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The Mystery Of Buddhism
I am an admirer of Master Nan Huai-Chin, whose books Working Toward Enlightenment and To Realize Enlightenment I have always found difficult but helpful. They are not easy-going, but Master Nan is so knowledgeable and his experience so vast and wide-ranging that he is always insightful. According to Master Nan I cannot realise enlightenment because I am not celibate, but in many other respects I try to live by the Buddhist precepts he advocates. I will have to leave enlightenment for another lifetime.
The first volume Working Toward Enlightenment starts with an interesting conversation and question, leading to one of his characteristic insights. He writes,
There is a story behind this book. An old friend, Mr. Xiao, came to see me. As he was about to leave. he asked me a question: “Shakyamuni Buddha left home when he was 18, and finally – much later, after years of effort- lifted his head, saw a bright star, and was enlightened. What was it that he was enlightened to? “
Master Nan explains that he answered his friend by saying that the Buddha was enlightened to interdependent causation and inherent emptiness. Mr. Xiao said ” Oh… right”, pushed the door open , and left. This exit left Master Nan disturbed. Mr Xiao was a serious student of Buddhism. “If someone else asked this question, it wouldn’t matter much, but since he was asking this question, it was very serious. In other words, when he asked this question, it had extraordinary depth.”
So what was it that the Buddha was enlightened to? Master Nan confirms that he awakened to inherently empty interdependent origination. But the point is that the Buddha awakened to it after 12 years of practicing all sorts of techniques and studying with a number of teachers. It took him years of effort to bring himself to the point where just stopping his meditation for a moment and looking up into the night sky to see a bright star brought him to enlightenment. It was a matter of an experience, a truth discovered through practice, whereas Master Nan points out that you and I can open up any book on Buddhism and we can read about these principles and truths that we have not experienced, except through reading them.
Master Nan says that we are “inverting cause and effect”, taking the truths and principles that the Buddha discovered and adding them intellectually to our lives, without going through the experience that would really make them truths for ourselves, real lived experience. I have an idea of what the Buddha was enlightened to when he looked at that star, but it’s still more intellectual speculation- words. I won’t bother putting it down here, since this question – What was it the Buddha was enlightened to? – is a kind of Koan, a question to mull over and penetrate, until finally the answer (if there is one) comes out of your practice.
My New Film: How Sigmund Freud escaped from the Nazis
The Escape Of Sigmund Freud
A film by David Cohen
I’m preparing a new film which tells the story of how the world-famous creator of psychoanalysis managed to leave Nazi-occupied Vienna protected and helped by the Nazi who was meant to make his life a misery. Anton Sauerwald ignored Berlin’s orders and gave Freud and his family assistance, much to their relief and amazement.
This is a true story based on a book by David Cohen (The Escape Of Sigmund Freud) published in the UK, US, Japan, Brazil and other countries.
Freud managed to leave Vienna with sixteen members of his family, and his overseer, Sauerwald, arranged to sell some of Freud’s art collection to pay for the extortionate exit visas. He then sent Freud’s possessions to England by lorry, and later visited him in London (1938). On that visit Freud asked Sauerwald if he could drive his Viennese surgeon to London to operate on Freud’s cancer of the jaw. But the most striking part of this strange relationship between the second most famous Jew in the world (Einstein was the first) and Sauerwald, a committed Nazi, is the fact that Sauerwald found the Freud family’s hidden foreign bank books. If his superiors knew they existed, Freud would have been immediately arrested.
Sauerwald kept the bank books to himself, never reported them, and gave them back to Freud, without asking for a penny for himself.
After the war Sauerwald was arrested and tried for stealing from the Freuds. He asked Anna Freud to write a letter explaining what had happened. Perhaps influenced by the fact that her four aunts (Freud’s elderly sisters) all died in concentration camps, Anna hesitated for some time before finally writing a letter which declared Sauerwald’s innocence.
The events the Freud family endured are alarming and terrifying, yet strange and surprising twists of character and fate take place, leading almost to a sense of disbelief. Could this really have happened? Did a deep-dyed Nazi actually help Freud escape? Many Holocaust stories defy belief, but this one is different. It exposes the contradictory nature of the human mind, and it seems in keeping for this to happen to Freud, whose fame derived from studying the mind.
David Suchet is attached to play Freud, and there are other great parts. If we succeed, The Escape of Sigmund Freud could become one of the great Shoah films of our time, showing the horrific change that fell upon the Jews of Europe once the Nazis took control of their homelands. This is a sad, terrifying and moving story, but it still has moments of dry humour, since it was Freud’s sense of gallows humour which kept him sane.
Freud’s escape shows how complicated relations between Jews and Nazis could become. Who could imagine that a strange friendship like this could develop? Although Freud was world famous for understanding the human mind, he was at a loss to explain why Sauerwald helped him, and Sauerwald too could not understand it.
The film will be shot largely hand-held, so that the sense of actuality will be preserved. The intention is to help the audience see the events unfolding in front of their eyes as events happening to the Freud family, and not as an ‘historical’ film.
It is really an amazing story and I am looking forward to making it.
A Cultivator’s Diary Pt 8 (From my journals 2007)
February 27, 2007
My generation, me included, started our adult lives with great optimism, wanting to change things, to live by different values, not to follow the conventions set by our parents. But we abandoned all that, and as John Carpenter said, we all turned into money-grubbing guys, just like our parents’ generation, perhaps even worse than that.
Is it possible to go back to that earlier state of mind and of being, to want to change things for the better, to live by a different set of values, a more human set. Can I do this for myself before it is too late, before I lose it, age and become useless to myself and others. This would be a great project to set yourself. Are you capable of it? Can you in fact go back to that 11 year old you who you admired so much. This is the great work for you: to reverse your aging, reverse your body and mind, and go back to the state of being of your 11 year old self. Can you do it?
The Seeker – Pt 3
The Seeker is taken from the writings of Chuang Tzu and appears in my book The Spiritual Teachings of The Tao. Nan Jung Chu was an older student who wanted to become a Real Person. His teacher suggested he visit Lao Tzu, who tried to teach him:
7. Fourth Teaching: Preserve Inner Freedom
One who preserves his inner self doesn’t act for the sake of fame. One who lives for the world has his will set on whatever he can take. One who acts without thinking of fame may seem ordinary, but shines brightly. One whose will is set on gain is just a trader.
People see how he stands on tiptoe, while he thinks he is naturally superior. A person attached to things becomes possessed by them, while one indifferent to things just lets them pass by.
Attached to things, you lose concern for other people. Unconcerned with others, everyone becomes a stranger. In this way a person becomes alienated from others.
There is no weapon deadlier than the will — even the sharpest sword is inferior to it. There is no robber greater than Yin and Yang, from whom nothing es-capes. But it’s not Yin and Yang that do the robbing – it’s your own heart that does it.
8. Fifth Teaching: Hide In Non-Existence
Tao is in everything, found in the complete and the divided. To divide something is to create something else. To create something is to destroy something else.
So when people emerge and are born, if they don’t know how to return to their previous non-existence, they are little more than ghosts. Everything that is born also returns – they die, as we say. They may be killed off and gone, but their life is like that of ghosts.
If the formed can learn from the unformed then true understanding can take place. We emerge, but not from a root. We return, but not through an opening. We have a real existence, but it’s not located in a place. We have duration, but it has nothing to do with beginning or end.
We have a real existence, but it has nothing to do with place: that’s our relation to space. We have duration, but it has nothing to do with beginning or end: that’s our relation to time.
We have life, we have death; we emerge, we return. To emerge and return without showing our form is called the ‘Gate of Heaven’. The Gate of Heaven is Non-being.
All forms of life come from non-being. The first beings couldn’t bring themselves into being – they must have come from non-being. And non-being is just the same as non-existing.
So the sage hides himself in non-existence and this is his secret.”
9. Sixth Teaching: Find Real Knowledge
Lao Tzu continued his teaching, “Among the ancients there were those whose knowledge reached the extreme point. What was that point? There were some who thought that in the beginning there must have been nothing. This was the extreme point, the furthest reach of their knowledge, to which nothing could be added.
Next were some who supposed that in the beginning there was existence, and they considered life to be a gradual ebbing, and death a return to the original state. And there they stopped, but made the division between life and death.
And there were those who said, ‘In the beginning there was nothing. Later there was life. And in a while life was succeeded by death. We believe that non-existence is the head, life the body, and death the buttocks. Any-one who understands that existence and non-existence, death and life, are all under One keeper, will be our friends.’
Although these three views are different, they belong to the same family. They are one, even though they seem to be diverse.”
10. Seventh Teaching: All Life Is One
Lao Tzu continued, “The possession of life is like dirt that collects under a cooker. When this is distributed in different forms, we consider it different. But to try to talk about these differences is a waste of breath. There is always something we don’t understand.
For instance, at the Winter Sacrifice the intestines and hooves of the sacrificial animal are placed on separate dishes, but we don’t consider them parts of different victims. The animal is one.
Again, when you inspect a house to buy, you go over all of it in detail – bedrooms, shrines and toilets – making estimates of different parts of the house. But the house is one.
Let me speak about how people make distinctions. Life is the root, and knowledge is applied to it. Using knowledge, people examine life, and debate right and wrong, trying to determine what will bring fame and fortune. Their conclusion is that only they know what’s right, and they try to make others adopt them as a model, even prepared to die to defend their views.
These people believe being an official is a mark of knowledge, and not being in office a sign of stupidity. They think success entitles them to fame, and failure is a disgrace. The people of the present day who follow this method are like the cicada and the little dove — there’s little difference between them.
If you tread on someone’s foot in the crowd, you apologize. If an older brother steps on his younger brother, he comforts him. If a parent treads on a child’s foot, no need to ask forgiveness.
Hence it’s said:
‘Perfect politeness shows no special respect;
perfect justice takes no account of things;
perfect wisdom makes no plans;
perfect good shows no emotion;
perfect loyalty gives no oath of sincerity.’”
11. Eighth Teaching: Keep A Calm And Stable Mind
Lao Tzu concluded his teaching to Nan Jung Chu,
“Suppress the impulses of the will;
unravel the errors of the mind;
untie the knots of virtue;
unblock the free flow of Tao.
Glory and riches,
prominence and position,
fame and profit;
these six are the impulses of the will.
Personal appearance and style,
beauty and cleverness,
excitement and memory;
these six are errors of the mind.
Hatred and desire,
pleasure and anger,
sadness and joy;
these six are the knots of virtue.
Rejection and acceptance,
receiving and giving,
knowledge and ability;
these six obstruct the free flow of Tao.
When these four conditions,
and their six causes,
no longer disturb your heart,
then you will be correct.
Being correct, you are calm;
being calm, you are clear;
being clear, you are empty;
empty –
the state of doing nothing,
in which everything gets done.
Tao is revered by all the virtues.
Life is when their power can shine.
Nature is the substance of life.
Nature’s movement we call action.
When action is false,
it fails to strike home.
People who are knowing attach themselves to things outside and always have a plan. With all their knowledge there’s always something they miss – they can’t see straight.
When you act because there is no alternative, it’s called ‘virtue’. When you act from your deepest self, it’s called ‘governing’.
You may think these two terms are opposed to each other, but in reality they are in agreement.”
So ended the Master’s teaching.
Did Nan Jung Chu ever find Tao?
Did he keep his health and guard his life?
We shall never know.
The Seeker – Pt 2
The Seeker is taken from the writings of Chuang Tzu and appears in my book The Spiritual Teachings of The Tao. Nan Jung Chu was an older student who wanted to become a Real Person. His teacher suggested he visit Lao Tzu:
4. First Teaching: Close The Gates
Nan Jung Chu entered Lao Tzu’s school and the Master suggested he try to develop the things he liked, and dismiss all unpleasant thoughts.
For ten days he meditated and fasted, and went again to Lao Tzu, who said to him, “Even though you’re purifying yourself, you still seem anguished. You’re still clinging to things you dislike.
When external influences trouble you, you may try to control them, but you’ll find that very difficult. Better to stop their invasion by protecting your inner core. Likewise, when internal impulses bother you, it’s difficult to hold them in check. Better to close the gates of your self against their leaving. A master of the Tao and its power wouldn’t be able to control these two influences acting together, and how much less can one who is only a student!”
5. Second Teaching: Thaw The Ice
Nan Jung Chu said, “A villager fell ill, and when his neighbours asked about it, he was able to describe the symptoms, even though it was an illness he hadn’t had before. When I ask you about Grand Tao, it’s like taking medicine which only increases my sickness. It will be enough for me if you can just explain the Tao of keeping good health.“
Lao Tzu replied, “You ask about keeping good health.
Can you embrace the One?
Can you keep from losing it?
Can you know good and bad fortune without consulting the oracle?
Can you rest where you ought to rest?
Can you stop when you have enough?
Can you leave others alone and seek it in yourself alone?
Can you flee from desire?
Can you be sincere?
Can you become like a little child? A child can cry all day without becoming hoarse- so perfect is its harmony. It can clench its fists all day without relaxing its grip – such is the concentration of its power. It can stare all day without moving its eyes -so unconcerned is it by the outside world. It walks but doesn’t know where. It rests where it’s placed, but it doesn’t know why. It unconsciously mingles with things, and just follows their flow. This is how to guard life.
Nan Jung Chu said, “And are these the characteristics of a Real Person?”
Lao Tzu replied, “No. This is called thawing the ice, and melting the frost.
Can you do it?
The Real Person, along with others, shares food from Earth, and happiness from Heaven. But unlike others, he doesn’t relate to considerations of profit and loss. Unlike others, he doesn’t do strange things, form plans, or have projects. He flees the allure of desire, and pursues his way with a complete simplicity.
This is the way he guards his life.”
“And does this constitute perfection?”, asked Nan Jung Chu.
“Not quite,“ said Lao Tzu. “I will ask again whether you can become like a little child, a newborn who acts without knowing what it’s doing, and walks without knowing where it’s going. Its body is like dried out wood, and its mind like cold wet ashes. Because of this, good and bad fortune don’t affect it. Experiencing neither good nor bad fortune, how can it suffer human calamities?”
When your mind reaches such spontaneity, its emits a Heavenly light, and in this light everything is revealed: humans reveal their humanity and things their substance. When a person has cultivated himself to this point, he becomes constant. When he is constant, others will seek refuge with him, and Heaven will help him. Those in whom others take refuge we call the People of Heaven. Those whom Heaven helps we call the Children of Heaven.
Those who seek this by study look for something that can’t be learned. Those who seek it by effort, attempt what effort can never achieve. Those who seek it by reason, use reason where reason has no place. Knowledge of when to stop when you can’t arrive by knowledge is perfection. Those who can’t grasp this will be destroyed by Heaven.”
6. Third Teaching: Maintain Inner Sincerity
Lao Tzu continued, “When everything is done to maintain the body; when the mind is aware of possible dangers; when inner reverence is cherished and given freely to others; if all this is done, and bad fortune still arrives, it’s due to Heaven, and not to humanity.
These misfortunes aren’t enough to disturb your serenity, or to invade the Spirit Tower of your heart and mind. This Tower has a Guardian but unless you know this Guardian he won’t recognize you.
If you try to accomplish anything without this inner sincerity, every attempt will fail. Malign influences will enter, and you will be unable to free yourself from them. Then with every fresh attempt there will be still greater failure. If you do evil in daylight, people will punish you. If evil is done in darkness and secrecy, then spirits will inflict punishment. Understand your relations both to people and spirits, and then you’ll know what to do in the solitude of yourself.”
Part 3 to follow.
What is Cultivation?
On October 22nd I posted In Praise of Hardship which was about a British Taoist Association retreat led by Meng Zhiling, a Taoist priest from China. He impressed me very much. In the latest edition of The Dragon’s Mouth, the journal of the BTA, is an interview with him, and he says some interesting and unusual points about cultivation.
Meng had been working as a teacher at the White Cloud Temple in Beijing, but he felt the need to find some of the old Taoists and to seek a quiet spot to cultivate himself. He ended up at a cold region called Dongbei and he carved out a cave to live in. He accepted no donations, but earned money to survive. He said “It was difficult, but it was the life I had chosen. If there was anything that could make my life easier, I would reject it.” This is the true spirit of the Tao.
After a while local villagers came to ask him about the Tao. He told them he didn’t know anything, but they didn’t believe him and kept coming, which disturbed his tranquillity. So he decided to find somewhere even more remote. He found an abandoned hut at the foot of a mountain and started living there. “It was in a bad state but I managed to fix it up enough to live there. My clothes quickly turned to rags, the palms of my hands were thick with callouses and my fingertips were often bleeding. Some of the tasks I set myself were really unnecessary, but I would just do them to make my life more difficult. I would spend my days working and meditating, just those two things.”
Incredibly, he kept on looking for ways to make things more difficult! “I began to see that difficulties in life have no end, but we just need to put them aside and forget about them. Then eventually you will reach a state where nothing is difficult, nothing is impossible. Once you’ve reached such a state, no matter where you go or what you do you will not find it difficult. Nothing can affect your heart/mind any more. So this is when your heart/mind becomes more clear and your original nature is radiant again.”
Meng says this about original nature: “Our original nature is like a glowing pearl but through our day to day lives, with all our thoughts and desires, we accumulate dust which covers its original condition. But if we remove this dust then the pearl will be able to shine again. The term for this method of cultivation is to stabilize our heart and transform our nature (xiangxin huaxing). To stabilize our heart means that we stay tranquil. When we stay tranquil we stop accumulating more dust. And by removing the old dust that we have already accumulated we transform our nature. So once we’ve removed all the dust from our heart/mind then our true nature is revealed. And our true nature is Tao.”
His advice to us sounds basic, but is profound: “Keep your heart simple and clear. Don’t get caught up in too many theories of cultivation, that just creates more ideas. Just keep your heart simple and clear.”
This sounds easy, almost too easy, but you can’t find one person in a million who can do it.
A Cultivator’s Diary – Part 3 (From my journal 2007)
January 25 2007
In the morning, when everyone has left the house to go to work or school, there is a great silence and peace in the house. But at the same time, because there is so little for me to do, a great lassitude comes over me. This reluctance to move but only rest (the desire to read a book or contrarily to go out and buy a newspaper) needs a certain discipline to get me into the yoga room to practise. Once there it is easier- force of habit and the feeling in my body that moving and stretching are what I really need take over and I am into it.
I want to see if my arms/shoulders have changed since yesterday’s work. Is there as much pain in those specific points? Is there more mobility? What effect did this work have on other parts of the body, if any?
Evening:
Reading To Realise Enlightenment by Master Nan Huai-Chin. He talks of how you have to understand that Form is Emptiness and Emptiness Form. Quantum physics also says that Form is Emptiness, that atoms, which make up the Form of the material world, are 99.9% empty once you open them up. What we take to be solid and stable is actually dancing and ultimately empty, separating out into vast areas of emptiness in a tiny space. Since space is relative a tiny space can be a vast space. Inside the atom it certainly acts like one.
So if my body, my Form, is Empty, then as Nan says it is birthless and deathless. What is born is a Form, a baby, developed from a smaller Form, an embryo which grew from a sperm and egg. But if all of these are Forms, however small or large, then all of them are also Empty and once they are all resolved to Emptiness, how is Emptiness ‘born’ and how does Emptiness ‘die’? If we are all Empty then we are all unborn, and our births and deaths just transformations of Form, something which the elements we are made of have been doing from the beginningless beginning of time.
Can you live with a mind that sees that all is Emptiness? Can you put that into practise? How does that relate to your law suit with the Pythons? That is certainly part of the world of Form – it exists as a concept and a thing so must be Empty. I suppose the attitude should be: I’ll pursue my case because people have cheated me and I should not allow myself to be cheated. However if I lose the case I should just walk away from it with no regrets, bitterness or anger. And while it is going on I should feel no anxiety about the outcome, no matter whether I win or lose. In fact Emptiness means that winning and losing do not exist. They dissolve away into an equality of Empty Form.
Living Philosophy – from my journal October 2006
Whatever happens is going to happen. Things will play out as they are going to, and nothing you can do will alter that. The more you try to fight or alter the way it is going, the more frustrated you will be, and the more energy you will lose trying to fight against the flow of things. And the flow of things is the Tao. Relax, lay back, play the cards you are dealt in the best way you can, but don’t get too worked up. Try to enjoy the situation and the circumstances rather than getting angry and worked up, which only hurts you, makes you sour and bitter. Better to laugh at it all, smile, take it easy and enjoy the ride.
This is real philosophy, if only you could live it like this, rather than just writing about, that’s the test, walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
Lost Forest – Clee Clothing
My daughter Cleo started her fashion business- Clee Clothing – in 2009 when she was 16. She knew nothing about business and wasn’t interested in fashion, but she just had some clothing ideas that she wanted to make. Two of her earliest successes were the ‘Made in’ series
and the ‘I Love Ur Mum’ series, 
both of which were heavily copied by others.
After a couple of years she wasn’t satisfied with her brand. She knew it was missing something. She gave it a lot of thought and realised that what was missing was an identity. And the only identity that it could have would be hers. It was her creation and it was her designs and skills that was the essence of the brand and that is what she needed to focus on – her own thoughts ideas and images.
In February 2012 she held an event to create a Rebirth of the Brand, and brought out new themed designs that reflected her feelings about life.
This is what she wrote about the Rebirth: “Cleo started Clee Clothing aged 16 with no solid plan but lots of ambition. Fast-forward 2 years; Cleo paused, and realised how unhappy she was with what her project had become. Her lack of business understanding had led to a lack of brand value, meaning and direction. What was Clee Clothing, and what did it want to be?
Months of self-reflection later, Cleo decided that despite her discontent, she wasn’t ready to let go of all she had worked on. She decided to use all the negative feelings she had to begin rebranding, to work on new designs and to build the foundation that had been missing.”
Cleo relaunched Clee Clothing under “The Rebirth” because, as a Phoenix is reborn out of the ashes of itself, so was Clee Clothing.
The first collection under ‘The Rebirth’ is broken into 3 stages: Lost, Trust and Unrestricted.
Stage 1, Lost , is where Cleo felt she was before The Rebirth took place. As George The Poet eloquently puts it:
None of us have a clue why we’re here. And
Some of us are too fly to care. Life is a
String of mistakes that find purpose, the confusing
Thing is what makes that time worthless. You’re
Selling a vision, wanting us to buy the dreams, but
What if the end doesn’t justify the means?
None of us have a clue why we’re here, unless you’ve got
Something you could prove which you’d like to share?
Otherwise we struggle with two types of fear: the
Fear of what could be and the fear of what will be
Dealing with thousands of sharks feeling around in the dark.
Missing that childhood freedom you found in the park, which
You would fight for at all costs: but the
Bottom line is that you’re lost.
I recently saw one of her designs that came from the theme of Lost. It is Lost Forest, a beautiful black white and grey T shirt that is really a work of art.
As Cleo says, “Clee Clothing now reflects the honest and personal journey of its founder and designer – Cleo Forstater. The way a musician uses their music, the way an artist uses their art; this is her expression. All the designs, either explicitly or inexplicitly, echo a feeling or thought that Cleo has held.”
Check out Cleoi thing.com and you’ll see what I mean. –
Mark Forstater's Blog 