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In what became known as the Four Noble Truths, Sakyamuni perceived that man’s existence is inseparable from sorrow; that the cause of suffering is craving; that peace is attained by extinguishing craving; that this liberation may be brought about by following the Eight-fold Path: right attention to one’s understanding, intentions, speech, and actions; right livelihood, effort, mindfulness; right concentration, by which is meant the unification of the self through sitting yoga.
As Buddhists, they know that the doing matters more than the attainment or reward, that to serve in this selfless way is to be free.
Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.
The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law. . . . To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being . . . he has failed to realize his life’s meaning.
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this the interior way “Tao”, and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao fulfilment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done, the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.10
Drugs can clear away the past, enhance the present; towards the inner garden, they can only point the way. Lacking the temper of ascetic discipline, the drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life. Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the “I” from true experience of the One.
As in the great religions of the East, the native American makes small distinction between religious activity and the acts of every day: the religious ceremony is life itself.
And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.
Even in this century it was believed that ours was the only galaxy, whereas Asian sages long before the time of Christ had intuited correctly that the galaxies numbered in the billions, and that universal time was beyond all apprehension: more than four billion years was but one day in the existence of their Creator and His night was of equal length, and all this was no more than “a twinkling of the eye of the immutable, immortal, beginningless Lord, the god of the Universe”. In the Rig Veda, an oscillating universe is conceived to be expanding from a centre—this is consistent with the “Big
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The cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the centre of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no centre. Such an idea holds no terror for mystics; in the mystical vision, the universe, its centre, and its origins are simultaneous, all around us, all within us, and all One.
Maya is Time, the illusion of the ego, the stuff of individual existence, the dream that separates us from a true perception of the whole. It is often likened to a glass vessel that separates the air within from the clear and unconfined air all around, or water from the all-encompassing sea. Yet the vessel itself is not different from the sea, and to shatter or dissolve it brings about the reunion with all universal life that mystics seek, the homegoing, the return to the lost paradise of our “true nature”.
in the Tibetan “Book of the Dead” which I carry with me—a guide for the living, actually, since it teaches that a man’s last thoughts will determine the quality of his reincarnation. Therefore, every moment of life is to be lived calmly, mindfully, as if it were the last, to insure that the most is made of precious human state—the only one in which enlightenment is possible.
When one pays attention to the present, there is great pleasure in awareness of small things;
By firelight, we talk about the snow leopard. Not only is it rare, so says GS, but it is wary and elusive to a magical degree and so well camouflaged in the places it chooses to lie that one can stare straight at it from yards away and fail to see it.
The snow leopard is usually found above 5000 feet and occurs as high as 18,000 feet. Though nowhere common, it has a wide range in the mountains of Central Asia, from the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan eastward along the Himalaya and across Tibet into southern China, and also northward in the mountains of the U.S.S.R. and of west China to the Sayan Range, on the Siberian border of Mongolia: the few captive specimens caught in the wild come mostly from the Tien Shan Mountains of the U.S.S.R.,
The snow leopard is the most mysterious of the great cats; of its social system, there is nothing known. Almost always it is seen alone; it may meet over a kill, as tigers do, or it may be unsociable and solitary, like the true leopard.
That happy-go-lucky spirit, that acceptance which is not fatalism but a deep trust in life, made me ashamed.
Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.
There is also a custom called “air burial”, in which the body of the deceased is set out on a wild crag such as this one, to be rended and devoured by the wild beasts; when only the bones are left, these are broken and ground down to powder, then mixed into lumps of dough, to be set out again for passing birds. Thus all is returned into the elements, death into life.
To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon—the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.
I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows.
Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, when all the great faiths of mankind are on the wane.
