(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - Thanks again, Ratna Garber. So my talk's called The Myth of Tristan and Isalt, love, transgression, and death. I'm not gonna assume you know anything about this myth. Some of you might know it quite well. Others might just be names. So I'm not gonna assume you know who these characters are or how the story goes. But I'm going to try and convince you that The Myth of Tristan and Isalt is a founding myth of European culture. So actually I'm not going to do very much by way of trying to say what it means or what we can do with it. I'm not sure it's that kind of myth or I'm not sure myths work quite like that. The way they feed into the imagination and work on us is perhaps something a bit less conscious altogether. But perhaps the ideas I do come up with might help you to relate to The Myth a bit more, to find ways in. That's the idea. So let's first step right back out from any particular myth and ask well, what is myth? Of course myths are stories. What kind of stories? According to Joseph Campbell, the famous American mythologist, dream is personalized myth and myth is our collective dream. I think this is a wonderful definition. So we all dream, some of us remember our dreams. If you remember some significant dream which had a narrative, you'll remember the strange associations, the sense of meaning, but the bizarreness of the thing. The way meanings you have to feel for them, intuit them in the midst of what's going on. And these are significant for us very personally. Perhaps we can't talk about what our dreams mean to others. But our myths, these are dreams that belong to us as a culture, as a collective, not to any particular individual. There was no one person who fought up the myth of Tristan and Isold. It belonged to European culture as a whole and emerged from a collective imagination, as it were. This is Joseph Campbell's idea, anyway. The point of talking about this is that the myth of Tristan and Isold came out of the collective imagination of Europe at a particular moment, 12th century Europe. I'll be talking more about why that might be and what was going on at that time. And what I mean by the myth arising at that time is it met in need. And you could say it met in need in the soul of Europeans at the time. If you think of soul as our inner lives, the dimension of our existence, which is much faster and much deeper than our conscious, rational surface existence, that dark vast space where everything we know has a room to find a place. In that soul of Europe, that's where the myth came from. And that's where it was needed. That's what I'm gonna try and show you, anyway. So the myth begins, "My Lord, if you would hear "a high tale of love and death, "here is that of Tristan and Queen Isold, "how to their full joy, to their sorrow also, "they loved each other, and how at last they died "of that love together upon one day. "She by him, and he by her." Aha, it's a love story. Of course, all cultures have love stories. I doubt there's anywhere in the world which doesn't have its love stories. It's 12th century Europe when this myth got going. There was very little by way of literacy. There was very little by way of widespread education. Storytelling was the way people learned things. It was Europe coming out of the dark ages. In the 12th century, the dark ages were just one or two centuries back. This story emerged into feudal culture with a very fixed social hierarchy with the aristocracy very much controlling everybody else, and most people just carrying on with their lives on the land. You can imagine the storytellers travelling around in this fixed society, inspiring people they talked to with these stories, and then people passing on the stories somewhere else. It was an oral culture, if you like. So this is the love story that's flourished in that environment. An environment was much less cultured than the Roman and Greek civilization that preceded it, for instance. I mentioned that, so we can talk about the image of Cupid or Eros. You're very familiar with the angelic little fellow with his bow and arrow, who shoots his arrows of love and causes people to fall in love in that way. That's a myth that belongs to classical civilization. It's playful, from that we have a sense of falling in love as something that happens to us as if by the whim of a god. But it's nothing too serious, or perhaps it is, but it isn't quite tragic. This is a very common image of falling in love as well. It went, or maybe it's common to Indian and Greek and Roman civilization, because in India there's the god Karmadeva, who similarly has a bow and arrow. He far as flower arrows, which have just the same effect as Cupid's bow and arrow. And of course Karmadeva in Buddhist Tantra became curricula. Perhaps some of you have come across this image with red Tara, who also has a bow and arrow and fires flower arrows to fascinate and seduce people to the Dharma. That's what the Tantra, Buddhist Tantra, did with these lightweight myths. So Tristan and I salt in this story by no means is there a lightweight myth of bows and arrows. It's a much darker, much more ambiguous love and much more ambiguous passion. So I'll summarize the story just to allow you to orient yourselves in the overall picture. Tristan is a hero. He's a medieval hero character. He lives with his uncle, King Mark, King of Cornwall. And Tristan wins the hand of I salt, daughter of the King of Ireland for King Mark to marry. He brings I salt back over the sea from Ireland to Cornwall. But Tristan and I salt accidentally drink a love potion that had been prepared for Mark, King Mark and I salt to drink on their wedding night. And so Tristan and I salt fall in love. Nevertheless, I salt in King Mark get married. Tristan remains King Mark's loyal baron, Lord. And therefore Tristan and I salt continue their love affair despite great difficulties. They even try to settle down to normal lives. But they never fit in, their love never finds a place in a Cornish society. They cannot settle down. And eventually they die in each other's arms and they're buried together. So that's an outline of the story. So far it might, that might sound familiar, familiarly strange, slightly unconvincing. It's the details, I think, that start to make this myth come alive. So that's what I'll do now. I'll plunge into a few details. Some themes, the big themes that give life to this. So, of course, we've got a hero, we've got Tristan and we've got a princess, we've got perfect people. We've got a story about people who are, regarded as the best amongst their own kind. We've got the theme of the love potion. I'm gonna come back to that. That's the real center of this story. A potion that can cause people to fall in love completely and irrevocably. And we'll ask ourselves what this means. We've got the theme of the abandonment of social duty. Tristan and I saw, do not follow their duty. They live a life of adultery and falsehood. We've got the theme of a passion that the lovers cannot satisfy, but cannot give up. And we've got the theme of death. Death because of transgression. And beyond all that, we've got the theme of a story and storytellers. The storytellers crop up in the versions, the early versions of this story. They include themselves. We've got storytellers, and we've got the God who the storytellers think of is behind all the action. Who never censure the lovers. They never say that Tristan and I saw are doing anything wrong. In fact, it's the opposite. They're always on Tristan and I saw the side. They're on the side of the adulterers, the side of the liars. So what we've got is an alternative morality. And this alternative morality is supposed to have its own superior logic. And yet it's tragic. It ends in death. So these are the themes of the story. Of course, what we're talking about is an idealized love. We're not talking about anything that ordinary people might expect to experience. Perhaps ordinary people might not wish quite to experience. It's not supposed to be realistic or a template for real life. This is because it fulfills an imaginative purpose in European culture. A purpose that belongs to the life of our desire imaginatively. And it was needed to overcome what was at the time a very anti-romantic culture. 12th century Europe wasn't a place where people were doing much falling in love. But it's not a romantic tale in our normal sense. There's not a lot of happiness. And there's not a lot of chance of the love of any ever coming to any kind of happiness. Whereas perhaps we think of romantic love as having a happy ending, at least possibly. So we return to dark and difficult origins of romantic love. Romantic love does start here, but it starts in difficulty in the darkness at the back of the soul. It's worth just dwelling on this theme here. Nowadays, we take it very much for granted that we can have, broadly speaking, it's possible for us to have meaningful sexual relationships that we can possibly find a partner who we can enjoy intimacy with without that being an entirely impossible or socially unacceptable kind of thing to do. So you've got to imagine a time where this assumption did not hold, where men and women couldn't expect to have this kind of meaningful intimacy. And that's the context of this difficult myth. So let's enter the Cornwall of the imagination that this myth occupies. It's Cornwall, there's familiar places, there's Tintagel, there's a rocky shoreline, there's the Atlantic Ocean, but it's like the London of Bridget Jones or of Notting Hill, that film. It's not quite as it really is. King Mark, for instance, he's the king based at Tintagel. That's the capital of Cornwall, this marvellous castle on a rocky outcrop, the walls of which were made by giants long ago. Ticking Mark at Tintagel comes Tristan. Tristan was born in Brittany, according to the stories. There's a lot of background story, which feels in episodes, if you like. The point is that Tristan's a hero, he's a medieval hero. He's a wanderer and an adventurer. He ends up in Cornwall, following his own last for adventure. And discovers that King Mark's his uncle. There's that kind of coincidence that happens all the time in this myth. And therefore there's a special relationship builds up between King Mark and his nephew Tristan. They trust each other completely. And King Mark wishes to hand his kingdom to Tristan in some, in time. They love each other, not as father and son, but in a different kind of way, as King and Lord, with that kind of mutual respect and honour. This myth, Tristan and I saw, it has Celtic origins. This is what I was looking into in the background to writing this article for A Thona Magazine, was the Celtic origins of this myth. And they tell us an awful lot about, about how this story came about. In the French versions, which are our first versions that still exist, Tristan is said to be called that because he's a child of sadness, because he's traced in French. However, in fact, he's called Tristan because in Welsh he's dressed in. And he's the, in the Welsh stories, he serves King Mark. And King Mark is married to Queen Isalt. So these characters all come from earlier Celtic stories. Probably in Cornwall, but there's no trace left of these Celtic roots to the Tristan and I saw it myth. Scholars have tried to reconstruct how our myth of Tristan and I saw it might have emerged, but to no avail. The Celtic culture was mainly oral. Hardly anything was written down to after the 12th century. But the fact that these characters are recorded in Welsh myths and other Celtic myths shows that they were already in existence and turned into the characters we find in our familiar myth. So what do heroes do? Most importantly, they slay bad guys. In this case, he had to slay Moorholt, the brother-in-law of the King of Ireland, Isalt's uncle. The Moorholt was a giant warrior who came over from Ireland to extract tribute from the Cornish people. He wanted 300 of the flower of Cornish youth. That was his demand. Unless anyone would take him on in single combat. Nobody but Tristan would do this. And so to a deserted island went Tristan and the Moorholt and they fought for days and nights and Tristan finally triumphed. He put his sword into the Moorholt's head and chipped off a splinter. The Moorholt died and therefore, Cornwall was freed of this necessity of terrible tribute. Tristan proves himself as a savior of Cornwall. One of the little details that crops up at this point in the story is that Tristan is poisoned by the Moorholt's blade in the course of the fighting. His wounds go septic. He stinks, nobody will go near him. There's nothing can be done. He's put on a boat and he floats out into the sea with nothing in his boat with a harp. In his illness, he drifts on the tide, he plays his harp. He's picked up by Irish fishermen who take him to shore and I salt and I salt's mother also called I salt, queen I salt, let's just say. They are skilled in healing and they heal him. They don't know who he is and they don't know he's killed the Moorholt of Ireland and he comes back to Cornwall. This shows the connections between Tristan and I salt from an early stage in the story. They get really important when Tristan returns to Ireland. He returns to Ireland to find a wife for King Mark. King Mark doesn't want to get married. He'd be quite happy for Tristan to inherit the kingdom but his barons won't have it. They're envious of Tristan. They force King Mark's hand and Tristan being a completely noble follower, devoted lord. He wants to find a wife for King Mark so that he's not seen to be favoured. He goes to Ireland because I salt, Princess I salt, has been, it's said that if anyone can kill a dragon who is terrorising the people of Ireland, then Princess I salt will be available to marry. Tristan, being a hero, goes straight for this dragon. With the head of a bear, the body of a lion, the far breathing habits of our normal dragons but being a bit smaller, they enter into combat and Tristan manages to slay him. Cuts out his tongue to prove that he's killed him. Puts it in his boot but the poisonous tongue immediately knocks him out. So that takes a bit of a sorting out. The I salts have to do some healing again. Eventually Tristan's in a position where he can say, "It was me that killed the dragon." So I claim Princess I salt. He claims I salt for King Mark. It's very clear. He has no particular designs on I salt at all. We should just dwell on what the relationship is between Tristan and I salt, at this point, to get a feeling for what the story is saying. They're enemies as social beings. They belong to different countries which are at war. Tristan has killed I salt's uncle. When she discovers this, she hates him. When she finds out that she has to be taken away by him to marry King Mark, she thinks this can only mean he does not respect her and wishes to humiliate her, which is perfectly reasonable sort of conclusion in the circumstances. At the very best, you could imagine that what could come out of this, of what's gone on, is a political alliance between Cornwall and Ireland. Emotions don't come into it. Perhaps Tristan and I salt could bear each other. So, the boat ride home from Ireland to Cornwall is not a bundle of laughs. Richard Wagner, the 19th century composer. His opera, Tristan and I solder. It starts at this point. It starts with the boat ride, the boat trip from Ireland to Cornwall and the livid tension between Tristan and I salt. I salt's humiliation and hatred of Tristan and his inability to do anything about it. However, on the boat, I salt's maid, Barangwin has a picture of potion prepared by the Queen of Ireland. And the Queen of Ireland had said to, let's call it Bronwyn rather than Bronwyn, had said to Bronwyn, "Take all care, my child, that they alone, King Mark and I salt, shall taste this brew. For this is its power. They who drink of it together love each other with their every single sense and with their every thought forever in life and in death." So, I salt's maid, Bronwyn, is entrusted with this very powerful potion to be given to Mark and I salt on their wedding night. But she doesn't look after it very carefully. Tristan and I salt are thirsty. They come up off this picture and down they glug it. I salt drank deep of that draft and gave it to Tristan and he drank also long and emptied it all. Bronwyn came in upon them. She saw them gazing at each other in silence as though ravished and apart. She saw before them the picture standing there. You have to imagine these two people. They've hated each other up to this moment. They've just drunk something. They don't know what it was. They have no idea what it might signify and something is happening which they don't know. But they find themselves looking at each other and it's a fact creeping over them. It seemed to Tristan as though an ardent briar sharp thorned but with flour most sweet smelling, drave roots into his blood and laced the lovely body of ice salt all round about it and bound it to his own and to his every thought and desire. Doesn't sound comfortable does it? Is it familiar? This is the gravitational center of the story. This falling in love of Tristan and ice salt. Something neither of them chose. Perhaps neither of them would have chosen had they the chance to choose. Something that has happened to them as if by accident. It's the love potion that's changed from the Celtic sources. This is the great shift in the myth which changes it from a Celtic story into something which is completely different and which becomes the founding myth of our romantic love tradition. We can work this out from the Irish story of Dernlud and Grownia. This belongs to the thin cycle of the Irish mythic cycles. Different names, Dernlud, Grownia, no sense that they're related to Tristan and ice salt but it's the same story. We've got Agin King Finn, married to Grownia and Finn's nephew, Dernlud, who is devoted to his uncle. But in this version, in this Irish version of the tale, Grownia is not so much a princess. There's something like a divinity. The Irish ladies have got something a bit magical about them. They can do things called a gash which is something in between an oath and a spell. And so she, Grownia herself, she puts everyone to sleep and then puts a gash on Tristan because she fancies him, not Tristan, sorry, on Dernlud because she fancies him and says, "You must run away with me. If you don't, you will die." This is how these stories go in Ireland. And he doesn't want to. He wants to be the loyal subject of his king, King Dernlud, King Finn, sorry. But he's unable to resist this gash so Dernlud and Grownia run off to the wild wood and eventually Grownia does get him to consummate their love. So there's a very different kind of story. It would appear that the falling in love in that version, that early, different Celtic version of the story, is not based on a love potion. The introduction of this love potion does something completely different. It gives falling in love, its own autonomy. No person is responsible for falling in love. It would suggest that the lovers don't have any choice. And perhaps it suggests that in Europe of that time, there wasn't any conscious room for falling in love. So the only way can happen is completely unconsciously by accident. What do we mean by accident? Now you just come across this picture of love potion. Now it happens that Bronwyn, who was supposed to be looking after the love potion, is also in Celtic mythology, the goddess of love. So it's not looking quite as accidental if you look at the Celtic background. And it was, in fact, the queen of Ireland who made this love potion and entrusted it to Bronwyn. Now who's the queen of Ireland? Could it be that really she is, as Ted Hughes might say, the goddess of complete being? Which is to say she represents the totality of our natures, of which our conscious ego is only a small part. This pagan sort of vision of the goddess very much belongs to Ireland, very much belongs to Celtic culture. It fits with her being a witch and healer and creator of magic potions. No doubt the myth, the storytellers of Cornwall, the Europeans, had no conscious idea of these kind of themes of the goddess and the goddess of love. And yet this is what is in the background to our story. Once you know this, you start to get a sense of what's coming through in this European story. Tristan and I saw that they've fallen in love, but they're not Celtic people. They're Europeans from Cornwall. They do not avoid their social duty. They are a part of feudal culture and they can't escape from it. They shouldn't have fallen in love, but they have, and this leads to constant duplicity. Love pressed them hard as thirst presses the dying stag to the stream. Love dropped upon them from high heaven as a hawk slipped after long hunger falled right upon the brood and love will not be hidden. They continue their affair when they get back to Cornwall. They manage not to be caught. I saw managers to persuade Bronwyn to take her place in the marriage bed the first night. King Mark couldn't be ticket-serving, he doesn't notice. So Tristan and I saw managed to maintain their affair. Tristan is in King Mark's good books. He's completely trusted and in the royal household of those days, Tristan would have slept in the room next to the king. I saw it would have been very near. It was very easy, apparently, according to the stories for them to find space for each other, to find a bit of privacy. And they couldn't not. But love will not be hidden. Those with eyes will see what's going on. Those envious barons who had wanted King Mark to get married in the first place. Those envious barons, the storytellers, they make out these barons are just evil and wicked and horrible. In fact, they're just people who want King Mark to be respected and want him not to be married to, not to be co-colded. But the storytellers won't have it. So I've been mentioning the European situation in the 12th century. So now it's time just to make it more explicit. What was the historical situation in which this myth emerged? In 12th century Europe, there was a peculiar, probably unique combination of factors going on. There was feudalism. There was a social structure where individuals were completely subordinated to their place in a highly organized society. Which was contracted for the sake of many things, but probably not love. There wasn't any room for that kind of consideration in feudal society, certainly not among the ruling classes situation, which in some ways hasn't changed a great deal now. So they didn't pretend otherwise, whereas Charles and Dye's marriage was made out of this fairy tale of romance, though it was not, from what one can gather. So there's feudalism. At the same time, there's Christian ethics, it's a Christian culture, and Christian ethics is peculiar in that from an early stage in Christianity, there had been a connection made between women, the flesh, bodies, therefore weakness and evil. With that kind of set of connections, women aren't going to have a great deal of power, and sexual love is not going to be regarded as particularly morally appropriate. So this combination of marriage contracted with love not as an option, and an ethical set up, where sexual love and women are pretty much downgraded, leads to a situation where the general sort of, what would you call it, moral atmosphere of the culture is almost without any imaginative connection with falling in love, there's just no room for it. So now perhaps we can understand that this myth about falling in love, about Christian and ISIL, represents a trans-evaluation, you could say, of the social norms of the time, the social values. It turns them upside down, it represents a completely different picture, it introduces falling in love as something completely necessary, completely right, and yet totally odds with what else is going on. In this way, the story opens up the imaginative space for people's emotions to happen really, but only imaginatively, only in terms of the story, it's not as though there's actually not socially much room for people to be doing falling in love. But what we can do in our imaginations can almost make up for these kinds of limitations. And this is why in the story adultery and lies are not evil. The storytellers really believe this. They constantly tell us how God is on the side of the lovers. Not only God on the side of the lovers, but this love in itself has a moral purpose because love has the effect of creating, cultivating a noble heart. In order to be in love, you have to have a noble heart. It leads to the development of this kind of heart, which means being in love has its own morality in a way which eschews convention back to the story. The king is suspicious. His barons, they continually present it with the facts of the matter. He can't help but become suspicious. They get involved in an evil dwarf called Frocken. And this evil dwarf who's got magical powers tells the king where to go to watch Tristan and Eisalt going about their wicked adulterous Trist. The king climbs a tree in the orchard, but fortunately both Tristan and Eisalt notice he's there and have a thoroughly contrived conversation in which they don't give away the fact what they're really up to. And therefore they get away with it. But it doesn't last forever. The lies just don't work. In the end they're caught out. They're caught out by a ruse that the king has set. He sets them up to fail and they do. They're caught, not quite an inflagrante, but more or less. So they flee, Tristan and Eisalt, they flee to the wild wood, the forest of Moroi. And in a way this is a return to paradise. This is the happy bit of the story. Tristan and Eisalt, they get away from that place where their love has, cannot really succeed. And they go somewhere else where there's nobody else. There's just the old hermit and the old woodsman who doesn't really stop them going about their love. So at last they return to a sort of paradise. So in the depths of the wild wood began for the lovers that savage life which yet they loved very soon. They passed into the high grass and the underwood. The trees hit them with their branches. They disappeared beyond the curtain of leaves. The summer passed and the winter came. The two lovers lived, all hidden in the hollow of a rock. And on the frozen earth the cold crisped their couch with dead leaves. In the strength of their love neither one nor the other felt these mortal things. But when the open skies had come back with the springtime they built a hut of green branches under the great trees. Tristan had known ever since his childhood that art by which a man may sing the song of birds in the woods and at his fancy he would call the thrush the black bird and the nightingale and all winged things and sometimes in reply very many birds would come onto the branches of his hut and sing their song full-throated in the new light. They live for years like this. It's wonderful. They will not repent of their love. The king even finds out where they are at one stage. But when he comes to find them to have revenge he finds them asleep together with a sword between them. It just happens to be there so he assumes naturally that they are living a chaste life together. So it would appear that they are forgiven, that they don't need to, in this forest at least they are living a blessed life. This fits in a way. This is where in the open space of the imagination there's no constriction from social convention. But the story presents an interesting twist to. Although God and the universe is constantly saying that this love isn't wrong it's nevertheless not quite bearable. And this is because life in the woods is without civilization. This suggests that human beings need society. We need to belong to society and culture, to really find fulfilment. But although we can find pleasure and happiness in the outside of society, in the wild woods, happiness will never quite be fulfilled. Tristan thinks, "Queen," she was, at Mark's side, "but in this wood she lives a slave, and I waste her youth. And for rooms all hung with silk she has this savage place, and a hut for her splendid walls, and I am the cause she treads this ugly road." And I so thinks, "See what I have done. He should have lived in a king's palace. He should have ridden through kings and barrens fees, finding adventure. But through me he has forgotten his knighthood, and is hunted and exiled from the court, leading a random life. Neither want the other to be limited in this way. They both want the best for each other, that's the meaning of their love, and that best includes honour." You could say that honour and respect. So Tristan presents, he takes Isalt back to King Mark, and manages to arrange it such that she can take up her role as Queen again. This happens after three years, by the way, in some of the early versions of the stories, the love potion is said to last for three years. So could it be that this corresponds to the way the natural experience of falling in love only lasts a certain amount of time, and after that time is up, a certain sort of realism comes in? In other versions of the story, Gottfried's version, for instance, it lasts forever, which doesn't allow this interpretation. So Isalt has become Queen again. The wicked barons don't quite trust her, of course. She has been living for three years in the world with Tristan, so she has to prove herself. The way they did that in those days is to put her through an ordeal by fire. This very fair form of judgment involves her grasping red-hot iron if she's innocent, it doesn't burn her, if it burns her well. She arranges with Tristan that he will dress up as a poor beggar, pilgrim type person, disguised himself, be next to a river where she is going to alight from a boat when she crosses that river, to go to the place where this ordeal will take place. When she arrives at the place of the ordeal, she gets this beggar to carry her in his arms to reach the safe bank of the river so she doesn't get her address wet. In other versions, he gives her a piggyback that the early versions are a bit rougher, basically. Oops, I knew that would happen. And then the oath she swears, this is how she gets around, this is how it works. The oath she swears that King Mark approves of is she says, "I swear that nobody has had me in his arms except King Mark and this poor beggar." Or in the early versions, "Nobody has had me between my legs, nobody has been between my legs except King Mark and this beggar because he gave her a piggyback." King Mark accepts this oath and hence she can pick up the red her iron and it doesn't burn her and everyone satisfied. How is that for a poor king? This is how it works, I saw it is vindicated and she can go back to being queen, as if she has obeyed all social propriety. But now begins the tragedy really, apart, the lovers could neither live nor die, for it was life and death together and Tristan fled his sorrow through seas and islands and many lands. Whilst isalt could have a go at living the Queen's life in King Mark's court, was Tristan's lot to go and wander to carry on his adventuring heroic trade really, doing brave deeds. But really, without ever having his heart quite in it, there's various, the story has various twists and turns here. And one of them, he does come back and see isalt by pretending to be mad. He becomes a fool, a medieval fool, as a wonderful episode where he manages to get three days with her on his own while pretending to be a fool. But they never try and go back to the wild wood days as it were. Their love has become something different, something that just tortures them. Tristan returns to Brittany and he marries somebody else. It's a sort of desperate attempt to be normal really. In the story she's also called isalt, isalt of the white hands. They never consummate this union apparently, which is a terrible insult for isalt's family, that the other isalt's family. The Tristan becomes injured in one of his battles, one of his wars, and he realizes that only isalt can heal him. Isalt is summoned from Cornwall. She rushes over as fast as season winds allow, but Tristan's jealous wife tells him that the boat that is approaching has a black sail, which is a sign that isalt is not on board. So Tristan, heartbroken dies. Isalt leaps ashore, finds the recently deceased Tristan, and she too just dies on the spot. Where they die they're buried together and in my favorite version of this story, a hazel tree is planted in one grave and a honeysuckle in another. And the hazel tree and the honeysuckle grow up and twine around each other, a lovely medieval image of union. So it's clear that the storytellers in this myth are on the side of the lovers. And then what they want to do in this story is somehow represent the emotional life which is bursting within them, which can find no place in normal social life. Anyway the story pushes out of this need. It builds on these Celtic roots, these Celtic stories that must be floating around in Cornwall, but in the way of stories it proliferates, it grows, it develops into this magnificent myth, which for the first time in European culture gives room for falling in love. In the 12th century this was very necessary. This is a northern European myth, it emerged in Cornwall in northern France, then in Germany. There's various early versions from Brittany where they spoke both Celtic languages and French and from northern Germany. The finest of the early versions is by Gottfried of Strasbourg and Strasbourg is in northern Germany now France. In southern Europe at the same time were the poets of what's now called courtly love. These poems are slightly different but they're doing something very similar emotionally. It was the combination of these two streams that later led to our traditions of romantic love which over centuries developed into what we're now familiar with as our stories of romantic love, Romeo and Juliet and so on. Just to summarise what I think is going on in the myth, by siding with the lovers on the level of imagination, the storytellers validate that completion of human nature that is to be found in passionate love. The story forgives Tristan and I saw everything and it heaps disprays on anyone who would judge them. So the heroes of the story in those days they would have consciously meditated on Tristan and I saw its pain and destiny and they would have kept alive that great question about this human condition. Can there be a love that meets the heart's longing which can also find a place in ordinary social life? At that time it was an incredibly difficult question, there was no answer. But it's one that by raising it imaginatively, European art and culture continued to ask it and very gradually traditions of romantic love came about. And so European culture ventured further into this mythic kingdom of the heart. I'll just end with just a little reflection on why this myth might be of interest for Buddhists. I was talking to a friend over at the community just before I came here. I mentioned I was going to be giving this talk and he was saying I wouldn't wish falling in love on my worst enemy. He's married in fact. I think he loves his wife personally, I didn't tell him that. But that's a story you do here, at least you used to, that falling in love is of no value in itself. I'm not sure I go along with this. I think this myth of Tristan and I saw tells us about what it is to be European. And in my opinion we're not products of Indian history and culture and therefore the Buddhist world view, the Indian Buddhist world view, may not entirely match our emotional, imaginative situation. And in that sense I think there's two fruits of the romantic love tradition which began with this dark story of Tristan Nersal. The first one is the sentimentality of an idealized union, a quasi religious kind of ideal that if you find the right person to be with, then you will find the whole meaning of life. I leave it to you to work out whether that's a sensible ideal. The second fruit which is any way I mentioned at the beginning that we might take for granted is possible for there to be love and intimacy in the sexual relationship. This was something that was not the case in the 12th century, it may be the case in ancient India but they have an entirely different social set up and still do in India. Love marriages are very much frowned upon now and it certainly wasn't different hundreds and thousands of years ago, whereas for 200 years at least now in our European cultural milieu our marriages have been based on individual choice and love. This is something that's fairly unusual in world cultures in fact and this is as it were a product of the long development of stories, of imaginative adventures, of the kinds of myths such as Tristan and Isalt whereby people have dwelt on the possibilities of falling in love. So the myth of Tristan and Isalt was the start of our discovery of traditions of love and perhaps it can still help us from taking it too lightly. Thank you. [Music] the world. Thank you. [Music] the world. Thank you. the world. the world. the world. You [BLANK_AUDIO]
