(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. - So welcome everybody to independent cards called tonight's very special event. Tonight's event, in fact marks the beginning of our spring summer season of events at independent arts. And of course we have a very full and exciting programme of lectures, films, and planes, poetry, interviews, and a group of launchers. Among the good things in store are John Mortimer and Francis King launching new novels. As only Donald Mitchell speaking on invention of Britain, Richard Butler launching his life of balance sheet, Alan Benton Patrick Garland performing on the down-century road. Film season called Values and Cinema, selected by Dennis Powell, and so on. Now you may well know that all this activity arises out of a particular view of the arts, the view that the arts can be seen as a means to communication of values. This same view of art is very strongly upheld in this new book, The Religion About by Saint-Gorachette. And so we're very pleased indeed to stage an event right to my publication of this book. We're privileged to have with us the author of the book, Saint-Gorachette, the young and young British Buddhist teacher and writer. As well as the poet and scholar, Captain Wren, whose journal, Taminoz, is also dedicated to the same view of the arts. Saint-Gorachette is the founder of the modern Western Buddhist movement known as the grounds of the Western Buddhist Order. And is the head of the Western Buddhist Order itself, which, as it happens, is 20 years old today. (audience laughing) It's also the author of a number of important books on what is including a survey of Buddhism, the volume of autobiography, The Thousand Paddles Lotus, which is very shortly to be reissued in prose, and a selection of his poems, Conquering New Worlds. And Grouachette is particularly highly respected for his ability to communicate Buddhist teaching in a way which is relevant to the needs of the modern West. And indeed, The Religion About, this collection of essays, this new collection of essays is important from this point of view, that it shows that Buddhism and our overlap at this, of course, to its western art. Kathleen Rayne is a poet and president. She has published some 14 volumes of poetry of which the latest, the presence, appeared very recently. She is also the author of three highly acclaimed volumes, Waterbox, and of course has a worldwide reputation as scholar of play, and yes. She's also the co-founder and editor of Tenement, the unique journal which aims to adhere to the highest values and standards reflected in works of every civilization. So now it's an enormous pleasure to welcome to independent arts, Saint-Grouachette, and Kathleen Rayne. (audience applauds) (audience laughs) It fills with joy to enter a room filled with seekers for truth. I'm not a Buddhist, I'm too old to be anything. I've been a seeker for many years myself, and the older one grows, the more mysterious the whole thing becomes, but there is no doubt that Buddhism is a way of supreme beauty and truth and its values are beyond criticism by any standards. It is perhaps the final and greatest of the religions. I haven't reached that point yet. I'm much too fond of this life. I'm afraid to be known. I find this world wonderful. As Tagore said about this world, I have found it unsur possible. And when we started "Teminos" in 1980, it seemed to be dropping into a void, this review affirming that literature and the arts existed in reality as vehicles before a vision of higher worlds. This is not at all how these things are seen in the secular world, it cannot be so because higher worlds are precluded. So we dropped this into a void, and since then it's been extraordinary. How if you set up a standard, people come towards it. First of the saying, we thought we were the only person who felt this way about things, but now one comes here, for example, or to Beshara, or to other grassroots level, Buddhist, Sufi, and so on. And one finds this tremendous turn of the tide going on because people cannot live by bread alone. It isn't that they wouldn't like to, but it says it's impossible. And therefore, the soul searches for its proper food. - You can't even live by homemade bread alone. - I'm not eating bread alone. (audience laughing) And I read your book, "Sanghara Chitara." I was given a copy some weeks ago, and I skimmed through it again yesterday. And I think basically it is a book about these questions. And I think I've said enough, and may I now lead to you? - I was very interested to hear you just now speaking of Buddhism as a way of supreme beauty. Because that's not the way that quite a lot of people have come to think about Buddhism. Some of them, both in the East and the West, they think of Buddhism as something rather grim and rather terrible and aesthetic and life denying and all that sort of thing. They don't see that Buddhism, in fact, yes, is a way of supreme beauty. Because it's a way that leads to the development and cultivation and experience of states of mind which are supremely beautiful. So I think that is really, though not the usual one, a very appropriate way of describing Buddhism. And I remember in this connection that years ago, when I was in South India, I happened to be traveling through Madras and I paid a visit to Adya, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. And I went along to a lecture which was given by Urukmani Devi Arandal, who was a famous exponent of Indian classical dance. I think she afterwards became president of the Society for Work. But she gave a talk under the Banyan tree there on Buddhism and beauty. And that really impressed me very deeply because I think probably up to that time, I was only about 22 or 23 then, I hadn't myself thought of Buddhism so much in terms of beauty. But this is one of the things I've tried to say in the religion of art, or quite to show in the religion of art, that there is no incompatibility between Buddhism and beauty, between purely as it was spiritual approach and the aesthetic approach to life or to reality, in as much as that approach, that aesthetic approach, does include a mediation of values or consists above all in a mediation of higher spiritual values. Beauty is the lock of the truth of the spiritual state. Speaking of India, I can describe to you my encounter with Buddhism in India, which of course is not about this country, except now there are many Buddhists moving in from outside. But I had been in Varanasi, Benarius, and this was my first visit to India by the way, and I thought I was prepared for everything, I wasn't prepared for anything. One temple after another, I thought the idols of India, the gods and goddesses of works, oh, do you see that, it's all right. Instead of that, one found this absolutely naked confrontation with the effigies of Kali with her black face and her tongue and of Shiva, you know, Khad would be drawn and you would see this blood red terrifying image that you couldn't make up quite what it was. They were awe-inspiring, they were powerful, but they were not beautiful. The idols, you know Benarius, I'm sure, and they're not beautiful, are they? In a sense, a lot, in a way they're not, they have a depth of appeal. I'd say that they were sublime rather than beautiful. Well, then the next day, we went on to Sonat. Yes. And there is the birthplace of Buddhism, where the Lord Buddha preached his first sermon and there is this wonderful museum of these effigies of the Buddha, which are of, they are the most beautiful. Surely you can say beautiful icon of our humanity that has surely ever been produced in the world. They transcend, perhaps all with a few exceptions, the effigies of Jesus Christ, which are, as it were, highly individualized depictions, usually of human torture and suffering. Occasionally, in the Greek church, you get these superb pantocratos, which are Christ the King. But there is no uniformity, there is no as it were. You cannot say the face of Jesus Christ is this or that, whereas what has traveled around the world and back, and I later went to Ajanta and Elora. And so one after another of these depictions of the supreme beauty of the human spiritual reality in these effigies of the Buddha, which always speak the same language, however simple they are, even if they're carved in wood or stone, or wherever it is, or in Cambodia, or in the music, Dimee, or in the Far East, where I've never been. But it is a creation. It's, what Buddhism says is the face of the Buddha, is it not? - One does find that that face of the Buddha speaks to people, even who've never heard about Buddhism, or who aren't especially interested in any spiritual path. I remember in my own experience of Ajanta. This was many years ago when I saw the painting, the fresco of the famous Ajanta Buddha. I don't know if you happen to see that, but it's Padma Parni, it's a three quarter-length figure looking down in compassion on the world, and holding a blue notice. And it seems to me at the time, and I think even reproductions do capture this to some extent, that it was really not possible to express in terms of a human face and a human smile. That, well, as we say in the Buddhist tradition, transcendental compassion. - No words could express these things. It is beyond words. And it is the supreme icon of the higher humanity. - And it would be better not to stop talking about beyond words, otherwise that conversation may quite happen. - But it is, if you like, this is art at its highest value, that it is communicating. It is the vehicle, these wonderful Buddhas, or these village Buddhas, or whatever they are, are communicating through a form, spiritual content. And that is what all art should be. This channel, this vehicle, this embodiment. - That's beyond the Buddha smile we say, so detective, well, there is only silence. - Well, that's another question. That's your side in front here, as it were. Whereas mine is lost on this side. But you cannot produce any living valid art. You cannot produce great art unless it is informed by this spiritual content. - So you would therefore say that there is very little, great art around in the West today. - It seems virtually numb. - Oh, wait a moment now. - One or two figures? - One or two. A few people are beginning to try again. I think painters like Cecil Collins, who are again painting the soul. It's very hard to say, suddenly. But basically, no, no supreme art in the medieval sense of the Gothic cathedrals, or the art of Sonnek, or Cambodia, which none of us have ever seen now. I don't know whether you did say that. - I did, I'm afraid of that. But what about the field of literature? - Of literature. Would you say there were glimmerings of something archetypal or spiritual there today, in any particular area, or the work of any particular author? - Well, there was the 8th. When I was young, there was still a number. There was Eliot, there was Yates, there was Wilker, there was every meal. Vernon Watkins, a little bit in Dylan Thomas. But this is minor, compared with the supreme art. Well, no, Yates is not minor, neither indeed is Wilker. But, compared with the Psalms of David, or the Vedic hymns, or the Ramayam, Mahabharata, it's come down a long way. But I hope it's going up a little bit now, I don't think. - I'm not sure, I'm afraid. I'm not sufficiently in touch with the literary scene there. - But why should it go after all, from such a world as ours, in a very late stage of the decadence of our civilization? I see no likelihood of our civilization recovering in terms of the arts. I think that the change now is that people don't regard the arts as sources of knowledge, or understanding, or contemplation. It is something you do as a form of meditation, as a sort of therapy. But I think we're going to a period of being, rather than doing. And this is where you, sang a very much on the knife edge between art, and you see it from the side of religion, that it's a sort of door into religion. I also see it from the other side, too. I see art as a door into religion, and religion as a door into art. It's a sort of two-way communication I feel. - Yes, it should be. - Yeah. But I mean, my thoughts go back to the time when I got fairly deeply into the age, which was in Kalimpong, of all places on the Tibetan border. And I must say that I wasn't spending all my time practicing meditation and being a skeptic and all that sort of thing. I also re-read my English points. And I read, I think it was for the first time, dates in Kalimpong surrounded by Buddhist culture. And he did appeal to me very, very deeply indeed. But at that time, and that was the time when I wrote the essays contained in the religion of art, that is the early 50s, I felt myself in a way, and I feel this even more nowadays. I felt myself to be, in some ways, a complete anachronism. I sometimes tell my fingers, some of the people here must have heard me saying this, that I feel that I'm really quite medieval in spirit. I don't belong to the modern world. I have very little sympathy with the modern world. I have very little sympathy with science. My interests are definitely humanistic. They're definitely religion, literature, poetry, the arts, in the full spiritual, traditional sense. And just re-reading my own work recently, I couldn't help feeling that, you know what? I didn't understand it very clearly then. I didn't understand the extent to which I was anachronism. When I wrote those essays, because I was in the east, I was in India. But coming back, I felt, well, these essays of mine, the religion and art, and so on, are just so old fashions. No one in the West is going to be infected in them. It's very old stuff, which, well, it's not even Victorian, you might say. But I must say, I was very encouraged to just re-reading the whole volume, which is the first time I've done it, really, for decades, just a few days ago. And I'm thinking, well, perhaps I'm not such an anachronism, as I thought, but there are other people in the West who feel as I do. And of course, you're one of them. In fact, you feel these things in some ways, even more strongly, and express them more clearly than I have done. So I begin to feel that, well, at least so far, as some people are concerned, I'm not the anachronism that I thought I was. And I'm very glad to discover that. Well, the timeless is always timely, is it not? Indeed. It's what in the Christian gospel, Jesus called, who brings for his treasure of things new and old, they are unaging A8's face, unaging internet. Monuments, unaging internet. You look at the Chinese landscape painting. It might have been painted today, or the face of the Buddha. The avant-garde is always, or of hat, 10 years later. The modern movement. Where is it now? Yes, and keep on feeling that the modern movement is old-fashioned. Terribly old-fashioned. [LAUGHTER] Of course, I feel also rather like someone going into battle, and suddenly looking around and realizing, well, the battle's been won. And when did this miracle happen? You know that instead of feeling one was a solitary outpost on a great plane, suddenly, hey, what are you see? The timeless is always related to time. And great art is always its function, I would say, is to relate the timeless to whatever the time may be. The '60s, the '70s, the '80s, no matter. But it is always contemporaneous, you see, that, well, the eternal world is contemporaneous. That's the great test, is it not? It's only the fashionable that quickly passes off. That goes on. But you mentioned that you felt that the battle was won. But what about the war? Well, it goes on. This is, after all, this world is the battlefield. But what I mean by that is that somehow a tide is beginning to turn. Yates uses the symbol of the jars, which are, of course, Platonic and Indian, all sadly. And after swinging so far that way, humanity's had enough. There's a turn of the tide. And all things run in that unfashionable jar of the day. Yes, talking of jars, I came going through my own work, going through the vision of art. I couldn't help feeling that, perhaps in the course of this very year, I'd come to a point corresponding to the point at which I'd arise when I wrote the religion about, perhaps on a slightly higher level of the spiral. So I can't help wondering whether I might not even, in future, be trying to express myself more in terms of poetry than prose. Because in the course of the last 20 years, when I've been concerned with the work of the F.W. I've given lots of lectures. I've written books. I've held seminars and discussions and pressure announcements, but sometimes I thought, well, would it be good also just to write poems and go from place to place reading them? Wouldn't that be an equally valid, perhaps an even more valid way of communicating whatever it is I have to communicate? I could. Depends on the poems. Yes, of course, of course. One is not, of course. One is not there by making any claim for the poem, as such, when it's not even claiming that it is a real poem. But at least one could read it and see and see what effect it had upon people. But silences could also communicate. When we encounter people, we aren't really listening to what they say, so much as what they are. Well, I can assure you I have quite a lot of experience of listening to people. The last few days I've listened at some length to, I think, some 60-odd people, some of whom have told me some very interesting things. But yes, we have to listen as well as to try to communicate. There must be space for silence. I find personally, I don't know how it is with you, but as regards to whatever poetry I have written, the poem is usually spring out of periods of isolation and solitude and silence. I could almost guarantee if I went off somewhere on my own to some quiet place where I could be by myself within a few days I'd be writing poetry. But in between bouts of administration and even giving lectures, it just isn't possible. Well, it's very therapeutic, even whatever the poem is like, it's good for people to write them. And I should think probably 90% of people here would find the same, that from time to time you write poems, not necessary with a view to publication, but in order to bring something to the surface that is not-- I think nearly half the people present have sent me poems from time to time. And I take this opportunity of saying, I always read them, and I always enjoy them. I don't know whether they're poetry or not, but I enjoy them. Doesn't matter, does it? I mean, you can regard the use of poetry as the people write it, or the people read it. They're two different things, really. But to return to this thing of the religion of art, it's liable to become a heresy. I think you make that clear in your book. And I have been a Blake scholar for many years, and, of course, Blake was the first, as far as I know, to speak in the terms of his time, of Jesus the imagination. In other words, he used the name Jesus, for which the Indian would use the word the self. And as a Buddhist, what would you call it, the Buddha nature? One could say, Buddha nature. The Zen people often say Buddha nature. Something like that. But it is that which is within all. It is the human existence itself in Blake's terms. And he identified this with Jesus. And he said, Jesus and his disciples are all artists, meaning that the human imagination, the true self within us naturally expresses itself in this way. And he said anyone poetry painting and music, man's three ways of conversing with eternity, that the flood has not swept away. And elsewhere, he said, whoever is not a poet, a painter, a musician, or an architect, is not a Christian. He didn't have me in anything to do with the church. Not a human being. Not a human being, because they are not expressing that living presence within them. And I before this morning, making a photocopy of what Blake said, and Mary made you this, because it is the sort of basic text of what you write of as the religion of art, in the true sense, because it has a false sense as well. Making a religion of art is one thing. And there are people who do. The art dealers make a religion of art. Whereas the religion of art, in Blake's sense, is given a new meaning to art. He said one thing alone makes a poet imagination, the divine vision. And this is what he wrote quite late in his life. A poet, a painter, a musician, an architect. He who is not one of these is not a Christian. You must leave fathers and mothers' house if they are in the way of art. Prayer is the study of art. Praise is the practice of art. Fasting, et cetera, all relate to art. The art with ceremony is antichrist. The eternal body of man is the imagination. God himself, the divine body, Jesus, we are his members. It manifests itself in his works of art. In eternity, all his vision. And then further on, he writes. Jesus and his apostles and disciples were all artists. And the older New Testaments are a great code of art. Art is the tree of life. God is Jesus. Science is the tree of death. The whole business of man is the arts. And all things common. No secrecy in art. The unproductive man is not a Christian, much less the destroyer. Christianity is art, not money. Money is its curse. What we call antique gems are the gems of errands, breastplate, and so on. Where does this come from? This is the comment on the layer of kawan. It is written all over. He did a drawing of the layer kawan statue. And he wrote this all around. And it's been decoded by Geoffrey Keynes. But this is what is the-- I think the foundation of this whole thing of the religion of art, regarding the arts, not as a sort of decoration, but as fundamental expression of the spirit. What would you say about that? I would agree with that kind of thing. Because in the introductory essay, which is on the meaning of Buddhism and the value of art, I do make the point that the Buddha himself, in a sense, was a point. Which is not how people usually, in the Buddhist world, at least think of the Buddha. But the Buddha did speak, he did teach, and he often spoke and talked in verse in poetry. Whether it was very good poetry is difficult to say on these in any case to read it in the original. Sometimes it is really quite good. And many of his disciples were points. I don't know whether you're aware of this, but some of our friends are. But in the Buddhist scriptures, the Polish scriptures, there are two books which are collections of poems, songs, by the Buddha's male and female disciples. There's the terigata, the songs, the poems of the elder monks, and the terigata, the songs or poems of the elder nuns. Recently, there was a poetry reading in knowledge in aid of our women's retreat center. And I read there poems by women. And I included some English translations of the terigata that it is a poems written 2,500 years ago by some of these direct disciples, female disciples of the Buddha himself. And when I included these poems in the program, I thought that may be being so old and also being translated. They wouldn't come across quite so well as some of the actual poems by English, written in English recently. But actually, they came across so some of the women afterwards assured me, better than any of the other poems. Yeah, probably better poems. Yes, because they felt they were so real. At least one of them ended with the woman poet concerned with terry gaining enlightenment. The poem culminated in that. The end of the poem was the end of her spiritual quest. That is poetry being used as a way of all true poetry isn't there are things in verse or not, is it? It's a language of the soul. I would define poetry as the language, the natural language of the soul, which tends to be rhythmic because the higher one goes in the level of consciousness, the more rhythmic it becomes. And of course, prophetic to pre-imperch is the language of the spirit. Our present society doesn't make any distinction. There is only one level. That is the daily level. And if you deny the level of the soul, you are, in fact, denying poetry. And you cannot call poetry even if it is in splendid verse. What relates only to the mundane lower levels of consciousness, it is as you go higher. So it becomes more fully poetic, would you not say? Indeed, in traditional Indian literary criticism, which is neither Buddhist nor Hindu by Jang, but which is, as it were, a common tradition. There is a term kavita, which we usually translate as poetry, but the Indian critics, the traditional critics, make it clear that the kavita is neither verse nor prose. It can be expressed, or it can find expression in terms of verse, but it can equify the expression in terms of prose. It's where it comes from. It's where it comes from. It's the level from which it comes from. The level. Could you please speak a little about that, Sangha Rachital, because you, in your first essay in that book, have very interesting things to say about the Indian view of different levels from which poetry comes, a new poetry or a binder, whom I also have read that book, and very much agreed with what he was saying, so could you perhaps say a little about them? Well, in all the Indian spiritual traditions, and even in Western traditions until recently, it was generally recognized that there were many different levels of consciousness accessible to the individual human being, some lower, some higher. And Ourobindo has elaborated on this in a quite interesting way. He speaks in terms of the vital, and the lower mental, and the higher mental, and the overminder. And he speaks of this mainly, he speaks of these different levels, mainly in connection with the experience of yoga. In Buddhism also, we have these different levels. We have, for instance, the levels of the four genres, the levels of higher consciousness, is a set of four lower higher levels, and has set for higher, higher levels, and so on the other classifications too. But this is common grounds to all the great spiritual traditions, especially in the East. But Ourobindo very interestingly speaks of poetic inspiration, artistic inspiration, as coming from any of these, from the vital, from the lower mental, the higher mental. And he seems to believe that the higher the level, the greater the poetry. But of course, with this proviso, which I'm not sure, but he actually makes, that it is poetry to begin with, because I think I know what they're thinking. The Ourobindo's theory is excellent, but his actual practice as a poet doesn't let us say quite come up to his own artistic standards. He wasn't a carvie, but in India, don't you find-- I've read poetry nearly quite a number of times now-- I always find that the Indian audience is sort of antennae saying, what level is it coming? They don't hear the sort of thing is to notice how it is structured, how well made the poem is, or if it's realistic, or if it relates to social realities, or if it's Marxist or whatever, you see. Not so in India. There is always this double listening taking place. There's the sensuallyer, and there's also the other ear. It's a piping to the spirit that is of no tone. Precisely, yes. The one is very aware of that, and really excellent-- I mean poets that in England pass for the sort of thing that people go for doesn't get anywhere in India. Because they're listening from where does it come from? Because one must reflect that even now in India, so many people are illiterate. I mean, I'm very aware of this, because when I go to India, when I give lectures, I know that three-quarters of my audience is illiterate. And therefore, the oral medium is very important. It's the main source of education for a lot of people. And this perhaps helps to explain why in India they do have so many of these, what one can only call, poetry meets. They're not poetry readings in our Western, or at least our English scenes. You get vast crowds of people. Just as symbols to hear, poets read their own poems. This is especially so in the traditional Urdu poetry. And you might have 10,000 people. And as I'm fast, Shamiana. And you get the poet standing up. And he usually knows his own poem by heart. He doesn't read it. He pronounces it. He evokes it. And a wave of emotion just passes over the whole fast audience. It's a very special-- Cub of India is it's so westernized. You get so many Indian poets who are writing sort of a secular way. But of course, I have also heard readings in Hindi of the Mahabharata and of the Ramayana. And people assemble to hear these. These are the traditional source of poetry and teaching. Both teaching and lifting the story onto the level of the-- not to the sense of what they are, but to the spirit. And this keeps the whole consciousness, or did, because it's all becoming very secularized. But it kept the consciousness of the whole people attuned. Two things of the spirit. I don't know what corresponds to that in Buddhism. The reciting of-- Well, in all Buddhist countries, there are different ways of reciting Jātaka stories. That is to say the legend of the stories of the Buddhist previous lives. And you get it done in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it's dramatized. Sometimes you get two monks sitting on either side of the altar. And they do a sort of double act. Recreating the whole story and playing on the feelings of the audience. This is very common in Thailand, I believe, very popular. But a more recent development in Indian Buddhism, which is very interesting, I don't know if you've heard of it, is what is called Dalit for literature. Dalit means depressed, not depressed in the psychological sense, but in the sociological sense. The depressed classes are the untouchables. Many of whom have become Buddhists. And there's a whole movement of Dalit literature, which is sprung up quite spontaneously from among these Dalit people, mainly around Bombay and Gunna, giving expression to their deepest feelings as not only untouchables and depressed people, but as Buddhists. You get the two things working together. And there's a whole very live literary movement. Well, literacy has nothing to do with spirituality. Literacy in our country is a sort of terrible deception. It enables people to read advertisements for artish-ave, nourishment, and you know all the rubbish. Comes through literacy. Well, Kumara Swami wrote a famous essay, didn't she, "I could bear a literacy." Precisely. I could bear a numeracy. The illiterate people, and I used to know them a bit in the Hebrides, now they're all literate, of course. But they too have an oral tradition which preserves the, as it were, qualities of the soul of that particular people. I'm afraid I'm not very interested in readings of modern poetry. It all seems to me to belong to the secular decline of our civilization. And I feel that the loss of oral tradition, my mother came from Scotland, not the highlands. But she had a wealth of oral poetry, the border ballads, the songs of burns, which of course were traditional songs gathered, all this embodied and preserved, and you get it in Ireland, to this day, the wealth of that whole culture is within it. And modern poetry is highly individualistic. It's self-expression, it's mostly on the level of the external world. And Yeats, of course, was a great exception. There are great poets who rise above this. But Mary, do you want Yeats wrote about it? Just do. To return to this thing of the arts as the vehicle of spiritual knowledge, I expect you to know my friend Pupil Jayakar. And she was responsible for the Indian exhibition here. She was a very famous lady in India. Very famous lady. And she said, after all, it wasn't the writers of the Vedas who produced the images of the gods of India. It was the craftsmen, it was the illiterate craftsmen who carved these wonderful, like the sizz of the gods in the temples, these sensuous, wonderful dancers, the suria and his chariot at Kanarak. Well, everywhere, you know. These were the craftsmen who created these. The same is true, in a sense, is it not at the face of the Buddha? That is created by anonymous humanity. They didn't sign their works. They didn't sign their works? I had a very interesting experience in this connection. There was a Tibetan artist who came to Britain. And he started in your fulfilling orders for British Buddhist. And I saw one of his works. And I saw that in the bottom right-hand corner, he signed his name. And I thought to myself, the generation has already set in there. Absolutely. They didn't sign the works. The scouts of the shop didn't sign their works. The picture frame is when people began to paint. It was after the Renaissance, was it not? That the individual artist signed his work, not until then. Sign their work. OK. Well, now we do what-- [LAUGHTER] What Yeats said about this, about, again, the religion of all that you like, and of course, Yeats was Blake's greatest disciple and first editor, actually. He is taking on from what Blake said about prayer as a practice of art. This is a stage on. It's after the pre-Raphaelites, art for art's sake, which I think we would neither of us accept that art was for art's sake. No, not really. Not at all. Art for the sake of the archetypal, we might say. For the sake of that which comes through it. Well, he didn't have much use for the church. Although he has a very interesting essay somewhere on Christ, seen not against the background of history, but against the background of the archetypal. And his wonderful passage, of course, about Byzantium as the perfect city. But he said-- it's over the page I didn't try to copy it, but he was very religious but had no use for churches. And I invented an almost infallible church, a poetic tradition of a fardle of stories and of personages and of emotions inseparable from their first expression, past armor from generation to generation by poets and painters. But some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually and not in pictures and in poems only, but in tiles around the chimney piece and in the hangings that kept out the draft. I had even created a dogma because those imaginary people are created out of the deepest instinct of man to be his measure and his norm. Whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking, maybe the nearest, I can go to truth. When I listened, they seemed always to speak of one thing only. They, their loves, every incident of their lives were steeped in the supernatural. It is out of the human consciousness, itself these forms emerge. Yes, from the deeper or higher levels of human consciousness. And of course, Prince Siddhartha, no one knows what he looked like. In fact, there were no depictions of the Lord, but it had much later were they? All that we know of him, of his personal appearance from the Buddhist scriptures, suggests that he was tall, well-built, healthy, and had deep blue eyes. Really? Yes, deep blue eyes. But the face of the Buddha, as we know it, as it is, as it were, the core of your religion, is not a likeness, it's not a photographic or pictorial representation of Prince Siddhartha in any sense. There is no true enshroud in what is that? Exactly. Well, the true enshroud is another matter. Yes, it's not. It is under investigation at this very moment. It's not a portrait. Right. I often wonder whether it wasn't a miracle laid down for the present time, because it could not have been decoded until the camera. It's a very strange thing, too. It's a very strange face, a very strange expression. Very strange. Yes. Very impressive. You must have been. Yes, impressive. Yes. I'm looking at it or looking at reproductions of it. I can't help wondering, you know, just looking at the face and the expression, whether I would really have liked to meet that man. Which of this was? To confront. Yes. It ceased. It ceased. You surely don't deny that the Lord Jesus was in Avatar? Mm. Yes, since no. Because Avatar, strictly speaking, is not a Buddhist term. It's a term from the Hindu tradition. Well, I am a Hindu. [LAUGHTER] Yes. There is quite a discussion among Buddhists in modern times as to exactly where we're going to put Jesus, whether he is a Buddhist sat-fert or what he is. He is of that order. You couldn't surely deny that. I think I personally experienced some difficulty in being certain whether he was a historical character. I'm not sure whether this is heretical. But, I mean, I've read a fair amount of literature in the beginning which writes that. On this question of, well, the historical Jesus, they do find it-- Does it matter? Well, if one thinks in terms of whether he was a living Buddhist sat-fert, well, the historicity matters. If one thinks just as an archetype, well, it doesn't matter. I can believe in or accept the Christ archetype. But whether there was a historical Jesus we embodied at that time, this I can't really be sure about. And what about the historical Buddha? I'm reasonably certain about that. And does it matter to you? It does matter to some extent, yes, to a great extent, because Buddhists have always seen the Buddha as an enlightened human being. And the fact that there was in the past someone, well, not just one person, but a number of people who lived historically and who did achieve higher levels of consciousness, even enlightenment itself, is important to us because what they have achieved, we too, if we make the necessary effort, can likewise achieve. So from that point of view, historicity is one-- but it doesn't have to be that particular word. If it was Millarepa, it would be the same. Or if it was Padmasambhava. Or if it was one's own master, or a recent Zen teacher, Orochi, the principle would be the same. There is a precedent for the attainment of enlightenment by human beings. And that gives us tremendous hope and encouragement. And what about the reality of a diptovine incarnation, which is the central point of Christianity that he was made man? And that, you may say, has happened in the Lord Krishna, who also speaks much as Jesus does. I think we have to distinguish between the Hindu conception of Arotara, which literally means descent. And the orthodox Christian conception of incarnation. To me, incarnation is suggestive of a sort of duality between the flesh and the spirit with the spirit descending into the flesh. We don't quite have that sort of duality in Buddhism. In fact, it's the duality of Christianity that you find impossible. Duality regarded as ultimate. Yes. But certainly, for all practical purposes, there is a duality for the time being provisioning. Inasmuch as we are at present in, so to speak, an unenlightened or less enlightened state. And we're trying to achieve a higher state of more complete enlightenment. There is duality in that sense. But according to perhaps the highest Buddhist teaching, when we do achieve that higher or the highest level, if there is, in fact, literally a highest level, we see through all dualities whatsoever, including that between the enlightened and the unenlightened. But if you like between the Buddhist and the non-Buddhis. I agree with you there about duality being the unacceptable thing about Christianity. But I don't think you find it in the words of Jesus himself. He said, "I am the father of one." And spoke very much as Krishna speaks in the Bhagavad Nita. But the church has made men speak of the whole thing. Well, the church in that case has quite a lot to answer for. The church has a great deal to answer for. Well, I have said sometimes in the past that if I was as it were forbidden to speak of Buddhism in Buddhist terms, I think I could manage to speak of it in Christian terms. In the sense of, I know that there are certain verses in the New Testament that I could make use of to express what I myself actually think and feel. But I must also say that there are some verses which I would have to just put aside. And of course, I do greatly admire many of the Christian mystics. And I'm not so much thinking of Blake, who tends to transcend these sort of categories. But I must say that I have some favourite Christian mystics. I particularly like and you might be surprised to hear this in Catherine of Siena. I'd rather admire that lady, I must say. - I've never read her. - Yes, yes. I don't like Christian mystics. I always have. But I'm glad we've found something to disagree about. Well, I always turn for fresh air to the far east, you see. I turn for fresh air to the Baghavad Gita, or to the Upanishads, or the Ramayana. I don't know the Buddhist scriptures so well, I fear. But I'm sure one will find the same. That there is this pure air, that it's something sort of... But would you not say that all religions were cultural in a sense, and that the supreme truth transcends any religious, cultural tradition? Well, of course it does. But what does it mean, in practical, down-to-earth terms? - Oh, well. - Yes. Yes, I mean, there is a Buddhist sutra called the... Waoharsir as a sutra is called the perfection of wisdom, and especially the heart sutra, the heart of the perfection of wisdom. In all dualities they're reduced to partition, yet are the one. Well, we can't even call it absolute, because if we say it, it's absolute, well, absolute means it isn't relative, but this absolute is not absolute, no relative, nor as we say in Buddhism, both or neither. So once again we end up with silence, perhaps a little prematurely. But talking about the Christian mystics, if you don't mind me saying just a little bit more about them, I must say within Christianity itself, I find myself in the deepest sympathy with the Orthodox Eastern tradition, that is to say the Russian or Greek Orthodox tradition. I find that in some ways very continual. And they have this beautiful icon of the Rism Christ, the spiritual Christ, rather this continual dwelling on the mortal body on the cross, which is the icon of the Western church, and very terrible it is. They also have the icon of Sophia, don't they? Yes. The female wisdom, red in colour, and with red wings. So I find this a very attractive and rather mysterious figure. Well, there is the blessed burden. I'm afraid she's not very popular in the FWA. Not with the latest, especially in things. I don't quite know why, but she isn't a very popular figure. One of my own favourite figures is Saint Jerome. For me, Jerome has a lot of sort of symbolical significance. I've given a talk on him, what was it called? Saint Jerome revisited. Because to me, Saint Jerome is the great translator and interpreter. He translated the word, I've written a poem about that too. He, as it were, translated, not just from one language into another, but he translated from the language or the spirit into the language of the earth, which we can understand. He brought it down as it were. So to me, Saint Jerome represents that sort of figure within the Christian tradition. A great scholar. A great scholar too. Who would be his equivalent in the Buddhist tradition? A great translator. We could say Kumara Jiva, who translated so many great Mahayana Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese. We could also mention in a slightly different way, Nagarajuna, who is sometimes called the second founder. He, according to a legend, brought up the books of the perfection of wisdom from the realm of the nagas at the bottom of the sea, where they'd been kept by the naga maidens, the daughters of the dragon king for centuries after the time of the body brought them up and made them public. So these are quite evocative symbols. So for me, Saint Jerome, within the Christian tradition, has that sort of significance. So yes, I quite like some of the Christian mystics. Like I appreciate them. And some of the Spanish mystics too, I mean, leaving a site there, sort of post-tridentine Christiana. Yes, I don't like this, I don't like this. I do. I like the poetry of Saint John of the Cross, especially in Wai Campbell's translation. I mean, I can't say whether it's the best, but I certainly like that translation. Well, in our time, I think it was the best. Possibly you knew Wai Campbell. I do, yes. I've recently been reading a biography of him, I found it really fascinating. And the way in which he ended up, deeply immersed in Spanish Catholic mysticism and especially Saint John of the Cross, after a very hectic and adventurous life. The symbols of any religion, they surely emerge according to the imagination of that particular culture. And West and Christianity thrown up the cross in the mangled body, which always used me to evoke a certain sadomasochistic response, which is where I agree with you that the Greek timeless Christ of the risen Christ is a much better. I've really noticed this sometimes visiting art galleries in Italy and tracing the development of Christian art from the very early beginnings. When with Byzantine art and with the mosaics, the mosaics of Ravenna and Saint Marco in Venice, you get a different sort of world. And then as you come down the centuries, it just gets bloodier and bloodier. Yes, it's really dreadful. And you notice it as you go through any sort of picture gallery where the paintings are arranged in chronological order. It's a remarkable thing. I really cannot understand how it came about. I don't know whether you have any ideas about that. Curiously enough, I had this experience in Washington, D.C. when I was giving some lectures of the Andrew Mellon lectures of the Mellon gallery there. And I had a lot of leisure wandering through the pictures. And I'd never really thought of Christianity in those terms, but I thought these wounds and sadism and masochism and the tortured aspects and effigies and the cruelty and the delight in cruelty and in suffering. It was terrible. But it wasn't there at the beginning. No, not at the beginning. And then I used to go across the bird. Do you hear the fear? That's their Oriental Museum. Very beautiful. And when we went between two, are they called yachars? Yachars and demons. And they had two demons. Well, they're kindly demons. Oh, very full of energy and wickedness. And you walk through between the yachars and you were in this world of serene beauty in which the human spirit, it is mainly Buddhist art. Sculptures and vases, pots, jars, paintings. It isn't as if there wasn't bloodshed and cruelty and wickedness in China or Indonesia or anywhere else in the world, but the religion sees it is necessary to free the spiritual essence from all that. Right. Mangled. But flesh. And it used to be a wonderful rest to the soul to go around the fear. I had exactly your experience of never having taken it in at a whole sort of... It seems to start with the Renaissance. Yes. This is not quite what one would have thought, but it does. Yes. It's when the individual, the individual human selfhood and its experiences in this world, on this level, comes to take precedence of the spiritual reality which you still get in Ravenna. Right. And in other, even up to Joktor, but not much after. Yes, I remember my first visit to Italy took place in 1966. And rather to my surprise, my greatest aesthetic experience, if one can call it, that Italy was in connection with the mosaics. The mosaics, especially over Ravenna, which I really visited a few years ago. Yes. I thought even the best of Renaissance painting in certain respects could not touch those mosaics. They speak to the spirit. Yes. And art when it does not speak to the spirit goes right down and makes it more realistic only, makes it more remote from that which art should be communicating. As Yeats says, they all speak of one thing, everything speaks of the supernatural. And when the arts no longer open a channel to the higher worlds of the soul and the spirit which is beyond the soul, which is universal, then it becomes fragmented, trivialized, sadistic, go to any Catholic church and look at the stations of the cross. What horrible things they are and what bad art they are too. Or could they be good-asked, you think? No, I don't think they could because you can't separate the theme from it. It draws it down into the world of mortality. And the world of the icon of the Buddha is speaking all the time of the immortal being a prince, it offer, of the immortality. And the stupa, of course, is an abstract form, is it not? Of the body of the Lord Buddha represented in the four worlds, is it not? My friend Keith Crichler. I don't know if you've had Keith Crichler here, you should do. I ask him to come and talk about the stupa because I've heard him give brilliant accounts of the symbolism of the stupa, which is the, as it were, abstract to the spiritual body of the Buddha. That was one of the things rich Lama Govinda greatly studied. There is a small book by him on the subject, the stupa and its symbolism. And it is the most beautiful art form too. It is, there are so many varieties of it, especially in Tibet and Japan. And we have, in fact, a stupa in London, don't we? The pagoda in Battersea Park. Battersea, that, of course, is a pagoda with a form of stupa. And in Battersea Park of all places. And you know, people behave with such reverence there. You don't see people fooling around and dropping beer cans and screaming. You see people quietly and reverentially, it imposes on people. And that's what a work of art should do. It should impose on people a different mode of experiencing, even Battersea Park, which has some beautiful dreams. And there you see a few oriental people, or Buddhist laying little offerings. But you also see, I've never seen anyone behaving in a van, in a nice manor there. It fits very beautifully into the landscape. And across the river. Yes, I've seen it so far, only from across the river. And it looks so beautiful that it goes to the trees. And the whole approach to it from the park, it's... It's probably thought out by the Japanese. It was, but it imposes, it imposes its meaning. And a work of art must impose its meaning on people. There's music there. You'll have to say, "What does it mean?" You must respond. That sounds almost like the last word, doesn't it? You must respond. Yes. Well, from a terminals point, if you know art, that does not have its roots in some little tiny underground trickle of spiritual reality is not art. It's simply self-expression. If this is something I have come to feel very strongly, because I've seen certain examples of modern art. I don't know whether I should have mentioned any names, you know, perhaps I'd better not. But some of them seem to me to be just people, as I sometimes say, being sick onto the canvas. And they should just, you know, just get rid of it. I mean, perhaps they need it to be sick. I'm not quarreling with them being sick. Or even on the canvas, you know, if it's... Well, this is an old used piece of canvas. But please don't exhibit it. And please don't call it art and ask us to admire it. Yes, it's not nourishing anyone's soul. It's not nourishing any of us, no. Oh, yes. It belonged to the hospital, not to the art family. We had a piece on Francis Bacon on those lines. But there's a... In the current terminus, Tarkovsky, whom you would like, because he is, of course, an orthodox Christian artist in the film. And he said, "Let anyone visit the Vatican Museum of Modern Art. Can they find there anything to nourish a Christian soul?" And if you know the Vatican Museum of Modern Art, this is absolutely true. I visited the Vatican, but I didn't visit the Vatican Gallery of Modern Art. You were right. I think we just walked through it, but it is. It's got everything it's got. Oh, what's that American who dribbles on the canvas? And it's got Francis Bacon and it's got... Well, it's got everything like that. Yes, I did visit the Vatican Gallery of Ancient Christian Art. You thought that was bad enough? Oh, no. Ancient Christian Art, the art of the very early period. And classical, bicharoma. It was beautiful. All those lovely, early Christian psychophic, I ate, but really beautiful. Yes, they are. And they are basically, in continuity with the bicharoma. Yes, yes, with just a Christian touch or tinge. That's all. But if you can tell a religion by the quality of its art, I'm afraid the Vatican Museum is no great recommendation for modern Christianity, at least in the Western Church. Well, I'm afraid we don't have very many greater, even good artists in the field of Buddhism either. Because, yes, we have sort of standard conventional Buddhist art, which has a traditional basis. But a lot of that seems to lack genuine inspiration, in the sense of real contact on the part of the artist with some higher level of being. He's just reproducing the traditional formulae, which is all right so far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. Of course, Jung says this is the age of interiorizing the symbols, so we don't want. I don't think there will in the future be great poets in the sense in which they were in my childhood, or my middle age, or great art in the old sense. Because I think the music has changed, and people are going to concentrate on being rather than living it. That's a very interesting thought. You wouldn't say that there weren't holy people to be found in the Buddhist world. I'd be very sorry indeed if I had to say that. Yes. Yes, yes indeed. Because that would mean that our last link, your head's snapped. I'm sure that that is what's happening, that there's this interiorization, and we're not going to look for our message in contemplating however beautiful an effigy of the Buddha, say the Buddha. One is going to look for that image within, which is very much I felt in a gentle. I expect you to know some of the caves I mean. We're going to, it's like a little nave of a church, and they will have carvings of events of the Buddha's life, and much like a Christian medieval church. In those of columns carved out of the rock. Carved, beautiful. Very squat and solid. And then at the end, through, as it were, the chancell, you would have either a stupa or an image of the Lord Buddha. And as you go in, it is like going into your own soul and finding there within, an image of the self. In the self, the catalyst in the Hindu or Jungian sense. And there, it does communicate that inwardness of that image in a way that Christianity is always stressing the historicity, whereas Buddhism seems to stress the interiority. That's a very interesting thought. It reminds me very much of a set of Buddhist, the cave temples or cave monastery, set a place called Bajar, near Puna. And we have, that is, the F.W. has a meditation center just there within a few hundred yards of those caves, which are, I think, third century AD. And I remember when I was there last looking from the veranda of the meditation center up towards the cave temples. And in the evening, when the sun shines from the west, you east, and the cave temples, as it were, face east, the last beams of the rising sun penetrate right into the depths of that cave temple and shine directly onto the stupa at the far end. Yeah. And it becomes, as it were, golden. Wonderful. As though the depths have been lit up by... This is the depths of the soul, this is the heart. Yes, lit up by the, you could say, the supranal sun, yeah. I wasn't there, like, wasn't in Puna long enough. I wish I had been there. This, I think, is about 40 miles out of Puna. Between Bombay and Puna. Are there any questions that we want to write here? But if I'm going to hear it, I'll be there. Well, they're always pushing questions to me on various occasions. That's, they'd like to concentrate on Kathleen Wayne. No, that's not fair. I don't have any answers. Well, there are questions and there are answers. I thought I was wrong, but why do you think that the inferiority isn't going to want to be a threat? Why the inferiority? Interiority. Because I think we're discovering the inferiority as the reality. In ourselves, you see, a work about, at best, can only awaken that interiority. By we look at it, look at a painting or a sculpture or architecture. It reminds us, it awakens in us what is within ourselves. And if we are, I think in this age, seeking that interiority in itself, we don't expect, you said, the Christian religion, the great fault of it was. It's all outside, the symbols of religion are outside. And the reality is within, and I think the new age, if one could use that dubious expression, but it is true, is going to, we are searching for the thing itself in meditation, in often art therapy, writing, poetry, drawing. We are going back to the source. That seems to be the new reality. I seem to meet it in so many forms. I don't know, do you think? I think perhaps one could say that we have become obituated in the West, to looking for our satisfactions, outside us, to such an extent that we have to reverse that trend. What do you feel about that? I thought seeing how people probably think about it, they know more about it. But knowing about art is very different from re-experiencing, the thing that informed it, you know, admiring a work of art and thinking, "Oh, that wonderful daughter is quite different from the experience which created it." And I think we're climbing up the other way now, having gone out with it, I think we're coming in. The danger is perhaps a shallow aestheticism, and I've gone a little bit into this, in the religion of art, haven't I? Mentioning Tennyson's poem, "The Palace of Art." Yes, indeed, you put that, I think, in your book. Yes, you go into, I hope to say more about the heresy of the religion of art, which is not art as a vehicle of religion, but making a religion of art, which is quite different. Someone like Kenneth Clark, you see, the most civilized of men in this wonderful program, so the civilization. But he, I would have said, made a religion of art, left it there. Yes, he made, or one must say he was a follower of the religion of art, with a small art and a small A, not with a capital art and a capital A, very cool. What was it you told me at dinner? Would you repeat it about someone saying you were not qualified to let your own Buddhism, because he would have Buddhist and therefore had not... Oh, yes, I mean, I have a great grievance here, so I'll gladly repeat my job. Yes, I'm still feeling really quite indignant about it. This happened some years ago. There was a publisher in Finland, and the Finns, you probably know, are great readers of books. They've got the second biggest bookshop in the whole world. Fools being the biggest. Oh, yes, great readers. So they're always publishing not only books in Finnish, but translations of books from all other languages. They've probably got some of yours, I imagine. But anyway, they were wanting a book on Buddhism, a big publisher in Helsinki, was wanting a book on Buddhism. So a friend of mine sent along through this publisher's my own book, The Three Jewels, and it was considered, and it was rejected, because the publisher said we don't want to publish a book on Buddhism by a Buddhist, because it won't be objective. So they published something by Alan Watts instead. Yes, that's the attitude. Yes, you find that in the universities. The university professors, they are awful. They think that they know all about Buddhism. But they may not be Buddhists, more one or two of them nowadays are, which is an improvement. But they're not Buddhists. They've no sympathy with Buddhism. In some cases, they don't even believe in the possibility of spiritual experience. But they at the same time believe that they are the authorities on Buddhism, and publishers accept them as authorities on Buddhism. And they are supposed to have the last word on the subject, not me. I've only been studying it and trying to practice it for 40 years. I'm a measure of all Buddhists. I'm not an authority on Buddhists at all. They wouldn't want to publish some of them, my books. So of course, I feel rather annoyed about it, and rightly annoyed, and I hope to get back at them in some ways. This is the academic academic. It has to be history of art. It mustn't be a painting in any village in France. At least they kneel and weep before the effigy of Christ, or some bad little piece of sheep, a china that is the Virgin Mario, or Orin Islands and Bridget, or whoever it is. At least they recognize that this is a divine presence. But that won't do for the universities. It has to be objectively safe. I've worked some time ago. The game was in the fifties, I think. It's much better to worship a tree than not to worship anything, just to be a scientist, much better to worship a tree. Or to be an animist. I wrote an essay in those days called A Defense of Animism. I'm afraid I lost it. No one would publish it, you see, and it's been lost. A Defense of Animism. Of course. Yes. Because sometimes you read books about Buddhism, especially Burmese Buddhism. And when they say, well how terrible, the Burmese have mixed up your this beautiful pure spiritual Buddhism with animism. I think it's a thoroughly good thing. I'm all in favor of animism. I wish we had more of it in Britain. I wish we had two. More sacred wells and, well, whole stunning things. Will all over India, practically anything you stumble over, maybe sacred, an anthill, may have no good means on it, because it is a sacred anthill to go there, or a tree, or you know. But if this had been India, we'd be sitting here wearing marigold garlands. That'd be nice. Because at the beginning, at the beginning of every meeting in India, certainly Buddhist meetings, they load you with marigold garlands. I'm not sort of hinting anything to Padma Raja. Well, we've got this for that. But this is the attitude, this is the spirit. We've got some criticisms. Yes. Well, I say, we've got them. We're not going to be allowed to take them away, I expect. They've already got to do duty tomorrow. But in India, yes, this is the sort of attitude. And they hang garlands and marigolds on sacred trees. I mean, I haven't seen them around sacred anthills. They're all sacred. This is true, yes. Well, I quite believe it, because in India, they'll make anything sacred. Well, you often get to nogos living in anthills. They go there for the water, but also anything. So we've lost this. We've lost it, yes. And we don't know that we've lost it. What else could it be but sacred? I mean, I was thinking as we came along, I was saying to Mick, looking at the way trees are clipped and cropped in England. And thinking how in India, I'm sure seeing this a thousand times, you will see a temple and an old tree, very ancient tree, coming through the temple wall and the wall broken down. Well, why is this? Because the tree is sacred. The wall is something you make and you, when the tree gets too big, you take away the wall, you don't lock the tree. Or you crop the tree up or you build that little wall under it. You just support it, but you don't destroy a sacred tree. Particularly of people. It's the beginning to do that, even in India. Well, that's a secular experience in the world. I've been about this when I was in Cunningham, where I was really, really upset to see all the trees being cut down in the living forest for charcoal. And they were just burning the forest in India. Oh, India's being destroyed. I'm afraid it is. They've lost, I think, three-fifths of their forests already since independence. But after all the diaspora, perhaps we'll send this knowledge to the west and it's interesting that your Buddhist missionaries are now going from England back to Bombay, where I'm sure they're badly. Yes, I'm afraid that badly needed everywhere. But we do our little bit. May I read your poem? Oh, please do, I'm afraid. It's called Memory of Sarnak. It was the face, they say, of the enlightened one, recalled his first disciples, unconvinced by words, whose countenance blissful as life and calm as death, tells all and nothing to generations of our kind. Carved in wood or stone or cusp or gold, great civilizations have adorned with all the treasures of the soul that planetude of emptiness, the known unknown, the unknown known all know and are, that prince who fled by night his palaces and gardens fathomed our mystery, whose only scripture is a smile all read and know its doctrine to be true, being itself unbounded as the stars. Thank you very much. Can I give it to you? Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freeputus.io.com/donate, and thank you. Thank you. a lot. [BLANK_AUDIO]
