Don’t go off sightseeing.
The real journey is right here.
The great excursion starts
from exactly where you are.
You are the world.
You have everything you need.
You are the secret.
You are the wide opened.
Don’t look for the remedy for your troubles
outside yourself.
You are the medicine.
You are the cure for your own sorrow.
Rumi
I have gone off sightseeing.
What do I find?
I have spent this week wandering the alleys and clouds of Dali, an ancient town in Yunnan Province, China. My words can only grope at the beauty of the place and its people: standing on the sidewalk, I turn right and see thunder-promising clouds looming over the frozen waves of the Cangshan mountainside, I turn left and I see bright blue sky reflected in the still waters of Erhai Lake. Around me is an old kingdom’s capital, soft eave curves in white and blues dark and white, cloud patterns and natural scenes: the environment sings the environment, in every piece of the city, from the women’s emerald headscarves to the smile-carved lineaments sprouting from their easy eyes.
A few days ago we were walking the cloudpath above, admiring the sways of gorges and the gorgeousness of the ways beneath. I tried hard to simply stay present but I continued to have tension somewhere between my heart and my mind: What is next? What is next? What am I going to do? Going to be?
When I lived in Seoul, I had the privilege of long conversations with Kari, once-and-future SuperGuest and purveyor of fine education analysis: a great philosopher, a superb teacher, and an even better friend. The kind that disagrees with you.
In that Korean (and Japanese) summer, I felt a radical shift in my heart and mind, an easternization of my deeply Greco-German self. I began to meditate and to write, to journey inside myself, and began to gainprelinguistic knowledges. I studied Zen intensively, assisted by the deep reading of Zen Action, Zen Person, a book which I have mentioned before here. I began to realize the slipperiness of language and the tragedy of focusing on the past or the future. I cultivated a sense of presence, of being a child of the moment.
Kari was not so impressed with the book.
“But I like thinking!”
“You must be present!
“It’s important to plan!”
“There are ways of living your ego doesn’t know about”
“You underestimate the power of my ego”
And so I have been present being present. In that presence, I have not planned. I lived naturally, followed opportunities as they presented themselves to me, and, in living that philosophy, I am now in this enchanted valley.
Walking in the clouds, why could I not escape my mind? Why did I feel slippery, though the ground below me was firm? Something inside of me wanted security. So, Kari, let met tell you this: you were right, (at least in regards to comfort).
It’s funny what an unread book can do, a mark furtively placed inside, such as my copy of Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good. A hundred years ago he harmonized Japanese thought with Continental. The Philosopher’s Walk in Kyoto is in his honor. The then-young thinker is on the cover of the book, and no matter where I placed him, on my table, on the television, on the bookshelf, he challenged me. I was reading this and that, putting off the serious work of his philosophy.
I told Rada of this struggle, and she said that the book will be there when I am ready for it, at the right time. I packed it for this trip. This is the right time.
On the bus from Kunming to Dali, I read a chapter titled “Thought.” The German-influenced Nishida describes consciousness as a system, one that is continually developing:
Consciousness, as stated earlier, is fundamentally a single system; tits nature is to develop and complete itself. In the course of its development various conflicts and contradictions cop up in the system, and out of this emerges reflective thinking. But when viewed from a different angle, that which is contradictory and conflicted is the beginning of a still greater systematic development; it is the incomplete state of a greater unity.
What he is telling me is obvious: the tensions that I feel within me are part of a larger unity, a larger self. I am developing, and a necessary part of development is the mystery: the magicof life. I am reminded, again, of words I first saw on a refrigerator in Kauai, from Rainer Maria Rilke:
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Love the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books in a foreign tongue. Do not look for the answers. They cannot be given to you. You would not be able to live them, and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, on some distant day, live into the answer.
Jessica always tells me that life wouldn’t be any fun if you knew where you would be at the end. My life, and your life, are the greatest narrative we will ever experience, and, like every mystery, it is spoiled if you know the ending. So we love the questions.
SEOUL — JANUARY 30
DRAKE-TEACHER: “What are going to do with your privilege?”
PETER-STUDENT: “Realize my self!”
DRAKE-TEACHER: “Yes, but you must also help the world.”
My manager Jackie in Seoul gave me a great book for my birthday, The Compass of Zen by Seung Sahn, a Korean zen master. He says that we must do two things:
1) Achieve enlightenment
2) Help all beings
Sahn says the two are like wheels of a cart, in doing one, you will attain the other. If you seek to help all beings, you will come closer to enlightenment; in the path of enlightenment, we will help all beings. I have felt guilty for simply being a traveler, for not giving back to these places that I take in, that take me in. This is why I feel compelled to teach (but not to write; writing is for me, and for you). I dress my selfishness in noble clothing.
Today I cracked open Nishida. He had more advice for me:
“Only when we function according to a certain profound, imparted notion do we feel active and free. Conversely, when we function in opposition to such a motive, we feel compulsion. This is the true meaning of freedom. Freedom in this sense is synonymous with the systemic development of consciousness.”
I feel called to make this travel, to write these words. My heart is in the inkwell, my soul in my shoes. I do not know what will come – my future memories are not yet revealed. My greater self is not yet known. I am, and you are, a profound process, a unfurling mystery.
As we know, we are a part of the universe. There is something deep inside inside each of us that is nowhere else. In developing ourselves, we develop reality; in seeking our depths inside, we elevate the outside. Sergeant Peppers and Starry Night didn’t fall from the sky. Their makers had the courage to create Let us listen to the Stephen Dedalus:
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Or, again, Rumi:
In your light I learn how to love,
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
Listen, forge, create, be free: these phrases are all synonymous. We need simply to seek infinity within ourselves — and let it out to the world.
Tomorrow I leave Dali. This afternoon I wandered through the old town, until I found a lovely park, where I sat reading and writing this:
Under Bamboo
Two old men talk in a park
their canes rest next to them
bamboo and aluminum
A baby cries out.
Bamboo points up the street,
they laugh,
Canvas hats bobbing up and down.
He tells a good story,
a hunch in his back from work
a lovely smile in between white wisps
has painted beautiful lines in his
once-handsome face.
Birds chirp.
Aluminum is a good listener,
one hand now on his cane,
the other stretching across
a corduroy knee,
head slightly askew,
patient and interested,
tender eyes in red frames.
Leaves rustle.
Bamboo cackles in the wind.
The speaker gesticulates,
making a box with his hands,
drawing at lengths.
They look at me, curious, measuring my height.
I am curious too.
What have these men lived through?
What story does the bamboo tell,
laughing in the wind?
***
Thanks for reading.
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