Roger Weir presents Ritual 6: Euripides And Genji
Ritual 6: Euripides And Genji
Roger Weir came to the Bodhi tree Bookstore in May 2000 to present his lecture Ritual 6, entitled Euripides and Genji. This is one out of a series of 104 lectures of the Differential Consciousness Educational Course. It was chosen as an example of the depth and style of his presentation and serves as an introduction to his work.
Roger Weir, a former university lecturer, began his visionary work on the history of ideas, or as he calls it, "the yoga of civilization", in 1955. Out of this grew his two year educational course, Differential Consciousness. It is offered as a 21st century education. Based on transformed ancient Eastern and Western wisdom traditions, the course embraces nature, ritual, mythology, symbolism, vision, art, history, and science. Consciousness, in all its aspects, is deeply explored. His educational course reflects his conviction that our civilization, following Greek and Roman models, has reached a point of crisis and no future exists without the emergence of something new. That something new is Weir’s Differential Consciousness Educational Course. Weir explores themes that span traditional wisdom school philosophies and their potential contribution to a future civilization. He emphatically states that we desperately need to develop a capacity for freedom to come into wholeness.
Weir's narrative challenges us to learn and understand in new ways. For example, he develops themes of "pairedness," "shared presence," “harmonic relationships,” and “complementarity.” He uses a poetic language, an extensive vocabulary, and weaves his narrative with a storytellers cadence designed to transform the mental process. In Educator Roger Weir’s unique, transformational educational course, he introduces a Planetary History of possibilities, featuring some of the rarest people, greatest ideas and best visions. Weir presents a progressive narrative of our humanity with startling images, symbols, art and science revealing our most esoteric and most sublime visionary wisdom development.
Roger Weir's Differential Consciousness Educational Course is designed as a two-year program of one lecture per week, four phases or parts per year (following the seasons), for a total of eight phases and 104 lectures. Each phase consists of twelve lectures followed by an "interval" lecture (thirteen lectures mirroring the Pythagorean tradition of Wisdom Tradition teaching). The Differential Consciousness Educational Course includes a comprehensive reading list, a list of accompanying music, and a list of movies that enhance the flow of narrative in each phase of the education.
The first year of four phases is the integral cycle: Nature, Ritual, Myth, Symbol. The second year of four phases is the differential cycle: Vision, Art, History, Science. Together they present a pattern (eight fold mirroring an octave) providing a comprehensive understanding and disclosure of the natural and supra-natural. Roger Weir fills in the gaps and inter-relational spaces that have developed in the contemporary world. The Differential Consciousness education restores the consciousness of this background and the requisites of human character commensurate with the restoration. The participant/student enters into a living algorithmic form of coming into maturity/wholeness.
The following is the complete text of Roger Weir's presentation of Ritual 6, Euripides and Genji.
Roger Weir: We're coming to the center of the second of the phases and these phases have a very special relationship. I was talking earlier to someone saying that the ideas and themes-the motifs-using a Wagnerian term for a moment-the motifs are arranged like hairs so that they're able, finally, to be combed out and braided so that you can take any series of any year of this education and find a way to braid it with the other one. The educational implications of this are ancient, but the utilization that I'm bringing into play is new. It's never been done before in this way and I thought that I would work into the lecture today-into the presentation-a little bit of the philosophy of learning that accompanies this particular technique. And it fits into the lecture today.
For those of you who are acquainted and coming in the regular way, you know that our educational cycle follows the seasons-four different seasons for a year-and in keeping with an ancient tuning fork structure, we use a pair of years, so that you have four and four, you have an eight-part or eight-phase cycle, but, the second year, the second cycle, does not fit over the first, but pairs with it, along the side of it. And what would have been a circle repeated ritually as another circle, changes its structure so that the two circles come together in such a tangential way that they touch at one and one point only and together make an infinity sign rather than two circles. When wisdom follows the cycle of a natural year, we recognize that this is a deep wisdom. In the Asian tradition-we're going to be talking about Asia today-it's called 'dharma.' But, when the cycle is paired like that, so that there's an infinite openness that's possible, that goes cosmically beyond nature, it's no longer called dharma, but it's called 'high dharma.' And, so this education is a high dharma, it's a 21st Century presentation of the best technique that our species has for learning. Not just learning how to fit into nature, but, how to recalibrate ourselves so that we can be in any nature and find a way to be real within our lives. And so it's good for a species who's ready to go, not only outside of the sandbox of a particular province where you might live, or city, or even country, but, even planet. And, so an education like this is good for a star system-wide inhabitance. And, good for any star system. So, it's new and it's ready; its time is coming very quickly.
The difference between a dharma and a high dharma is that a dharma always has an image base and a high dharma has no image whatsoever. So, that in the natural cycle, integration is the mode of what's happening and images will, through the medium of a language, acquire deep enough correspondences so that they 'interiorize' and further integrate into ideas. And so ideas are very common, very ordinary in the integral nature of beings like ourselves. We think. And our thinking generally comes out of our feeling tone range of experience, which is where the images play. And what our education is looking at is how, at this particular point-at Ritual 6-is that how those images occur out of the existential action of our bodies and of material things. That the movement of our bodies, in a world of things, in this ritual comportment, this action, this activity, existence flames into the language which carries the images which are interior pictures of things which have an exteriority, a materiality.
But, at the same time as learning this kind of traditional way of integration, because we have a whole other strategy, a completely different strategy-something which people of our species have been doing for several thousand years now-we have a differential strategy as well as the integral. And so we're learning in the first year to follow nature and to integrate, but we're also learning that, in tandem with nature is consciousness and that consciousness is not integral in its mode at all, but differential. And so it takes a modicum of patience to be able to allow for this pairing-the integral and the differential-to come into play and were we to do it in a strict sequence, the differential would be co-opted into an idea of the differential and we would never be able to find our way out.
So, we sabotage the limiting structure of the idea of differential consciousness before we get to it by introducing high dharma, no image qualities, as early as now, Ritual 6
The quality of an image which is there is important in integration, whereas in differentiation, it's important to have the liminal boundedness of the place where an image would be, but is not, that it was there-we had an image and now the image is gone and so the liminal boundaries present a form of no image. And this is not difficult at all; it goes back to Paleolithic wisdom, of the hand which is dipped into your iron oxide or your ochre or your soot and you make a representation-an image of the hand on the rock, the cave. That's an image of that hand.
But, you can, in a different way, take the material of the color and mulch it with the saliva in your hand and hold your hand against the rock and blow the material on that, so that when you take the hand away, it leaves a negative print-out. It leaves a no-image of the hand, which has a particular kind of a quality. If we try to hold an image of the hand in a no-image differential, we fall into illusion automatically. There's no way that this will not happen. It's not a function of ignorance, it's a function of intelligence. This is how intelligence works. Intelligence, in order to have its operative nature effective, must integrate. The mind, in order to be its mind, has to integrate: it has to see images and, from images, it has to integrate into ideas and out of this comes a synthesizing symbol-a synthesizing idea and that is of our sounds. The eye within integrally developed from the eye without. So that the image and the self-conception, very natural, always happens, does happen-this is the way the mind works when its brain-based, when perception and conception are cognate.
But, there is a very peculiar quality that occurs which in the kind of language that we would speak ordinarily in our time, there is a way in which the idea of self evaporates. It integrates to the point of vanishing. It implodes. And in that radical state, implosion vanishing, what is left is a stencil, no image print-out of who we thought we were and it is clear now that we are not that, were not that, but, that we have made some identification where we believed that that was who we were-that identity.
At this point, consciousness begins to occur and consciousness is different from ideas. Ideas are always integral. Consciousness is differential and works on a recognition rather than on cognition. As long as you are habituated ritually to a cognitive, integral science-as is so-called-you will never understand consciousness, or understand consciously the person in the cosmos. It just won't occur. What you will always have are increasingly convenient ideas about these things-representations conceptually about these things, but not the quality itself.
So, in this education process that we're doing now, while we have pairs of books that we use all the time-every month, they change, to a new pair of books. These pairs of books are like a pitch-pipe that tunes a choir to sing. They're a registry for us for that month, for that lunar cycle, to bring together two very powerful books which generally, in the course of our civilization, in the course of our history, anyone in each one of these books have been used as texts to develop the integral mind to make very powerful ideas, to make powerful ideas that have re-cut and stylized nature into shapes of human culture and human civilization which are of baffling complexity today.
And, generally, in history, all of this would be fine. The only times when it's not fine is when it no longer works and there are times in human history where men and women like ourselves have lived on the cusp, as we do now, today, the Year 2000-lived on the cusp where one old form of civilization didn't work anymore and a new one was not there yet. Now, these are not lost generations so much as invisible generations. Because the people who-the men and women who find 'themselves' do not find identities; they find the negative print-out, no image, no mind, no identity, which has liminal boundaries of exploration rather than any kind of traditional way of fixing. And, so instead of being fixed, there is rather a resonance of an infinite mobility that characterizes such men and women and they learn that there's a different scale of freedom, that there is a freedom to be real rather than just a freedom of choice. And that freedom of choice is very low on the rung of achievement. And to have freedom of choice between 'A' and 'B,' between polarities-you can vote for 'A' or you can vote for 'B'-the entire entourage of that kind of choice level is absurd to the differential consciousness. One may not need a leader, much less 'A' or 'B.' It isn't a question of choosing 'C' or 'D' or 'none of the above'-it may be differentially determinable in consciousness, in high dharma, that this is a time for no leadership, but, by participation of all.
One saw such a thing in the India of the middle of the 20th Century-the past century-where the high dharma political movement in India prized what they called 'Sarvodaya'. 'Sarva' means oral service, service to all-Sarvodaya-that nothing would be done in the village unless there was unanimous consent. Everyone had to be heard from and that an action was taken not on the basis of majority rules, but, on unanimity. Now, to the integral mind, unanimity is impossible, yet, there were Bhagavad Gita spirit warriors 70 or 80 years ago who found ways to make Sarvodaya a way of life for 70 or 80 million people.
When it was founded, Sarvodaya-the Gandhian technique of Sarvodaya-was founded on Satyagraha-'graha,' grasp; 'sat,' truth-truth in the sense of having sat and heard. The 'shad' in Upanishad is very close to the 'sat' in Satyagraha: Truth-holding. But not truth-holding in an integral way-truth-holding in a conscious Gestalt, where there's no integral shape, but, there is a differential range of possibility that occurs. So, that such social movements, instead of the laws of Manu or the Khasthra warrior ethic of politics, used the Bhagavad Gita as a karma yoga workbook.
How do we do without condensing it into ideas compacted of images with identities serving with authority in majority or at least power roles-how does anything get done? And, of course, this is high dharma-how it gets done. That the alternative is not an alternative as like another choice, but, is a completely over-reaching eclipse of the entire realm in which integration happens exclusively at all.
Now, 1200 years ago in Asia, all of this was daily conversation among men and women, in China and in Japan. This is the way that men and women who were refined and learned talked 1200 years ago. This was the high dharma of the East Asia civilization that changed at that time and we're focusing-because one of our books-one of our pairs of texts is the great classic novel of Japan, The Tale of Genji and we're pairing it with the Greek tragedy by Euripides, the Bacchae. Euripides and Genji. And Lady Murasaki wrote 1000 years ago. And all of this is relevant, as they used to say 30, 40 years ago-it's all relevant because Lady Murasaki came from one of the most powerful clans in Japan-the Fujiwaras-and she wrote The Tale of Genji around 1020 A.D.
That period of Japanese history, if you were to look at a volume 1 of 6 of the new Kingbridge History of Japan published 1999-is called 'Heian Japan.' The Heian Dynasty started in 794 and went to 1185. So, Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji is the great epic of the Heain Dynasty and comes right in the middle of the Heian Dynasty. And the Fujiwara clan is extremely important because one of her ancestors was the man who founded the capital city that became the center of the world for Japan. The Heian capital city was called, when it first founded in 793 A.D., Heian Kyo and today it's called Kyoto. And it was the founding of a new kind of civilization in Japan, one they had never seen before. And it was modeled, at the time-794- as the Japanese will always do, they pick the best in the world and then they model their version of it and then they improve the imitation until it becomes as refined as humanly possible. The Japanese Heian Dynasty used Chinese civilization as its model and then they improved on it until Lady Murasaki's time, it became like ace perfect, even beyond what the Chinese were able to accomplish.
When Kyoto was founded in 793 by a distant ancestor of Lady Murasaki, the greatest city in the world was in China, the great capital of China-the T’ang China. Just as Heian, Japan is the great golden age of Japanese, the T’ang Dynasty was the great golden age of Chinese history. And the best city in the world, by far at that time, was the capital of T’ang, China-it's called Chang’an and Chang’an was in its day at that time what New York City was in the 20th Century. It was just the greatest city on earth. It was where everything went to happen and so they modeled Kyoto on Chang’an. They wanted to have their version and by Lady Murasaki's time, Kyoto had become so refined, the society there using the Chinese model had become so refined and complex as to be one of the great wonders of the world and The Tale of Genji records the population of people who had become used to a civilization based upon a no image, no mind that just played with the image world and some 7 or 800 years after Lady Murasaki, when the Japanese were looking for a way to adjust to the incursion of the West, they went back to this images of the floating world and made the Ukiyo-e prints.of Hokusai and Hiroshigi and so forth. Going back to their own genus, their own origins because they had transformed China one time and the Ukiyo-e prints-the Japanese prints-were the beginning move of Japan digesting the West to a point of ace perfect, being able to then lead it. And the Japanese had done in Lady Murasaki's time.
Now, one of the curious qualities in all of this is that, whenever you use a differential consciousness to recalibrate the spectrum of possibilities, you bring into play all of the elements that are there, whether you knew that they were there or not. And, the T’ang Dynasty and the China of its great heyday in Chang’an, had a secret esoteric element that almost nobody knew about and almost nobody was conscious about for a very long time-more than a thousand years.
We have to, for just a second, go back to the founding of the T’ang Dynasty. The emperor-his name in Chinese, Li Shimin was always known in Chinese history after founding the T’ang, as Tang Tai-tsung. He was the Augustus Caesar of the Chinese empire-the real Cosimo De Medici of the Chinese civilization-and later on became a figure in mythical proportions in Chinese novels. When Tang Tai-tsung founded Chang’an-Chang’an had been the capital for the Han Dynasty some 900 years before Tang Tai-tsung-and under the Han-the Han were the Chinese Romans-they had spread almost to Persia and went from the Pacific Ocean deep into the Gobi Desert and when Tang Tai-tsung founded the T’ang, he wanted to not only do what the Han had done, but, to go further. And so Tang Tai-tsung is the one who extended China from Siberia to Vietnam and all the way to the edges of the Roman Empire in the West and sought to incorporate Japan as an inclusion; the military expeditions were unable to conquer Japan and eventually Japan kept its independence.
But, Chang’an, being the center of this vast, international, inter-cultural world, had emissaries from almost every place in the known world. And the Chinese, in fact, had sent whole fleets of naval ships out along almost all of the shores of the planet. There was a great scare about 90 years ago when a Chinese stone anchor was found in San Diego Bay that was brought by Chinese ships that came along the California and Mexican coasts around the 400s A.D. and some of the Mayan features look very much like Chinese blood in the genome. And there are many mysteries yet to come. There was once a Chinese Admiral Ho Ma known as Cheng Ho in the 1400s, and Ma Huan who compiled an enormous book called, The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores [Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores (1433), translated by J. V. G. Mills, 1970 Cambridge Univ Pr. for the Hakluyt Society] and he meant every shore on the planet-that the Chinese had been everywhere and had mapped all of those. Unfortunately for him, it was a generation that decided that ships were too expensive and the Chinese moth-balled their navy and they were never a naval power again until just recent generations.
They came within an inch of colonizing Europe. They sent fleets of 100 ships at a time to Africa. The African xylophone comes from Indonesia by way of Chinese traders. And then they stopped. And it's characteristic of Chinese civilization to get to a level of incredible facility and then to be satisfied with that and stop. Like in the great Science and Civilization in China volumes-some 20 plus huge, thick volumes published by Cambridge University Press-Joseph Needham-discovered in the records of Taoist monasteries, that they had discovered the mathematical techniques of calculus some 800 years before Newton [Sir Isaac Newton] and Liebniz [Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]. They used calculus as an intellectual discipline in the Taoist monasteries to develop differential consciousness as a yoga and not as a scientific application mathematically.
So that the Chinese characteristic: go so far and then stop. And the Japanese, using the Chinese model, also came-- by swallowing that as a model-came to have this quality of perfecting everything to that certain point and then, that was it. And, so there's a technique limitation in the application which comes out and reads out to someone not in that particular ethos as a lack of creativity.
But, the time that we're talking about-the Heian Dynasty-where Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji is at the center of that whole development-Kyoto, based upon Chang’an-one of the most incredibly characteristic qualities of Tang Tai-tsung's Chang’an was that it's religious-they used to use the term 'syncretic'-every religion in the world was presented together-it was like ancient Alexandria. So that the city was cosmopolitan. It didn't belong to any tradition-all traditions were not only woven together, but, they were woven into a glistening fabric that glowed phosphorescently in the dark so that you had magical qualities and one of the most esoteric elements in the Chang’an of Tang Tai-tsung was that there was an esoteric Christianity woven into the Taoism and Buddhism of the day.
In fact, in Chang’an, in the great imperial city outline-the imperial city of Beijing-is a miniscule imitation of the imperial city of Chang’an. Kyoto has a much better-it has about a 1:6 scale-the Imperial Palace grounds in the founding of Kyoto was based exactly on Chang’an-it was about six times smaller-and there in the great capital grounds of Chang’ an, Ti Song had a great slab-a stone stele raised to this most esoteric of religions and it is called the Nestorian Monument because there were Nestorian Christians in the T’ang Dynasty at that time. The Nestorian Documents And Relics In China, published in Tokyo in 1951. The Nestorian Monument of Hsi-an Fu. Chang’an today is known as Xi’an. What does it read-this great Rosetta Stone of religious transformation? It reads of esoteric Christianity as the transform for Buddhist Taoist differential consciousness. That esoteric Christianity should be the secret transform of Buddhist Taoist differential consciousness is an absolute astounding realization. It says on the stele, 'It is acknowledged that there was one unchangeable, true and still the first and unoriginated incomprehensible, in his intelligence and simplicity, the last and mysteriously existing, who with his hands operating in the mysterious abyss of space, proceeded to create and by his spirit, give existence to all the holy ones, himself the great, adorable, was this not our Aloha, with his marvelous being, free and one unoriginated true lord.'
So, that in the center of Chang’an is this great monument that Tang Tai-tsung had to esoteric Christianity and the Japanese who came to study there, took this back to Japan with them and there was an exact copy of that Nestorian monument in Chang’an raised in one of the suburb areas of Kyoto and just north of what Heian Kyo was at the time-now a part of larger Kyoto, because it's a huge metropolis-but in the Heian era there was a mountain, Mount Hiei and nearby, Mt. Kōya, endearingly called Kōyasan--sometimes the temples there are called Kōyasan and esoteric Tantric Buddhist Taoist with a Christianity from an ancient Nestorian branch secretly worked into it. And here in Los Angeles, you can go down to 342 East First Street because there's a Kōyasan Temple--a branch of that one there.
Manley P. Hall once went to the great Kōyasan Temple-the esoteric Tantric Buddhist monument outside of Kyoto-went up the flights of steps that were as wide as football stadiums and all the way up to the top-hundreds and hundreds of them-and there the central sacred center of the entire realization-you had to bend down in order to go inside and when you went inside, as your eyes became used to the almost complete darkness, you saw that there were no images of anything in there whatsoever-it was empty. There were no Buddhas there because, at the very center of this esoteric Buddhism was a vanishing point that vanished out of the Buddhist ethos were there were statues of the Buddha and emerged into an esoteric Christianity which was still Jewish that there should be no graven images of God. And so one has to go back to an esoteric Hellenistic Judaism in order to understand why Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji staggered the world at the time and made of Japan one of the great esoteric essays in differential consciousness.
It's curious because one of the greatest critics in the T’ang Dynasty of Buddhism, which had come to inhabit hundreds of thousands of monks in monasteries and places, had sapped almost all of the available gold to make Buddhist statues. There was enough gold in the Buddhist statues of one of the leading Buddhist monasteries at the time that it held a sizable fraction of the total amount of gold in all of China. So that there should be some critic saying, 'We've got to melt these golden Buddhas down and get the gold back into make the economy run again.' Also was one of the discoverers that there was an esoteric hidden vanishing no-image quality to Buddhism and that critic-his name was Han Yin-became one of the great apologists who founded the realization that there was such a thing as Chan Buddhism, which became Zen in Japan. No mind. More after we take a break. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
[There is a 15 minute break. Roger Weir returns to the speaker’s platform and continues his presentation]
Ancient Japan and ancient Greece and us here at the beginnings of a whole new time form, trying to find some traction to learn and one of the perspicacious cues for us is the closing lines from a film that Robert Zemekis did, 'Back to the Future,' where Christopher Lloyd shows up in his super-car from the far future, Michael J. Fox's character says, 'Well, what kind of roads do they have there?' And Christopher Lloyd says, 'Ah, we don't need roads,' and the wheels fold under and the car shoots off into space. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] We don't need roads anymore. If we're going to be at home in the stars, we have to stop paving our way. That's why the spirit has wings.
Here's an excerpt that heads chapter 8 of the new 1999 Cambridge History of Japan. Chapter 8, 'Religious Practices,' and this is all about ritual. It reads, 'Upon arising, first of all, repeat seven times, in a low voice, the name of the star of the year. Take up a mirror and look at your face to scrutinize changes in your appearance then look at the calendar and see whether the day is one of good or evil omen. Next, use your toothbrush and then, facing west, wash your hands. Chant the name of the Buddha and invoke those gods and divinities whom we ought always to revere and worship. Next, make a record of the events of the previous day. Now, break your fast with rice gruel, comb your hair once every three days-not every day. Cut your fingernails on the Day of the Ox or your toenails on the Day of the Tiger. If the day is auspicious, now bathe, but only once every fifth day.' This is from the testamentary admonitions of Fujiwara no Morosuke and he was a very close relative of Lady Murasaki.
The ritual comportment is the glue by which existence stabilizes and keeps cognitively familiar and tends to become unglued to the extent that consciousness enters into free play, so that ritual is suspicious of freedom-not from any kind of ideatonal stance, which integrational learning always mistakes, but because of its very nature. And the body learns to trust the stability of the world ritually and so bodies become nervous to the extent that things might be unsettled. And the neurosis is a living in an unsettled condition without wings.
So that this whole quality in our education, now-Ritual 6, is to set ourselves to appreciate how genuinely difficult it is to learn past the stage of integration of mind with ideas. It's very difficult because that threshold is like a barrier and that barrier firms up with anxiety the closer we approach to it so that it's rather like the classic breaking of the sound barrier. There was a beautiful presentation of it in the movie, 'The Right Stuff'-where a great modern playwright, Sam Shephard, is playing Chuck Yeager, the jet pilot who broke the sound barrier October 14, 1947 and before then, the worry was that maybe no one can go through this because sound becomes like a brick wall at that speed and that, in the old Air Force jet pilot parlance, a demon lives in the air at the speed of sound and if you hit that, you're going to disintegrate. Your instruments won't work, you can't go through it. A couple of hundred years from now, when the light barrier is surpassed, it'll have a similar kind of anxiety and quality for those people about six or seven generations down the line.
The quality of appreciation of the fearfulness of the limnality of freedom is an essential strategy which a spiritual education encourages for the people, for all of us. We all share and participate in that. And yet, the most trusted stabilities are from the ritual level and it is those trusted stabilities in especial that have to be let go at a moment where consciousness springs free. And so there is a paradox involved. The very use, here, in Fujiwara no Morosuke admonitions about holding the mirror to one's face-this is a yogic technique that comes from Hellenistic Judaism, by way of the esoteric Nestorian Christianity comes into Japan with the development of the Heian Dynasty and by the time this was written, in the 950s, 960s A.D., it was a part of just the daily work in discipline; they wouldn't have known that there was such a thread even viable in going there and yet it was. If you're looking for the classic Hellenistic Jewish presentation of it, it's in the 'Odes of Solomon,' it's the 13th Ode. That 'Ode of Solomon' says, 'Look in your mirror and see that this face is painted in such a way that you can wipe the paint off and just so the face that you assume is there.' Can be wiped off. And when you stand with no face, showing the mirror, then you're ready to praise God, because you have no graven image in the way.
This kind of esotericism, like another aspect of this thing from Fujiwara no Morosuke, 'Make a record of your events of the previous day.' That kind of a retrospective diary is a Pythagorean technique from around 2500 B.C., which became folded into Hellenistic Judaism at the time of the Teacher of Righteousness and the founding of Quamran and the esoteric Essene movements and quickly went into the Therapeutae communities in Alexandria [De vita contemplativa by philosopher Philo of Alexandria]and became just a part of the way in which the Hellenistic Judaism of the early first century C.E. had its no mind, no-image Gestalt of differential consciousness. But, it was received in a recognition mode by Tang Tai-tsung in China and by a recognition mode imitation in the Han Dynasty in Japan. Where did that recognition come from? Where was the seed for that? And the seed for that is that Hellenistic Judaism is carried to South India by Thomas, the Apostle Thomas, to that district known as Kerala, near the tip of South India. And he went there about 41 A.D., 41 C.E. and within 50 years of that you find the Buddhism of India has gone through a sea change, not because of contact with the Greek ethos-the Greeks were in India in a very powerful way from Alexander's time, from the 300s B.C. There were Greek kingdoms in northwest India for hundreds of years-400 years before you find the Mahayana expression of Buddhism-a complete transform of it. It's not a Greek Buddhism, it's a Hellenistic Jewish Buddhism. The first document in the Mahayana, written by Ashvaghosa, 90 A.D.-at the same time as the Gospel of John was written, at the same time as the hermetic Poimander is written. The title of the Ashvaghosa's book, The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana [Mahậyậna-sraddotpậda-shậstra]. The Platonic and Pythagoreans did not talk about faith. It's a Hellenistic Jewish concept to have faith in the Mahayana. And sraddhā [Sanskrit for faith] and pistis [Greek for faith] are so ambidextrously there that, later on in the development of the high dharma of the Mahayana, you find the Hellenistic Jewish cosmic person inhabiting the same kind of glow that the Purusha in the Bhagavad Gita exhibited and does exhibit and out of that came the great ideal of the Bodhisattva, of the cosmic person who is a helper to all, who, like a messenger angel, comes to help, to encourage and to mature.
And so by the time of Tang Tai-tsung and setting up the great stele in Chang’an, after 500 years of this acquaintance in Asia that had built through the Prajnaparmita Hridaya Sutra [Heart Sutra] literature for centuries and had come to be the prize vision at the founding of the T’ang Dynasty, the esoteric Hellenistic Jewish-Christian were so structurally expressive of the vanishing synthesizing core of Buddhism and Taoism that there was no way to disentangle them and why would you? So that when the Heian Dynasty founded Kyoto on this kind of a basis, the whole center of concern was to make a ritual comportment that does not tie you to a pride in this world, but releases you to the spiritual vision of a cosmos beyond this world which has a concern of nourishing this world just the same. And so you find the great perfection sect of Japanese Buddhism-the Tien-Tai-heavenly, the great heaven-became in Japan Tendai and that this Tendai, this heavenly perfection, is exemplified in the ritual of transform that one has. One goes to this sacred mountain at night, with a friend-you go in pairs-spiritual friend pairs-and around the circumference of this mountain are 100 stations and the yoga is in a single night with your spiritual friend to make a check-in at all 100 stations so that you arrive at the beginning at dawn. And it takes a tremendous athletic discipline to be able to just physically do this. It takes a seamlessnes of mind so that you allow this to just happen continuously because if you try to introduce the idea of the pilgrimage, the idea of the sacred into the activity, it produces minute glitches that forbid you from accomplishing and you do not make the circuit; you can't make it. You can't physically make the circuit and yet thousands of people do it all the time. And they make it by no mind. By specifically not thinking about it while they do it. Zen. But, there has to be some way in which that can inform the society of ritual. Can inform the culture of mind. It has to bear some relationality to it. The all-time great time example of that is Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji. She is consummate in her.appreciation of the delicacy of not being too delicate with life. And so she is like.a meta-Japanese Jane Austen. She understands how it is that human life is this incredible dramatic texture of interchange between people on all kinds of levels and concerns; a seething, pulsing membrane of interchange and that all the time, there's this floating world of transcendence that allows for this to happen and that if you have a participation in that kind of a cosmic mystery, then the exchange and interchange becomes a seamless drama of true life and the vicissitudes are not meant to defeat or encourage at all, but, to simply occur on the level of appearance because the truth registers on the levels beyond appearance. And that this is in no way a meta-realm; it is simply the true realm, where our reality occurs.
And so we find, at the time of the founding of Heian Kyo, of Kyoto, of the Heian Dynasty, with the Fujiwara clan and Lady Murasaki, exactly at the time you find the seeds of a Japanese version of drama that later on becomes Noh drama, Nō plays: Zen theater. And though the seeds are there at the time of the founding of Kyoto, the moving of the old Japanese imperial society from Nara to Kyoto. The old capital to the new capital. Of moving from Nara to Kyoto; of moving from a kind of peasant agricultural society, a community that goes back into the distant reaches of agrarian origins, at a level of culture where Shinto shrines in nature are the way in which rituals node their traction. That the nodes of effective registry that, 'We've done this; this is how we do this,' that ritual action is tied into the boughs of nature places where one sends up shrines-Shinto shrines-and the transformation from Shinto shrine to Buddhist temple happens at the founding of Kyoto. Which is why you do not find so many Shinto shrines in Kyoto, but, you find Buddhist temples everywhere. And yet the archetypal Buddhist temple at the top of Mount Hiei is a Buddhist temple whose altar is a Shinto shrine [Enryaku-ji monastery]-a place where there are no Buddha images whatsoever; there are no fantastic paintings. There's no raked sand, even. It's a building that holds open nodes. Like nature shrines do. The old habitation of Zeus where the oak groves of Dodona. And Zeus inhabited Dodona only when the dignitary aspect was in play with the winds of that ancient Arcadia; then Dodona was a prophetic place where Zeus now manifested in the divination. Otherwise Zeus was Sky God, through electrical energy like lightning bolts. But, came to earth in the groves-the oak groves of Dodona. When the wind rustled the trees in a certain way, one could hear, if one knew how to hear the weaving of those sounds, one could get the prophecies of Zeus from that sound-the rustling of a few leaves in an oak grove. And, there's a poignancy. If one went to Ojai in the days when Krishnamurti was lecturing under the oaks-Minor's Oaks in Ojai-and you were amazed that there was no wind blowing and there was no sound and that that was the true divantory context within which a Krishnamurti would speak. And all of these kinds of paradoxes-all of these juxtapositions which would never happen in nature happen in our consciousness as a matter of course because consciousness has a ratioed reality rather than an existential reality.
We put together images that would not occur in nature at all and, by juxtaposing them in new ways, we creatively discover facets and aspects that were never going to be there and are only there because we now are doing them. And, so freedom turns out to be a very huge cosmic thing and that we carry that capacity in this universe. In the epistle to the Hebrews, written in Alexandria, one of the pinnacles of Hellenistic Jewish wisdom, the writer-teacher says, 'Man is much higher than angels. Which of the angels inherits the house of God? They're just messengers. But, man is of the family. He inherits the whole estate and can pass it on to his children.' So, that man is wondrous-beyond devils and angels, both. And that this capacity needs to be disclosed in a discovery of freedom and cannot come to reside in any kind of stability that an integral would establish. So that bodies and minds are incapable of being the altars of spiritual freedom. They, at best, can present an alignment which allows for that threshold to be disclosed. When the historical Buddha would describe himself, he never called himself 'Buddha'-never. The appellation that he used vis-à-vis himself was Tathāgata. 'Gata' comes from the same root word-Indo-European root word-that our word 'gone' comes from. 'Tathatā' means suchness, it means the existentiality of stuff. So, Tathāgata means the existentiality gone. And, in the Prajnaparmita literature, the term of high dharma is 'well gone wisdom.' That we have concourse whether there is no traction of bodies and minds is a truth of our spiritual reality. That we operate quite adequately on those true realms shows that we were living into a small token example of the possibilities of life and not the total-not the spectrum, not the full possibility. And so dramatic action, like a Greek tragedy or a no drama, present us concisely with those opportunities to observe this ritually, to know this symbolically and to go there personally.
There's a whole development here in the The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki-it comes at that juncture where the early seeds of this kind of what became Noh drama-the term 'Sarugaku' later on, about 600 years later-came into play. Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji exhibits for the first time the cosmic tapestry of the spiritual person who has learned to be at home in a world where bodily rituals are still necessary and mental symbols still do work, but, all of this is interlaced with a freedom of possibility that would never have been there before. In other words, Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji is like an educational exemplary novel of growing up so that one becomes cosmically free, even when you're in a ritual society that by all accounts is staggeringly frozen. And so it's the combination of fire and iron together, which would have seemed impossible, and in nature would be impossible. It would not have happened-it could not happen-and yet someone like Lady Murasaki 1000 years ago did it so gracefully that the Tale of Genji discloses again and again-and has for 1000 years-that we can learn to learn to be free. And that's what it's all about here. That's what this education is about also.
When Lady Murasaki began writing, her model for writing was not Japanese but Chinese. The great Chinese language forms, which were current in her day, and the great Chinese language forms that were current what would we colorfully call, Chán Poetry.' Taoist poetry. T’ang poetry. From Li Po and Tu Fu and Wang Wei going back all the way to the origins and all the way up to the beginnings of really Sung Dynasty poetry, Su Tung Po, a contemporary of Lady Murasaki. The Chinese poetic tradition was something that she learned because her family had been doing this for hundreds of years already. She came from one of the most cultivated families in Japanese history. And so she learned to use language in a differentially conscious aesthetic rather than to use language in a clever way to make a politic. Instead of making a politics to hold human society together, she made an aesthetics to liberate it.
So, that The Tale of Genji is how to grow up on cosmic scale even though you're socially imprisoned in something that seems impossible to do anything about. It's only impossible to do about if you're thinking of breaking out; you don't have to break out. You can carry your transcendence with you at any given moment, any given day, and you are free.
And so this incredible discovery of spiritual poignancy available at any time at any place and so great was her achievement that when the Chinese came finally to the genre of writing great novels in the Ming Dynasty, they used Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji as their model. She taught the Chinese how to do it. Because you never had novels in China until the Ming Dynasty and then all of a sudden, you had four or five of the greatest novels in world history all written there and all of them have this quality that The Tale of Genji has. And perhaps one of the greatest novels in the world that came out about 750 years after Lady Murasaki, at the very end of the classical civilization of China in what was called the Chen Lung period of the Qing Dynasty-the Qings came after the Ming-and Chen Lung ruled China for two-thirds of a century and the greatest literary work in prose in China was written at that time. It's called Dream of the Red Chamber by Hong ou Meng. And when you look at the beginning of Dream of the Red Chamber, Heaven has been made out of all of these fundamental stones, but, when the bulk of heaven was finished, there was one stone too many; it was left over. And, so the maker of the dome of heaven just threw this extra stone away, but when God throws a stone away, where does it go? When does it go? That is, it goes where and it goes into what, when? [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] And so at the beginning of the Dream of the Red Chamber, the Taoist of infinite space meets the Buddhist of infinite time and at this juncture, at this crossroad of differentially infinite time and space, they have a conversation, which this castaway stone overhears-- because it's made by God himself, has all the sentience and intelligence-- and the Buddhist of infinite time and the Taoist of infinite space are talking about the marvelous adventures that man has-out of all the creations that there are, human beings are the most fabulous. And in their infinite and indefinitely complex fractile conversation, they come to tell each other of the saddest story they have ever heard. And so the stone remembers this story and when it comes time for this certain gifted writer to write something, he learns from that stone, that story, that those two infinite spirits of the saddest tale they have ever heard and that tale is the Dream of the Red Chamber.
It is a direct link back to The Tale of Genji. It is a direct link to the way in which Lady Murasaki exemplified not just the sophistication of her family tradition, which was the best that there was, but she reached differentially into all of the possibilities that were hidden as well as apparent and brought out one of the great treasures of world civilization-still good for star civilization-because it has to do with the discovery within a ritual-bound society, within a symbol-bound mind, personal freedom and cosmic possibility. And that all four of them have an objectivity that shares together an ordination that one hadn't supposed was there before and that those four together make-up four quarters of a completely new realm called reality. And that the center of those four quarters of that realm of the real is a pivot-it's called the pivot of the four quarters-and that was the old archetypal foundation upon which the architecture of royalty was always founded.
The largest expression of the architecture of royalty was not a building, but was a city. And that the city, whether it's the City of God, or it's the Rome of Augustus Caesar, or it's the Florence of de Medici, or it's the Athens of Pericles, or it's the Chang’an of Tang Tai-tsung, or it's the Kyoto of the Fujiwaras, it's always that there is this city which has a shape of cosmic man, that not only is placed in a space on the earth, but serves as a transform between the earthly life and the celestial realms of freedom. The holy city, whose perhaps greatest recognizable archetype in the West is Jerusalem. Jerusalem exists as a portal to transform everyone between the earth and the heavens and back from the heavens to the earth, so that it's the place, it's the osmotic focus, it's the threshold by which heaven and earth find their exchangeable wholeness through the creative gifting of man using his divine powers to be divine. Using a function which only he alone can do and if he does not perform that function, it is not done and the universe becomes static and the cosmos de-energize. And all of the spirits-demonic and divine-beseech man to wake-up and fulfill his function, otherwise the cosmos is dead. And so it's this kind of quality that's there in Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. Incredible.
And one of the elements, not the least, one of the elements that's current in her is her femininity-her womanliness. Her distant ancestors came from the Hata clan that inhabited Kyoto before there was a Kyoto. Thousands of years ago, the Kyoto basin was a bay of the Sea of Japan, the inland sea, and when Kyoto was founded in 790s, it was still sort of marshy, criss-crossed by five or six rivers. There was a huge pond, there was a fabulous lake-which is still there-Lake Biwa-like a banjo or mandolin-and the lake is shaped like that, so it's Lake Biwa-Lake Music. Her people were, in the earliest Neolithic times, thousands of years before there was a Heian Dynasty, they were already the cream of the royalty of the region and Hata women were always chosen by the Fujiwara clan men for wives, they became the mothers, they became the grandmothers, they became the carriers of this contact to the primordial earth and that this holy Jerusalem like city of Kyoto, that this great architectural osmotic focus of heaven and earth, to make not just a dynasty, but to make a portal by which the cosmos inhabits life.
That the earth is fructified, is the word. Not just that it's fertile to make food, but it's fertile to make spiritual people. Because when the land can make spiritual people, then it is a part of the cosmos. It belongs in the everywhere and, thus, is real. So, that it's true existence is not existential-just to be atoms-but spiritual-to be atoms resonant in a harmony of the real. And when one understands that kind of depth, then you have a high dharma. It's not a sociological truth; it's not a psychological principle. It's not a mental idea. Those are wonderful. They're sandbox toys. They're hardly noticeable in the effervescent gossamer joy of spiritual creation. But, it's not that the earth is some kind of thrown-away speck; it's a sacred stone that overhears the archetypal story that, when it's told in the right aesthetic way, dissolves the tyrannies of all political ritual-bound, idea-bound hells and opens those portals to fresh air and starlight and spiritual concourse.
More next week.
