold posthumous dialogue with selected authors”, I already had Benoit in mind, He’s a dry and intellectual writer, I want to say “he thinks too much”, but I seem to have spent years in his company, trying to get juice from this book, in which he tries to reconcile “traditional Western metaphysics”, psychotherapy and Zen. What if I summarize his chapters, and then compare them with my own experiences? His entire focus, despite the long-winded path he takes to reach it, is satori, a Zen term which means awakening, or seeing into one’s own true nature.
I started on the task, but didn’t get far. My book wouldn’t be much fun for the reader; it would mean months of drudgery for me as a writer. It suddenly hit me that my true motive was simply to compare Benoit’s notion of satori, as presented specially for Westerners, with the realization that came to me near the traffic lights, on that latest errand to buy the milk. Apart from curiosity, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, for the thing is too simple to describe.
I can only write on my own terms and speak, as I have always done here, from personal experience. There’s Chinese Zen, Japanese Zen, and the efforts of Hubert Benoit & Terence Gray to translate Zen into Western terms. I don’t have anything to say about any of that. The belated promise I made to George Whitman, while his bones lie in the Père Lachaise cemetery, has disappointingly fizzled out within twenty-four hours.
But now I see the glimmer of an honourable way out, via another promise, made to a friend whose opinion I greatly respect, to write an e-book in a series of volumes, a simple omnibus version of this blog, in chronological order. Not exactly a new idea—I’ve been fiddling with it for the last seven years. Not exactly a promise either—I told her I was thinking of doing it, and she said “I’m glad you have taken the decision . . .” which is good as a commitment signed, sealed & pending delivery. It’s something I want to do and am able to do. Suddenly I see it (this blog, in whatever format it’s published) with new eyes, as a kind of Zen diary all along, the record of a mysteriously guided path to I know not where. Will this do, George?
As to what satori is, who has attained it, what disciplines Zen may prescribe, who cares? That’s all second-hand material, fodder for scholars. (Sometimes I like to play at being a scholar.) You and I each live within the horizons of our own landscapes. Here and now is the stage in which we strut, the arena of our developing awareness, with always the choice to live like Lao Tzu’s “good traveller [who] has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving”.
I wondered why I didn’t hear this before, this message so full of meaning. Sometimes one gets decipherable dreams, that tell us something we’re unaware of in waking life. I don’t seem to get those any more. The message comes in a fully waking state, like suddenly encountering a mirror to the soul, or hearing the advice of a kind, wise friend. It was no trance either, for this time I went by car, stopping off at the shop on the way to somewhere else. I’m used to these angel-whisperings, if the term isn’t too fanciful. Over the years I’ve noted in these pages numerous “moments”, and what they seemed to be saying. Sometimes the words come first and the deeper understanding afterwards. Quite a few have occurred on that short stretch of road, near the traffic lights. In an earlier and more Christian age, I might have made a modest roadside shrine there, as if the place were sacred and out of gratitude to Our Lady or other saint. Similar gestures were made in pagan societies.
The inner voice conveyed that I’ve grasped something, It gave me an instant certainty, that the truth revealed in that moment would never go away. A realization had come to stay. It was very similar to that instant healing of ten years ago, referred to in my last; when I knew I was better, definitively and with no lingering shadow of doubt. That certainty has held solid ever since. This time it was the realization that any spiritual quest has been fulfilled; an integration has occurred. There is a profound and tangible inner calm; my restlessness and habitual folly is stilled.
It is apparent that there are magical powers in language, for good and for ill. Words are the mechanism for human thought. To put it crudely, we either manage them or they manage us. It has taken me ten years and half a million published words to reach this point. Of all the magic inherent in language, consider just two aspects: narrative and naming. From our earliest days, stories have held us “spellbound”. They are the connective tissue of memory; memory is the connective tissue that builds the individual sense of “I”. So powerful is language that it can take us beyond experience, and lead us totally astray into confusion and lies: the black magic of propaganda, that we pick up from the ambient culture and reinforce for ourselves. Or, as in the case of these occasional “whisperings”, language can give us wise guidance; much more to the point than anything I ever got from a guru.
And then there is naming. This is where language starts. As soon as there is naming, there is linkage. When the toddler learns to say “dog”, it learns an abstraction. Dogs come in all shapes and sizes, but it learns the quality of “dogness”, which links every member of this class of animals. Perhaps, as we get older, we learn the power of the word “realization”, which can link all the instances of direct knowing in our lives; so that perhaps we will become more sensitive to them.
And then, there is the magical power inherent in describing these things to the stranger, the unknown reader, a few cyber-friends scattered across the globe. I can’t talk about these things face to face with anyone. Only in writing, this writing, can I tell the things for which I struggle to find words, yet seem to me profoundly important. In books, sometimes rare ones, they find confirmation. And sometimes I have been drawn to books for the vistas they open and the promises they make, even though I couldn’t understand them.
Perhaps I became intoxicated with the idea of “realization” by a book on Zen that I saw in a shop window in the Latin quarter of Paris. It was Spring and I was twenty, sleeping rough, mostly beside the central-heating boilers of the prestigious École Polytechnique. (You could get in by squeezing through the window-bars.) By day I often sat by a bank of the river Seine, where the beatniks gathered, and that is where I started to read it. Later I obtained shelter with George Whitman at his bookshop “Mistral”, before it was renamed “Shakespeare & Co”.
George had adopted the custom of offering hospitality to writers, not just his friends but strangers who just turned up. The list includes Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Samuel Beckett, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to mention a few I’ve actually heard of. We hardly exchanged a word during the many days I remained there, but one day we had this brief conversation.
“So. What kind of author are you?”
“I’m writing a book on Zen Buddhism.”
I made it up on the spur of the moment, fearing he would throw me out otherwise. He merely grunted. The conversation was over, like one of those enigmatic encounters between master and monk in Zen writings. He resumed the topic days later.
“So why are there so many books on Zen Buddhism? What’s wrong with Mahayana? Why don’t you write about that?”
I was caught off-guard. He may have disbelieved me from the start, but George was notoriously hard to fathom; never exactly friendly, but always good-hearted; never told me to go. Eventually I moved on, left Paris and didn’t return till 1995; and then I knew I must go and see him again. Nothing important had changed. George was still sitting at the till near the entrance, serving customers, most of whom were young and carrying backpacks. I re-introduced myself. Of course he wouldn’t remember me, but I told him of our conversation and confessed that I’d never written that book, hoping he’d absolve me with a smile. But he took it seriously, gave me a penetrating look and said “You have still time. Go and write it.” This was as good as an angel-whispering but I wasn’t tuned to that wavelength in those days.
And so I never gave it another thought till now. He is still right, I do have time, and now would be good. As a point of honour, let me fulfil a promise, no matter how bogus it was at the time, no matter that it was made to someone who died three years ago.
So I thought of starting my theme on the book which inspired it in the first place: La Doctrine Suprême Selon la Pensée Zen by Hubert Benoit. How could I write on this topic on my own, from scratch? Do I know anything except from other people’s books?
When I said to Ellie in a comment on my last, “I deem it time to hold posthumous dialogue with selected authors”, I already had Benoit in mind, He’s a dry and intellectual writer, I want to say “he thinks too much”, but I seem to have spent years in his company, trying to get juice from this book, in which he tries to reconcile “traditional Western metaphysics”, psychotherapy and Zen. What if I summarize his chapters, and then compare them with my own experiences? His entire focus, despite the long-winded path he takes to reach it, is satori, a Zen term which means awakening, or seeing into one’s own true nature.
I started on the task, but didn’t get far. My book wouldn’t be much fun for the reader; it would mean months of drudgery for me as a writer. It suddenly hit me that my true motive was simply to compare Benoit’s notion of satori, as presented specially for Westerners, with the realization that came to me near the traffic lights, on that latest errand to buy the milk. Apart from curiosity, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, for the thing is too simple to describe.
Before enlightenment: hew wood, draw water. After enlightenment: hew wood, draw water.And the memory of a phrase, from Benoit’s book, I believe, suddenly comes back to me:
D’un seul coup j’ai complètement écrasé la caverne des fantômes.(In one blow, I’ve smashed the cave of ghosts, i.e. stilled the nonsense of the chattering mind).
I can only write on my own terms and speak, as I have always done here, from personal experience. There’s Chinese Zen, Japanese Zen, and the efforts of Hubert Benoit & Terence Gray to translate Zen into Western terms. I don’t have anything to say about any of that. The belated promise I made to George Whitman, while his bones lie in the Père Lachaise cemetery, has disappointingly fizzled out within twenty-four hours.
But now I see the glimmer of an honourable way out, via another promise, made to a friend whose opinion I greatly respect, to write an e-book in a series of volumes, a simple omnibus version of this blog, in chronological order. Not exactly a new idea—I’ve been fiddling with it for the last seven years. Not exactly a promise either—I told her I was thinking of doing it, and she said “I’m glad you have taken the decision . . .” which is good as a commitment signed, sealed & pending delivery. It’s something I want to do and am able to do. Suddenly I see it (this blog, in whatever format it’s published) with new eyes, as a kind of Zen diary all along, the record of a mysteriously guided path to I know not where. Will this do, George?
As to what satori is, who has attained it, what disciplines Zen may prescribe, who cares? That’s all second-hand material, fodder for scholars. (Sometimes I like to play at being a scholar.) You and I each live within the horizons of our own landscapes. Here and now is the stage in which we strut, the arena of our developing awareness, with always the choice to live like Lao Tzu’s “good traveller [who] has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving”.
This is the Square du Vert Galant where I
started to read La Doctrine Suprême.
Click on the photo for a tale about it.
George Whitman, Allen Ginsberg,
Gregory Corso (& an unknown man
in an Afghan coat) some time in the
Seventies at Shakespeare & Co, Paris
An edition which set me off on a long quest
The English translation by Terence Gray
Biography of Terence Gray
former director of a modernist theatre
(the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, 1926-1933)
friend & translator of Hubert Benoit
I believe this man and this book
first sparked Benoit’s interest in Zen
Terence Gray’s first book on Zen published
anonymously under the pseudonym
Wei Wu Wei. I obtained a copy in ’63,
ignorant of his connection to Benoit
From the cover of “All Else is Bondage”,
another book on ‘Realization’ by Terence Gray.
Click for a PDF excerpt.
4 Comments:
Another great post, Vincent.
George at Shakespeare & Co. was right: why write another book about Zen? Surely the whole point of Zen is that you don't 'get' satori by reading a book, or writing a book. All the Zen stories, koans, anecdote,s are about sudden awareness that 'Zen' or satori was there all along, we just didn't notice it because we were too busy reading about it or writing about it or looking for Masters to teach it to us. The Zen Master hits the pupil on the head with a hammer and says: there! Now you've 'got' what Zen is.
Thank you, Natalie. From this, you demonstrate your knack of simplicity---or at any rate, of inducing it in others. For us who are too prone to see details & distinctions multiplying everywhere, you and your art are almost one, witness to wholeness.
And I will find always reason to quibble, as in this case, where I imagine the master in fact gives the pupil a ritual whack with a light bamboo stick when it's least expected, along with an extremely fierce glare.
I come to your posts with no fixed expectation. I have discerned that you are on a journey of developing awareness. Experience has taught me that the material I read here will not be second-hand but unique to the path that you have traveled through life. If you are passing some familiar landmarks, however, you are not circumscribing a circle but ascending a spiral staircase.
With gratitude and appreciation, ellie.
Ellie, I'm sorry I didn't respond to your generous comment earlier. The words still lived in my mind, but I didn't remember to add my thanks.
I agree it's a spiral rather than a circle. Indeed there are familiar landmarks but you're right, they are seen from a different viewpoint. Younger persons than you, Natalie or I may not appreciate the treasure locked up in memories, as long as we still have access to them. It is wonderful to revisit those scenes and see particular details with clearer eyes than the first time round, and draw from them a wisdom which passed over us the first time round.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home