HAVING NO DESTINATION, WE ARE NEVER LOST

Having no destination,
I am never lost.

    --Ikkyū.

I am an iconoclast and a heretic. I reject all claims and assertions of supernatural religion and authority. In the words of Thomas Paine, my own mind is my own church. So, it is no surprise that I have a soft spot—no, not that one—for other iconoclasts, heretics and freethinkers. Ikkyū [pictured left] was one such man. He was a 15th century Japanese Zen Buddhist monk. He not only revitalized Zen but also had a profound influence upon the Japanese tea ceremony. 

Now, Zen has always sought to cut through the crap so as to arrive at a direct, immediate and largely intuitive experience of life, but Ikkyū’s radical approach was really something to behold. He was an iconoclast extraordinaire. In any field of any endeavour we need the man or woman who says, ‘But the Emperor has no clothes!’ That is why I’ve always loved the American comedian Groucho Marx, who spent his entire life deflating the pompous, the pretentious and the phony. We need more people like that.

Here’s the second most profound piece of metaphysical wisdom---there is nowhere to go. I’ve told you this story before, but I’ll tell it again. A young man is on his way home. He comes to the banks of a wide, and very deep, river. He finds he is on the ‘wrong’ side of the river. The river is fast flowing, with numerous rapids. There is no bridge or other means available for crossing the river. The young man sees an elderly Buddhist monk standing on the other side of the river, so he yells over to the monk, ‘Oh, wise one, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this river?’ The monk ponders for a moment, looks up and down the river, and yells back, ‘My son, you are on the other side.’ Yes, wherever we want to 'go', we are already there. The young man wants to get to the other side of the river, only to be told that he is already on the other side of the river. To reach the other side of the river is to see that this very side here is the other side. When there is no separation in our mind between one side and the other, then in that very moment we are one with the very livingness of life flowing through us and all things. 

The author at a Japanese tea ceremony.

And the first most profound piece of metaphysical wisdom is this. Well, it follows directly from the first. It is this---truth is right where you are. People strive for worldly success and for the approval and admiration of others but those things will not take you away from yourself—not for long, anyway. Truth—also known as reality and life—is right where you are. All we need to do is to see things as they really are in all their directness and immediacy. That’s where mindfulness comes in.

Listen to these words from Ikkyū:

Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning -- already gone --
thus should one regard one's self.

The folly and blind hope of supernatural religion is that we are going to live forever in one place or another, with one such place supposedly being more attractive than the other. I do not believe that. We come from dust and to dust we return. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In one sense, we remain part of life’s self-expression—for life cannot other than be. That, as I see it, is the true meaning of those words, ‘The spirit returns to God who gave it’ (Ec 12:7), but I am in absolutely no doubt that at the point of death our consciousness as a separate, thinking, feeling individual together with what we call our personality, comes to an abrupt and very final end. If you want to believe otherwise, that is your prerogative. As I see it, we are, in the words of Ikkyū, like ‘vanishing dew’, a ‘passing apparition’, a ‘sudden flash’. In the words of Shakespeare, taken from what is my favourite play of his, The Tempest:

…       …       …       …     We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Ikkyū is, however, saying more than that. He is making a comment about how we should regard ourselves. Most of us take ourselves far too seriously, thinking that we will be remembered long after we are gone. A few of us will live on longer in the memories of others. As George Eliot expressed it in her poem 'The Choir Invisible':

Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues.

That is very sweet sentiment but the plain and simple truth of the matter is this---most of us will be completely forgotten in two or three generations. How's that for a reality check?

Lake Ashi, Kanagawa Prefecture, Honshū, Japan.

Photo taken by the author.

Ikkyū had much to say about so-called sacred texts. Now, don’t get me wrong. Most sacred texts contain some helpful advice on the art of living—along with a lot of unhelpful and divisive nonsense. The task is to separate the wheat from the staff. Listen to what Ikkyū has to say about sacred texts:

Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure.
Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in and out of the clouds;
Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs night after night.

…       …       …       …

I've burnt all the holy pages I used to carry 
but poems flare in my heart.

The concept of ‘original mind’ in Zen is a most important one. Imagine for a moment that you had not been brought up in the faith or belief system of your parents or particular culture. Indeed, imagine that you had not been inculcated in any way to believe this or that about life. You would then have a mind which was entirely culturally free and unconditioned. Such is the nature of your ‘original mind’. Is it possible to have such a mind today? Well, people such as J. Krishnamurti say that it is indeed possible for the mind to decondition itself entirely. For my part, I am still working on the task.

I love what Ikkyū has to say about poetry. My late father used to say that there was more wisdom in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám than in The Bible. Maybe. Maybe not. I think Dad was telling me more about what he didn’t or couldn’t believe as opposed to which work contained more wisdom. After all, The Bible contains some great poetry as well, and the Book of Ecclesiastes has a similar tone to much of its writing as the Rubáiyát, although the latter does seem to be promoting a more earthy approach to life and its fleeting pleasures.

Take a good look at the religious fanatic. It does not matter which religion he or she is fanatical about. The fanatic has completely lost their original mind. He or she can no longer see and appreciate things as they really are. Everything gets filtered through, and distorted by, their belief system. Yes, the same thing can happen to the atheist and nonbeliever. However, Ikkyū is making the point that any study of sacred or spiritual books, as well as meditative practices, can result in your losing your original mind. One good way of deconditioning your mind, and returning bit by bit to your original mind, is to spend more time communing with nature. That is very good advice.

Well, I haven’t burnt all the ‘holy pages’ in my home library. There are still hundreds and hundreds of books on religion and spirituality, as well as on many other subjects, on my bookshelves. However, I have burnt something, and that something is this---the mindset that says, ‘This, you must believe’, ‘The Bible says …’, ‘God has spoken His final word in …’, and ‘There is only one way … .’

You are never lost when you know the way home. And where is ‘home’? Well, it is right here, where you are now. Look around you. Look within you. What do you see? What do you feel? It is life. You are an expression of the spirit of life. That life did not begin with your birth. It will not end with your death. Recover your original mind, and start seeing and experiencing things as they really are.

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MINDFULNESS IS TASTING THE STRAWBERRY---EVEN IN THE JAWS OF DEATH

Seize the moment! How often we hear those words, yet how rarely do we heed them.

Here’s a Zen kōan that’s all about the importance of seizing the moment. It’s said to be a parable told by the Buddha:

A man travelling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, the man caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

This is a very powerful story. Here’s this man, facing imminent and certain death---and death in a most unpleasant manner---and what does he do? He plucks and eats a strawberry. And how sweet that strawberry tasted!

Now, this is a parable. It has an ‘inner’ meaning, so to speak. The strawberry represents the present moment which before we know it becomes the past. The tiger above the man is birth, and the tiger below is the man’s imminent death—and our death as well. And what of the mice some of which are black and the others white? As I see it, they represent our days on this planet. Some days are good (‘white’) while others are, well, terrible (‘black’). Remember the words of Omar Khayyám [pictured below]? ‘Tis all a Chequer-board of nights and days.' Black or white, the mice symbolise the passage of our days while we are here on earth. Sooner or later the mice will gnaw through the vine of our life's breath and then ... death. Yes, life is damn short, even if many of us are living longer than in years past. Here are some more lines from Omar Khayyám:

Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain — This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

 

Mindfulness is living with awareness, and being fully and consciously present, from one moment to the next. Life is all the more precious by reason of the fact that we will ultimately lose it. ‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?’, asks the dead Emily in Thornton Wilder’s wonderful play Our Town. Sadly, most of us don’t. Most of us live mindlessly. We don’t really live. We don’t even exist---we subsist. In the words of Thoreau, we ‘lead lives of quiet desperation,’ and go the grave not having ever known the joy of living with choiceless awareness of the present moment.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating hedonism. Not at all. I am simply asserting that living mindfully is better than the alternative. Facing certain and imminent death our hero in the parable continues to live mindfully. He looks. He observes. He tastes. In similar circumstances I suspect that most of us would not even see the strawberry, and if we did few of us would have any interest in eating it. ‘How can I think of eating at a time like this?’, I hear myself saying.

Seize the moment ... before it’s too late.

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The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (for copies, click here) is said to be one of the ten best known poems in the world. At any rate it is doubtful whether any other piece of Oriental literature has been as widely read, and as much loved, in the Western world as The Rubaiyat.

When I was growing up as a kind we had two copies of The Rubaiyat in our home – one which had been my late mother’s (bought, I think, before her marriage to my father), and one which was my late father’s (similarly bought before their marriage). Nothing was ever thrown out in our household. My wife would say, “Nothing has changed there, unfortunately.”

I still have my mother’s copy of The Rubaiyat (see copy of its cover below) but my Dad gave his copy away to a very dear friend of his - a devout Catholic - not long before his (Dad’s) death, with the remark, “This book makes more sense to me than what your Church teaches.”

My father was not a formally religious man, but he was the most honest person, and one of the wisest, I’ve ever known. He often said that there was more wisdom in The Rubaiyat than in The Bible. I won’t go into that. All I’ll say is this ... there is, in my view, much less that is culture-bound, and thus irrelevant to our times, in The Rubaiyat than in The Bible.

The question of whether or not the Persian poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam (pictured below) was a Sufi mystic is a hotly contested issue. My view is that of Edward J FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat’s most famous English translator and interpreter, who wrote: “No doubt many of these Quatrains seem unaccountable unless mystically interpreted; but many more as unaccountable unless literally. Were the Wine spiritual, for instance, how wash the Body with it when dead? Why make cups of the dead clay to be filled with—‘La Divinité’ by some succeeding Mystic?”

I don’t think that Khayyám was either a Sufi mystic or a promoter of Epicurean hedonism. To me, he was an early exponent of, and apologist for, Mindfulness and, in particular, the practice of mindful living, that is, living mindfully and consciously in the present moment - in other words, simply being aware of the fact that each moment spent wisely, and with awareness, is to live in the now, and to be truly present in and fully engaged in the moment. Take, for example, this well-known quatrain:

The caravan of life shall always pass
Beware that is fresh as sweet young grass
Let’s not worry about what tomorrow will amass
Fill my cup again, this night will pass, alas.

Note those words ... “fresh as sweet young grass”. You can almost smell the grass, yet how ephemeral it is. Then we have this:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

The bird is “on the Wing”. Watch it fly away ... it will, of course! Further, as is written in another quatrain, “The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.” Observe them both, without judgment, condemnation or fear, for is it not the case that ...

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

So, what are we to do? How are we to live? Here, in my view, is some good advice:

Look to the Rose that blows about us—"Lo,

Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow:

At once the silken Tassel of my Purse

Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw."

Living mindfully means that we accept the fact that everything is in the process of becoming a dissolution ... yes, everything is in a state of flux. All is transitory and will eventually vanish from view. So, as the American Unitarian Universalist minister and former head of Amnesty International, Dr William Schulz, points out, “the paradox of life is to love it all the more even though we ultimately lose it.”

That is what makes this present moment so very special. So let us engage with it ... with a whole-body-and-mind awareness. When we do that, and interfere with nothing, strangely our minds become free from all limitations, fetters and bonds.

So, in the words of Omar Khayyám, "Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life."

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