A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

by Tiziano Terzani

Sitting at the stern, I wondered how much longer such a world can last, based exclusively on the inhuman, immoral and philistine criteria of economics. As I strained my eyes to make out the silhouettes of distant islands, I imagined one inhabited by a tribe of poets, held in reserve for a time when humanity, after this dark age of materialism, will begin once again to sustain its existence with other values.

I had time to think about time, about how I instinctively always find the past more fascinating than the future, and how the present often bores me, so that only by thinking of how I will remember it later can I enjoy the moment.

His sorrow for the disappearance of the Kas, mythical savages of the Laotian mountains, was quite authentic.

At times, in those idle hours, I mentally reviewed the various fortune-tellers I had met, trying to find a common thread in all they had said. It seemed to me that the point of traveling is in the journey itself, not in the arrival; and similarly in the occult what counts is the search, the asking of questions, not the answers found in the cracks of a bone or the lines in your palm. In the end, it is always we ourselves who give the answer.

Straits of Malacca

Trieste,

A strange fate, that of Mao. He began by trying to revitalize China by giving its civilization a new foundation and new values, and ended by wrecking what little still remained of the old.

The fate of this extraordinary civilization saddened me. For literally thousands of years it had followed another path, had confronted life, death, nature and the gods in a way unlike any other. The Chinese had invented their own way of writing, of eating, of making love, of doing their hair; for centuries they had cared for the sick in a different way, looked in a different way at the sky, the mountains, the rivers; they had a different idea of how to build houses and temples, a different view of anatomy, different concepts of the soul, of strength, of wind and water. Today that civilization aspires only to be modern, like the West; it wants to become like that little air-conditioned island that is Singapore; its young people dream only of dressing like “businessmen,” of queuing up at McDonald’s, of owning a quartz watch, a color television and a mobile phone. Sad, is it not? And not just for the Chinese, but for humanity in general, which loses so much when it loses its differences and becomes all the same. Mao understood that in order to save China it had be closed to Western influence, it had to seek a Chinese solution to the problems of modernity and development. In posing the problem Mao was truly great. And he was great in being wrong about how to solve it. But always great, Mao: a great poet, great strategist, great intellectual, great murderer. Great like China, great like the tragedy it is now enduring. If someone is able to look back at the history of humanity a...

But life is also a continuous waste. Think of how many wonderful people we meet without realizing it, of how many beautiful things we pass every day on the way home without noticing them. It always requires the right occasion, a particular event, a person who stops you and draws your attention to this or that.

“Think only of that point, feel only that sensation of the breath touching your skin,” John repeated, very slowly, sitting on the platform like a great wax Buddha. “At the moment when your breath touches the surface of the skin at the nose, the nerve tissues in the skin respond with a feeling, a sensation, an experience of touch. Be aware of that sensation. Be aware of the in-breath and the out-breath, and thus greed, hatred, and ignorance will be unable to arise. The fires of craving and aversion will be extinguished and your mind will be calm, peaceful, free of fears and anxiety.”

This silence was a great discovery. Without the foreground of other people’s words, I realized that the glorious beauty of nature was in its silence. I looked at the stars and heard their silence; the moon made no sound; the sun rose and set without a whisper. In the end even the noise of the waterfall, the birdcalls, the rustle of the wind in the trees, seemed part of a stupendous, living, cosmic silence which I loved and in which I found peace. It seemed that this silence was a natural right of every man, and that this right had been taken from us. I thought with horror of how for so much of our lives we are pounded by the cacophony we have invented, imagining that it pleases us, or keeps us company. Everyone, now and then, should reaffirm this right to silence and allow himself a pause, some days of silence in which to feel himself again, to reflect and regain a degree of health.

And so, after three days of anapanaa, we went on to inner meditation, vippasanaa. This means to direct “that magnifying glass, that band of attention of the mind, sharpened by concentration,” to the contemplation of one’s own body. We were told to begin by fixing our whole mind on the point below the nostrils, and then to bring the mind up to the crown of the head—I finally understood why so many statues of Buddha have a flame at that very place. Then, from the highest point of the body, very slowly and without losing control, one moves the mind to the skin, under the skin, into the skull, into the brain, into the eyes, into the nose, and slowly down into the chest, into the lungs, the heart, the veins, the bones, the internal organs, down, down to the legs, the toes, the soles of the feet, never thinking of anything else. The mind is directed like a searchlight in a cave, constantly aware of every sensation and aware that all sensations are transient—pain, pleasure, sound, the touch of the wind, always fugitive.

anicca

May all beings be peaceful and happy. May all beings be free of all ignorance, all cravings and all aversions. May all beings be free of all suffering, all sorrows and all conflicts. May all beings be filled with infinite loving kindness, compassion and equanimity. May all beings be fully enlightened.

U Ba Khin,”

thought of Leopold’s remark on the Nagarose, that travel makes sense only if you come back with an answer in your baggage.