The Way of the Warrior

Essential Teachings An Excerpt from Budōshoshinshu Budōshoshinshu and Hagakure are the most influential treatises on samurai philosophy from the Edo period. The two books were written at about the same time and both address the warrior’s role in times of peace. While Hagakure was mostly a secret book of the Nabeshima clan until the twentieth century, Budōshoshinshu was widely available almost from the start. It was a text meant for the younger samurai, as the literal translation of the title, “collection for beginners in the way of the warrior,” suggests. Chapter 5: A Sense of Shame Will Uphold Justice Bushidō is established when a man who would be a warrior has a solemn understanding of justice and injustice, and the absolute resolution to strive in the former and avoid conduct in the latter. Justice and injustice are defined as good and evil, justice being nothing other than good, injustice being nothing other than evil. Although men are not always able to distinguish good from evil or justice from injustice, often they consider the performance of justice and the advancement of good as confining and troublesome, and the achievement of injustice and evil as interesting and easy. Thus, they devote themselves to injustice and evil, and find the performance of justice and the advancement of good to be distasteful. If a man is a simpleton, unable to distinguish right from wrong or justice from injustice, it is one thing. But a man who has understood in his heart the evil of injustice and then turns his back on duty and commits acts of injustice anyway does not possess the character of a warrior. This is an extremely regrettable situation. It can be said that a shallowness of forbearance is the source of such unjust acts. Although the phrase “shallowness of forbearance” does not seem so bad, when one looks at its root, he will understand injustice arises from cowardice. Thus, it is said to be essential for a warrior always to avoid injustice and to act justly. Now, there would seem to be three levels of what is called “acting according to justice.” As an example, say you are going out with an acquaintance to some place or another, and your companion has brought with him one hundred ryo in cash. As it would be inconvenient for him to walk around with it in his pocket, he entrusts it to your keeping until returning, and thus you become the secret recipient of that money. But before you leave together, the man is suddenly stricken with food poisoning or apoplexy and dies on the spot, with not a soul knowing that money passed between the two of you. In such a situation, a man who acted justly would be pained by the circumstances and, without the least evil in mind, would explain the matter of the entrusted money to the man’s relations and quickly return it to them. Next, there is the person who would reason that the man was just an acquaintance and hardly anyone with whom he was familiar or intimate. Moreover, as no one knew about the money, no one would be likely to inquire about it later. This was a convenient event, since his circumstances were rather pressed, and it would not hurt to keep the money himself. To have such evil thoughts, but then to feel their sordidness and a sense of self-revulsion, and to return the money in the end, is to feel shame in one’s heart and act with justice. Finally, there is the man who returns the money when there is at least one person among his family and servants who knows about the entrustment of money, and who is ashamed of that person’s opinion or afraid of rumors in the future. This is said to be having a sense of shame before others and acting with justice. Although there is some doubt as to what such a man would do if no one knew of the money, it can be said that he is a man who knows what justice is and acts accordingly. Justice and injustice are defined as good and evil, justice being nothing other than good, injustice being nothing other than evil. Generally, an understanding of behaving justly originates with a sense of shame before the deep scorn of one’s intimates, beginning with one’s family and servants, which in turn widens to shame before the derision and scorn of others. When a man practices justice and avoids injustice in this way, it is certain that the practice itself will become a mental habit, and later he should possess a disposition for enjoying justice and hating injustice. In the Way of martial valor as well, a man of natural valor will advance on the battlefield no matter how violent the rain of arrows and gunfire, with no thoughts at all, immersed in loyalty and duty, making a target of his own body. When the valor of such a mind manifests itself, there is nothing further to be said about our admiration for the man’s conduct. Again, according to the individual, there are those who get weak in the knees and fainthearted, wondering how best to act in such dangerous situations. Nevertheless, as they will be seen by their allies as the only ones who remain while those around them advance, and will be unable to make excuses later, they are compelled to make up their minds and advance along with the previously mentioned valiant men. Such men are far inferior to those who are naturally courageous. Yet even they, meeting with such conditions many times, repeating the experience and becoming used to it, will become strong warriors of praiseworthy deeds, in no way second-rate to those born brave. Thus, it is said that there is no principle better than a sense of shame for acting with justice and striving with courage. But there is nothing that can be taught to the man who acts unjustly, ignoring the accusations of others, or who continues to commit deeds of cowardice, regardless of the derision and condemnation of his unmanliness. These words are for the understanding of those who would be warriors. Chapter 6: In the Mind, the Way; in Form, the Law The study of the Way of the Warrior is nothing other than inwardly regulating the mind according to the Way and outwardly preserving the Law in form. Regulating the mind according to the Way is understanding that one manages his affairs following the justice and correctness of the Way of the Warrior, and does not diverge a hair’s breadth into unrighteousness or evil ways. Thus, it is quite proper to meet with men of virtue, learned in the works and traditions of the sages, to study in detail the stories of the Way. Regarding preserving the Law in form, there are two Laws and four levels. The two Laws are the Law of Normal Conditions and the Law of Altercation. The four levels include, within the Law of Normal Conditions, the Gentleman’s Code [士法] and the Martial Arts [兵法], and within the Law of Altercation, Martial Law [軍法] and Combat Strategy [戦法]. A warrior accomplished in the knowledge of the four levels of the Law of Normal Conditions and the Law of Altercation is said to be a samurai of the highest quality. First, the Gentleman’s Code is in bathing in the morning and at night, washing one’s hands and feet, and keeping one’s body clean. Early each morning, the Gentleman should bind up his hair, from time to time shaving his forehead. He should wear the correct clothing according to the season, and carry his long and short swords. Things of this nature go without saying. He should also carry a fan at his waist, even in cold weather. In meeting with guests, the Gentleman should observe the length and breadth of courtesy according to the guest’s social position and take care not to speak useless words. Even in partaking of a single bowl of rice or cup of tea, one should be prudent to do so in a skillful way, avoiding carelessness. If a man is serving as a retainer, whenever he is off duty or resting, he should learn something from a book or practice writing, rather than just sitting around. Beyond that, he should impress in his mind the old ways of the warrior clans. Whether coming or going, sitting or sleeping, he should carry himself so that his actions and manners befit a warrior. Next are the Martial Arts. Although there is nothing lacking in the Gentleman’s Code, a man’s basic purpose as a Gentleman Warrior [武士, bushi] is to train in the usage of arms. Thus, one should be determined to begin by unsheathing the sword at his waist and learning what it is to fight. He should pursue training in all the martial arts—whether handling the spear, horsemanship, archery, or riflery—attaining his own measure of skill. If a man will advance and discipline himself in the levels of the Gentleman’s Code and the Martial Arts, he will not be lacking in the Law of Normal Conditions, and will be considered a good and useful warrior by most people. Be this as it may, the warrior is a man who serves at times of altercations, which are matters of social disturbance. At such times, a man puts on armor without ceremony and must put aside for a while the usual Gentleman’s Code. Men who are ordinarily called “lord” and “master” are now called “general,” and samurai retainers of both high and low rank are called “soldiers” and “troops.” Both high and low doff formal dress, don armor, grasp the soldier’s staff, and advance toward the enemy. This is the condition of the battle camp. The various methods and measures concerning these things are called Martial Law, and a warrior should not be without this knowledge. Finally, there is Combat Strategy. When one’s enemies and allies are at the point of battle, these strategies are the determinants of victory, when one has correctly judged his allies’ prepared dispositions and the deployment of their numbers, or [are the determinants of] defeat, when he has managed these conditions poorly. The practices and secret traditions of these various methods and measures are called Combat Strategy, and a warrior should also possess this knowledge. A warrior accomplished in the knowledge of the four levels of the Law of Normal Conditions and the Law of Altercation is said to be a samurai of the highest quality. Although a warrior will get by as an individual preparing himself only in the Law of Normal Conditions, if he has only a superficial understanding of the two levels of the Law of Altercation, he will be useless in such important roles as general, group leader, or administrator. It is essential that a warrior aim beyond himself to think these points over well and, as a warrior, train himself in the disciplines of Martial Law and Combat Strategy, as well as the Gentleman’s Code and the Martial Arts. He should never put aside his aim of eventually becoming a first-class samurai. These words are for the awareness of those intending to be warriors. Share Related Books William Scott Wilson is the foremost English translator of traditional Japanese texts on samurai culture. Learn more.

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Thomas Merton's Journals

Explore Thomas Merton’s journals and discover his inner life, spiritual journey, and enduring wisdom through the reflections of Mary Gordon. Mary Gordon's Close Read of the Journals An Excerpt from On Thomas Merton A Structured Approach I very much regret that it took me so long to get to Merton’s journals. There are seven volumes of them, over 2,500 pages—longer than the whole of Proust, whom I also read obsessively for years. I entered into Merton’s mind and heart, his lived life, in a way that was, like my reading of Proust, not like reading a book but having another life. As I would read a certain date that was important in my own life, I noted it: “first anniversary of my father’s death,” “my ninth birthday, I know I was miserable,” “I saw this book by Merton at the world’s fair.” I realized that the membrane between reading and living had grown dangerously thin when I got out of the bathtub one day and, seeing Merton’s alluringly smiling face on the cover of volume 5 on a nearby table, quickly covered myself with a towel. The journals are Merton’s best writing because in them he found the form that best suited his gifts. In part this is because the journal format is in its essence, like so much about Merton, self-contradictory. A journal is theoretically a private record, but as Jonathan Montaldo, who edited volume 2 of the journals, says, by 1950 Merton had begun “blurring any line that might have previously existed between his journals as spontaneous diaries of remembrance and as conscious, semi-fictional reconstructions of the self, autobiography as a work of art.”1 It is a challenge to write coherently about a form that does not put a premium on coherence, that jumps from one subject to another, contradicts itself, revises itself, corrects itself, and admits its own delusions. As early as 1951 he notes that “this journal is getting to be the production of somebody to whom I have never had the dishonor of an introduction.”2 I approached the journals in two ways: I tried to understand what was constant throughout all the years, and also what showed evidence of development and change. To the lamp on my desk, I pasted three index cards. They read ardent, heartfelt, headlong. Because whatever he wrote, even if he changed his mind the next day or in the next paragraph, his vibrating presence comes through in every word. Nothing is ever noncommittal or lukewarm. This is what makes Merton, and the journals, so intensely lovable and inspiring to those of us who are stumbling toward, if not Bethlehem, then Calvary. On my computer I created files in which to place material from the journals in discrete categories: Merton and America, Merton and Europe, Merton and the Church, Merton and the Monastery, Merton and Politics, Merton and Nature, Merton Psychological Reflections, Merton Descriptions, Merton and God. It was a way of starting, but I couldn’t be rigid about my categories, because so many of them bled into one another. Where, I would ask myself, does this passage belong: Politics, the Monastery, or the Church? Or this one: Europe or the Monastery, America or the Church, Description or Psychological Reflection? Many of them that I put initially under one heading, I ended up copying into the largest file: Merton and God. Whatever he wrote, even if he changed his mind the next day or in the next paragraph, his vibrating presence comes through in every word. Nothing is ever noncommittal or lukewarm. Descriptive Writing It was easiest to begin with the file “Merton Descriptions” because his talent for description is his greatest. When his senses are fully engaged, his writing comes most vividly alive. To my mind—and I know there are many who will disagree with me—he is weakest when he is trying to sustain an argument. I detect a much greater sense of spiritual vitality in his journal passages than I do in his books that are self-consciously “spiritual.” In those, I feel the strain, an excessive abstraction that leads to flaccid and disembodied language. But from the very first pages of the journals, everything he describes using sensory language shimmers and resonates. His writings on nature are well known and widely treasured, and their strength lies in their capturing of disparate elements, netting them in an image that startles and satisfies. This gift does not diminish throughout the decades.On December 2, 1948, he writes: A thousand small high clouds went flying majestically like ice-floes, all golden and crimson and saffron, with clean blue and aquamarine behind them, and shades of orange and red and mauve down by the surface of the land where the hills are just visible in a pearl haze and the ground was steel-white with frost—every blade of grass as stiff as wire.3 Ten years later, he presents us with a marvelously ominous description of the night sky. March 15, 1959The sky before Prime, in the West, livid, “blasted”—fast-running dark clouds, pale spur of the firetower against the black West.4 The sky is undomesticated here, far from Wordsworthian, a sky looked at with the eye of one up late, or early, but wide, wide awake. His ability to yoke two unlikes—the hallmark of successful metaphor or simile—are evident in two passages from 1964: April 24, 1964Large dogwood blossoms in the wood, too large, past their prime, like artificial flowers made out of linen.5 April 28, 1964There was a tanager singing like a drop of blood in the tall thin pines.6 Often, he makes the natural more apprehensible by comparing it to something inorganic or man-made: “the moon . . . dimly red, like a globe of almost transparent amber”; “waves of hills flying away from the river, skirted with curly woods or half-shaved like the backs of poodles”;7 “a puddle in the pig lot shines like precious silver”; “pillared red cliffs, ponderous as the great Babylonian movie palaces of the 1920s.”8 His writings on nature are well known and widely treasured, and their strength lies in their capturing of disparate elements, netting them in an image that startles and satisfies. I notice the number of times violent images connect with beauty: “the tanager . . . like a drop of blood”; “the sun . . . under a shaggy horn of blood”;9 “the pines were black . . . a more interesting and tougher murkiness”;10 “smoke rising up from the valley, against the light, slowly taking animal form . . . menacing and peaceful”;11 “they lighted the orchard heaters to fight against smoke, and the farm looked like a valley in hell”;12 “Claws of mountain and valley. Swing and reach of long, gaunt, black, white forks.”13 So much for Milosz’s criticism that Merton was an overly optimistic romantic when it came to nature. On Travel In the last year of his life, when he was allowed to travel more than he had for many years, he took great pleasure in the new landscapes that presented themselves to him. From a plane he wrote, May 6, 1968Whorled dark profile of a river in snow. A cliff in the fog. And now a dark road straight through a long fresh snow field. Snaggy reaches of snow pattern. Claws of mountain and valley. Light shadow or breaking cloud on snow.14 Merton’s ambivalence about whether or not Gethsemani is the place he wants to end his life finds its expression in his response to the trees of the West Coast and the trees of Kentucky. May 30, 1968I arrived back here in Kentucky in all this rain. The small hardwoods are full of green leaves, but are they real trees? The worshipful cold spring light on the sandbanks of the Eel River, the immense silent redwoods. Who can see such trees and bear to be away from them? I must go back. It is not right that I should die under lesser trees.15 One of the sadnesses surrounding Merton’s death is that this man who was so nourished by the created world died under no trees at all, but in a bathroom. I wondered what he would have made of it if the accident had been just an accident, not a fatality. He might have been funny about the absurdity of the situation: he was often very funny. He might have given us a fine description of a bathroom in Bangkok: his gift for description wasn’t limited to the natural world. He could conjure a place, a room, a public or private space with a few details—using not only his eyes and ears but his nose, skin, and fingertips. In 1940 he described a Miami hotel: Venetian blinds, stone floors, coconut palms making a green shade . . . The smell is a sort of musty smell of the inside of a wooden and stucco building cooler inside than out . . . a smell that has something of the beach about it too, a wet and salty bathing-suit smell . . . of dry palm leaves, suntan oil, rum, cigarettes. It has something of the mustiness of that immense and shabby place in Bermuda, the hotel Hamilton . . . also like the Savoy Hotel in Bournemouth, which stood at the top of a cliff overlooking a white beach on the English Channel. It had fancy iron balconies, and even when the dining room was full you could feel the blight of winter coming back upon it, and knew very well how it would look all empty, with all the chairs stacked.16 His description of a restaurant in Lexington—caustic, ferociously observant—accomplishes what the best of his journals do: the creation of a whole world, an atmosphere, a set of characters, in a few words. April 6, 1968Lum’s in Lexington. Red gloves, Japanese lights. Beer list. Bottles slipped over counter. Red waistcoats of Kentucky boy waiters. Girl at cashier desk the kind of thin, waiflike blonde I get attracted to. Long talk with her getting directions on how to get to Bluegrass Parkway. While we were eating a long, long freight train went by, cars on high embankment silhouetted against a sort of ragged vapor sunset. A livid light between clouds. And over there a TV with . . . the jovial man in South Africa who just had the first successful heart transplant. . . . He had an African Negro’s heart in him, beating along. They asked him if he felt any different towards his wife and I really fell off my chair laughing. No one else could figure out what was funny. When I was in Lum’s, I was dutifully thinking, “Here is the world.” Red gloves, beer, freight trains. The man and child. The girls at the next table, defensive, vague, aloof. One felt the place was full of more or less miserable people. Yet think of it: all the best beers in the world were at their disposal and the place was a good idea. And the freight train was going by, going by, silhouetted against an ambiguous sunset.17 Merton’s compassion and tenderness toward the poor and the marginalized shows itself in tender but piercing snapshots, revealing that his political convictions had their roots in a deep and wide human sympathy. He describes the journey of a black junkman: November 6, 1950The willows were like silver this morning. . . . A junk wagon came along. . . . The wagon seemed to be all bells, like a Chinese temple. . . . The mule was flashing with brass disks. . . . The wagon . . . had something of the lines of a Chinese junk [seaship]. . . . On top of it all sat the driver with his dog. Both were immobile. They sailed forward amid their bells. The dog pointed his nose straight forward like an arrow. The negro captain sat immersed in a gray coat. He did not look right or left, and I would have approached, with great respect, what seemed to be a solid mysticism. But I stood a hundred yards off, enchanted by the light on the mule’s harness, enchanted by the temple bells.18 His rendering of the suffering of a child caught in a fire is worthy of James Agee: March 19, 1959After the fire . . . a little boy with a pathetic face and holes in his pants, whom I had seen some weeks before with an ugly scar on the side of his head. The big scab was gone and you could see the place of the scar. His face made you wonder if he ever had anything happen to him in life worth smiling about.19 Merton’s compassion and tenderness toward the poor and the marginalized shows itself in tender but piercing snapshots. . . It’s not surprising that Merton wrote on December 18, 1939, “I have always been fond of guide books. As a child I read guide books to the point where it became a vice. I guess I was always looking for some perfect city.”20 Perhaps New York was the closest he came to that “perfect city”; his palpable delight in his return after more than twenty years away bursts out in every word: July 10, 1964Riding down in the taxi to the Guggenheim Museum around one o’clock, through the park, under tunnels of light and foliage. . . . The people walking on Fifth Avenue were beautiful, and there were those towers! The street was broad and clean. A stately and grown-up city! A true city, life-size. A city with substance and scale, large and right. Well lighted by sun and sky, anything but soulless, and it is feminine. It is she, this city. I am faithful to her! I have not ceased to love her.21 Notes 1. Merton, Entering the Silence, 394, fn 50. 2. Merton, Entering the Silence, 458. 3. Merton, Entering the Silence, 248. 4. Merton, Search for Solitude, 268. 5. Merton, Dancing in the Water, 99. 6. Merton, Dancing in the Water, 100. 7. Merton, Search for Solitude, 6. 8. Thomas Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey, Volume Seven 1967–1968, The Journals of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 106. 9. Merton, Other Side, 70. 10. Merton, Other Side, 33. 11. Merton, Turning Toward the World, 74. 12. Merton, Entering the Silence, 195. 13. Merton, Other Side, 94. 14. Merton, Other Side, 94. 15. Merton, Other Side, 112. 16. Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation, Vol­ume One 1939–1941, The Journals of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). 162. 17. Merton, Other Side, 78. 18. Merton, Entering the Silence, 438. 19. Merton, Search for Solitude, 270. 20. Merton, Run to the Mountain, 113. 21. Merton, Dancing in the Water, 125. Mary Gordon is a novelist, essayist, memoirist, literary critic, and the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is the author of many books, including Final Payments, Circling My Mother, Reading Jesus, The Shadow Man, and The Company of Women. Learn more. Related Books See Product See Product See Product See Product See Product See Product Share

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Navigating the Battle of Life | An Excerpt from The Bhagavad Gita

Explore the Bhagavad Gita’s teachings on life’s struggles, inner conflict, and duty, and discover how its timeless wisdom can guide you through challenges. A Fresh Translation The Yoga of Arjuna's Crisis No Life without Struggle Dhritarāshtra asked: Sanjaya, what did my sons and the sons of Pāndu do, when they were gathered for the sake of fighting on the field of dharma, in the field of the Kurus? Forces in the Battle of Life Sanjaya said: Having seen the armies of the Pāndavas, Duryodhana approached his Teacher [Drona] and said, Behold, O Teacher, this vast army of the Pāndavas, arrayed by Drupada’s son, your gifted pupil. Here are heroes, great archers, the equals of Bhīma and Arjuna in battle; Yuyudhāna, Virāta, and the great warrior Drupada; Dhrishtaketu, Chekitāna, and the valiant king of Kāshi; Purujit, and Kuntibhoja, and that bull among men, the king of the Shibis; the valorous Yudhāmanyu, the heroic Uttamaujas, the son of Subhadrā, and the sons of Draupadi, all mighty warriors. Know also, O best among the twice-born, those who are distinguished amongst us. I shall name the leaders of my army for you: yourself, My Lord, and Bhīshma; Karna and Kripa, the winner of many battles; Ashvatthāmā, Vikarna, and the son of Somdatta. Many other heroes, with various weapons and arms, and skilled in battle are also there, ready to give up their lives for my sake. Guarded by Bhīshma, the strength of our army is without limit. But the strength of their army, under the protection of Bhīma, is limited. And so in all movements, stationed according to strategy, you and your men should all guard Bhīshma above all. Then Bhīshma, the mighty and splendid grandsire, the eldest of the Kurus, thundered forth his lion’s roar and blew his conch, gladdening the heart of Duryodhana. The Inner and Outer Battlefield Conches and kettledrums, tabors, horns, cymbals and trumpets blared forth together making a tumultuous sound. Then in a great chariot yoked to white stallions,Mādhava [Krishna] and the son of Pāndu [Arjuna] blew their divine [divya] conches. Hrishikesha [Krishna] sounded Pānchajanya and Dhananjaya [Arjuna] sounded his Devadatta. Bhīma, wolf-belly, the man of terrible deeds, blew his great conch Paundra; the king Yu-dhishthira, the son of Kunti, blew Anantavijaya, Nakula and Sahadeva sounded Sughosha and Manipushpaka. The king of Kāshi, the superb archer; and Shikhandi on his great chariot; Dhrishtadyumna; Vira-ta, the unconquered; Satyaki; Draupada and sons of Draupadi; and Subhadrā’s son, the mighty-armed, blew their conches on all sides, O Lord of earth. That tumultuous uproar re-echoing through the earth and the sky tore the hearts of Dhritarāshtra’s sons. Then, as the clash of arms had begun, seeing the sons of Dhritarāshtra, the monkey-bannered Arjuna lifted up his bow and spoke to Krishna: O Unshaken One [achyuta], stay my chariot between the two armies so that I may see these people who long for battle and whom I have to meet in this game of war. I wish to see those who are gathered here ready to fight desiring to please the evil-minded [durbuddhi] son of Dhritarāshtra. Thus addressed by Arjuna, O Bhārata [Dhritarāshtra], Krishna brought the best of the chariots between the two armies in front of Bhīshma, Drona, and all the princes of the earth and said, Behold, O Son of Prithā [Arjuna], these assembled Kurus. Arjuna’s Crisis Then Arjuna saw uncles and grandfathers, teachers, cousins, sons and grandsons, comrades, fathers-in-law, and benefactors in the opposing armies. Seeing all those kinsmen, Arjuna was filled by great pity and spoke with sadness: Seeing my own people, set for battle, O Krishna, my limbs sink down, and my mouth becomes parched, my body shudders, and my hair stands on end. My bow falls from my hand, and my skin is burning. I cannot be still and my mind wanders. I perceive inauspicious omens, Krishna, and I foresee no good arising from the killing of kinsmen in battle. I do not desire victory, O Krishna, or sovereignty or pleasures. Of what use is kingdom to us, of what use enjoyment or even life? Those for whose sake we desire to win kingdom, possessions, and pleasures are gathered here for battle, ready to give up life and wealth: teachers, fathers, sons, as also grandfathers, uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law, and other kinsmen as well. Even though they may kill us, I do not wish to kill them, O slayer of Madhu, not even for the sovereignty of the three worlds, much less for that of this earth. What joy will be ours, O Krishna, by slaying these sons of Dhritarāshtra? Evil alone would light upon us if we slay these aggressors. Therefore we should not kill these sons of Dhritarāshtra, our kinsmen. How can we be happy, O Krishna, by killing our own people? Although they, with their minds overcome by greed, see no evil in destroying the family or the crime in hostility to friends, why should we, O Krishna, who see the evil resulting from destruction of the family, not turn away from this sin? Even though they may kill us, I do not wish to kill them. With the destruction of the family, the eternal dharma of the family is destroyed; with the collapse of the dharma, disorder overwhelms the whole family. When disorder predominates, O Krishna, the women of the family go astray. When the women are corrupted, O Krishna, a mixture of castes results. This confusion leads the destroyers of the family and the family itself to hell; their ancestors fall, for they are deprived of offerings and oblations. When the destroyers of the family lead to the confusion of castes, the eternal dharma of the caste and that of the family are destroyed. Those whose family traditions are destroyed, O Krishna, are doomed to live perpetually in hell—thus have we heard. Alas! in preparing to kill our kin out of greed for the pleasures of kingship we have set out to do a great evil. It would be better for me if the armed sons of Dhritarāshtra slay me unarmed and unresisting in the battle. Having thus spoken on the battlefield, abandoning his bow and arrows, Arjuna sat down in the back of the chariot, his mind agitated by grief. The Yoga of Awareness An Inward Turn Sanjaya said: Krishna, the Slayer of Madhu, spoke to Arjuna who was besieged by pity [kripā], whose eyes were full of tears, and whose heart was full of sorrow, O Arjuna, whence does this weakness come? It brings no glory, it is unbecoming to the noble and it does not lead to heaven. Yield not to unmanliness, son of Pritha; it is unworthy of you. Shake off this petty faint-heartedness, and arise, O Terror of the Enemies [Parantapa]! Arjuna said, How, O Slayer of Madhu, O Slayer of Enemies, shall I fight in battle with arrows against Bhīshma and Drona who are worthy of respect? It is better to live in this world on alms than to slay these teachers of great nobility. If I slay these teachers all the pleasures I shall taste will be blood-stained. We do not know which is the better course for us—whether we should conquer them or they should conquer us. If we slay the sons of Dhritarāshtra who stand before us, we would not care to live. My very being [svabhāva] is afflicted with the flaw of pity [kārpanyadosha] and weakness of spirit. My mind is confused about dharma. I ask you: tell me decisively which is better. I am your pupil for I have taken refuge in you; teach me. I do not see what would drive away this sorrow which parches my senses. Even winning a prosperous and unrivaled kingdom on earth, or even lordship over the gods, will not ease this sorrow. Sanjaya spoke: Gudākesha [Arjuna], the Terror of his Enemies, having spoken thus to Govinda [Krishna], Lord of the Senses, added “I will not fight,” and then fell silent. A Vaster Vision O Dhritarāshtra! Krishna smiled and spoke to the desperate warrior there between the two armies. He said, You speak wise-seeming words, but you grieve for those you should not grieve for. The wise do not grieve for the dead or for the living. There never was a time when I or you or these princes did not exist; nor will there ever be a time when we shall cease to be. As the incarnated being [dehī] in this body passes through childhood, youth and old age, so it passes on to another body. A sage is not bewildered by this. O Arjuna, the physical sensations, which cause cold and heat, pleasure and pain, come and go. They are transient; learn to endure them, O Bhārata [Arjuna]. O Best of Men, the wise to whom happiness and unhappiness are alike are not shaken by these; they are fit for eternal life [amritattva]. What is real cannot cease to be, and the unreal cannot come into being. The truth about both is seen by the seers. Know that which pervades all this is indestructible. No one can destroy the imperishable. Bodies of the incarnated Eternal can be destroyed, but the Eternal Itself is indestructible and immeasurable. Therefore fight, O Bhārata [Arjuna].” Whoever thinks the Eternal One slays, or thinks of it as slain, lacks understanding. It neither slays nor is it slain. It is not born, nor does it die; having been, it will never cease to be. Unborn, eternal, everlasting this primal one is not slain when the body is slain. One who knows it to be indestructible, eternal, unborn, and imperishable, how can that person slay, O Pārtha [Arjuna], or cause anyone to be slain? Just as a person discards worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, so the dweller in the body discards worn-out bodies and takes on new ones. Weapons do not cut it, fire cannot burn it, water does not make it wet, nor does the wind dry it. It cannot be cut, it cannot be burned, it cannot be made wet or dry. It is eternal, all-pervading, permanent, immovable, and primordial. It is unmanifest, unthinkable, and immutable. Knowing this, you should not grieve. What is real cannot cease to be, and the unreal cannot come into being. Even if you think that it is born and dies repeatedly, even then, O mighty-armed, you should not grieve. Death is certain for one who is born, and rebirth is certain for one who dies. You should not grieve for what is inevitable. The beginnings of all beings are unmanifest, and they are unmanifest again in their end, O Arjuna; only their middle states are manifest. What is there to lament about this? Rarely someone sees it, rarely someone speaks of it, and rarely someone hears of it; but even on hearing of it no one knows it. O Arjuna, the incarnated being in the body of every creature is eternal and indestructible. Therefore you should not grieve. Considering your own dharma, you should not tremble, for there is no greater good for a warrior than a battle required by dharma. Happy are the warriors, O Arjuna, who encounter such a battle, as a gate of heaven open wide. But if you will not wage this dharma war, you will abandon your own dharma and glory and incur sin. Besides, people will forever speak of your infamy, and for one who has been esteemed, disgrace is worse than death. The great warriors will think you deserted out of fear, and those who highly esteemed you will belittle you. Many unspeakable words will be spoken by your detractors slandering your strength. What is more painful than that? If you are slain, you will win heaven; if you are victorious, you will enjoy the earth. Therefore arise, O Arjuna, determined to fight! If you become impartial to joy and sorrow, gain and loss, winning and losing, and engage in this battle, you will not incur sin. Buddhi Yoga What has been declared to you, O Arjuna, is the theoretical wisdom; now listen to the yoga of awareness [buddhi yoga]. When you are disciplined with it, you will be free from the bondage of action [karmabandhana]. On this path no effort is lost and no harm occurs. Even a little practice of this dharma protects one from great danger. The awareness of the resolute has a unity, O Arjuna; the awareness of the irresolute is endlessly fragmented [bahushākhā].  O Arjuna, undiscerning people are satisfied with the letter of the scriptures [Vedas] and uttering flowery words while engaging in many rituals and rites for attaining selfish desires [kāmātman] and heaven, saying, “There is nothing else.” The fruit of these actions is rebirth. The awareness of those whose heart is carried away by words and who cling to pleasures and power is not established in contemplation [samādhi].  The scope of the scriptures [Vedas] is limited to the three gunas [strands of material causality]; but you, Arjuna, should transcend the three gunas. Free of opposites, constantly oriented to truth, without acquisitiveness, be self-possessed. All the scriptures [Vedas] have as much value for those who have spiritual discernment as the water in a well has when there is a flood of water on all sides.  You have a right only to action, never to its fruit. Do not let your motive be the fruits of action, but do not be attached to inaction. O Dhananjaya [Arjuna], do your work established in yoga and abandon attachment. Be impartial to success or failure, for yoga is equanimity [samatvam].  Actions are far inferior to buddhi yoga, O Dhananjaya; seek refuge in awareness [buddhi]. Those who are motivated by results are pitiful. One who is in buddhi yoga leaves behind both good and evil deeds. Yoga is skill in action, therefore strive for yoga.  The wise who renounce the results of their actions through buddhi yoga are freed from the compulsion of birth and attain the state that is free from sorrow. When your awareness is free from the tangle of delusion, then you will become indifferent to what has been said by the scriptures and what might be said. When your awareness, now perplexed by the scriptures, is steady and stable in contemplation [samādhi], then you will attain yoga. Related Books See Product See Product See Product See Product Ravi Ravindra, PhD, is an international speaker and the author of books on religion, science, and spirituality. A Canadian of Indian birth, he is Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, where he served for many years as a professor in Comparative Religion, Philosophy, and Physics. His spiritual search has immersed him in the teachings of Yoga, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, and Christianity, as well as interreligious dialogue and the relationship between science and spirituality. Learn more.

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Bhartrihari the Poet | An Excerpt from Some Unquenchable Desire

Bhartrihari the Poet, Bhartrihari the Linguist Nalanda Everything known for certain about India’s poet Bhartrihari could be engraved on a grain of rice. He steps into the wavering historical record like a ghost out of the mist in 671 C.E., when the Chinese pilgrim I-Tsing (Yijing in the newer way of spelling) jotted down his name in a travel journal. I-Tsing had left Tang Dynasty China on what proved a brave, persistent twenty-year quest for Buddhist teachings and manuscripts across Asia. His travels took him to India’s splendid center of learning, Nalanda, a crossroads of the Buddhist world in those days, part monastery, part university. The grounds held lotus ponds, peacocks, green iridescent parakeets, an eighty-foot-tall stone Buddha layered with hammered copper, fragrant jasmine coiling over sandstone walls, shady arcades with red-tiled roofs. Today the ruined grounds of Nalanda sit in the state of Bihar, a painfully impoverished “nation” (100 million residents) with extensive ecological damage. This damaged world is one you can almost glimpse in some of Bhartrihari’s poems, as though he could see around the bend of millennia. What we know, however, of the old Nalanda Institute conjures a spacious, biologically diverse campus filled with parkland and artificial lakes. The campus had been built during the course of several centuries by donors of enviable wealth. For scholars in I-Tsing’s day it must have looked like paradise. The grounds held lotus ponds, peacocks, green iridescent parakeets, an eighty-foot-tall stone Buddha layered with hammered copper, fragrant jasmine coiling over sandstone walls, shady arcades with red-tiled roofs. The name Nalanda may have been that of a nāga or serpent that lived in the achingly blue waters of one lotus pool. During his stay at Nalanda, I-Tsing listened to lectures and debates punctuated by a great bell in the morning and a drumbeat that observed the passing hours. The pilgrim noted in his diary the name Bhartrihari, a figure he heard had died two decades earlier, around the year 652. I-Tsing spoke of Bhartrihari as a linguist, a poet, and a Buddhist. He may have initially met the name in a treatise by the Buddhist logician Dignaga, who cites some of Bhartrihari’s reflections on grammar. I-Tsing could have read or heard some of Bhartrihari’s poetry, too. If he did, he recorded none in his journal. To get a glimpse of Bhartrihari’s milieu—and why Nalanda was a likely place to hear word of him—it is instructive to conjure the site. The translator Hsuan Tsang, a pilgrim whose life-story is embedded in legend, had preceded I-Tsing by several centuries. He brought this description back to China: “The whole university is surrounded by a brick wall, which encloses the convent from without. One gate opens into the chief college, with eight other campuses distributed about. The richly adorned towers and fairylike turrets, which look like pointed hilltops, cluster together. The observatories seem to be lost in morning mist, their upper stories above the clouds.”1 A water clock organized the daily rounds—one massive bell signaling the morning hour to bathe in the ponds. Evening had chanting and the reciting of sūtras. Hsuan Tsang gives a further description. “An azure pool winds around the monasteries, adorned with the full-blown cups of the blue lotus; the dazzling red flowers of the lovely kanaka hang here and there, and outside groves of mango trees offer the inhabitants their dense and protective shade.”2 Nalanda housed at least four libraries, including a nine-story tower to hold the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) sūtras, foundational texts for Mahayana Buddhism. One story says Bhartrihari was the brother-in-law of Vasubandhu, who co-founded the Yogacara school of Buddhism, a notable interpretation of the Perfection of Wisdom literature. If correct, this dates Bhartrihari to the fourth or fifth century, not the seventh. Bhartrihari's Collections: The Vākyapadīya and Śatakatrayam What Bhartrihari left behind is a treatise on grammar, the Vākyapadīya, far in advance of its era. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, at the University of Berlin in the late nineteenth century, consulted the treatise for his doctoral dissertation, a specialized treatment of Sanskrit grammar, and used its ideas to set the stage for modern linguistics. Bhartrihari also left an indeterminate, though limited number of lyric poems. Later scribes arranged the poems into books, divided more or less thematically. For centuries the compilation has carried the bland title Śatakatrayam: it comprises three (traya) collections of a hundred (śataka) poems. A hundred detached stanzas, not linked by narrative, not grouped into themes, but moving cyclically across a patterned terrain of emotion, was a standard collection for old India. The emblematic number one hundred fit old India’s delight in symmetry. Somewhere along the way an anthologist provided Bhartrihari’s three śatakas with descriptive titles: Nīti, Śṛngāra, and Vairāgya: the first is a book of counsel for those involved in high-class life; the second, a book of romantic love; and the third, a book of “dis-passion,” or hermit renunciation. These were not Bhartrihari’s titles, nor the way he himself arranged the poems. There is no way, Kosambi says, to know what kind of arrangement, if any, the poet gave them. Nor is there any way to confidently determine that these are the poems Bhartrihari actually wrote. In the mid-1940s the Indian scholar D. D. Kosambi examined nearly four hundred manuscripts and books attributed to Bhartrihari. The collections were confounding. Though all carried the title Śatakatrayam, they diverged crazily in number of poems, which poems they included, and in what order the poems appeared. Sifting out two hundred stanzas that show up in nearly all manuscripts, Kosambi set these aside as the nucleus of an authentic collection—poems likely written by Bhartrihari. There is no way, Kosambi says, to know what kind of arrangement, if any, the poet gave them. Nor is there any way to confidently determine that these are the poems Bhartrihari actually wrote. The earliest manuscript anyone has found was written down a thousand years after the poet’s death. Poems with his name attached had been swapped for centuries. They passed from person to person, orally or in fragile handwritten collections that moldered and crumbled in India’s monsoon-punctuated climate. Some had been sloppily reproduced by indifferent scribes. There are words that make no sense and occasions of nonsensical grammar. Kosambi is clear; the poet himself could not have “promulgated any edition comparable to what we possess today.”3 Common Themes in Bhartrihari's Poems Many of the Bhartrihari collections make an awkward attempt to stack the poems into subgroups, based on related image, repeated vocabulary, or similar opening phrases. No poet would order poems like this. It stinks of contrivance. It drains out the life force. It reduces the impact of each poem and blunts their sharp inventiveness. My sense is that Bhartrihari was a complicated man. A thousand emotions, ideas, words, and rhythmic syllables stormed through him. He ordered the chaos by writing poems. In particular he shows himself torn between sexual desire and a hunger to be free of failed love affairs and turbulent karma. Meeting the eyes of a woman could alter his life, and from the poems, this sounds like his preeminent challenge. Placing his love poems together, as though they came from a single period of his life, makes little sense. I’d guess he felt sexual attraction throughout his years, writing poems of love from youth into old age. To group these poems by topic is to miss the texture of life, the way the passions surge through, settle down, rise up again. In a different mood Bhartrihari looked with undisguised fury on the show of luxury. He knew the ways of the rich, and he despised their allure. Quite possibly he never visited the campus at Nalanda that had hosted I-Tsing. Had he gone, the lavish grounds might have provoked skepticism or revulsion: seeing religious rites settled amid grand wealth would have troubled him. When political power or religious exaltation took precedence over wisdom, or brushed kindness aside, a great loathing rose up. Some of his best poems, written to sensuous, infantile warlords, coil with contempt. He was proud of being a poet. Bhartrihari returns to familiar themes: love, sexual desire, despair, anger, fear; a tenuous brief ecstasy in the arms of a lover, an urge for spiritual peace. These drive him to make poems. To group these poems by topic is to miss the texture of life, the way the passions surge through, settle down, rise up again. It misses his wizardry with vocabulary or command of rhythm. His ability to leverage the precise grammar of the Sanskrit language and release its snaking syntax. (There is rhythm as well in the way a writer orders poems in a manuscript or for oral recital.) For his poems to ring into the twenty-first century, he had to study rain and sleet, mangy street dogs, dung-smeared mendicants, and sharply dressed ladies. He had to examine the properties of timber, flowers, medicines, and herbs. To beg and go hungry. His mastery of Sanskrit tells me Bhartrihari the poet could indeed have been Bhartrihari the linguist, though scholars are cautious in identifying the two. I see no reason to think a mystically inclined grammarian could not have been a unique, heartbroken, barefoot, well-read, and at times caustic poet, who thought it no big deal to break the rules of grammar. If he never gathered his poetry into a book, he did produce a substantial number of poems held together by a consistent personal clarity. Selected Poems Coils of burst lightning. The ketaki pine’s fragrance stings then vanishes. Clouds heap up, thunder growls and the soft mewing of peacocks at love. How can a long-eyelashed woman get through the season, drenched with eros apart from her lover? K. 137 Prajāpati* stirred up the wind, food for snakes harmless and easily had. Wild animals chew plants, they sleep on the ground with ease. For humans he made a different way— designing our spirits to cross samsara’s stormy froth. Go that way. It is a matter of character. K. 352 *Prajāpati, “lord of creatures.” A totem figure, mythic ancestor of all living beings. You hold the bankroll, but words speed to my command just like this! What you want you take through force. I speak of the true world and root out the malady of pride. Mad for a few coins people debase themselves to you; but they come hear me dispel the mind’s unruly thoughts. You don’t give a damn for your poet, King— less than I do for you. Take this counsel as I depart. K. 166 Mantras can’t dispel it, it is way past the compass of drugs. Hundreds of exorcisms won’t drive it out. Love is a seizure that wrenches the whole body with its fury. Your vision breaks diabolically familiar things turn upside down. K. 126 Should I settle along a holy river and practice rigorous yoga? Or squire ladies about, who favor me with unrestrained passion? Might I drink from that torrent of ancient books— the many poems, brimming, deathless, impassioned, rich. What to do—in this life? It’ll be gone in an eye blink. K. 172 Notes 1. Paraphrased from S. Beale, The Life of Hsuan Tsang. 2. Grousset, In the Footsteps of the Buddha, 159. 3. Kosambi, The Epigrams Attributed to Bhartṛhari, 64. Related Books Andrew Schelling is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, the most recent a collection of essays, Wild Form, Savage Grammar. His translations of India’s classical poetry appear in numerous anthologies. The Academy of American Poets honored him with the Harlod Morton Landon Translation Award in 1992 for his Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India. Learn More.

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Finding One's Self in the Universe | An Excerpt from Song of Myself

The Core of Walt Whitman’s Poetic Vision I am enamoured of growing outdoors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships, of the wielders of axes and mauls, of the drivers of horses, I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.   What is commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me, Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns, Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me, Not asking the sky to come down to my goodwill, Scattering it freely forever.   The pure contralto sings in the organloft, The carpenter dresses his plank . . . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp, The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner, The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, The mate stands braced in the whaleboat, lance and harpoon are ready, The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches, The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar, The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel, The farmer stops by the bars of a Sunday and looks at the oats and rye, The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case, He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bedroom; The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco, his eyes get blurred with the manuscript; The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist’s table, What is removed drops horribly in a pail; The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand . . . . the drunkard nods by the barroom stove, The machinist rolls up his sleeves . . . . the policeman travels his beat . . . . the gate-keeper marks who pass, The young fellow drives the express-wagon . . . . I love him though I do not know him; The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race, The western turkey-shooting draws old and young . . . . some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs, Out from the crowd steps the marksman and takes his position and levels his piece; The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee, The woollypates hoe in the sugarfield, the overseer views them from his saddle; The bugle calls in the ballroom, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other; The youth lies awake in the cedar-roofed garret and harks to the musical rain, The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron, The reformer ascends the platform, he spouts with his mouth and nose, The company returns from its excursion, the darkey brings up the rear and bears the well-riddled target, The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemmed cloth is offering moccasins and beadbags for sale, The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with halfshut eyes bent sideways, The deckhands make fast the steamboat, the plank is thrown for the shoregoing passengers, The young sister holds out the skein, the elder sister winds it off in a ball and stops now and then for the knots, The one-year wife is recovering and happy, a week ago she bore her first child, The cleanhaired Yankee girl works with her sewing- machine or in the factory or mill, The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing; The pavingman leans on his twohanded rammer—the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the notebook—the signpainter is lettering with red and gold, The canal-boy trots on the towpath—the bookkeeper counts at his desk—the shoemaker waxes his thread, The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him, The child is baptised—the convert is making his first professions, The regatta is spread on the bay . . . . how the white sails sparkle! The drover watches his drove, he sings out to them that would stray, The pedlar sweats with his pack on his back—the purchaser higgles about the odd cent, The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype, The bride unrumples her white dress, the minutehand of the clock moves slowly, The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just opened lips, The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck, The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other, (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,) The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries, On the piazza walk five friendly matrons with twined arms; The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold, The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle, The fare-collector goes through the train—he gives notice by the jingling of loose change, The floormen are laying the floor—the tinners are tinning the roof—the masons are calling for mortar, In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers; Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gathered . . . . it is the Fourth of July . . . . what salutes of cannon and small arms! Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs and the mower mows and the wintergrain falls in the ground; Off on the lakes the pikefisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface, The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe, The flatboatmen make fast toward dusk near the cottonwood or pekantrees, The coon-seekers go now through the regions of the Red river, or through those drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, The torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahoochee or Altamahaw; Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great grandsons around them, In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport. The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time . . . . the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these more or less I am. I love him though I do not know him I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, One of the great nation, the nation of many nations—the smallest the same and the largest the same, A southerner soon as a northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable, A Yankee bound my own way . . . . ready for trade . . . . my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deerskin leggings, A boatman over the lakes or bays or along coasts . . . . a Hoosier, a Badger, a Buckeye, A Louisianian or Georgian, a poke-easy from sandhills and pines, At home on Canadian snowshoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland, At home in the fleet of iceboats, sailing with the rest and tacking, At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine or the Texan ranch, Comrade of Californians . . . . comrade of free northwesterners, loving their big proportions, Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen—comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat; A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfulest, A novice beginning experient of myriads of seasons, Of every hue and trade and rank, of every caste and religion, Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest. I resist anything better than my own diversity, And breathe the air and leave plenty after me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place. The moth and the fisheggs are in their place, The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place. These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing, If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This is the common air that bathes the globe. This is the breath of laws and songs and behavior, This is the tasteless water of souls . . . . this is the true sustenance, It is for the illiterate . . . . it is for the judges of the supreme court . . . . it is for the federal capitol and the state capitols, It is for the admirable communes of literary men and composers and singers and lecturers and engineers and savans, It is for the endless races of working people and farmers and seamen.   This is the trill of a thousand clear cornets and scream of the octave flute and strike of triangles.   I play not a march for victors only . . . . I play great marches for conquered and slain persons.   Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall . . . . battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.   I sound triumphal drums for the dead . . . . I fling through my embouchures the loudest and gayest music to them, Vivas to those who have failed, and to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea, and those themselves who sank in the sea, And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes, and the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known. I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise This is the meal pleasantly set . . . . this is the meat and drink for natural hunger, It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous . . . . I make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away, The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited . . . . the heavy-lipped slave is invited . . . . the venerealee is invited, There shall be no difference between them and the rest.   This is the press of a bashful hand . . . . this is the float and odor of hair, This is the touch of my lips to yours . . . . this is the murmur of yearning, This is the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face, This is the thoughtful merge of myself and the outlet again.   Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Well I have . . . . for the April rain has, and the mica on the side of a rock has. Do you take it I would astonish? Does the daylight astonish? or the early redstart twittering through the woods? Do I astonish more than they? This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody but I will tell you. Who goes there! hankering, gross, mystical, nude? How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you? All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, Else it were time lost listening to me. I do not snivel that snivel the world over, That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth, That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears. Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids . . . . conformity goes to the fourth removed, I cock my hat as I please indoors or out. Related Books Walt Whitman (1819—1892) is considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets. His collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, in which “Song of Myself” appears, is probably the most influential volume of American literature. Whitman’s work was radically unconventional in both content and technique, with a poetic style that was free and organic in structure.

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At the Mercy of the Bootstraps Barbershop Chorus | An Excerpt from Notes for the Everlost

Sharing is the antidote. Irene messaged me a few months after her son Oliver had died of SIDS, another episode in our ongoing conversation from one continent to the other. Looking for you today. I hope you don’t mind. Oh! Are you okay love? No, but I’m getting used to it now and don’t expect it to be any different for the next while. The biggest thing for me is the anger at people who are being jerks. Even those close to me. I can’t shake it off. It’s exhausting. How are you? I still feel that way sometimes. It’s softer now than it used to be, but when I talk about it (rare these days) it triggers everything all over again. When I remember how someone called Liam a “gynecological mishap,” it’s like an electrical current of anger through my body just as vivid as a decade ago. Back then I was in shock, and I didn’t have the energy to stand up for myself. But I saw it for what it was, somehow. I knew the problem wasn’t me, but them. It was a wellspring of self-protection, but it comes with some pretty painful revelations and complicated feelings. Keep talking to me. When we connect with each other, we take the power away from the jerks. That’s how you realize everything is universal. The loneliness, the dismissals. You can talk back or walk away, but either way, quietly rearrange your circle to keep allies close to you. I feel like a bullshit magnet. Yeah. Your reaction—naming and pointing at the jerks, even if it’s just in your head—that’s your dragons stepping up for you. That’s your wellspring. THANK YOU. Doesn’t matter if you give your dragons an explicit voice or not. They will stand in between the soft parts of you and the bullshit. They’ll fade when you don’t need them anymore, but they’ll never go away. They’ll always be watching. They’ll be proud when you don’t need them and instantly onside when you do. . . . . . . . . What is it about the death of a baby that either brings all the bullshit out of the woodwork or inspires otherwise decent people to say bullshitty things? It’s a phenomenon. I have a vested interest and will therefore snap her out of this, they think. Then out it comes. Paraphrased: Look at the Millers, the family with the daughter who lives in the bubble for her immune sys­tem. Or the Robinsons with the alcoholic and the foreclosure. You’re not the only one in the world who hurts, you know. Stop dwelling. Think of all the people around you who need you to be uplifting. Be like so-and-so with the Down syndrome boy. She’s always so positive. My only regret, in hindsight, is that I’d sit there with my mouth hanging open, flies buzzing in and out like Homer Simpson at the control panel of a nuclear power plant. It was too much to unpack. I went outside myself, observing from some other place, as detached as I could be. It was bizarre, but thank god, I knew it at the time. With my mouth hanging open, I’d think What that person just said is sociopathically awful. The corrective/punitive stuff would come from people beset with forcibly submerged pain on the inside, a tidy spit-polish on the outside, and an aggressive commitment to keeping it that way. I was a threat to be neutralized. Turning me proper—sweeping the unmentionable under rugs, like Kleenex draped over a garbage heap (Nothing to see here, folks)—would have been proof of everything being in its place, with no place for me as I was. If you’re going to be a Coper—not one of those Non-Copers—you should just forget it. So-and-so did. She doesn’t even remember. She never complains, because she’s great. She’s optimistic! You should be like her. You should be strong enough to pretend it never happened. Homer Simpson . . . buzzing flies. I knew what health was. And I knew I had it. I was doing well, given what we’d been through. I wasn’t curled up in a ball, crying all day (had I been, that would have been fine). I wasn’t talking nonstop about what happened (had I been, that would have been fine). I rolled around on the floor with my two-year-old. I grilled cheese and chained daisies. I cried sometimes. Then to bed and up again in the morning for the NICU commute. I’d push those swinging double doors open and step across the threshold to scrub in like Jesse James. Sometimes, when someone would ask me how I was doing, I’d answer vulnerably. Truthfully. I’d say I’m upset. I’m scared. Slowly clotting blood is leaps and bounds better than infection, and I was willing to bleed. Made to live through it again I would choose to be, do, say, and feel the same way with no hesitation. For two months I pumped and cuddled, loving both of those boys regardless of what their outcomes might be. I forced myself to stare unblinking at the horror until I could see the beauty underneath all the wires and tubes because dammit, if one or both of them were to die, I wanted to know as much as I could of their hearts, their eyes, their soft skin, their grunts. Not only their machines and their misfortune. My pain has always been a clean pain. People with garbage heaps swept under rugs can’t say the same. That has nothing to do with me, nothing to do with you. On the flip side of the forcible bootstraps barbershop chorus is the silent majority: “What a crummy spring we’re having . . . too much rain, eh?” he mumbled as he stared at his shoes. I hadn’t seen him since Liam died. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew. He stood in front of a wrinkled, gray, twenty-foot trunk spitting peanuts against his forehead with a shwuck! schwuck! schwuck! as he shrugged: Elephant? What elephant? I’m being considerate, the silent majority congratulates itself. I’d always walk away thinking less of you, silent majority. You were smaller than I had thought you were. You were afraid of death cooties. It’s years later and I still think you’re a chickenshit. You, just as much as the grief-shaming barbershop chorus. . . . . . . . . For two months I pumped and cuddled, loving both of those boys regardless of what their outcomes might be. Years later, I’m in a café writing this chapter with my shoulders all jammed up against my ears. The outrage—the self-protective mechanism—kicks in, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to let it go. In my head: Good for you for seeing toxic people for what they are. That’s harsh. Tolerance for compassionless people is the master class of compassion. Screw tolerance. You gonna be this prickly forever? At least I’m not prickly on the outside. Most of them don’t know what I really think. Doesn’t matter if they know or not. You’re still carrying it around. We’re nuts, huh? We’re all nuts. Here’s a new outlook on ineptitude of all kinds. I’ll share it with you because someone shared it with me. You’re at the dinner table, on the street, bumping into peo­ple who either know exactly what to say (the wrong thing), or who say nothing. You’re standing there with your mouth hang­ing open. You feel abandoned, shamed, isolated. You might feel like nobody cares. You might feel damn near abused by thoughtlessness. Here’s your mantra: Jane is doing the best she can. This abhorrent scene represents the very best she can do. That’s what all of us are doing at any given moment, given our demons and distractions. Our contextual best. And this particu­lar criticism, dismissal, or peanut-gallery correction has nothing to do with you. Absolutely nothing. You need not respond to it, and you need not take it on as something to consider. So close your mouth. Flies are gross. Flies land on poop. Nod, mutter something, get away. Find some fresh air. Spend your life with people who don’t stare at their shoes, and who aren’t afraid of the dark. If you can’t get away, embark on a lifelong practice of expect­ing as little as possible—nothing, if possible—from certain people. You know who they are. What sounds like pessimism is peace. As soon as you detach from the expectation that Jane might someday change her behavior, you’re following a sliver of the Buddhist way, the right way, and you don’t need to know anything about the Rinpoche to do it. Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It’s similarly fruitless to attach meaning to someone else’s pattern and to let yourself be repeatedly hurt by it. It’s not worth the energy to even inwardly grumble about it. So don’t. Jane’s pat­tern will repeat itself again and again and instead of feeling like your face is going to explode, again and again, stand there and say to yourself: What we have here is Jane being Jane. This is her way of . . . Who knows? Who cares? She is unlikely to ever change. Nei­ther will Dick. . . . . . . . . I wrote. I wrote so much. I hadn’t yet found anyone else who was bereaved in this way and needed the exercise of trying to find words for what was inexpressible. It was satisfying in the same way it’s satisfying to pressure wash something filthy. You animate the inanimate with attention. You hear it say Aaah. A surface feels pleasure at its dirt being noticed and addressed, running in rivulets down the road. Even though it knows the dirt—the pain—will collect again. The practice of exposure to light and air is worth it, even for an afternoon. A farmer friend of mine watched my doves taking a bath in a tourtiere plate. They shook and dipped and shook gloriously, thrilled. “Giving an animal what it needs to clean itself is the most wonderful and basic kind of caring,” she said, smiling. “Even for the little ones.” To write—to make any art and be generative, either in sol­itude or with company—is animal husbandry for dragons. It calms them. The day after the twins were born, a distant relative came to the hospital with a gift. The drugs were still wearing off. I was unable to move, but I was conscious. “Here,” she said. “This is for you.” I reached out to take it with shaky hands. It was an empty, lined book. “You can write in here,” she continued, explaining. “Since you can’t write about this anywhere else. I mean, nobody would want to read it. I mean, you wouldn’t want anyone to think. . . anyway. This is so you can keep all this to yourself. Obviously.” Remembering that moment years later, I transport myself back to that hospital room. But not as the Kate with the freshly stapled incision. I am today’s Kate, the ghost of her future. People will say “there’s no right way to grieve,” but there is, I whisper to her. Or at least there’s a wrong way to show up, and that’s what you see in front of you. Carry on. The Kate of 2007 hears the Kate of 2017. “Right, I’ll do that,” she lies to the roomful of people, who watch approvingly. She is carrying on. Good girl. I filled the notebook and what felt like a hundred more. I look at them sometimes. I flip to a page and see myself hanging on to cliffs with my fingertips, near hysterical in how alone I felt. But I didn’t keep it to myself. I shared everything as it unfolded because that’s what was right for me. I founded a community for us, a place safe from mixed company where talking about feeling suffocated helped us all to breathe. I spoke at memorial walks. I made my own light and air. In all kinds of ways I allowed my pain to clean itself. I cared for it. And I wasn’t alone at all. FIELD NOTES 80-Page Steno Book Ruled Paper / Durable Materials Double-O Wiring / 6 x 9 February 2, 2016 In a performance hall watching this brilliant, accom­plished woman talk about innovation. Feeling quite a bit like a caveman, from the woods by a Nova Scotian creek to shining glass in downtown Vancouver. What is the takeaway? In business they call it “dis­ruption,” and they—the smart ones, anyway—say dis­ruption is integral to positive change. Nothing happens without a shock. She is talking about market strategy and team dynamics and I am listening, mostly, but in my mind, everything she says points to Liam. Not to reduce him to a prop for personal growth. But I am left here without him. There is no bigger disruption. The shock still unfolds, though more gently than it once did. For the rest of my life I will grapple with his absence. Grappling is growth. I can’t love him by wiping his nose. I can’t open his bedroom door, see he’s all gummed up in his blankets, and creep into the dark to untwist him, clammy limb by limb, for a fresh tuck. I can’t shampoo his hair or turn his socks right side out. I can’t stand it that he’s not here. But would I have rather not known him at all? The mass of this pain is still inside me. I wish I didn’t have to carry it. But I’d be his mother a thousand times over. I appreciate his imprint on who I am more than I resent the pain of witnessing his death. Covering a lecture for a client, I flipped to an empty page to doodle LIAM in block letters, with one star that looked like the hand-cut cookie of a three-year-old. LIAM. It was almost entirely absentminded, his name existing for me somewhere on the spectrum between sacred core and curiosity. One moment I’d been riffing on what I was hearing about experience design and corporate social channels and the next, my thoughts had drifted to him. I was almost a decade beyond him, yet I was adding polka dots to the M before I realized what I was doing: noting the disruption that made me. Disruption. When the twins were born three months early, I didn’t have access to a particular faith or philosophical array, but I didn’t feel a lack of one either. A hospital chaplain knocked repeatedly on the door, leaving notes about being available. I’ll come back tomorrow at 3:00, he’d write, and the next day at 3:00 I’d hide in the bathroom until his knocking stopped. But I worried, a little, that all I had was writing. Would it be enough? Was it the right thing, or was it “dwelling”? Disruption. Suddenly, you’re in over your head. You are flail­ing, panicking. Your faith or philosophy is not the life jacket you’d thought it would be. It is a Victorian ball gown with hoops and layers, forty pounds of ruffles and bustle and a corset designed for admirers, a shallow breath, and a straight back. It identifies you, as long as you’re on solid ground. It is your swank and swagger. But as soon as you hit the water, it wraps around your legs and lungs with the buoyancy of cinder blocks. To be shaken, uncertain, and searching for answers is to be naked. No god has betrayed you, no prayer had gone unheard. No theory was catastrophized into an ultimate test. If you’re going to be dropped into water over your head, you may as well be in your skin. Keep the ball gown. It’s a part of you too. But know when to let out a seam. Don’t buy into everything they tell you that you should be and shouldn’t. Make it as easy as possible to find the rhythm of your dog paddle. . . . . . . . . Don’t Complain. You are not so special. Other people have it worse than you. You need to get over it. Don’t Complain. Good Christians don’t. I expect the good Muslims and good Jews and good Hindus and all the other good devotees aren’t supposed to either, because to complain is to take issue with the grand master’s plan. Swishy proper types don’t. If you want everyone who meets you to marvel at your perfect manicure and perfect disregard for all emotions in the UNDIGNIFIED cat­egory, to complain is to invite the side eye of other swishy prop­ers. The nouveau Bohemian types aren’t supposed to either. See also: The Secret and viral Facebook memes and airport self-help books about how Positivity! rewires brain synapses to Manifest! Good! Things! But— But— But— If nobody ever complained, nothing would ever happen. No change, no growth. Like that movie about the town stuck with black-and-white pin curls and pressed slacks, every shirt tucked in and every button buttoned, but with no fistfights and no back seat hand jobs, no midnight ice cream, no musty basements, no French kisses, no gay uncles, no cotton candy cavities, no thrilling risks, no vagina-as-flower art, no smashing glass, no rose cream macarons, no keggers, no stray farts or nipples, no Thanksgiving politics, no caramel wrappers found stuffed between the couch cushions. No complaints. No one to say Why can’t I (scream when I need to / say what I mean / be who I am)? We are lusty and outrageous creatures. Our lust and our out­rage is the furnace of our aliveness. Complain, dammit. Incorpo­rate this new heat. Your baby died. Complain, darling, and weep and sob or talk about it to everyone or only yourself. Whatever is best for you. But complain. Complain until the heat of it brings you into your color. Gray and untouched is a half-life. The next time your peanut gallery winds up, say it out loud: Gray is the only true nothingness. Then walk away. Or imagine walking away. . . . . . . . . Don’t buy into everything they tell you that you should be and shouldn’t. Make it as easy as possible to find the rhythm of your dog paddle. My mom, cooped up with a toddler and an infant, went to her first quilting bee and found art, meditation, and friendship. I’ve grown up surrounded by straight pins and fat quarters, bundles of fabric from floor to ceiling, baskets of ribbons and hoops, the hum of her machine, and a house full of women of all ages chat­ting and laughing and sewing with hot pots of tea and fancy cakes. They were all soft, to me, like my mother. Some were wrinkled and plain and beaming, others wore bright lipstick and hand-knit socks and smelled like flowers and lemon squares. They all were delighted and occupied, laps heaped full. They knew my name and asked with great interest how school was going, where I’d go to university. They’d pass around stacks of half-finished piecework to marvel at each other’s tiny stitches and rare cottons, their voices blending into a chirpy, contented mur­mur downstairs, their busy hands warming our house. One day not long after our release from the NICU, with Evan at daycare having a Big Kid Day, I wandered the bins of the Bridgewater Frenchy’s—a chain of thrift shops that has punc­tuated the Maritime experience since before I can remember—with a sleeping, perhaps six-pound Ben wrapped up in the mei tai. I was pulling little long johns from the TODDLERS bin when I sensed someone walking my way. It was Polly, one of my mother’s first mentors and closest quilting friends. She has written books and had exhibitions. It was Polly who taught my mother how to sew. “Oh! Hi,” I said, dropping the clothes in my hands and step­ping toward her for a hug. She stopped in front of me and took me by the shoulders. “Oh god, Kate, I am so sorry,” she said. “I heard what hap­pened with Liam, and I am so upset for you. It’s awful, and I am so sorry. I just can’t believe it. How are you doing, Kate? Tell me, how are you?” Polly, you should understand, isn’t one of the particularly flow­ery ones. She’s witty and sharp. She doesn’t stand for any fluff, if that makes sense. She’s passionately opinionated and direct, so when she said “I’m sorry,” she didn’t say it the way most people do, drifting-off. She said it how it’s supposed to be said. With fervor and agitation. I can’t remember how I responded. I only remember she didn’t look away. She was angry for me. She felt it was wrong, back­ward, and unfair for a baby to die, and she wanted me to know it. We talked a while, had a long hug. She peered into the mei tai to see the top of Ben’s head. It’s rare to encounter people who say the words That sucks with loving attention and outrage. And how lovely it is to exhale like that. I have never forgotten it. . . . . . . . . Related Books  Kate Inglis is an author and photographer living on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. Learn more.

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The Path of Spheres | An Excerpt from Kabbalah

Kabbalistic Meditation Since the Middle Ages the cosmic tree of life with its ten spheres, or divine attributes, has been the central image of kabbalistic meditation. Though some masters adapted the “seven heavens” of the first century Merkabah mystics, equating them with the seven lower branches of the tree, most Kabbalists focused their attention on the symbolic tree alone. With its inner “lights,” corresponding colors, metals, and divine names, the tree itself was complicated enough. The mystic’s attitude as he approached meditation on the spheres proved him to be as certain of his ultimate goal as he was reverential. Says Moses de Leon, a thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist: When God gave the Torah to Israel, He opened the seven heavens to them, and they saw that nothing was there in reality but His Glory; He opened the seven worlds to them and they saw that nothing was there but His Glory; He opened the seven abysses before their eyes, and they saw that nothing was there but His Glory. Meditate on these things and you will understand that God’s essence is linked and connected with all worlds, and that all forms of existence are linked and connected with each other, but derived from His existence and essence.* * Quoted in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 223 In this spirit, the mystic prepared to scale the tree, confront the worlds, acknowledge the links through his own person, and come to a direct experience of the divine ground on which the whole scheme rests. “When I open the book Zohar,” said the Baal Shem Tov, “I behold the whole universe.” The sphere of Sovereignty represents our world of matter. Foundation, Endurance, and Majesty combine as the premanifest world of spirit. Beauty, Loving-kindness, and Judgment form the world of creation. While the world of Wisdom, Understanding, and Crown is the very domain of divine immanence. Thus, in “climbing” mentally toward his source, the mystic traverses the myriad universes embodied in the ten spheres, as well as the four archetypal worlds, the seventy divine names, and innumerable “faces” on the tree. The culmination of all devotional, contemplative, and visionary works alluding to this ascent—the guide book of guide books—is the Zohar, or “Book of Splendor.” A massive compendium of stories and biblical exegesis, this book both decoded the esoteric Torah and presented the devotee with a detailed map of the visionary landscape he would be exploring along the tree. “When I open the book Zohar,” said the Baal Shem Tov, “I behold the whole universe.” And he meant it literally. Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai and the “Zohar” Scholars, on the other hand, call the Zohar a brilliant forgery devised by Moses de Leon, who, they say, attributed the work to the great Tannaitic sages in an attempt to legitimize it. Forgery or no, the Zohar is indispensable to an understanding of Jewish mystical life from the Middle Ages to our own times. The background of the book is well known: Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, its hero, was a second-century sage who, accompanied by his son Eleazar, lived in a cave for thirteen years to escape the Romans who had killed his master, Rabbi Akiva. Miraculously sustained by a carob tree and a fountain, which both sprang up at the mouth of their cave, the father and son sat buried in sand all day in order to protect themselves from the scorching sun that shines on the area that is now occupied by the Ben-Gurion Airport in Lod (Lydda), Israel. Here they studied the Torah under the guidance of the prophet Elijah. In the thirteenth year of their exile, the Roman emperor Trajan, their principal persecutor, died, leaving the two sages free to emerge from hiding. Horrified at the lack of spirituality he encountered among the Jews on his return, Rabbi Simeon returned to his cave to meditate for another year. At the end of that period a voice resounded through the cave, urging him to leave ordinary men to their own devices and to teach only those who were ready to hear him. The discourses given by Rabbi Simeon at the urging of that divine order—recorded by the loyal group of “companions” who gathered round him on his second re-emergence into the world—comprise the Zohar. Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai apparently belonged to that small group of gifted teachers whose mere presence could transform spiritually any man, woman, child, or animal. He taught that all observable things here were reflected in a higher world and that no thing or person survived independently on any plane of existence, no matter how high. Anyone determined to elevate his own soul was therefore automatically committing himself to elevate every sentient, and even insentient, entity in God’s creation. “All souls form but one unity with the Divine Soul,” was the basis for all his teachings. The entire aim of a man’s stay on earth, said Rabbi Simeon, is to realize this in the experience of union: All things of which this world is composed, as the soul and the body, will return to the principle and to the root from which they sprang. For God is the beginning and He is the end of all the degrees of creation. And all the degrees are bound with Hisseal. He is the unique Being, in spite of the innumerable forms in which He is clothed. Rabbi Simeon’s message is therefore a call to union with the Divine. In his view even the written and spoken Torah are actually One, since they emerge directly from the revelation at Sinai, where God’s words were each divided into seventy sounds which appeared in the form of seventy lights that enabled the Israelites to see the words as they heard them. Similarly, the spheres, also emanations from the One, provide the Kabbalist with the opportunity to relive the Sinai mystery in his meditations. More than mere rungs on a ladder, the divine attributes actualize the otherwise physically imperceptible notion of God. So closely intertwined are these attributes with the very words of the Torah that they are virtually interchangeable for purposes of contemplation. When seen in this light, the divine attributes (which are themselves interchangeable) resound with the hidden Names which God assigned to Himself. The egoless heart of the mystic radiates these illumined names and is simultaneously absorbed by them. Rabbi Simeon taught many forms of meditation on the spheres. One example of the multiple possibilities he expounded was to imagine the attributes as a series of dancing lights against the branches of the tree. Closing his eyes, the Kabbalist visualized them vibrating with color, blazing with the letters of the divine names, each one reflecting its corresponding metal, planet, angel, and human body part. He gazed until the lights began to shift positions; one mounting on the left; one descending on the right; one entering between them. Two spheres crown themselves with a third; three merge into one; one suddenly emanates many colors. Then six spheres descend all at once, doubling to twelve. Twelve become twenty-two, then six again, and then ten. At last, all the spheres are swallowed up in one. The human breath is a mixture of subtle elements comprised of air, fire, and water. Without breath we die. Although there is a definite resemblance between this mental exercise and certain drug-induced experiences of light, color, and movement, we ought not assume that Rabbi Simeon and his companions were transporting themselves with hallucinogens. All evidence points to a strict pattern of mental concentration in an alert state heightened by nothing more than fasting, perhaps, and isolation. The parts of the Kabbalist’s body, too, are alive with knowledge. The seven lower spheres on the tree correspond to seven centers of heavenly power disbursed along the spine. Meditation on the spine reveals that a human being is composed of male (active, fiery) energy on the right, and female (receptive, watery) on the left. Thus, says Rabbi Simeon, in observing and combining the two qualities, the disciple actually experiences the unifying principle of creation directly: “In the form of God He made him, male and female He made them” (Genesis 1:27). Furthermore, the seven lower spheres by which the transcendent Absolute is comprehensible to man all share human neural counterparts which, like the spheres along the tree, meet in the highest center located in the brain. Rabbi Simeon refers metaphorically to the crown of the head as “the Brooks of God,” and, reminding his companions of The Song of Songs, asks: “What is this ‘fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, flowing from Lebanon? It is nothing more than the sphere representing Wisdom.” And since the word “Lebanon” comes from the same root as laban, “white,” Solomon also here means it to represent the “white matter in the brain.” In Rabbi Simeon’s hands, the entire verse becomes an esoteric lesson in contemplation: Come with me from Lebanon, bride, with me from Lebanon! Look from the top of Amana, from the top of Senir and Hermon, from the lion’s dens, from the mountains of the leopards. Breath and sound emerge from the white matter in the human brain, here called “Lebanon.” “Amana” is the throat, which projects the breath from the topmost nerve center of the body and allows it to circulate downward to the lower nerve centers along the spine. The top of “Senir” and “Hermon” represent the tongue; the “lion’s den,” the teeth; the “mountains of the leopards,” the lips and speech. King Solomon’s Breathing Exercise Solomon, gifted in speech and song, devised this contemplative exercise, says Rabbi Simeon, as a result of his own ecstatic experiences. Having attained to the seventh sphere on the tree, he condensed the mystic ascent into three books for those who would follow. The Song of Songs therefore represents the nature of the sphere known as Beauty; Ecclesiastes depicts the sphere of Judgment; and Proverbs characterizes Loving-kindness. Solomon’s father David, also a poet, transmitted to him the technique for evoking the “holy breath,” or inspiration, which induced the visionary experiences and, ultimately, the three great books. Says Rabbi Simeon, “the human breath is a mixture of subtle elements comprised of air, fire, and water. Without breath we die. By learning and practicing the secrets inherent in the breath, Solomon could lift nature’s physical veil from created things and see the spirit within.” What is usually translated in Ecclesiastes as “vanity” (hebli) may therefore be read esoterically as: “I have seen all things in the days of my breath, hebel.” In some as yet undisclosed way, Rabbi Simeon taught Solomon’s technique of directing attention to the white matter in the brain while altering normal breathing patterns. Insisting that union between man and God “is best effected on earth” through the vehicle of breath, he likened the mystery of breathing to the sacred Shema, the daily declaration of God’s unity with His Name. Rabbi Simeon pointed out that the three names contained in the blessing—YHVH, Elohaynu, YHVH—signify the fire, air, and water of the human breath. Visualizing the three highest attributes on the tree (Crown, Wisdom, and Understanding) as he recites the declaration, the Kabbalist makes of his own breath a channel for the divine influx. “Whilst a man’s mouth and lips are moving his heart and will must soar to the height of heights, so as to acknowledge the unity of the whole.” Share Related Books A descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, Perle Besserman has studied Jewish mysticism with Rabbis Zvi Yehuda Kook and Aryeh Kaplan. Learn More. 

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The Desert Knows | An Excerpt from Desert

Parched Stories define us, it’s true. And they matter, though they always leave so much out. I like it that way, keep telling them to desert, and desert keeps filling in whatever it is we’re missing. For months now death has felt frail and far away. Breath surprises me. The usual morning ridgeline surprises me, sun- lit wasp wing, lichen- stained bark jade- green. Breath pulses, pulses, pulses. So far away death. How will I ever find my way back home there? The desert never mentions arrival. Solar heat, sky, dust- light, a few parched colors: they rinse so far through me there’s nowhere else to go. I set out. Snow goes on falling, flurried all day through it- self. Once things get simple enough, there's no understanding or even recognizing them, like this flurried snow nothing more than flurried snow falling, falling through all our knowing. Or my face in a mirror gazing out, gazing out at itself utterly. Who knows how far I’ve come. But to keep moving, sometimes you need things simple. If we could not speak, not share the bright clarity of whatever occurs with us, who could bear it? The day is all yellow desert here, blue sky. Less and less happens. How is it there’s so much more to say? Autumn-worn desert grass in late sun, its scratches of light horizoned against blue sky: how could this routine sight feed me so perfectly? Feed me, feed me, and keep hunger wide- open? Death lives in us like this: one more way desert unfurls its distances. Light thinks through things in its own way, ignites every detail of their every surface, and the eye opens those bright surfaces all the way inside me: mesquite bloom, cottonwood leaf- shimmer, sky. They say beauty is only skin deep, mere surface, but light knows how deep surfaces go. The desert knows how it is, the empty parched desert. I bow to rain. I wake every morning the same person. Same life- history, same mind, same eyes looking. Some- times, when the boredom seems almost endless, I walk out among mountains the same mountains, sky sky, and I understand them perfectly. Related Books David Hinton’s many translations of classical Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary poems that convey the texture and density of the originals. Hinton has received many national awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, both major awards for poetry translation, and most recently, a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Learn more. 

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