Tag Archives: Chuang-Tzu

Mountains and rivers remain

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Should spiritual people avoid politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT of the world,” or “We are uniters, not dividers.” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would shut up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

Should spiritual people embrace politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT be worldly,” or “What use is spirituality if it is not engaged?” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would speak up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

And I wrote about shutting up or speaking up here. And Henry Shukman, a Zen teacher, quotes the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu from the eighth century:

“The nation is shattered. Mountains and rivers remain.”

Things are volatile in the relative realm of apparent separation, but they are unchanged in the Absolute realm. In The Way, I wrote, “I find that I live a better life when I live as if there is a Oneness, as if we are supposed to bring our understanding of the Absolute world, which is Oneness, to our relative world, which can seem disconnected and divided.”

Larry Jordan

Larry  Jordan – who describes himself as “a follower of Jesus with a Zen practice” – is making a point very similar to Joan Tollifson’s, which I quoted the other day, where she wrote,

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

Mountains and rivers do remain. As Steven Pinker points out, no human, and no point in human history, stands alone. We are all part of an evolutionary current; as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is easy to forget. We are so readily, especially at times like the present, drawn into polarised positions, swayed by shouts of “Pick a side!”, that we lose sight of not only our indissoluble common humanity, but the metaphysical oneness of things, Being (Eckhart Tolle), the Tao, Rigpa.

Only be still, be quiet. The flickering passage of thought and emotion is no different to the impressions of the senses, the sound of the jackdaws settling into their roost in the old water tower, the rustle of tyres on the road at the end of the garden.

Out of stillness arises, quite by itself, what is needful. I nearly said, “what needs to be done”, but maybe there is nothing that needs to be done. Now is all that is real; if it contains doing, so be it. That will be doing, but in stillness. Like Chuang Tzu’s Cook Ding, following things as they are, we do what is needful without resistance. But only in stillness, only in quiet, can the way open, just as it is.

Amor fati

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The literal translation of the Latin phrase amor fati is “love of fate”; the Wikipedia article states simply, “It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.” Though the phrase has come for many to be associated with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, it has its roots in the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

For most of my adult life, I have had the obscure sense that there was a grain in the way things come to be, a natural falling into place that, if yielded to, would ultimately lead to the right end. At times, I have had no words for it, hardly dared to trust my own intuition; at other times I have sought, or been taught, to characterise it as the will of God, and my own role as that of surrender to that will. This, perhaps, is getting closer, as the Christian contemplative tradition has for many years understood, most clearly in the hesychast teachings of the Eastern church.

Over time, though, it has become clearer that – for me, at any rate – its most poignant expression is in the philosophy of the Tao. “The Tao is that from which one cannot deviate; that from which one can deviate is not the Tao.” (The Doctrine of the Mean, as quoted by Alan Watts) He goes on:

However, it must be clear from the start that Tao cannot be understood as “God” in the sense of the ruler, monarch, commander, architect, and maker of the universe. The image of the military and political overlord, or of a creator external to nature, has no place in the idea of Tao.

The great Tao flows… everywhere,

to the left and to the right,

All things depend upon it to exist,

and it does not abandon them.

To its accomplishments it lays no claim.

It loves and nourishes all things,

but does not lord it over them.

[Lao Tzu 34, tr. Watts]

Yet the Tao is most certainly the ultimate reality and energy of the universe, the Ground of being and nonbeing.

The Tao has reality and evidence, but no action and no form. It may be transmitted but cannot be received. It may be attained but cannot be seen. It exists by and through itself. It existed before heaven and earth, and indeed for all eternity. It causes the gods to be divine and the world to be produced. It is above the zenith, but is not high. It is beneath the nadir, but is not low. Though prior to heaven and earth, it is not ancient. Though older than the most ancient, it is not old.

[Chuang Tzu 6, tr. Fung Yu-Lan]

To “accord with the Tao,” then, is to drop back, sit still, pay attention. Cause and effect are the way things happen. They are one thing, really. The separation of the two words is quite artificial. There is a deep peace in knowing this, and more than a peace. Truly to embrace the coming-to-be of what comes to be is to love the way itself; and yet it is not something to be attained, not an achievement or an accomplishment. The path opens of itself. All one can do is be still.

Without time

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I have written elsewhere of the days when, as a young boy slowly recovering from a long illness, I lay for hours on a tattered quilt under the trees in the old orchard at the back of our house, Just being as one with the endless blue vault of the sky, with the little black ants walking carefully along the edge of the quilt, the big bumblebees in the apple trees, the distant drone of an aircraft passing high overhead…

Andō quotes from Stonehouse’s Poems for Zen Monks:

Below high cliffs
I live in a quiet place
beyond the reach of time
my mind and the world are one
the crescent moon in the window
the dying fire in the stove
I pity the sleeping man
his butterfly dream so real.

The memory of that remembered place on the Sussex coast is not a thing I return to, and yet the condition is where I find increasingly myself again during practice, or at least it is a gift that comes during particularly graced times of practice. Like the medieval Chinese hermit poet Stonehouse, this stillness is intensely real and present. The last two lines of Stonehouse’s poem refer to Chuang-Tzu’s dream of being a butterfly; as he points out, this is not a dream. Nor, in my case, is it a memory.

I am grateful, extraordinarily grateful, that I spent that long year’s convalescence at home just when I should have been starting school. Just as I had no reason or context for those timeless times on the old quilt in the orchard, I have none for where I come to find myself now. Practice is not even a way there. I think it is no more than a clearing of the way to where I already am.